Journalists from CNN, Politico, and other outlets were banned from attending an Environmental Protection Agency summit on water contaminants this week. When one CNN reporter showed their credentials and attempted to enter the conference, a security guard told them “they ain’t doing the CNN stuff,” and an Associated Press journalist was physically removed from the summit after requesting to speak with a public affairs staffer about the ban.
A federal judge has ruled that Trump cannot legally block Twitter users from viewing his posts.
Facebook has announced three new tactics for fighting fake news on the platform. The company is inviting researchers to study the phenomenon, mounting a public education campaign on Facebook’s homepage, and releasing a short video called Facing Facts. “The message is clear,” writes Wired’s Nicholas Thompson. “Facebook knows it screwed up, and it wants us all to know it knows it screwed up.”
At The Intercept, Maryam Saleh explores the decision made by reporter and Caliphate podcast host Rukmini Callimachi to remove thousands of pages of internal ISIS documents from Iraq, and how that choice impacts the country’s understanding of its own history. “How can Iraq or any country come to terms with its own history when its people no longer possess the documents that can help them better understand all that they’ve endured?” she writes. “What should journalists do when they come upon important documents that are abandoned or without protection during war?”
In the New York Times’s “By the Book” column, Florida author Lauren Groff wonders why men aren’t influenced by books written by women. “When male writers list books they love or have been influenced by — as in this very column, week after week — why does it almost always seem as though they have only read one or two women in their lives?” she asked. “And it isn’t because male writers are bad people. We know they’re not bad people. In fact, we love them. We love them because we have read them.”
As Meredith Corp. prepares to sell Time, the New York Times has compiled an oral history of the news magazine. Though there were many good times—like the move to the Time-Life building and the money of the mid-1990s—there was also an intensely gender-segregated workplace where women weren’t hired as writers or editors until the 1980s. Maureen Dowd, one of the first female staff writers at the magazine, remembers the Mad Men–style work culture. “My boss felt free, when we worked late closing the magazine on Fridays nights, taking all the young male writers out to dinner at the steakhouse downstairs without a thought that they were walking past the offices of the only two women in the hall — me and my friend, the late Susan Tifft,” she recalls. “Susan, a staunch feminist, confronted the boss. But we never did get to that steakhouse.”