donal brown

President Donald Trump is considering ending the security clearances of former Obama administration officials, namely, former CIA director John Brennan, former national Security adviser Susan Rise, former national intelligence directors James Clapper and Michael Hayden, and former FBI officials James Comey and Andrew McCabe. Brenner criticized Trump’s press conference remarks after his Helsinki meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin as “nothing short of treasonous.” Wrote the Times, “Mr. Trump’s threat appeared designed to rebuke high-profile

California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes charged in a campaign ad on radio and TV that the Fresno Bee was working with radicals to publish fake news stories. Nunes is known for his role in trying to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election. Nunes was upset about the Bee’s stories on Nunes’ investment in a winery. (Politico, July 18, 2018, by David Siders and Stephanie Murray) Despite the

Jacob Weindling reports a series of tweets in  Paste, July 18, 2018, by journalist Molly Crabapple showing the layers of obstruction and red tape that reporters face in trying to gain access to a  detention center. “Soon enough,” writes Crabapple in one tweet, “the journalist gets tired of driving out hours each way to facilities only to be turned away, of filing papers that will only lead to demands for more papers. Their deadline comes

On top of all the challenges in the Trump era of coping with hostility and shrinking revenues, the news media is facing ever escalating fakes of videos, photos and audio files. “The problem for newsrooms is threefold: how to identify sophisticated manipulations, how to educate audiences without ​inducing apathy and deepening mistrust​, and how to keep the growth of this technology from casting doubt on legitimate and truthful stories,” writes Heather Bryant for Nieman Lab,

Reporters are complaining that under the Trump administration, press briefings have become rare, brief and uninformative. Some believe that the failure to hold briefings reflects the disarray in the White House, the conflicts between the president’s tweets and what others in the administration are saying and disrespect of the press in their role in informing the public. (CNN, July 18, 20198, by Brian Stelter) The Associated Press declared in April that the presidential news conference