Scott Miller

A few weeks ago, there was an “inside baseball” media kerfluffle about whether whether journalists should characterize some Trump tweets as 1) “comments that some considered racist,” 2) “racist comments,” or 3) comments by a racist President.

This week, we’ll discuss the use of such labels—and whether they advance or inhibit dialogue and understanding.

Here’s a Washington Post op-ed to get us started.

Turkey is moving forward with a purchase of Russian SAM batteries, despite warnings from the U.S. and NATO that the integration of Russian defense technology is not consistent with NATO’s security requirements.

We’ll discuss:

• How did we get here? Is this mostly due to President Erdogan, or is it evidence of a longer-term megatrend that may be more difficult to reverse?
• What would be the implications of lesser Turkish involvement in NATO (either by the Turkish government’s choice or NATOs)?
• How important is Turkey to the NATO “European shield”?
• What should be done (if anything)…
  • By the U.S.?
  • By other NATO allies (or NATO in its own right)?

I hope we’ll be joined by Bob Sargent, who has some experience with Turkey. All depends on Bob’s availability and Mike Wolf’s ability to get the “Owl.”

Here’s an opinion piece from the Ellsworth American to get you thinking…but feel free to Google and add more sources in the comments.

We’ll discuss the social media giants’ impact on American society—the quality of discourse, data security, privacy and other related topics.

• Should social media platforms be subject to legal liability as “publishers” responsible for curating their content?
  
• Has social media “dumbed down” our citizens?
  
• Should user agreements for free services (like pretty much all social media, plus Gmail, etc.) be revised to make it clearer why this stuff is “free?” How should they be changed?

Here’s a WaPo article on “browser extensions” to get you started.

And a NYT op-ed piece on how the recent FaceApp affair isn’t really an outlier.