Media

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The annual Global Fact-Checking Summit is an opportunity for journalists, academics and technologists to come together as a network and exchange new insights and past experiences. But it’s also a breeding ground for impactful ideas that can grow into tangible, large-scale projects in the years to come. This year’s conference, hosted by Poynter’s International Fact-Checking […]

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Last June, CBS News reported that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, and Raj Shah, her deputy, were planning to quit the Trump administration. They stuck it out longer than expected. Shah left in January. Yesterday—exactly a year after the original CBS report—we learned that Sanders will depart at the end of this month. President Trump tweeted the news and Sanders did the same: a mode of communication that has characterized Sanders’s time as White House spokesperson.

Sanders took over as press secretary in July 2017, following the ouster of Sean Spicer. Sanders showed more endurance, but her performance has been no better than Spicer’s was. In her two inglorious years on the job, Sanders barred reporters who asked tough questions; promoted Trump’s bogus “fake news awards”; fell in line with the president’s anti-press, “enemy of the people” rhetoric; and routinely disparaged the intelligence and integrity of the journalists in the White House briefing room. She also lied a lot. Sanders said that Trump never encouraged violence (he did) and that he won an “overwhelming majority” of votes in 2016 (he did not). In April, the Mueller report confirmed that in May 2017, Sanders (who was then the deputy press secretary) knowingly misled reporters when she claimed—twice—that “countless” FBI staffers supported Trump’s firing of James Comey. Sanders told Mueller’s office that the claim was “not founded on anything”; it was a “slip of the tongue” that she then repeated “in the heat of the moment,” she said. How did Sanders respond to her confession becoming public? She reiterated the false claim.

ICYMI: Right-wing publications launder an anti-journalist smear campaign

Still, Sanders may not be remembered for her lies as much as her absence. “Last month, reporters noticed that there was literally a coating of dust on the press briefing room podium,” CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote last night. “That is Sanders’s legacy.” On her watch, the televised White House briefing, a fixture under previous administrations, has all but gone extinct. Earlier this year, Sanders set a record for the longest time without a formal briefing since the practice began. Then she beat her own record—twice. If she doesn’t brief soon, next Wednesday will mark 100 days since Sanders last faced reporters at the podium. (She did stand there in late April, but it was only for a “bring your kids to work day” stunt that she declared off the record.) In the absence of briefings, White House reporters have had to chase Sanders down on the White House driveway to ask questions, usually following her interviews with Fox News.

Fox could be a logical next step for Sanders: ex-administration figures often take contributor gigs on cable news, and Sanders has already said that she plans to remain “one of the most outspoken and loyal supporters of the president and his agenda” outside the White House. (CNN reportedly has no interest in Sanders; it’s hard to imagine MSNBC would want her, either.) Trump, in his tweet, encouraged Sanders to run for governor of Arkansas, a post previously occupied by her father, Mike Huckabee; according to CNN, Sanders is thinking seriously about a bid, though there won’t be a vacancy until 2022.

As far as the White House press secretary job is concerned, CNN’s Stelter writes that who replaces Sanders is anyone’s guess. Trump could promote her deputy, Hogan Gidley, or he could look to an outside booster such as Laura Ingraham. (Stranger things have happened: remember Anthony Scaramucci?) The president, who has gone without a communications chief since March, may decline to fill the post. Why would he need a press secretary, when he believes himself to be his own best messenger?

Below, more on Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the White House communications team:

• What was the point?: Several commentators, including NYU’s Jay Rosen and Mike Allen, of Axios, have argued that briefings, when they happen, are a waste of journalists’ time anyway. Others have countered that, despite the lies from the podium, briefings give reporters an opportunity to confront the administration. Last year, CJR’s Pete Vernon wrote that a briefing “is a testament to the idea that no one is above having to explain themselves. That makes it worth saving.”
  
