Reporting on immigration in the Trump era, how not to solve the misinformation problem, and misogyny in the media
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Published in
4 min readJun 22, 2018
edited by Marco Nurra
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- Image of sobbing toddler at US border: ‘It was hard for me to photograph’. “Photojournalists and reporters alike, we all want to make a difference with the work that we do. Some images have a unique power to break through the collective dissonance. Much of the time, however, even when we do our very best, our work often has limited impact on government policies. This image has energised the American public on the issue of the separation of families and touched many people emotionally. I hope it helps to change policy.”
- Breaking through the administration’s lies on immigration. The administration’s lies about and misrepresentations of its border policy have pushed reporters into unfamiliar territory. From headlines to briefing room questions, journalists are taking a more forceful stance against the official line.
- Journalists’ resources for reporting on immigration. Immigration has been a contentious topic for much of U.S. history, but Donald Trump’s presidential policies have led to fierce debate since his inauguration. Here are resources for reporters who are covering immigration.
- Instead of Trump’s propaganda, how about a nice ‘truth sandwich’? “Avoid retelling the lies. Avoid putting them in headlines, leads or tweets. Because it is that very amplification that gives them power. That’s how propaganda works on the brain: through repetition, even when part of that repetition is fact-checking.”
- Dear Journalists, Stop being loudspeakers for liars. “Please examine what you’re doing. You are letting liars use your traditional norms — which made sense in different times and situations — to turn you into amplifiers of deceit. You know you are doing this, and sometimes you even defend it,” writes Dan Gillmor.
- How news media was hijacked from 2016 to 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups. The report recommends practices on establishing newsworthiness and reporting on extremists and manipulators online.
- The three types of bias that explain all the fake news, pseudoscience, and other junk in your News Feed. Indiana University researchers “have found that steep competition for users’ limited attention means that some ideas go viral despite their low quality — even when people prefer to share high-quality content.”
- Report: Americans are bad at telling news from opinion. According to a Pew Research Center study, a majority of Americans were able to identify three of five news-related factual and opinion statements shown in a survey — but only 26 percent correctly identified all five factual statements, and 35 percent correctly identified all five opinions. Pew differentiated the two with the definition “the capacity to be proved or disproved by objective evidence.”
- First Draft Verification Toolbox is designed to help simplify and streamline verification for beginners.
- Facebook announces new strategies to combat misinformation. During the second day of the fifth annual Global Fact-Checking Summit on Thursday, the world’s biggest social network shared some news about its most visible effort to counter misinformation.
- We won’t solve the misinformation problem with systems which adjudicate on truth or on who to trust. “Your shorthand solution to help the world quickly sort true and false, reliable and unreliable, all within the bounds of the time-poor, over-informed, attention-saturated world, is now backfiring on the people who most need to improve how they consume information, and not really doing a lot to help the people who already have good information consumption habits,” writes Shane Greenup.
- How we know journalism is good for democracy; academic studies and articles that help quantify what happens when local communities lose local news. These studies are important in helping communities understand the democratic role of the press, in fostering new solutions to meet community information needs, and for making the case as to why local news needs to be a priority for philanthropy.
- How to end misogyny in the news industry; an open letter to the international journalism community. “We are done pandering to the egos of change-resistant influential men in the hope that our gentle lead will eventually encourage them to join us on a meander toward gender equality in the news business.”
- The new media and press laws in Egypt; the end of social media by law. Critics say el-Sisi’s media law shuts down free speech in Egypt.
- The Guardian has printed a list of 34,361 refugees known to have died trying to make it to Europe. An activist group has been gathering details behind the defining crisis of our times.
- Digital subscription revenue displacing digital advertising as a core revenue stream. Covering nearly 10 million digital subscriptions by title, the report finds that paid content success requires investment, intelligent application of analytics, an understanding of the local market and leveraging the emotional connection to a brand.
