When he’s not busy trampling free speech, crushing the First Amendment, and destroying media consolidation and consumer protection standards, Brendan Carr has other hobbies. Like helping the telecom industry patriotically sell a brutal coming wave of new layoffs caused by the kind of industry consolidation he regularly rubber stamps.

Carr recently began circulating plans for something he claims will restrict U.S. telecom companies’ ‌use of foreign call centers and require foreign-based customer service workers to be proficient in American Standard English. The plan is vague, but Reuters unskeptically frames it as a good faith effort to protect U.S. consumer privacy, improve customer service, and protect Americans from the scourge of foreign accents:

“Carr noted that nearly 70% of U.S. businesses outsource at least one ‌department, ⁠including customer service and call center operations, to overseas locations.

“As a result, too many Americans have struggled to resolve an issue with a representative due to cultural and language barriers,” Carr said, adding foreign customer ​service centers “also raise ​concerns about ⁠protecting consumers’ personal information.”

What is Carr really up to here? I suspect he’s working closely with U.S. telecoms to craft pseudo-patriotic/nationalistic cover for another brutal round of layoffs. Some of which will be caused by AI, but a huge amount of which will have been caused by Carr’s love of rubber stamping harmful telecom industry consolidation.

For one, there’s no real evidence that overseas customer service centers create serious cybersecurity issues. As he did with his recent effort to remove phone unlocking rules, Carr likes to use cybersecurity as a bogeyman when convenient to something unpopular he’s trying to help industry sell.

Then, with his other hand, Carr is busy making U.S. consumers less safe and secure by gutting functional oversight of giant telecoms (despite the recent massive Salt Typhoon hack by China).

It’s also not really clear the FCC even has this authority. Especially in the Trump era, which has involved the Trump courts taking an absolutely brutal hatchet to regulatory independence. This sudden micromanagement of telcom support runs contrary to Carr’s “light regulatory touch” rhetoric. It’s also worth noting that a lot of telecoms, like Charter, already have mostly U.S. support agents.

But here’s the more important thing. I’ve covered Brendan Carr probably longer and more extensively than pretty much anybody alive. And I can tell you, with 100% certainty, that Carr doesn’t do anything that’s just inherently in the public interest. That’s simply not who he is.

He’s always working an angle for industry or large companies, usually media and telecom giants. There’s just no evidence that he’s a good faith operator in any of the arenas Reuters gives him unearned credibility for, and his ethics and principles, as we’ve seen repeatedly, are not consistent.

So I really doubt this has anything to actually do with improving customer service, or holding telecoms accountable for shoddy overseas support. I suspect he’s cooking up a stage play.

We’ve long noted how these consolidated regional telecom monopolies have some of the worst customer service ratings of any industry in America (which is truly saying something). Maybe AI will improve some aspects of that, but as we’ve seen in other arenas where AI is layered on top of very broken sectors (journalism, health insurance) by unethical executives, the end result isn’t particularly great.

If you don’t fix the underlying monopolization, you can’t fix the symptoms of monopolization, which generally are high prices, spotty service, slow speeds, and abysmal customer service. Layer AI on top of a broken industry, and you usually get a badly automated broken industry.

It will be worth keeping an eye on Carr’s final proposed plan. But I suspect it mostly involves him working closely with telecom giants to put a nationalistic, racist veneer on looming plans to dramatically accelerate layoffs in a telecom sector that’s already seen massive workforce reductions, largely due to the mindless consolidation Carr regularly rubber stamps.

Brunchlords can only fail upward. It’s physics.

Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to get as much as $550 million in compensation and tax reimbursement as the company prepares to be acquired by Larry Ellison’s CBS/Paramount:

“Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is set to receive $34.2 million in cash severance; $517.2 million in equity in the combined company; and $44,195 in continued health coverage reimbursement benefits, per a WBD filing with the SEC.”

The Wall Street Journal suggests his payout could top $800 million, though I think they’re double counting potential tax reimbursement.

Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers mergers, which included thousands of brutal layoffs, consistent creative infighting, endlessly higher prices, cancelled programming, and a steady wave of overall dysfunction. And that’s before we even get to this latest merger with Paramount, which is expected to see more layoffs and chaos than ever.

Variety, as is generally the tendency for Hollywood trade mags, can’t be bothered to mention literally any of the real world consumer and labor costs of pointless consolidation. That’s just not of interest to editors there. They can’t even muster the interest to suggest Zaslav’s reign was controversial or that his payout might not be commensurate with any sort of actual real world competency.

If you visit the comment section of this story however, you can tell the public has… thoughts. You can find the same lack of interest in real world labor and consumer harms (and the public’s seething, palpable anger) at outlets like Deadline.

I’ve written a lot about the AOL–>AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery mergers simply because I think they perfectly encapsulate the pointless, destructive incompetence at the heart of modern media consolidation, and the cannibalistic nature of Wall Street’s obsession with illusory quarterly growth propped up by smoke, mirrors, and complex accounting.

Ever since the original AOL Time Warner merger back in 2001, pointless consolidation has promised no limit of innovative “synergies,” but instead resulted in more than 50,000 layoffs, shittier product, higher prices, the death of a ton of well-loved brands and IPs, decades of chaos, a decline in quality journalism at places like CNN, and a bottomless well of shit.

It’s the extraction class abusing the rules of the game to pretend to be good at business. They’re not actually building anything useful, nor are they remotely interested in the longevity of the company, its customers, the talent that powers it, or the people who work there. They’re playing with funny numbers to try and perpetually generate the illusion of impossible permanent growth at incredible scale, then cashing out when the check finally comes due for their complicated shell games.

Now, we’re poised to see what could be the grand master of dysfunction with the Ellison family’s whopping $110 billion acquisition, backed heavily by Saudi cash. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to predict this latest deal could make all the past chaos and dysfunction look positively adorable. And at some point, the entire shell game will come crashing to the ground, with guys like Zaslav nowhere to be found.

We’ve noted repeatedly how the U.S. authoritarian right is buying up all of our new and old media companies because they’re trying to mimic what Viktor Orban created in Hungary. Namely, a media where all the major outlets are owned by rich autocratic allies, who spew propaganda 24/7 while the government strangles real, independent journalism just out of frame.

Of course, you’re supposed to try and have some subtlety in this so the public isn’t fully aware of the con. But the Trump administration doesn’t do subtlety.

Last week Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently got upset by the fact Trump’s war in Iran isn’t going very well. Poor Donald clearly didn’t understand the evolving nature of modern and inexpensive drone warfare (despite all the brutal evidence in Ukraine), and has gotten the country bogged down in precisely the sort of clusterfuck the fake populist pretended he opposed last election season.

Even our soggy corporate press has occasionally been making this clear to the public, something that upsets Pete Hegseth very much. Hegseth apparently got particularly upset with CNN recently insisting that the Iran War had “intensified.” It made him so upset that he openly pined for the moment when Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son) control CNN, so they can cheerlead for war:

One of the funniest parts about this is that claims the war had “intensified” was made by his own agency in a press release!

It’s very clear that the U.S. right wing won’t be satisfied until the entirety of U.S. media is owned by a handful of rich right wingers like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, allowing them to create a North Korea bullhorn of daily, uniform propaganda that does nothing but lavish praise upon them. To build something like that here in the States requires a level of subtlety they’re simply not capable of:

Democrats historically suck on media policy and reform (even the progressive wing of the party is fairly incompetent on the subject), so you can’t expect much help there.

But there are several things working in our favor, including America’s sheer size (it’s very difficult to maintain the kind of control they’re looking for), our diversity, the decentralized nature of the modern internet, and the fact that most of the nepobabies (David Ellison) and brunchlords (Bari Weiss) integral to their plans appear to have absolutely no Earthly idea what they’re actually doing.

