Laurene Powell Jobs has said that President Trump’s attacks on the media are ‘right out of a dictator’s playbook,’ and that the press needs to be careful not to play into his hands by publishing stories without vetting them …

Speaking to Kara Swisher on the Recode Decode podcast, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs made the comments when asked what she thought of Trump’s frequent attacks on the media.

Apple has previously shared the human curation process it employs to ensure Apple News isn’t ‘total crazy land.’

If you look at polls about — and you probably know this better than I — but at the degree to which people trust any news source, and they trust even, you know, highly credibly fact-checking organizations and their reporting, it’s at an all-time low, and shockingly low.

It doesn’t help, though, that I think some media entities play into this where, you know, we just saw it with BuzzFeed, where there’s sort of a rush to have breaks before everything’s truly deeply vetted, and that plays into Trump’s rhetoric. And so, we should be careful about that, or you guys should then.

Jobs said that high-quality journalism was under threat from the uncertainty of its business model in the Internet age.

That, she said, was what led her to buy a majority stake in The Atlantic magazine, and make other media purchases.

From the access to abundant free news. And so the advertising model is no longer a viable model and the subscription-based model took a long time to concretize and take off. And so we lived in this time period for about a decade when we saw the collapse of credible viable journalistic properties.

But she said that she really wanted to see more local ownership, not just wealthy people making acquisitions.

Swisher didn’t ask her views on the Apple News monetization situation, nor on the company’s reported bid for 50% of subscription revenues, which was a shame – would have been interesting to get her take on these.

Jobs also backed Tim Cook’s view that you have to engage. Cook made the comment in a letter to Apple employees after being criticized for meeting with Trump back in 2016. Cook wrote then:

Jobs said that she met with Trump to discuss immigration policy, though it didn’t go well.

The whole interview is worth listening to, or reading the transcript.

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