Fox apologizes for “error” in news story that created the impression Eagles players knelt during the national anthem.

Context matters. Good journalists should go out of their way to avoid creating a mistaken impression. Fox News apologized Tuesday after receiving a torrent of criticism over the network’s use of photos of various players for the Philadelphia Eagles kneeling in prayer, creating the misleading impression that they were demonstrating during the national anthem. The photos ran during a segment on Monday night, after President Trump announced that he had…

Facebook “Grid View.” Is this new? My first thought is that I rather like it.

I just noticed an option for viewing a Facebook timeline in “grid” mode. For the past several years I have been trying to add a square image to all my blog posts, and the style I created for my blog uses these square images (in different ways based on the width of the user’s screen). Part of me wants to view Facebook in a stylesheet that resembles Netscape web pages…

Fascinating observation on Trump’s ability to drive the “Spygate” story

Within the span of five days, Trump went from having just heard about FBI’s use of a confidential source to rendering the judgment that this was a purposeful — and political — attempt by the Obama Justice Department to install a “spy” within his ranks. And deciding that this was a) a scandal and b) one of the biggest scandals in American history. What’s remarkable about all of this is…

Twitter changes strategy in battle against internet ‘trolls’

Reducing the reach of abusive tweets is better than censorship on the one hand, and nothing on the other. Of course, this is another reminder that the social media titans can and do manipulate what we see. Reducing the impact of bullies benefits Twitter’s bottom line, which is the same reason for every change to the Twitter algorithm. Twitter Inc on Tuesday revised its strategy for fighting abusive internet “trolls,”…

CNN’s Chris Cillizza on Trump’s definition of “Fake News”

Here’s some excellent analysis of Trump’s latest attack on journalism (I blogged a bit about this in “More Evidence That, to Trump, ‘Fake News’ Means Critical News“). Trump either doesn’t understand or ignores the difference between a story he doesn’t like and one that is not true. He conflates the two for his own political purposes — knowing his base hates the media and is more than ready to believe…