• What Sanders said about Trump: The Atlantic’s Megan Garber writes that Sanders “broke the news” during her time as press secretary. “Her tenure serves as a reminder of what happens when partisanship, aided by the power of the presidency, is allowed to subsume everything else: traditions, norms, truth, people’s lives,” Garber writes.
• A change of strategy: The White House Correspondents’ Association will soon elect a new president. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi writes that the leading candidates—S.V. Date, of HuffPost, and Steven Portnoy, of CBS News—plan to take a bolder, more confrontational approach to misinformation. (A third candidate,  Toluse Olorunnipa, of the Post, has yet to outline his plans.)
• Game, set, Hatch?: Kellyanne Conway’s name has been touted as a possible replacement for Sanders. Yesterday, the office of special counsel recommended that Conway should be removed as a White House aide for repeatedly violating the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from using their position to engage in partisan activities. Trump looks like he will ignore the recommendation: yesterday, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, called it “as outrageous as it is unprecedented.”

Other notable stories:

• Trump’s admission, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, that he would accept a foreign government’s offer of dirt on a presidential rival and not tell the FBI about it, drove the news cycle yesterday. Trump’s remarks added distressing detail to what has been established in the Mueller report on interference in the 2016 election, and bodes poorly for 2020.
• The Democratic National Committee confirmed yesterday that Wayne Messam, Seth Moulton, Steve Bullock, and Mike Gravel have failed to qualify for the first presidential debate; today, the 20 candidates who did qualify will be divided into groups of 10 that will debate on June 26 and June 27, respectively. For CJR, Jason Plautz explores the DNC’s refusal to host a debate dedicated to climate change: “While sixty-second answers won’t allow candidates to get far beyond the top-line goals of their climate-change plans, filling 90 minutes of debate time would force each to reckon with the differences between their plans.” On Wednesday, activists delivered a petition for a climate debate, signed by 200,000 people, to the DNC.
• When it comes to capturing public and press attention, Reid J. Epstein writes, for the Times, that Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren have outmaneuvered the other Democratic candidates for president, “demonstrating an innate understanding of the value of viral moments and nonstop exposure that drive politics in the Trump era.” Buttigieg has done so by emphasizing his personal background; Warren has inundated reporters with policy ideas. Both have climbed in the polls.
• Yesterday, Sajid Javid, Britain’s interior minister, confirmed that he signed off on the US government’s request to extradite Julian Assange, who is currently in jail in London. Today, the signed order will go before a British court. Assange faces an 18-count indictment in the US, most of which falls under the Espionage Act; last month, press-freedom experts called the indictment a “terrifying” threat to journalism. Sweden had also hoped to extradite Assange, to face a rape investigation, but a Swedish court ruled last week that Assange does not need to be detained in the country after all.
• In Turkey, prosecutors have charged Kerim Karakaya and Fercan Yalinkilic, two Bloomberg journalists, with attempting to undermine the country’s economic stability; the pair had reported last year on the official response to a severe currency shock in Turkey. The same indictment targets 36 other people “for social media comments on the story, or comments deemed critical of Turkey’s economy and banks,” Bloomberg reports.
• CJR’s Andrew McCormick looks at two Congressional bills intended to help out the news industry: one would allow publishers to team up to demand better financial terms from big tech platforms; the other would make it easier for news organizations to seek nonprofit status.
• Last month, Corey Hutchins reported for CJR from La Plata County, Colorado—an“orphan county,” where residents get irrelevant political news from a TV market based outside their home state. This week, following pressure from Cory Gardner, Colorado’s Republican senator, the Federal Communications Commission signaled that it will grant La Plata County residents access to Denver’s TV market instead.
• And the Mirror Awards, given by Syracuse University to celebrate reporting on the media industry, were announced yesterday. CJR was among the winners: Sarah Jones won for her piece about class and journalism. Ronan Farrow, of The New Yorker, won for his work exposing sexual misconduct by Les Moonves, who subsequently stepped down from CBS. Farrow addressed those gathered at the ceremony: “I see some people [here] who have lied to protect power,” he said.

ICYMI: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

This is the Poynter Institute’s daily newsletter. To have it delivered to your inbox Monday-Friday, click here. June 14, 2019 Happy Friday. The week was coming to a quiet close until the big news Thursday afternoon that Sarah Sanders was stepping down as White House press secretary. It marks the end of a controversial era for […]

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This has been a busy week for big reports on digital platforms and how the expensive enterprise of doing journalism can find supporting revenue. Here are some short summaries and my report card on the studies. A painful misfire on Google’s impact. The News Media Alliance, a lobbying group for the newspaper industry, kicked off […]

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When Singapore passed a law that outlawed the spread of false information online last month, news outlets, companies and civil society organizations were quick to condemn it. “Singapore ‘fake news’ legislation endangers press freedom,” the Committee to Protect Journalists declared a month before the law passed. “Google says Singapore risks hurting innovation with fake news […]

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Here's where governments are trying to outlaw misinformation, promote media literacy or investigate social platforms.

