"The President of the United States called a woman a DOG," author Stephen King tweeted this morning, continuing with what may be one of the most horrifying things he's ever written, "Let me repeat that: he called her a DOG. Have we gotten so numb to Trump's ugly, demeaning talk that this means nothing? You might like her, you might not, but to call her a DOG?"

Hate speech is often in the mind of the beholder. To my mind, Alex Jones' qualifies and not just because I hate it, but because it is an insidious form of hate speech that skirts the line of explicit, imminent threats in favor of longer-term and more underlying ones. As the name of his "show" honestly states, he is conducting "InfoWars" on our sensibilities. And the only sensible thing to do in response is to ignore and marginalize what he does.

Tom Rogers, who as head of NBC Cable ushered in the era of vertical news channels that have contributed to the political polarization of news programming and audiences, this morning used one of his progeny -- MSNBC -- to call out the media industry for failing to defend threats to their First Amendment rights from the Trump Administration. "I think the entire media industry has to be called out here," said Rogers, now executive chairman of WinView, on a segment of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that began by discussing a new wave of Russian disinformation attacks on digital media platforms like ...

In his first full day on the job, President Donald Trump declared war on the media. In recent weeks, he and his White House have declared war on the truth, altering official White House transcripts, as well as a video on the White House's official YouTube channel, to distort the meaning of a statement made by Russian President Vladimir Putin during their joint press conference in Helsinki.

If there was any doubt that Donald J. Trump was in active campaign mode, an analysis of political ad spending on Facebook the past two months should put that to rest. The analysis, conducted by New York University professors for 'The New York Times,' shows that Trump -- both individually and vis-a-vis his Political Action Committee -- is Facebook's top U.S. political advertiser.

On the fifth anniversary of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the Pew Research Center is releasing an in-depth analysis of the hashtag's life cycle and some proprietary research showing the role social media is playing in engaging Americans around, well, social issues. The hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times on Twitter since the July 13, 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin.

In a direct appeal to crowd-fund a paid media buy to distribute a video attacking liberals as "unhinged," the Trump-Pence campaign this morning sent emails to its list asking for "another $1OO,OOO before tonight's 9 P.M. airing deadline." The appeal does not explain the use of the proceeds or why there's a deadline associated with the ad.

There is an interesting direct-to-consumer media funding model emerging from the Trump Pence campaign this week. In an email signed by Vice President Mike Pence, the campaign is promoting contributions by implying it will be used to offset the Democrats "media machine."

If there's anything we've learned from 2016, it's that low voter turnout can produce some surprising electoral results. That proved to be the case Tuesday in a New York primary election for a 2016 Congressional seat that was closely watched. The incumbent, Joseph Crowley, considered a likely successor to become Speaker of the House, should was deemed a shoe-in. Guess what happened?

Webster defines womp as "an abrupt increase in the illumination of a television screen resulting from an abrupt increase in signal strength," which is exactly what Corey Lewandowski's snide remark on Fox News appears to have done this week.