For example, all the debt Ellison has adopted from the purchase of CBS and Warner Brothers is going to force them to engage in massive, unprecedented cost cuttings and layoffs, making it hard to maintain informational control and build an effective, ratings-grabbing propaganda operation (even if Bari Weiss knew what she was doing, which she assuredly does not).

And the public still has agency. Larry Ellison can buy TikTok and Elon Musk can buy Twitter, but they can’t control the flow of the public as they flee to other, less white supremacist, right wing friendly alternatives. It’s sheer hubris to think they can maintain information control in a country this massive and diverse, and there will be some useful entertainment value in watching them set money on fire trying.

Brendan Carr is once again doing Brendan Carr stuff.

Carr has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcasters that tell the truth about Trump’s disastrous war in Iran. In a post over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Carr insists that news outlets that are “running hoaxes and news distortions” (read: telling the truth) about the war will face potential headaches when their licenses come up for renewal:

If you can’t read that, it says:

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.

The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.

And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.

The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.

It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.

When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.

Time for change!

That’s certainly a lot of tough-talking bullshit.

Carr’s only authority comes over broadcast affiliates (not national media companies or cable TV outlets), most of which are already owned by Republicans and already kiss Trump’s ass (because they want to merge). The FCC hasn’t denied a license renewal in decades, and any attempt to do so would result in a massive, protracted First Amendment legal mess that the FCC would be extremely likely to lose.

Carr’s actual goal for this kind of stuff is three fold.

One, he’s putting on a show for our mad, idiot king that Carr is being a good boy. Two, he’s trolling the press so they’ll hyperventilate about his behaviors; those stories then advertise to the MAGA base the false impression that Carr is doing useful and bold culture war stuff (so he can potentially run for higher office). They’ll assume it all must be useful and important because he’s upsetting people of intellect, importance, and conscience, which they enjoy.

But most importantly it sends a message to media companies that they should get in line with the Trump administration or face costly and expensive (no matter how pointless) legal annoyances. Of course those threats haven’t really been needed, because most U.S. media companies (and big corporations) have been happy to bribe the president or kiss his ass anyway.

That sort of feckless journalistic failure in the face of power is why so much of the public has lost faith in U.S. news, not because they’ve historically been too critical of war or too tough on wealth and power.

While these sorts of threats certainly are dangerous, Carr is a monumental clown who is putting on a big show to try and pretend he’s a person of substance and power doing important things.

Meanwhile Trump is upset that some news outlets have been making it clear he was too stupid to understand the evolving nature of low cost, modern drone warfare (despite all the evidence in Ukraine). In his own post at his own right wing propaganda website, Trump went off on a local rambling tirade about Iran somehow misleading the entirety of U.S. media:

That one says:

Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at “feeding” the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.I. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony “Kamikaze Boats,” shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don’t exist — It’s all false information to show how “tough” their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal’s false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies. Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not — It’s FAKE NEWS, generated by A.I. For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media, shows our great USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at — Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information! The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they “win” are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets. The Radical Leftwing Press knows this full well, but continues to go forward with false stories and LIES. That’s why their Approval Rating is so low, and I can win a Presidential Election, IN A LANDSLIDE, getting only 5% positive Press — They have no credibility! I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic “News” Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, “FIRED.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

These are not the behaviors of competent, confidence people who believe things are going well. They’re the sad gyrations of pathetic men who know Trump is on historic trajectory to be the worst and least popular President in U.S. history (with ample room to fall). No amount of posturing can hide it.

We’ve discussed at length how Trump’s “fix” for TikTok’s problems basically involved forcing the sale of the platform to his greedy billionaire buddies (with the help of pathetic Democrats). The deal fixed none of the real issues Trumpland pretended to be concerned about (national security, privacy, propaganda), and China still maintains a significant ownership stake.

It was one of the more embarrassing examples of U.S. cronyism and corruption in recent memory.

But wait, as they say, there’s more!

