President-elect Donald Trump continues to shape his Cabinet, picking Jeff Sessions as his choice for attorney general and Mike Pompeo for C.I.A. director; Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner also expressed interest in joining the administration, sparking debates over the legal ethics and culture of nepotism in America; Facebook's failure to regulate its swaths of fake news has garnered sharp criticism for possibly swaying the presidential election; and why NPR decided to "normalize" hate speech on air with interviews from the alt-right.
Trump’s latest cabinet picks, Jared Kushner and the history of nepotism in America
As President-elect Donald Trump contemplates his Secretary of State pick, we take a look at what his current cabinet picks might mean for the path ahead for the White House.
With Jeff Sessions as his pick attorney general, Stephen Bannon as chief strategist, Mike Pompeo as his choice for C.I.A. director, Trump has been quick to assemble his transition team with prominent, and sometimes controversial, Republican figures. The son-in-law of the president-elect, Jared Kushner, has reportedly shown interest in joining the new administration.
Ethics lawyers have commented that the move would violate a federal statute designed to prevent family members from influencing government decision-making. The law was put in place almost 50 years ago, after John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general. No public official is allowed to hire a family member, by blood or by marriage, to an agency under his or her authority.
Fill-in host Libby Denkmann checks in with Anna Palmer, senior Washington correspondent at Politico, and historian Josh Zeitz, on Trump’s cabinet picks and the history of nepotism in America.
Guests:
Anna Palmer, Senior Washington Correspondent at Politico
Josh Zeitz, historian; taught at Cambridge University and Princeton University; currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
Dissecting the millennial voter in the 2016 election
Millennials turned out in droves for President Obama in 2012, but that wasn’t exactly the case for Hillary Clinton in this election.
True, most millennials did come out for Clinton, but a notable sub-segment also went for either one of the third-party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.
To help us understand the role the millennial generation played in this year’s election are Bloomberg writer Polly Mosendz, and San Diego State University’s Jean Twenge.
Guests:
Polly Mosendz, reporter at Bloomberg news who recently wrote a piece titled “What This Election Taught Us About Millennial Voters”
Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University whose areas of focus includes the millennial generation. Her books include “Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (Free Press, 2006); She has recently written a piece on the millennial voter and the election
Weighing impact of fake news on social media on election outcome
Have you seen the Donald Trump feature in a 1998 issue of People? In the piece, the President-elect supposedly commented that if he ever ran for president, he’d do it as a Republican because “they are the dumbest group of voters in the country.”
It turns out that interview is completely bogus, and it’s just one of the many fake headlines and stories that made their rounds on social media during the 2016 election. Others that made the rounds included a headline alleging Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump for president (he hadn’t) and that an FBI agent who was supposed to testify against Hillary Clinton was found dead in his apartment (which never happened).
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, many are wondering whether the proliferation of fake news stories may have swayed the election in Trump’s favor. Facebook recently came under fire for failing to filter out fake or embellished news stories such as the People Magazine interview from 1998.. Since then, Facebook has not only said it would address the issue but has even come forward with a plan to harness the power of users to flag false or fake content and to go after the purveyors of fake news where it hurts most: their wallets. Google has also said it would ban fake news sites and the people that run them from using Google’s advertising service.
While it’s unclear exactly how big an impact fake news may have had on the election’s outcome, a Buzzfeed News analysis showed that the top fake election news stories generated more engagement on social media than did the top 19 stories from reputable sources combined.
Did the selectivity of its newsfeed sway the presidential election by shaping opinion in its online communities? Should Facebook and other social media platforms be held accountable as publishing companies, as opposed to mere tech entities, in order to evaluate their impact on users’ political views?
Guests:
Caitlin Dewey, reporter and digital culture critic for The Washington Post’s blog ‘The Intersect;’ she tweets
Craig Silverman, founding editor of Buzzfeed Canada, where he covers online misinformation and fake news; he tweets
The journalistic ethics behind NPR’s recent interviews on alt-right
With the appointment of Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon as President-elect Trump's chief strategist, there are mounting concerns that Bannon might bring an alt-right mentality with him to the White House. Bannon, who once called Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right,” has many worried that some of the anti-Semitic and white nationalist political views that have been associated with the so-called alt-right movement will be given a platform in the Trump Administration.
After airing interviews with Breitbart editor Joel Pollak responding to criticism of Bannon as Trump's choice for chief strategist as well as Richard Spencer, an alt-right movement member who talked with host Kelly McEvers about the alt-right and its beliefs, NPR received a slew of feedback from listeners, enough to merit a response from NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen addressing listeners’ concerns and the idea of whether allowing the interviews to air was helping to normalize hate speech. Jensen even went as far as to say she’d rather those types of interviews not be done live, arguing that live interviews can be too spur-of-the-moment for a topic like this, which requires significant contextualizing and careful planning of the host’s questions and their framing.
Do you think NPR is giving a platform for hate speech by airing these interviews? Should NPR stop doing live interviews of this type altogether? What do you think NPR could or should have done differently in its interviews with Pollak and Spencer, respectively?
Guests:
Kelly McBride, senior faculty member at The Poynter Institute and one of the nation's leading experts on media ethics; she tweets
Judy Muller, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning television correspondent and a professor of journalism at USC
* Corrections: On AirTalk it was stated that Kelly McEvers' interview with Richard Spencer aired on All Things Considered on Friday. It aired Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016. The original version of this article also incorrectly identified Joel Pollak as an "alt-right voice." He is not associated with the alt-right movement.
Tippi Hedren on working with Hitchcock, her animal rights activism
Tippi Hedren's the iconic, icy, elegant blonde first introduced to moviegoers fending off a flock of murderous birds.
The danger brewing behind the scenes has now become the stuff of Hollywood legend. She's also a conservationist and animals rights activist, and she has a new memoir telling her story.
AirTalk contributor Libby Denkmann speaks with Hedren about her new book.
Tippi Hedren will be at the following event to talk about her new memoir:
Saturday, Dec 17th, 2016 at 3:00pm at Santa Monica Library Authors Forum
Guest:
Tippi Hedren, actor and author of the new memoir, “Tippi” (William Morrow, 2016)