We’ve noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run CBS News for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power (particularly Trump and Netanyahu), validate and amplify right wing grievance and engagement bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism. Even if she fails and CBS is ruined, Larry Ellison wins.
Bari’s problem so far isn’t that she’s not good at journalism or unqualified (which is true and irrelevant), it’s that she’s not doing a particularly good job at the task she was hired for: engagement agitprop and semi-cleverly coddling the status quo.
“Journalists at CBS News say that Weiss still has not laid out a clear strategy for how she wants the network to change and adapt, though she is expected to do so as soon as this week, sources say.
“I’m constantly confused by what her definition of ‘making news’ is,” a second current CBS News staffer said. “It seems like she only cares about big names saying controversial things. That’s not the same as newsworthiness.”
Most of the news coverage of Weiss tends to downplay the fact that she was hired specifically by the Ellison family not to improve CBS journalism, but to either destroy it, or distort it into a right-wing-friendly engagement slop. Even journalists at CBS still seem confused as to why Weiss doesn’t appear to be good at journalism, when it’s very clear that’s not what she was hired for:
“We are a prideful newsroom, and she’s rubbing people the wrong way,” a third network staffer said.”
Weiss will inevitably be a glass ceiling casualty of the new 80s ski-villain movie brunchlord culture at Paramount, who will probably replace her with some younger hustlebro chode better suited for trolling the Internet in order to “sex up” the ratings for their culture war agitprop.
And again, it’s important to remember that contrary to some breathless media missives, CBS was, with spotty exception, not a great news organization before this all started. Network leadership’s very first response to rising U.S. authoritarianism was to hire more on-air authoritarians. The last act of the outgoing CBS leadership was to bribe our authoritarian president to get a terrible new merger approved.
The best outcome for everyone is probably a complete institutional collapse at the hands of the network’s new nepobaby brunchlord leadership, accelerated by the fact that nobody in any position of authority at the new CBS seems to have absolutely any idea what they’re doing. Both in terms of journalism, or in terms of building a modern right-wing-friendly grievance and propaganda empire.
Donald Trump and his authoritarian friends have successfully destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the closest this country has gotten to having a useful and effective publicly-funded media. The CPB this week voted to officially shut down, just months after Republicans passed a massive billionaire tax cut plan that stripped the organization of more than $1 billion in funding.
“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” said Patricia Harrison, CPB’s president and CEO.”
As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based, corporate media. A media that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).
The destruction of the CPB is particularly harmful for local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations, which now face existential collapse.
The attacks on the CPB are part of a broader information warfare campaign by the U.S. right wing, which has involved destroying all remaining media consolidation limits, letting radical right wing billionaires buy up major news networks and social media platforms, and launching fake investigations into public broadcasting. They’re afraid of the truth and a functional press, and it’s not subtle.
While Republicans are outwardly hostile to informed consensus, Democrats historically have done a shit job defending journalism or implementing media reform. The press also generally doesn’t like covering this destruction too deeply because consolidated corporate media billionaire ownership doesn’t much like the idea of having to compete with government subsidized alternatives to their bland infotainment dreck.
And even though U.S. public media never truly reached the potential we’ve seen in other countries (usually due to decades of right wing defunding and attacks), this is a generational, devastating loss all the same. Especially in terms of what could have been.
American right wing propaganda companies are beginning to fight among themselves as a shrinking number of dodgy media companies vie for domination of the Trump-coddled U.S. propaganda market.
Newsmax executives filed an adorable complaint with the Trump FCC and Brendan Carr (who they actively helped install), pointing out that letting all the local fake-journalism right wing-coddling broadcasters merge into one giant shitty company will be bad for media diversity:
“The company formally filed a petition with the FCC on New Year’s Eve, arguing that the proposed merger “violates the law and creates an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of one broadcaster.”
Newsmax’s focus on its opposition is that the current ownership limits make a single entity owning enough stations to reach more than 39% of the U.S. TV households illegal. Should the proposed merger with TEGNA go through, Nexstar Media Group would reach nearly 80% of all households.”