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When Candi Carter stepped into her first leadership role at WISN-TV in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1993, she found herself working with a small team of “old, white union men.” It was part of their job to assemble a crew for the TV specials she was producing. Carter was the only young person. She was the […]

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Next week more than 250 fact-checkers from around the world will head to Cape Town, South Africa, for the sixth global fact-checking summit, Global Fact 6. At Africa Check, the continent’s first fact-checking website, we’re used to hearing myths, misconceptions and stereotypes about our home. We’re also pretty good at debunking them. Let’s set the […]

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Every year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is based at Oxford University in the UK, comes out with its Digital News Report, a survey of global trends and attitudes towards online news. Depending on your position in the media industry, it can be either good news or bad news. According to the latest edition, which came out Wednesday morning, if you’re a prosperous digital giant with a well-established subscription program, then you are probably in great shape, thanks to the growth of digital and mobile consumption of the news. If you’re a small publisher that still relies predominantly on print and your subscription plan still isn’t lucrative, however, the report is probably going to cause nightmares. As Facebook and Google continue to vacuum up the lion’s share of digital advertising around the globe, the landscape is looking increasingly barren for any publisher that isn’t already a market leader. (Google helps fund the Reuters report.)

One of the big headlines from the study is that, despite the efforts of news publishers to pivot away from advertising revenue and focus more on subscriptions and membership plans, there has only been a tiny increase in the number of people who pay for online news in any form in the past year, and the bulk of what little growth did occur came primarily in Nordic countries like Norway and Sweden. In the US, the so-called “Trump bump,” which led many news consumers to sign up for subscriptions to newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post, seems to have slowed into a virtual flat line. The number of people who paid for news in the US jumped sharply in 2017, the Reuters report says, but it currently remains relatively “stable” (i.e. it isn’t growing) at 16 percent of the population.

On a related note, the study found that even in countries where fairly large numbers of news consumers pay for their news, the vast majority of those consumers only have a single subscription. As the report points out, this phenomenon—which turns subscription revenue into a scarce resource that virtually every other news outlet is also fighting for—suggests that there is a “winner take all” aspect to online news. That might benefit the Times or the Post, or newspapers like The Guardian in the UK, but as those outlets grow stronger, their smaller competitors could find it even more difficult to sign up new subscribers, no matter how good their coverage is. Some media analysts believe there is a distinct possibility that this could create a polarized market, where the big get bigger and the small get smaller, and those in the middle either dramatically change their models or die out.

The Reuters study also suggests that news publishers aren’t just competing with other news outlets for subscribers. As more and more consumers—particularly younger ones, the kind the news industry is most interested in attracting—are looking to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify to serve their entertainment needs, there is a risk that even in markets where people don’t mind paying for news, a form of “subscription fatigue” may be developing. In this environment, “publishers may struggle to substantially increase the market for high-priced single-title subscriptions,” the Reuters report says. And publishers who are doing everything they can to sign up as many readers as possible could be exacerbating this problem by hitting consumers with paywalls more frequently. Reuters says that, in the US, about half of those surveyed said they now hit a pay barrier at least once a week.

If you’re desperate for a little good news, the study found that while trust in the news in general is down 2 percentage points to 42 percent across all countries, and less than half of those surveyed said they trust the news sources they use regularly, there are signs that these low levels of trust are helping move people towards more reputable sources of news. Across all of the countries surveyed, more than 25 percent said that they have started relying on more reputable sources, and in the US about 40 percent of those surveyed said they were doing the same (The study says the interpretation of “reputable” was left to respondents to determine.) How this particular statistic is likely to affect your media business depends on whether you are one of the reputable sources people are heading towards, or one of the not-so-reputable sources that readers are busy heading away from.

