"I am the least racist person," Trump told CNN's Don Lemon on December 9, 2015. Two days earlier, Trump had proposed "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." In his campaign kickoff speech on June 16 of that year he had infamously characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. On February 28, 2016, in a television interview with CNN's Jake Tapper Trump declined repeated opportunities to distance himself from expressions of support from former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, later blaming a bad earpiece. It was also Tapper who interviewed Trump on June 3, 2016 when Trump declared that Indiana born judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was handling two Trump University lawsuits, was ruling unfairly because "He is a Mexican." (Trump eventually settled the fraud case for $25 million.)

Sebastian Gorka is a deputy assistant to the President, serving as an adviser on national security. Still unknown to many Americans, Gorka gained some notoriety recently when he was found to have worn a medal associated with Miklos Horthy to an inaugural ball. Horthy led the Hungarian government from 1920 to 1944. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem, describes his government as anti-semitic, noting that it was the first government in post-World War I Europe to institute a quota on the number of Jews who could enter university. Although Horthy later resisted Hitler's more extreme measures, such as construction of ghettos, and concentration camps, he is revered by the far right Jobbik party in Hungary. The Jobbik party, which sponsored a statue of Horthy unveiled in 2013, has "stoked anti-semitism" in Hungary, "vilifying Jews and Israel in speeches in parliament," according to Reuters.

Gorka, whose specialty these days seems to be media appearances and his own celebrity, does not have the Top Secret or Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearance that would normally be expected of someone leading a government unit responsible for counterterrorism intelligence. Colin Kahl, who was a national security adviser in the Obama administration, wrote recently in Foreign Policy that he was unable to confirm that Gorka had a security clearance at all.

As reported by Cleveland.com by way of Daily Kos, marketing strategist Shannon Coulter began a movement to boycott Ivanka Trump's clothing line in October of 2016. The boycott expanded to businesses like Macy's, Amazon, Forbes.com, NASCAR, HSN, Nordstrom, Zappos and more. Originally a list distributed as a shared Google document, Coulter's efforts evolved into the website grabyourwallet.org, which advocates for ethical corporate policies, especially those that expand opportunities for systematically marginalized peoples.

Jay Rosen's Press Think

Mark Jacob's Stop the Presses

Media Matters

The Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin has a page of links to broadcast councils and other media entities where you can register a complaint or express a concern.

See below for links to individual media organizations.

The weekend's news was dominated by Trump's executive order restricting immigration, which manages to be cruel and incompetent at the same time. But this striking actualization of a campaign trope comes after a week in which lying was the most notable behavior by Trump and members of his administration. Confronted with lies so blatantly false and easily disproved, some reporters created a slack channel to exchange tips for submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding the Trump administration. While some observers sought to explain Trump's lying as learned behavior that had benefited him in his career as a businessman, others saw a more pernicious phenomenon.

Responding to Meryl Streep's speech after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement at the Golden Globe awards, Donald Trump denied having mocked a reporter with a disability. 

The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, known informally as the National Security Adviser, is the chief adviser to the president on national security issues. Consistent with the pattern of appointees whose political positions or temperaments seem antithetical to the mission of the agencies or positions they've been appointed to fill,  Trump's designated National Security Adviser, Retired U.S. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, has been investigated for passing classified information without authorization, and has promoted conspiracy theories and fake news.

Kansas Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo, Trump's nominee for the job of CIA Director, is on record asserting that so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques were "within the law and within the constitution." Pompeo made his remarks in December 2014 when California Senator Dianne Feinstein released a Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA detention and interrogation. The report documented CIA use of torture including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, "rectal rehydration," and denial of medical care.

Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" centers around a novel in which, unlike traditional fiction where a character's decision at one point in time forecloses other choices, instead all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously.

Corporate strategist Eric Garland's recent epic twitter thread on the intertwining geopolitical and national events that have led us to the current political crisis has something of a Borgesian quality.

Garland’s long narrative had the effect of a Rorschach test when it was posted on December 11. A representative positive reaction came from Washington Post investigative reporter David Farenthold, who has reported extensively on Trump foundation misdeeds. Farenthold tweeted "Damn, man, this is great writing, using a form that does not lend itself to greatness." Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, who has chronicled Trump’s history of business failures, lies, and possible cognitive disorder called Garland’s thread a "MUST read." On the other end of the spectrum, London writer and self-described "PhD candidate in applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge," writing in Slate called it, with apparently no ironic intent, the "worst piece of political writing in human history."  Garland’s tweetstorm even roused the ire of Gizmodo editor Alana Hope Levinson, although not for its content, but for its format, which she seemed to argue suited a blog better than Twitter. Tellingly, Levinson designated Garland’s content, which was arguably something like "the geopolitical origins of the Trump phenomenon" as "not important." (We should perhaps note that Levinson has fewer than 10% the Twitter followers Garland has.)