As the Wall Street Journal notes (paywalled), the “Trump administration” is set to receive a $10 billion fee from investors for facilitating the deal. The new owners, which include Trump’s friend Larry Ellison, private equity giant Silver Lake, and MGX (controlled by the UAE) are funneling the payments, which will total $10 billion, to the “Treasury Department”:

“They and other backers paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total, the people said.”

We, of course, don’t actually know where that money is going and will actually be used for. You can confidently assume it will somehow eventually wind its way into Trump’s pocket somehow, since the entirety of U.S. democratic oversight has been wholly corrupted by these whiny zealots, who are busy stripping the country for parts and selling it for scrap off the back loading dock.

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian:

“The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said. Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the U.S. operations is valued at about $14 billion in the deal, which some tech analysts have said dramatically undervalues the company.”

The outlet goes on to note that the $10 billion fee absolutely towers over any remotely comparable historical precedent:

“Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal. 

Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump’s role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers. “

The Wall Street Journal can’t be bothered to note that the deal fixed absolutely none of the purported concerns raised about TikTok. China still has a major ownership stake, and the new owners seem every bit as hostile to democracy and free expression as the worst Chinese autocrat (they’re just not honest enough with themselves or you to admit it yet).

All of these owners are equally just as likely to engage in privacy and surveillance violations as the Chinese (which again, despite a lot of pretense, did not have full direct control over the app). In fact, you could even argue that the previous TikTok was likely to be better on all of these subjects because they were at least trying to adhere to ethical standards to remain operating in the country.

TikTok’s new American owners are very up front about their plans to demolish the entirety of regulatory autonomy, corporate oversight, and consumer protection, leaving them with absolute freedom to pursue whatever unethical bullshit they can dream up. I suspect they’ll try to leave things alone for a year (to avoid a mass exodus of young people) before their goals become… unsubtle.

Again, Trump, with Democratic help, managed to steal the world’s most popular short form video app and offload it to his radical billionaire friends under the pretense he was protecting national security and U.S. consumer privacy. Even before you get to this $10 billion bribe, it’s easily one of the ugliest examples of corruption and U.S. tech policy dysfunction we’ve ever seen.

I like to convince myself history will not be kind.

We’ve noted how Microsoft is a little sensitive about AI slop at the moment. Back in January, CEO Satya Nadella wrote a well-circulated blog post lamenting critics of “AI slop” and demanding the public simply move past such conversations. It was relatively innocuous, but wasn’t received well for some valid reasons.

One problem is that Nadella put the onus on the consumer for ignoring a lot of Microsoft’s terrible choices as it relates to AI, whether it’s the ample lazy AI slop that fills the company’s zombified MSN portal, the rushed integration of AI into software in a way that poses major new security risks, their undercooked AI copyright bots, the company’s efforts to shovel Copilot down the throats of people (whether they want it or not), or some of the really dodgy privacy practices they’ve been engaged with via Windows 11 AI “snapshot” features.

Last week found Microsoft under fire yet again, this time for defensively locking down a Discord server after people wouldn’t stop calling the company “Microslop.” More specifically, Microsoft Streisanded themselves after they tried to ban the term on its Copilot discord server. When people found creative ways to get around the ban, Microsoft decided to lock down the entire server.

When called out for that by frustrated users, Microsoft tried to blame the entire incident on “spammers” who were trying to post “harmful content”:

“The Copilot Discord channel has recently been targeted by spammers attempting to disrupt and overwhelm the space with harmful content not related to Copilot,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us, adding that the “blocking of terms like ‘Microslop’ and some others associated with this spam campaign were temporary while the company worked to implement better safeguards.”

Microsoft executives don’t really seem to want to engage in any serious introspection into their rushed adoption of AI in ways customers don’t always appreciate. Most recently, their integration of Copilot into Notepad opened up a major cybersecurity vulnerability.

