A majority of journalists polled by Pew Research Center (55%) say that not every side of a story deserves equal coverage in reporting the news and when it comes to achieving greater racial diversity in their newsrooms, a minority say it is a big priority where they work.

That 55% not favoring equal coverage is compared to the 76% of the U.S. public at large who say journalists should always try to provide such coverage.

And while a majority of journalists (67%) said their news organizations have achieved “sufficient” gender diversity, only 32% say that is the case for racial and ethnic diversity and less than half (42%) say that addressing diversity and inclusion issues is a “major priority” in their newsrooms.

Social media appears to be a double-edged sword in the hands of journalists and their audiences.

A strong majority (87%) of journalists surveyed said social media has either a “very positive” or “somewhat positive” impact on promoting their news stories, and 79% said it helps them connect with their audience and find sources. But almost one-third (67%) said that social media has either a very negative or somewhat negative impact on the state of journalism and only 18% said it has a positive impact on journalism.

In a related issue, 42% of journalists said they have been harassed or threatened in the past year, and of those, 78% said the harassment came through some type of social media.

The survey was conducted among 11,889 journalists Feb. 1-13 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point. The survey of the general public was among 10,441 U.S. adults March 7-13 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points. ▪️

Morgan Murphy Media said it is launching two programs aimed at attracting and training TV journalists and other station staffers.

“Throughout our history, the company’s success has been rooted in the quality of our people,” said Morgan Murphy executive VP and chief operating officer Brian Burns. “These investments are unique in our  industry and are intended to send a strong message — Morgan Murphy Media is committed to your growth.”  

One program, Journalism 365, is designed to give fledgling journalists on-the-job training. It offers participants the opportunity to earn $5,250 a year on top of their salaries for three years in order to pay back student loans and other expenses.

“The fight for talent is immense right now,” Morgan Murphy VP of news Colin Benedict said. “Many journalists want flexibility, help with student loans and a clear development path, and we are providing all three.” 

The Journalism 365 program will be available to multimedia journalists at KOAM Pittsburg, Kansas/Joplin, Missouri. The news content producer program will be housed at WKBT La Crosse-Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  

The second program, called Grow with MMM, creates a new investment fund for staffers in all departments who want additional training and personal development programs. 

Morgan Murphy, which has TV stations in six markets, is making it easy to apply for the Grow with MMM program by setting up a dedicated website that will showcase the training opportunities available inside and outside the company.

“We are closely focused on our team members’ growth and success,” Kate Doty, director of talent and team development for Morgan Murphy, said. “These programs are core building blocks for us to develop the next generation of journalists and leaders.” ■

CNN pulled the plug on its broadcasts in Russia as Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new law making reporting a crime.

“CNN will stop broadcasting in Russia while we continue to evaluate the situation and our next steps moving forward,” a network spokesperson said Friday.

CNN still has journalists in Russia covering the country and the invasion of Ukraine.

Bloomberg and the BBC also stopped broadcasting in Russia.

“We have with great regret decided to temporarily suspend our news gathering inside Russia,” Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait said Friday. “The change to the criminal code, which seems designed to turn any independent reporter into a criminal purely by association, makes it impossible to continue any semblance of normal journalism inside the country.”

Bloomberg reported that the Russian legislation will impose prison terms of up to 15 years for people charged with spreading “fake news” about the military or calling for sanctions against the country.

Putin’s government has also been cracking down on independent Russian media outlets. ■

The Senate Antitrust Subcommittee has scheduled a hearing next week titled “Breaking the News — Journalism, Competition and the Effects of Market Power on a Free Press.”

The February 2 hearing is likely to include some focus on a proposed Senate bill, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which would grant publishers immunity from federal and state antitrust laws for a 48-month period while they bargain collectively with digital platforms.

Media outlets argue that Big Tech has been using their content without sufficiently compensating them for their investment in original, independent journalism, and sought the antitrust carveout to be able to present a more united negotiating front.

Also: GOP Backs Big Tech-Targeted News Media Antitrust Exemption

Sens. John Kennedy (R-La.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) — Klobuchar is chairwoman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and a lead sponsor of the bill — are political opposites in the chamber  They have said the JCPA would simply give “news content creators“ — print, broadcast or digital — an antitrust a safe harbor to negotiate collectively with digital platforms like Facebook and Google for carriage of their original content.

Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), the House antitrust subcommittee chairman who has backed a House version of the bill, has argued that if the balance of power remains as it is, Big Tech’s dominance of digital advertising could be an “extinction-level event” for local media.

Similar bills have tried, and failed, to provide a safe harbor, but the new pandemic-driven normal, with edge providers seen increasingly as gatekeepers rather than as tenders of the virtuous internet garden, could improve the bill’s prospects.

News content creators are defined as outlets with a dedicated professional editorial staff that create and distribute original news and related content concerning local, national or international matters of public interest on at least a weekly basis, and are marketed via subscriptions, advertising or sponsorship. They include operations that provide original news and related content, at least 25% of which is current news and related content, or broadcast original news and related content via an FCC license.

As introduced, the bill would apply to content distributors with at least 1 billion active users per month on all their websites worldwide, so the bill is clearly aimed at the biggest platforms. ■ 

Stop the presses! President Trump has taken action to honor journalists.

Actually it was only putting his signature on a bill, though with his refusal to sign the defense authorization and COVID-19 and omnibus spending bills, perhaps that was a heavy lift in the current climate.

Also Read: Enough Is Enough

The President has signed into law the Fallen Journalists Memorial Act, which authorizes the building of a national memorial in D.C. honoring journalists who have died in the line of duty, that duty being keeping the world informed.

“Since our nation’s founding, a free press has played an integral role in reporting the facts, informing the public and holding our democratic institutions to account," said National Association of Broadcasters President Gordon Smith. "Sadly, too often, journalists have made the ultimate sacrifice at home and abroad in service to the First Amendment. America’s broadcasters commend Congress for passing and President Trump for signing into law the Fallen Journalists Memorial Act to commemorate those who have lost their lives reporting the news.”

One of those that hit particularly close to home for reporters covering the communications beat was the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered in 2002 while covering Islamic extremists in Pakistan. Pearl had covered telecommunications in D.C. the late 1990s before becoming the paper's South Asia bureau chief. 

Also Read: President Signs Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act

The bill does not fund the memorial. In fact it says federal funds can't be used for that purpose.*  But it does establish the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation, which is authorized to create a memorial on federal land commemorating "America's commitment to a free press as represented by journalists who sacrificed their lives in service to that cause." The foundation is "solely responsible for acceptance of contributions and payment of the expenses for the establishment of the commemorative work."

Also Read: Trump Calls Out Media 'Criminals' Over Hunter Biden Story

President Trump has been, inarguably, the harshest critic of journalists and mainstream media of any modern President, mocking their appearance, calling them corrupt and enemies and criminals and purveyors of fake news. He has himself been branded (while a presidential candidate) by the Committee to Protect Journalists as a threat to press freedom “unknown in modern history,” as well as an ongoing threat to journalist safety.

*The 1986 Commemorative Works Act generally prohibits the use of federal funds for memorial design and construction, but Congress has made exceptions, including in 2005 appropriating $10 million for the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial, but only as a matching grant.

During this lull -- between June's civil unrest following George Floyd's death and August’s political conventions, usually a hotbed of contentious confrontations -- there's an opportunity to evaluate the disconnect between law enforcement agencies and journalists. Discontent has simmered on both sides for generations, but it is becoming ever more dangerous for reporters to cover legitimate public assemblies where police are sometimes literally gunning for them.

“No journalist goes out in the field planning to get arrested,” said Dan Shelley, executive director and chief operating officer of the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA). “They are there as witnesses to collect the facts and report them out broadly…. the same public on whose behalf the law enforcement officers are acting.” He discussed the evolving police/press process in the midst of recent live telecasts during which reporters from CNN, KPIX-TV, Australian TV and other outlets were attacked or arrested as they covered protest demonstrations.

While last month's police/media interactions loom large, the upcoming political conventions will pose another challenge. Although the Democrats’ convention in Milwaukee is expected to be largely virtual, the physical presence at the re-located Republican National Convention in Jacksonville is still uncertain. Recent history suggests that whatever the scale, the nominating (coronation?) events bring out protests and accompanying police responses. There are classic memories such as NBC's John Chancellor reporting "from somewhere in custody” at the 1964 Republican convention near San Francisco and CBS's Dan Rather knocked to the floor and gut-punched by a private security officer at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

As media companies, police and others make plans for the conventions, they are also evaluating what to expect during the long, hot summer ahead with so many other health, economic and inevitably weather issues that will affect Americans in coming months.

