I went down to the White House last night after hours of watching the election results roll in. Flipping between the networks and watching as journalists spent hours dissecting every micro-movement in the projected vote counts with a level of detail that only reinforced the horse-race nature of contemporary elections was not just anxiety producing, but also a failure to provide a public service to their viewers. Few took the opportunity to slip in a bit of civics or discussion of policy platforms. …

Being invited to testify to Congress alongside Christiane Amanpour, a journalistic icon, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression David Kaye, was definitely a career highlight. Sadly, the the hearing was prompted by the worst violence against journalists in a generation (most of it perpetrated by law enforcement) and apparent attempts to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media, whose outlets have spent decades building reputations for reliable, independent news in some of the most challenging environments in the world.

As I told the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as the Helsinki commission, the United States has a unique historical and legal commitment to protecting a free and independent press at home and abroad. …

Journalists are among the frontline workers who have been out ensuring the public gets its news despite the risks of the novel coronavirus. In most of the world, journalists are considered essential, allowing them the freedom to move around and report on the pandemic. …

The World Health Organization has called the novel coronavirus an “infodemic” and the topic of disinformation and “fake news” has remained at the forefront of this century’s worst pandemic, with social media and tech platforms playing a central role. COVID-19 has forced many companies to move to remote work, and tech platforms and social media companies were not exempt. But in many cases the human moderators who assess whether content violates the platforms’ terms of service are largely unable to do that work from home, so companies like Google’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter announced that they would be moving to automate much of their content moderation. …

Solidarity when politics is the most dangerous beat

The number of journalists murdered for their work in 2019 fell dramatically to the lowest number since the Committee to Protect Journalists first started keeping records in 1992. So, too, journalists killed in combat or crossfire declined to their lowest levels since before the U.S. invasion of Iraq as the deadly conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have abated to a large extent. …

In recent days, some of the world’s largest tech companies released new transparency reports, opened up their content moderation guidelines, and adopted approaches to fighting pernicious content as they tried to head off government regulation amid concerns about “fake news,” harassment, terrorism and other ills proliferating on their platforms.

The moves come amid a backdrop of governments across Europe and in the U.S. …

In light of the recent ProPublica investigation of YouTube’s policy of flagging state-sponsored media that found implementation was haphazard and inconsistent, I am posting an article I wrote for CPJ directly following the roll out of its labeling policy in the United States. The challenges of labeling media based on its ownership or editorial independence is a significant one given the lack of transparency around ownership in many countries not to mention the growing problem of media capture (a problem explored in this excellent book and this report by Marius Dragomir).

YoutTube started labeling state and public media channels in…

Active shooter drills. Body guards. Ramped up security. Trauma support. Amid existential threats to the economic sustainability of local news media, outlets around the country are having to budget for heightened security for their newsroom and staff following the murder of four journalists and a sales representative at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis one year ago.

A year after the worst attack on American media in a single day, the tally of violent attacks and deadly threats against the media sends chills through journalists, prompting some to self-censor and others to refrain from telling people their profession.

This attack was a reminder of how vulnerable local journalists are in the United States, which ranked alongside Mexico as the fourth deadliest country for journalists in 2018 because of the Capital Gazette shooting. …