This whole incident will, of course, only result in users doubling down on their criticisms:

These companies have invested untold oceans of cash into a technology that may have utility for many, but hasn’t, to date, been all that profitable. Many AI companies have layered under-cooked automation on top of very broken systems (see: health insurance or journalism or war) in problematic ways, raising questions about company valuations and systemically poor judgement. All while AI’s immense energy consumption has caused companies to disregard already tepid climate goals.

Instead of engaging in real conversation about these issues you tend to get a lot of generalized defensiveness (“why can’t you simply praise us for our innovation?”), all of which has been made worse by the tech sector’s enthusiastic coddling of authoritarianism.

Last election season, you might recall how the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would “rein in big tech,” and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time, that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway by a lazy press and a long line of useful idiots (including some purported “antitrust experts“.)

This last year has truly revealed the con: Trump not only has demolished regulatory independence, media consolidation rules, and consumer protection standards, he’s rubber stamped every shitty merger his administration has come into contact with (provided companies promise to be more racist), and fired the few Republicans in his administration that even vaguely cared about antitrust.

Trump’s latest betrayal to the the MAGA antitrust movement (that never really existed outside the skulls of rubes) is his DOJ’s surprise blindsiding of states by striking a pathetic settlement with Ticketmaster that doesn’t really fix the actual problem: monopoly.

The Biden DOJ and most US states sued Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary back in 2024, alleging that Live Nation has a monopoly on “the delivery of nearly all live music in America today.”

But while a new Trump settlement with the company requires $280 million in civil penalties and a 15% cap on service fees for people who want to use their amphitheaters, it backs off any attempt to pursue a break up of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the one move that would actually (more permanently) help protect consumers, artists, and the live music market from predatory behavior.

The Trump DOJ and pedophile protector Pam Bondi struck the deal behind closed doors and didn’t bother to tell any of the 27 states (including many Republican ones) currently fighting Ticketmaster in court. It’s another win for Bondi loyalists (whose function is to blindly serve our mad idiot king) and the final middle finger to Gail Slater and Mark Hamer types that at least sometimes cared about antitrust.

States are, you may be unsurprised to learn, pissed off and planning to continue the fight alone, though they say the Trump DOJ has caused potentially irreparable harm:

“The case went to trial, and testimony began last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. But the US and Live Nation informed the court of a proposed settlement on March 8, taking state attorneys general by surprise. The judge presiding over the case reportedly said in court today that the way the settlement was announced “is absolutely unacceptable.

States reserving the right to continue litigation filed a motion for mistrial, saying they need time to prepare for a new trial and evaluate the terms of the settlement between the US and Live Nation. The “sudden disappearance” of the US from the case will likely give the jury the incorrect impression that Live Nation’s “antitrust violations have been cured or resolved, or that Proceeding Plaintiff States’ claims lack merit,” the states said.”

This was always going to be the outcome. There were constant signs. Trump is an autocrat, fascist, and opportunist who believes in nothing beyond his own pursuit of power and wealth. The corruption and autocracy was always going to dominate any serious Republican interest in antitrust (which, let’s be honest, even among Gail Slater types was historically inconsistent at best).

The MAGA base belief in this line of bullshit was one thing, but Trump’s antitrust bona fides were also propped up by folks like purported progressive antitrust expert Matt Stoller, who praised guys like JD Vance and Josh Hawley for being serious anti-corporatists, when the entire thing was always a con designed to give phony populist credibility to autocrats who never had to actually earn it.

The U.S. press also played a giant role here. They spent years propping up Trump’s false claims he “wanted to rein in big tech,” when what the authoritarians really wanted was to abuse government power to scare (quite successfully as it turned out) tech companies away from doing even the most basic content moderation of right wing race-baiting propaganda online.

Now, unsurprisingly, here we are, staring down the barrel of democracy demolishing authoritarianism, with unchecked corporate power in full alignment with the effort.