RTDNA working groups have been developing the “correct verbiage to use in news stories” to understand how to be respectful of law enforcement officers, said Shelley, a former WCBS-TV executive producer as well as director of digital services. RTDNA’s “Guidelines on Civil Unrest” warn reporters not to use words like “protest” and “riot” (or “protester” and “rioter”) interchangeably. 

“Protests can be legal or not, while rioting is by definition a crime,” Shelley explained. 

Shelley conceded that sometimes reporters are “just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Others contend that they are in the right place, doing their jobs, while law enforcement officers are focused on doing their own jobs, which may be calming or breaking up a crowd without paying attention to details about who’s who.

The Committee to Protect Journalists tallied nearly 500 incidents in U.S. cities from late May through June where police and/or protesters' actions affected reporters. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker (a joint project of CPJ, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and other free-press organizations), during the weeks after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, there were 112 physical attacks on reporters (67 by law enforcement officers); 64 arrests of reporters and about 200 tear gassings, pepper sprayings and 104 rubber-bullet or projectile strikes. In addition, the report identified nearly 70 incidents of media equipment or newsroom damage.

The numbers merely encapsulate the situation. The on-screen arrests of TV reporters such as CNN’s Omar Jimenez in Minneapolis and KPIX-5 News reporter Katie Nielsen in Oakland, California, to name just two of about 60 such arrests, plus the devastating injuries to photographers – notably freelance photojournalist Linda Tirado, who lost vision after being hit in the eye by an expanding foam bullet early in the Minneapolis street demonstrations – became the focus of the first wave of critiques.

So far there has been almost no official local government response to the actions of local police in roughing up journalists who were doing their jobs. Requests to the organizations such as the International Associations of Chiefs of Police, the Fraternal Order of Police, the National League of Cities and other groups generated no response, despite multiple efforts to obtain their views.

Constitutional Protection, New Laws

Police reform legislation now in Congress doesn't deal with protection of reporters and media. The “best practices” recommendations in the bills may make it safer for reporters caught up in protests, but experts contend that First Amendment mandates are still the best protection.

Both the Republicans’ S. 3985, the “Just and Unifying Solutions to Invigorate Communities Everywhere (JUSTICE) Act,” and the Democrats’ H.R. 7120, the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020,” include “best practices” sections as well as directives for reviews police actions locally. Journalists could find protection under one section of the House legislation, the “Police Exercising Absolute Care With Everyone (PEACE) Act,” which recommends "deescalation tactics and techniques” that could apply to treatment of reporters.

RTDNA's Shelley acknowledges that attempts to avoid confrontations by putting words such as “Press” or “Media” on headgear or clothing, such labels “often make no difference to police” and may actually flag the journalists as “targets for media-haters in the crowd.” He also cited problems that arise when rabble-rousers don a “Press” vest or cap in hopes of avoiding rough treatment, and that police have become suspicious of such characters – and thus feel entitled to take aim at anyone wearing a press credential. He contends that even in tense situations, “officers should make the presumption” that a person is a journalist if he or she identifies as such.

“As journalists we don’t want poseurs out there who claim they are journalists [including freelancers] if they are not,” Shelley says.

Accreditation Won’t Necessarily Help

Admittedly, identifying legitimate journalists is an ongoing dilemma when anyone with a phone camera or a blog can self-declare himself or herself a reporter. At a Zoom video conference organized by the International Center for Journalism in early June, reporter Branden Hunter of the Detroit Free Press explained – as have many others – that merely being a “young black male” made him a police target, even though he was wearing a media pass given to him by the Detroit Police Department.

“They ignored it,” Hunter recounted.

A 24-year-old Des Moines Register reporter, Andrea Sahouri, was pepper-sprayed and arrested on May 31 while covering a protest and was charged with interfering with police. She claimed she identified herself and has pleaded not guilty. Last week she asked a judge to produce more evidence to back the charge, including police reports and body camera recordings, The Register reported.

Don Aaron, the Nashville Police Department’s public information officer and a former reporter at a local TV station, said his force seeks to alert officers of special treatment for reporters. He cited a recent curfew order which was accompanied by careful directives to “make sure that all officers know that media representatives were exempt from a curfew on downtown streets.”