Here’s more on the state of digital news:

• Print’s long decline: The Reuters report isn’t the only significant survey of digital media trends to come out this week. Mary Meeker is a veteran technology analyst who recently left the VC fund Kleiner Perkins to start her own fund, and she releases a 300-plus page overview of the internet market every year that companies and investors routinely scan for details. Nieman Lab founder Josh Benton scans the Meeker report every year for data on the state of print advertising, and every year the data gets worse.
• Active avoiders: Damian Radcliffe of the site What’s New In Publishing has picked out what he believes are the five essential charts from the Reuters media report that publishers need to pay attention to, including the fact that almost a third of those surveyed for the report say that they “actively avoid the news.” That’s up by 3 percentage points from when Reuters asked the same question last year. How can publishers convince more readers to subscribe to their sites if a significant proportion are no longer interested in news at all?
• Congress cares: The backdrop to the Reuters study is, of course, the dominance of digital giants like Google and Facebook, which Congress is currently holding hearings into, with a view towards possible antitrust action against either one or both. During Tuesday’s hearings, the media got a shout out from several congressmen, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman David Cicilline, who asked: “If online news publishers can’t survive, then who can?”
• The youngs: Not everyone was depressed by the Reuters study. Mark Little, a former Irish TV Correspondent who founded the social-media verification service Storyful and now has a news curation startup called Kinzen, says there are encouraging signs that younger news consumers are more interested in reputable sources, share less fake news and are more interested in paying for news than older consumers.

 Other notable stories:

• Jared Holt writes for CJR about how a number of media outlets ran stories about a study that allegedly showed sinister connections between antifascist activists and some reporters who cover the far-right. But while he identified himself as an online extremism researcher, the author of the study is an established right-wing troll who has been banned from Twitter for running multiple fake accounts.
• The publisher of the Loudoun Tribune admitted Monday that he lied to investors about the newspaper’s financial health. Brian Reynolds launched the Tribune in 2016 as a free newspaper and eventually raised more than $500,000, in part by claiming he had invested nearly $1 million of his own money and had almost the same amount in ad contracts. In reality, he only invested a few thousand dollars and the contracts were forged. Reynolds pleaded guilty to fraud and also to illegally possessing guns.
• Jennifer Brandel, cofounder and CEO of Hearken, writes about a project she is working on with New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, aimed at developing a “citizens agenda” model for campaign coverage. Instead of a traditional approach focusing on horse-race coverage and salacious details, Brandel says the project will turn to voters themselves and ask them what kind of coverage they need in order to cast an informed vote. “No longer can we presume to understand what our public needs from us,” Brandel writes.
• Ryan Mac of BuzzFeed writes about a seemingly innocuous photo of a get-together of tech luminaries used by GQ magazine to illustrate a feature story about a group of wealthy travellers making a pilgrimage to the Italian HQ of luxury designer Brunello Cucinelli. Mac noticed that the photo appeared to have been Photoshopped. The original was all men, but later two women (who were also on the trip but not in the photo) were added. GQ has since removed the photo and added a note to the story saying a picture was removed because it didn’t meet the publication’s standards.
• Cinnamon Janzer writes for CJR about meteorologists on local TV stations who have gotten into trouble—either with viewers or their station owners, and in some cases both—for breaking into TV programs with alerts about tornados and other serious weather events. A video clip of Jamie Simpson, a meteorologist at an Ohio station, went viral after he talked back to viewers who complained about his alerts interrupting The Bachelorette.
• The news that US consumers actually read doesn’t always match up with what they say they want covered more, according to data from traffic analytics company Parse.ly and a poll conducted by Axios. Data from more than 2,000 sites that use Parse.ly showed that in May, demand was highest for news about politics and government, followed by sports and immigration. But most consumers said they actually wanted more news about health care, followed by climate and education—topics that ranked 7th, 5th, and 11th in terms of demand.
• On Tuesday, the Arizona Daily Star published an opinion piece written by a local public defender, about how prosecutors in Arizona keep killing criminal-justice reform bills. The piece was quickly deleted from the newspaper’s website following a phone call from county prosecutor Sheila Polk, who said the article was not accurate about her voting record. According to a report from the Phoenix New Times, however, emails show that Polk did vote against a justice reform bill. The Daily Star has republished the op-ed piece with a note saying a passage was removed that “didn’t meet our standards for attribution.”
• Leveraged buyout firm KKR wants to take German newspaper publisher Axel Springer private, according to Bloomberg. The firm has made an offer that values the media company at $7.7 billion. Springer is controlled by Friede Springer, whose late husband started the publishing company, and CEO Mathias Doepfner. Springer, which bought Business Insider in 2015 for $343 million, has seen its stock price weaken over the past year as shareholders have grown nervous about the impact that Google and Facebook are having on newspapers and digital advertising.