We’ve already all seen what the Ellison family’s version of “editorial independence” looks like over at CBS, where contrarian troll Bari Weiss has turned the already very Republican friendly news giant into a safe space for right wing zealots and autocrats. All overseen by a Brendan Carr chosen censor tasked with ensuring the channel always makes Donald Trump happy.

As always with authoritarian regimes (and corporate ownership), this is all presented to the public as an effort to restore balance, eliminate (nonexistent) “liberal bias,” and reach out to real Americans. As if billionaires and their useful idiots could care less about everyday Americana.

After being gifted two Hollywood studios and two major news empires by daddy and Donald Trump, fail-upward nepobaby David Ellison made the rounds last week to insist that CNN’s “editorial independence” would be retained under Paramount/CBS ownership. His evidence? CBS:

“So, look, I’ve said this since the beginning, which is, you know, for — when it really comes to — editorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It’s maintained at CBS. It’ll be maintained at CNN. And, really, who we want to talk to is the 70% of Americans and really around the world that identify as center-left, as center-right. And we want to be in the truth business. We want to be in the trust business. And that’s not going to change.”

Of course, if anybody had actually been paying attention to CBS, they’d see how the network under Weiss has already tried to repeatedly kill stories that aren’t favorable to Donald Trump, gone out of its way to normalize right wing opportunists like Erika Kirk, and has driven away a lot of remaining CBS journalists with Weiss’ obvious efforts to pander to Trump and Netanyahu.

Like CBS, CNN already goes well out of its way to be extra friendly to authoritarians. The network has routinely faced criticism for consistently airing sneering MAGA devotee Scott Jennings. Under Ellison ownership there’s zero serious doubt, by anyone, that CNN will become even more friendly to autocrats. After they get done firing untold thousands of people to try and pay down the deal’s immense debt.

Traditionally there’s only one editorial direction U.S. journalism usually goes under consolidated corporate ownership. U.S. media owners like tax cuts, deregulation, subsidies, access, and merger approvals, so corporate media’s editorial slant generally follows the financial interests of ownership. The pretense that U.S. media suffers from widespread “liberal bias,” or the belief that there are still functional firewalls between ownership and editorial, are long-deceased relics.

Larry Ellison clearly wants to hoover up what’s left of corporate media (including CBS, CNN, HBO) — and fuse it with his co-ownership of TikTok to create a sort of Hungary-esque autocratic state media, where administration allies praise dear leader while the government strangles independent and public media just out of frame.

The only thing saving us from the full and terrible vision of this outcome to date is the fact that very few of the weird nepobabies and brunchlords being tasked with its creation have anything you’d mistake for competence.

Last month we reported on a strange story in two strange parts: first, a coder had his AI agent create an entire smear campaign against a coding repository volunteer because he rejected AI code. Second, an Ars Technica journalist named Benj Edwards used a bunch of quotes made up by ChatGPT in a story about the saga without fact-checking whether or not they were actually true.

Edwards was also very up front in terms of explaining and taking direct ownership of the screw up, noting he was sick with the flu at the time he wrote the story. Ars was also refreshingly up front about it, issuing an editor’s note apologizing for the error.

Edwards says he first tried to use Claude to scrape some quotes from the engineer’s website, but that was blocked by site code. He then turned to ChatGPT to farm quotes from the site, but ChatGPT decided to just make up a whole bunch of stuff the engineer never said (this is a pretty common issue).

Just cutting and pasting quotes probably would have saved the journalist a lot of time and headaches. And his job, apparently, since Ars has since decided to fire Edwards, something Ars doesn’t seem interested in talking about:

“As of February 28, Edwards’ bio on Ars was changed to past tense, according to an archived version of the webpage. It now reads that Edwards “was a reporter at Ars, where he covered artificial intelligence and technology history.”

Futurism reached out to Ars, Condé Nast, and Edwards to inquire about the reporter’s employment status. Neither the publication nor its owner replied. Edwards said he was unable to comment at this time.”

