3 News Stories You Should Read Today – 4/9/2018
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Department Of Homeland Security Compiling Database Of Journalists And ‘Media Influencers’
In today’s installment of “I’m Not Terrified, You Are,” Bloomberg Law reports on a FedBizOpps.gov posting by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with the relatively benign-sounding subject “Media Monitoring Services.”
The details of the attached Request for Information, however, outline a plan to gather and monitor the public activities of media professionals and influencers and are enough to cause nightmares of constitutional proportions, particularly as the freedom of the press is under attack worldwide.
And “attack” is not hyperbolic.
Facebook on Monday will begin alerting the 87 million users whose data may have been harvested by Cambridge Analytica.
The company plans to post a link at the top of users’ news feeds that will allow them to see which apps are connected to their Facebook accounts and what information those apps are permitted to see.
“As part of this process we will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica,” the company said last week.
Facebook users will also have the opportunity to use the link to delete apps and prevent them from collecting more information.
The Republican 2018 messaging crisis, explained: They “backpedaled into cultural issues, and it looked desperate.”
Traditional conservatives are quick to maintain tax cuts are a winning message. Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who leads the House Republican conference, said the country hasn’t yet experienced the “full momentum of tax reform” after Republicans lost a special election in a Trump +20 district in Pennsylvania.
“You should not undersell giving almost the entire country a tax cut,” Guy Benson, a conservative pundit and editor at Town Hall, told Vox. “The law is working, and you can use the law as a springboard of talking about what is working.”
But in the field, we’ve seen a different kind of messaging crisis management. In the Trump era of Republican politics, the backup plan to an ineffective economic message has been to wage a culture war.
Fearmongering and race-baiting about MS-13 gangs, Confederate statues, and sanctuary cities are divisive messages that worked for Trump. When polls tighten, we’ve seen Republicans turn to these messages in the final weeks of the race. It’s just not clear it will stanch the bleeding.
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