Under Democratic National Committee rules, today is the deadline for 20 candidates to qualify for the first Democratic presidential debate. Two weeks from today, 10 candidates will line up against each other in Miami. The following night, 10 other candidates will take their turn.

To get there, candidates had to secure donations from 65,000 people, register 1 percent in three recognized polls, or both. Conveniently, exactly 20 candidates appear to have qualified so far, 14 of whom say they have passed both thresholds. I’d list them, but it’s quicker to name the candidates who look set to miss out: Wayne Messam, the mayor of Miramar, Florida; Seth Moulton, a Congressman from Massachusetts; Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana; and (if you’re counting him) Mike Gravel, the former Alaska senator. In theory, Bullock could still pass the polling threshold; if he does, the DNC will invoke tie-breaker rules to settle on the final line-up of 20, which will be announced later this week. The qualifying candidates will be divided across two nights of the debate based on a “random” allocation that will also ensure “an even mix of candidates” each night, NBC reports.

ICYMI: Meet your new public editors

Both nights will run for two hours in primetime on NBC News, MSNBC, and Telemundo. Yesterday, we learned a little more about the format. Lester Holt will appear during both hours on both nights. For the first hour of each debate, he’ll be joined by his NBC colleague Savannah Guthrie and José Diaz-Balart, an anchor on Telemundo. For the second hour, Chuck Todd, also of NBC, and Rachel Maddow, of MSNBC, will appear alongside Holt. Progressive groups applauded the diversity of that line-up, although, as Bakari Sellers, an analyst on CNN, pointed out, it does not feature a black woman. Maddow is the curveball—she’s an opinionator, not a news reporter, and she has already made some of her thoughts about the Democratic field known. Maddow did help host a Democratic primary debate in 2016, Michael M. Grynbaum reports for The New York Times; nonetheless, he writes, “opinion journalists are rarely chosen to interrogate candidates in the formal setting of a debate stage.”

In recent weeks, a mini news cycle has developed around the qualification rules, as candidates have had to clamor to stand out. Kirsten Gillibrand called the 65,000-donor threshold “random and inaccurate”; Bullock, a late entrant into the race, said that it had penalized him for prioritizing his work as governor. Last week, Tom Perez, chair of the DNC, rebuffed criticism: he told CNN that candidates for president have to be proficient grassroots fundraisers. As several outlets have reported, however, imposing such a requirement at this early stage of the race has radically changed how smaller campaigns have operated—instead of building infrastructure in states like Iowa, they’ve had to plow resources into Facebook ads to attract further donors. According to the Times, acquiring one $1 donor can cost a campaign $40 and up; according to Vice, candidates have collectively paid Facebook over $1 million a week. This picture is only likely to get worse for candidates: the DNC recently doubled the threshold to qualify for the third primary debate, which will occur in September, to 130,000 donors.

The debate subjects, meanwhile, have themselves been subject to debate. Jay Inslee, the Washington governor who has built his campaign around climate change, requested that a whole debate be dedicated to that topic; the DNC said no and warned Inslee he would be penalized if he participated in any external climate debate. Yesterday, Perez wrote on Medium that granting Inslee’s request would have been unfair. But at least 10 other candidates want a climate debate, too. And Perez’s premise that climate is an “issue” is misplaced. As Naomi Klein tweeted last week, “Climate is not an ‘issue’—it’s the backdrop for all other issues.”

These qualification and format questions are political, but they also matter for the media. Ahead of 2020, there’s been much discussion of the need to keep the focus on policy. That’s our job as journalists, but the DNC’s rules aren’t helping. The donor threshold has driven candidates to chase “viral moments” that boost their popularity online; the lack of a climate debate, and the logic behind the decision, cuts against the idea of useful, substantive discussion. And the debates themselves could easily descend into an unfocused, noisy mud fight. Lester, Savannah, José, Chuck, and Rachel: no pressure.