“We want our police officers to know and appreciate the media’s role, even during protests,” Aaron said, explaining that a general curfew was imposed after rocks and bottles were thrown at officers and the city’s historic courthouse was attacked. He told me that the media members asked permission to cover events after curfew hours and, he said, “we’ve continued to let officers know that media representatives are allowed to be there to complete their missions as reporters.”

Aaron acknowledged the challenges of recognizing “new media” reporters, which may be difficult to parse out during tense situations.

For example, the issue of accreditation is a constant conundrum. In Detroit, like New York City and a handful of other jurisdictions, the police issue a “Press Pass,” although it’s often a controversial process. Big media companies also distribute photo identification badges/cards – but those are easily obscured in the heat of confrontations. Several publications ran images of press badges worn on cords around reporters’ necks during the melees. The badges were shattered and broken.  

Only a few major metropolitan law enforcement agencies issue press credentials for local reporters, notably the New York City Police Department. Accredited reporters must wear a visible badge, but there have been incidents in recent years where badged journalists have been attacked by police. Moreover, a police commander can revoke the credentials on the spot with no right of appeal.

Educating Law Enforcement

One ongoing challenge is to educate police about press freedom rights. Most local law enforcement officers take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution as well as state constitutions, but their actual training may be limited to about two hours of media training while at the police academy, according to sources I interviewed -- hardly enough time to delve into the First Amendment. Supervisors get additional training as they work their way up the ranks, but those constitutional values may lapse in the heat of a confrontation

Many observers, especially protective media organization leaders, contend that the police/media relationship is “the worst I’ve ever seen” (or some variation on that wording). But the contentious nature has long been obvious, notably in high-visibility confrontations between television reporters and law enforcers during the broadcast TV era. 

The fracas has been “part of the job.” As CBS's Rather said after he emerged from the scrum at the 1968 Chicago convention, "It’s all in a day’s work.” 

Those '60s smackdowns look tame, even quaint, compared to the current brutality. Today’s law enforcement practices – especially in this unruly, shifting, and immensely politicized media landscape – require broad changes to support the First Amendment and give citizens the news coverage they deserve. That’s more than police reform legislation can do.

Christiane Amanpour, CNN chief international anchor, will share her perspectives on the First Amendment, journalism and the news business when she takes part in the Taricani Lecture Series at the University of Rhode Island July 16.

The lecture, titled “Truthful Not Neutral in a Time of Dissent,” happens at 12:05 p.m. ET and is produced by URI’s Harrington School of Communication and Media. 

The livestream event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. 

Sree Sreenivasan, former professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, moderates. 

Amanpour graduated from URI in 1983. She’s the host of Amanpour on CNN and Amanpour & Co. on PBS. She was inducted into the B+C Hall of Fame in 2018. 

The event is named after Jim Taricani, who was a celebrated investigative reporter at WJAR Providence. The Taricani Lecture Series came to be not long after Taricani’s death in 2019. 

Taricani mentored Amanpour when she interned at WJAR after graduating from URI. He retired in 2014. 

“Providence turned out to be a brilliant news town,” Amanpour told B&C. “It was such an amazing experience.”

Authors and journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn were the guests in the Taricani Lecture Series last month.

The Columbia University Journalism School has named its 2018 Alfred I. duPont - Columbia University Awards recipients, with Netflix new to the winners circle.

Five of the awards, given for journalistic excellence, went to local TV stations, including two for Tegna-owned stations; three to commercial broadcast networks; two to PBS; and two to cable networks. Streaming service Netflix's award was for 13TH, the critically acclaimed documentary about the targeting of African Americans by the legal system as criminals, directed by Ava DuVernay.

The annual juried awards recognize excellence in broadcast, digital and documentary journalism. About a dozen news stories and films are honored each year for the strength of their reporting, storytelling and impact in the public interest.

The cable networks honored were HBO, for Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, and National Geographic Networks. CBS News's two included one for 60 Minutes in its 50th year, and ABC received one for a documentary on the Los Angeles riots. PBS's awards were for Frontline and World Channel.

Five local TV stations were honored for investigative reporting: ABC15 Arizona (Phoenix) for exposing abuse of the Americans with Disabilities Act; KARE 11 (Minneapolis) for three separate hard-hitting investigative stories; KHOU-TV (Houston) for revealing Houston’s wasteful police body camera program; KNTV (San Jose, Calif.) for an investigative series that chronicled the misuse of school police officers to discipline students; and WITI-TV (Milwaukee) for bravely challenging public opinion about laws intended to safeguard children that paradoxically may put them at greater risk.

