In a year-end memo to staff, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith warned that “fake news will become more sophisticated, and . . . will spread widely.” Smith also noted that the problem can be found on both sides of the political spectrum, as in the case of a highly embellished story of a Jewish family having to “flee” town after being falsely identified as the reason for a school Christmas play being canceled.
At the New York Times, James Risen writes that journalists have Barack Obama to thank for the possible mistreatment of the press under Trump. Citing the Obama administration’s prosecution of whistleblowers, the use of the antiquated Espionage Act to punish government officials who spoke to journalists, and his own experience being ordered to reveal sources by the Department of Justice, Resin writes, “Mr. Obama’s record of going after both journalists and their sources has set a dangerous precedent that Mr. Trump can easily exploit.”
Mattie Smith Colin, the Chicago Defender journalist who reported on the death and funeral of Emmett Till, died this weekend at the age of ninety-three.
Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker said this weekend that the newspaper will not label false statements made by Donald Trump as “lies.” According to Baker, the word “implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.”
Despite criticism, Simon & Schuster has decided to move forward with Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos’s book. The publisher maintains that they do not support hate speech, and asks that the public “withhold judgement until they have had a chance to read the actual contents” of Dangerous. Talks of a Simon & Schuster boycott continue, with some authors threatening to walk away from their own book deals as protest. At the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz writes that although the reported $250,000 advance Yiannopoulos received is small in terms of big-name publishers, “it’s still two hundred and fifty thousand dollars too many to give to a man who has helped define the Trump moment’s flippant bigotry in the service of brand-building narcissism.”