Below, more on the debates and the Democratic race:

• A pessimistic prediction: The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman writes that the debates will be “awful.” With so many candidates on stage, each will have comparatively little time to speak. Those further down the polls, in particular, could resort to sensational, viral-ready behavior to get attention. “When the cameras are on you, you have to find a way to stand out,” Waldman writes. “And reasoned, careful argumentation is probably not going to be it.”
• Fighting for airtime: Politico’s Michael Calderone reports that “no podcast is too small” as Democratic candidates jockey for attention in the fragmented field. “Podcasts, late-night programs and web shows are increasingly serving as off-ramps from the daily news churn, offering candidates opportunities for more freewheeling conversations and showing off their personalities or pop culture bonafides to a variety of audiences,” Calderone writes.
• A local angle: For CJR, Susannah Jacob talked to journalists from Texas, where two local politicians—Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro—are running for president. “National reporters’ dizzying task grows with each new Democratic contender, and Texas reporters don’t envy them. ‘Being a part of local press removes us from that conversation, and I think that’s really good,’” The Texas Tribune’s Abby Livingston tells Jacob.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, CJR appointed four public editors who will, respectively, act as watchdogs for the Times, the Post, CNN, and MSNBC. On Twitter, Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, answered questions about the initiatives; we rounded up the answers here. In her first column, Emily Tamkin, our public editor for CNN, weighs in on Chris Cuomo’s recent interviews with Kimberly Guilfoyle, an adviser to the Trump campaign, and Christopher Ruddy, the Trump-pal CEO of Newsmax. “If the people being interviewed aren’t in the administration, can’t be held accountable to anyone, don’t have relevant expertise, and refuse to answer a host’s questions, what’s their value?” Tamkin asks.
• Last week, Russian police detained and beat Ivan Golunov, an investigative journalist with Meduza, on charges of drug possession. Golunov says they were planted. His arrest sparked a vocal campaign of protest across Russia’s media. Yesterday, authorities released Golunov and dropped the charges against him. The climbdown, experts say, demonstrates the limits of state power in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, despite the country’s worsening press-freedom climate.
• Yesterday, a House antitrust panel kicked off its investigation into possible anticompetitive conduct by big tech companies with a hearing focused on the effect Google and Facebook’s dominance of online advertising has had on the news industry. David Cicilline, a Democrat, and Doug Collins, a Republican, have co-authored legislation that would allow publishers to band together to demand better terms from the platforms. Media critics are divided on the merits of the bill. The Post’s Margaret Sullivan strongly supports it. Politico’s Jack Shafer strongly does not.
• Last month, Facebook refused to take down a viral video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had been doctored to make Pelosi sound drunk. Mark Zuckerberg reached out to Pelosi to discuss the episode, but, according to the Post, Pelosi has no interest in calling him back. Over the weekend, a fake video of Zuckerberg was posted on Instagram, which Facebook owns. Some observers wondered whether the company’s response might show a double standard. An Instagram spokesperson told CNN that it will treat the Zuckerberg video “the same way we treat all misinformation on Instagram.”
• The Post and The Hollywood Reporter are both out with profiles of Gayle King, host of CBS This Morning, whose stock has risen following a series of well-received interviews and a reshuffle of on-air talent at CBS. Robin Givhan writes, for the Post, that King “is, perhaps, what the culture needs right now: a soothing voice of reason, an adult who isn’t drowning in cynicism, who is still capable of being let down by her fellow humans if only because she still has faith in them.” Marisa Guthrie’s Hollywood Reporter cover story will be out online today.
• In Nicaragua, Miguel Mora and Lucía Pineda Ubau—journalists with 100% Noticias, a news station that was shut down last year—were released from prison as part of amnesty designed to ease tensions between the government of Daniel Ortega and the opposition. Two men convicted of killing a journalist were also freed—the journalist’s family believes the men are innocent and that police officers were behind the killing. In November, Charles Davis charted Nicaragua’s totalitarian press climate for CJR.
• And David Bernhardt, the interior secretary, gave an accidental interview to The Colorado Independent. Bernhardt thought he was talking to his hometown Glenwood Springs Post-Independent; once he realized he had the wrong paper, Bernhardt agreed to an abbreviated conversation with The Colorado Independent. He told reporter Alex Burness that he doesn’t think climate change poses a threat to national parks.

ICYMI: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

Update: This post has been updated to reflect that Lester Holt will appear during both hours of both nights of the first Democratic debate. A previous version said Holt would anchor both hours of both nights.