“Like many of our Tegna stations, KARE and KHOU have produced incredibly meaningful work that impacts the lives of many," said Tegna president David Lougee. "Their projects are strong examples of the positive impact of local journalism on communities and the importance of storytelling for the public interest. We are committed to continuing to invest in our local stations to ensure they have the journalistic freedom to pursue investigations that make communities stronger without bias or agenda.”

Stacy Owen, president and general manager of KNTV, said: “We are honored to be recognized with this very important award and proud that our investigative unit helped to inspire security changes at schools in our own backyard and all across the country. The sweeping changes that resulted from our investigation reinforces our station’s mission of shining a light on questionable practices and holding the powerful accountable to make the Bay Area a better place to live for all.”

The awards will be given out Jan. 16, hosted by CBS This Morning's Gayle King and CNN's Jake Tapper.

Click here for a list of all the winners and their stories.

The infographic (pictured) from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is intuitive and simplistic. You can easily see that older people prefer TV news, while young audiences go for online and social media. No surprise there.

But it's misleading!

True, the "Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017" (unveiled this week) confirms that the screens-of-preference for younger audiences are mobile and dynamic. But identifying the platform does not necessarily tell you the source of the news. Consumers may look at an online or social media site to find reporting from established journalism sources (e.g., CNN, The New York Times, Fox News Channel) or just as easily from ersatz self-proclaimed bloggers or alt-news sources. The 136-page report delves more deeply into the distinction between the reception platforms and the actual content of the news.

The Reuters Institute, which conducted the global research (30 countries on five continents) with the University of Oxford, acknowledges that the findings are "a reminder that the digital revolution is full of contradictions and exceptions."

The results are also a roadmap (however ephemeral) toward future news consumption patterns, quantifying current usage patterns and offering eye-opening ideas for media providers about where to focus for future news packaging. The findings raise questions, such as whether today's 18-to-24 year-olds (only 24% of whom now consider TV as a primary news source) will migrate to TV sets by the time they are 55+ years old. (Doubtful.)

And the study's structure forces us to consider whether "online" and "social media" platforms are truly distinct from one another. An argument can be made pro or con about their congruence. Again the big blur quickly arises, given the propensity of established media companies to put their scoops on their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts — often before they go on the air.

Dozens of other fascinating factoids emerge from Reuters' study. For example, despite the popularity of social media, only 24% of respondents think it does "a good job in separating fact from fiction." Actually that's not too far different from the 40% who question whether traditional news media performs that task very well.

Nonetheless, 51% of U.S. respondents said that they now get news via social media, up 4% from last year and twice as many as in 2013, according to the study. (If you click the above link into the full report, the U.S. data starts on page 102.)

Avoiding News
Among the most threatening findings in the Reuters analysis was that 29% of people say they sometimes or often avoid news altogether because it can have a negative effect on their moods. Those are serious concerns not only for building an informed electorate but for the news networks that have enjoyed, as Reuters calls it, "a very substantial Trump bump" during the past year -- a boomlet that could quickly evaporate.

Of similar concern for traditional platforms is the finding that smartphones are now as important for news access inside the home as outside, suggesting that media consumers don't need to turn on a TV set. The study even caught a glimmer of the role of voice-activated digital assistants (such as Amazon Echo) as a new platform for access to on-demand news. Again, this suggests that legacy news sources must explore ways to become apparent via this emerging platform.

One encouraging aspect of the Reuters' study is that more Americans "than ever before (16%)" are willing to pay for online news, a 7% increase from last year. It also cited last year's Pew Center study that technology platforms now "command nearly two-third of all digital advertising revenues." In its roster of top U.S. news brands, local TV stations, Fox News, CNN and NBC/MSNBC took most of the top spots, with more than 25% of viewers indicating that they go to those channels every week. Online, CNN (22%) and Fox News (20%) attracted more weekly visitors than The New York Times, local TV news online and the websites of local newspapers.

In its evaluation of brand attributes, Reuters found that 49% of Fox News viewers say it is best for "accurate and reliable news" compared with 32% who say the same of CNN. Similar comparisons of FNC and CNN viewers generated similar preferences among each network's audiences for "understanding complex issues," "strong viewpoints" and "amusing and entertaining."

Although the Reuters analysis is merely another snapshot of the flux in the digital news era, its findings offer significant direction for networks and information purveyors about what audiences expect.