Washington Post’s new initiative
“Thirty days ago, Jamal Khashoggi was lured into a death trap,” Washington Post publisher and CEO Fred Ryan said at the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Awards tonight in DC on Thursday night.
Ryan, who was there to accept the group’s leadership award, dedicated his speech to Khashoggi.
“If Saudi Arabia faces no consequences for Jamal’s murder, it sends a powerful message of tolerance, perhaps even encouragement. And every journalist in every country will be at greater risk,” Ryan said.
Then he shared an announcement. “To help in this effort, today we announce an important new Washington Post initiative called the Press Freedom Partnership,” Ryan said. “Working with the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, Reporters Without Borders, and other interested groups, we are making a major global commitment to increase awareness of the importance of an independent press.”
What the Post will be doing
Ryan said the Post would devote “ongoing” resources; deploy its “marketing and advertising capabilities;” and use the reach of the paper’s platforms “to champion the journalists who take risks every day to expose the truth.”
“Through the Press Freedom Partnership, and initiatives that I hope other media organizations might launch,” Ryan said, “we can keep alive the noble work of Jamal Khashoggi. And we can honor all the courageous journalists whose efforts hold the powerful to account and preserve our fundamental freedoms.”
Turkish prosecutor: Khashoggi was strangled and dismembered
Earlier this week, the Turkish chief prosecutor said in a statement that Khashoggi “was choked to death immediately after entering the Consulate General of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul.”
This was the “clearest statement yet from Turkish authorities,” CNN’s team in Istanbul reported. Read more here…
Facebook’s election ads are a problem… but not the biggest problem
Donie O’Sullivan emails: Vice News, ProPublica, CNN and others have all found some holes in Facebook’s political ad disclaimer process this week. Essentially, people can still run political ads on the platform without Facebook users really knowing who paid for them.
But I bet if you told the company six months ago an ad disclaimer issue would be what reporters would be poking holes at on Facebook with 5 days to go to the election, they’d be pretty happy with it. There’s already a ton of dark money in US politics — lack of transparency didn’t start on Facebook.
The bigger problem, the one we can’t overlook, and what could likely impact more voters, is the ongoing one: misinformation. For instance, all the false viral images of the migrants marching toward the US boarder that spread like wildfire on Facebook last week. Read on…
Trump’s trick?
The White House told the press that President Trump would speak about immigration in the Roosevelt Room on Thursday afternoon… “We were told it would be new asylum proposals,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said… But he basically just repeated his stump speech and sparred with reporters. CNN cut away mid-event. MSNBC didn’t show it at all.
Gloria Borger on “AC360” later in the day: “You have to ask the question, ‘Why convene a policy address for a policy that hasn’t changed?’ I think maybe there was a little trick played on us, because he got some live coverage. We all thought that there was going to be some new policy here, and there really wasn’t.”
Wemple’s provocative Q
WaPo’s Erik Wemple writes: “It doesn’t matter whether the issue is immigration or taxes or trade. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a week from the midterms or a year from the midterms. It doesn’t matter whether Trump is speaking at a rally or in the quiet dignity of the Roosevelt Room. The president’s relish for lies is unchanged, and live television is absolutely no match for the fury with which his falsehoods tumble forth. So there’s no excuse for any U.S. television network to take his appearances live, at any time. The question now is: Which network will be the first to declare that it will not provide a live airing of next year’s State of the Union address?”
Does Ainsley regret saying this?
Ainsley Earhardt has positioned herself as a journalist despite being on “Fox & Friends.” She has a degree in journalism from the University of South Carolina. That’s why I’m wondering if she will try to walk back this embarrassing statement on Friday’s show.
During Thursday’s “F&F,” she tried to justify Trump’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric, which hurts her own colleagues. “He is saying if you don’t want to be called the enemy, then get the story right, be accurate and report the story the way I want it reported,” she said, setting herself up for a day of ridicule on social media. Obviously “accurate” is not the same as “the way the president wants it reported…”