There are several interesting layers here. The biggest being that AI isn’t an excuse to simply turn your brain off and no longer do rudimentary fact checking.

At the same time, this can’t really be unwound from the fact that media ownership rushed to tightly integrate often under-cooked LLM models into an already very broken journalism industry with the obvious and primary goal of cutting corners and undermining already-struggling labor.

The pressure at most outlets for journalists to generate an endless parade of content without adequate compensation or time off creates in increased likelihood of error. The overloading (or elimination of) editors (with or without AI replacement) compounds those errors. That the end product isn’t living up to anybody’s standards for ethical journalism really shouldn’t surprise anybody.

The President of Larry Ellison’s “new and improved” Paramount, Jeff Shell, has been conspicuously absent from recent events heralding the company’s problematic acquisition of Warner Brothers. The reason? Shell is being accused by a “whistleblower” and former partner of leaking company info, including early word of the company’s $7.7 billion August 2025 deal to obtain the exclusive rights to stream MMA fights.

Shell, previously fired by Comcast for sexual harassment allegations, allegedly had a… complicated relationship with the man, R.J. Cipriani. Cipriani claims to have been a “crisis communications” specialist who helped Shell plant favorable stories in the media in exchange for Shell’s promise to help fund a TV show. An internal Paramount investigation into the claims is ongoing.

But Cipriani is also now suing Shell $150 million for not following through on his promises:

“The plaintiff, R.J. Cipriani, alleges in the lawsuit that he had a relationship with Shell for 18 months, in which Cipriani would tip Shell off to forthcoming news articles and offer advice. The suit also alleges that Shell would share non-public information with Cipriani about Paramount’s plans.”

The whole story is an interesting read, and includes claims that Shell told Cipriani that Paramount significantly overpaid for Warner Brothers. And that Cipriani seeded the trade press with lots of information favorable to Paramount, including some allegedly peppered into this June 2025 story about a potential fight between South Park’s creators and Paramount.

Nobody in the story comes off as having particularly sound judgment. You also wonder, if Cipriani’s claims are true, who are the people at these media companies who are so easily manipulatable.

Shell was placed in the president spot at Paramount shortly after the previous CBS owners bribed Trump to ensure that Skydance could acquire the company. Shell was highly representative of the new “anti-woke” bro culture at Ellison’s Paramount, which I think was dissected pretty well by this Hollywood Reporter piece last year:

“It’s an echo of the feelings-don’t-matter, no-coddling ethos that powers Silicon Valley, where Ellison was raised and watched his father, Larry Ellison, grow Oracle into one of the most valuable companies in the world (and make himself one of the richest people on the planet). Multiple sources say Ellison is building a more brash culture that’s defiantly upending the circumspect, politically correct style that has defined Hollywood in the post-#MeToo, post-George Floyd eras. It’s a studio reborn, where blunt feedback is the norm, canceled talent is welcome (cheaper on the dollar, and yearning to prove themselves) and no one is walking on eggshells.”

If Shell and Cipriani’s behaviors are any indication, it sounds like the decision to purge the company of ethics and empathy is going great so far. And this was before all the disastrous stuff by Bari Weiss at CBS News, the massive layoffs at CBS overseen by Shell, and the most recent decision by Larry Ellison to gift his nepobaby son with a second major Hollywood studio on the back of Saudi and Chinese cash.

I bring all of this up because the previous three mergers related to Warner Brothers (spanning two decades) have been absolute disasters. Usually because the people acquiring the company were broadly incompetent (see: AT&T), had terrible judgement, and bit off way more than they could chew in terms of both depth, collaborative creation, and competency.

With a mammoth $111 billion price tag for Warner Brothers, thrown atop the debt acquired through the CBS and other deals, this new Paramount is a towering mountain of financial obligation that’s going to result in dysfunction, layoffs, and chaos likely to make past Warner deals seem quaint. All overseen by people who apparently (and quite proudly) have some of the worst judgment imaginable.

Get your popcorn ready.