These folks literally and actively helped install a corrupt NYC real estate con man president, who openly and repeatedly stated he was going to destroy whatever was left of U.S. media consolidation limits, and now they’re shocked and upset that he’s following through. It’s priceless.
Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy goes on, suddenly seemingly concerned about media consolidation issues:
“This merger would create an unprecedented and dangerous consolidation within the broadcast TV industry, giving them immense control over local news and political news coverage,” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy — who signed the filing with the FCC for the network — said in a statement.
“This merger is no better than others the FCC has already blocked,” the filing from Newsmax concludes. “The Commission should reject the proposed transaction because it violates the law, will harm competition, and will damage the public interest.”
Spoiler: Brendan Carr will not block the merger because he doesn’t care about the public interest, functional competition, or healthy markets. He cares about getting a post-FCC revolving door gig at whatever telecom and media giant remains at the end of the Trump administration.
It’s about to get much, much worse under Trump 2.0.
There are a few media consolidation limits left, like rules preventing the big four (ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC) from merging. There’s also the national television ownership rule, which prevents one company from reaching more than 39 percent of all US TV households (again, because the goal was ensuring a more diverse array of opinions and ownership, which is good for media markets and the public interest).
Once TEGNA and Nexstar merge, you can be absolutely sure the remaining company will seek to merge with Sinclair broadcasting, the poster child for right wing agitprop pretending to be local broadcast news. After that, expect efforts by ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC to both merge with each other, and increasingly merge with existing telecom and tech companies looking to goose stock earnings with pointless consolidation.
Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is preparing to take a hatchet to all of these remaining restrictions, propped up by the false claim that the modern media environment is just so damned competitive and vibrant, such restrictions harm “free market innovation.” Ironically, the consolidated mass media doesn’t like to report on the problems this will cause because that’s not in ownerships’ best financial interests.
It’s not all downside. These folks are all rushing to try and dominate a traditional media sector aren’t historically competent. And their ham-fisted attempt to replace U.S. journalism with infotainment cack is likely to result in an even greater exodus of viewers as their primary target audience dies off. Which is why right wing billionaires also made sure to acquire Twitterand TikTok.
Somewhere in this hot agitprop mess you’d like to believe that there’s opportunities for individual, independent and worker-controlled media (and ethical, public-interest oriented companies, if any remain) to grab greater audience share. And for actual innovators to disrupt traditional app and media domination. Otherwise, any hope of having an informed electorate and building a useful anti-authoritarian cultural counter-movement grows increasingly dim.
“In the public letter, which is addressed directly to Ellison, the signatories declare that they “stand in solidarity” with the 60 Minutes team that worked on “Inside CECOT,” the story that was pulled by Weiss shortly before it was set to air on December 21. They also note that this signaled a “breakdown in editorial oversight” and risked “setting a dangerous precedent in a country that traditionally valued press freedom.”
Ellison, of course, won’t balk. Much like Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the Ellisons bought CBS (and a part of TikTok) with the goal of information control. The goal is the same goal billionaires have had for generations: dominate mass media, soften its criticism of wealth and power, and befuddle, distract, confuse, and disorient an already pretty fucking dim electorate.
They’re not going to back off that agenda because you said “pretty please.”
It’s worth reiterating that CBS already wasn’t in great shape to begin with. Even before Ellison, the network’s very first response to rising U.S. authoritarianism was to hire more Trump-friendly Republicans. And if you haven’t read it already, this piece by longtime journalist Spencer Ackerman demonstrates how the network already had a very rich history of coddling U.S. wealth and power.
This is, as you might be noticing, a lot harder than billionaires tend to think. It’s very likely that the Ellison effort to dominate media simply drives people away from CBS and toward more ethical, interesting alternatives. There’s really no indication that this weird assortment of nepobabies and contrarian trolls have any idea what they’re doing. They’re not even good at agitprop.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. If successful, Ellison could still turn CBS, TikTok, and potentially CNN into an even worse version of Fox News, which is arguably the last thing American media needs.
Ethical folks who care about an informed electorate should fund trustworthy independent and worker-owned media (like Techdirt) whenever possible in the new year.
We’ve noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired Bari Weiss to run CBS for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power, validate and amplify right wing grievance bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism.
And she’s doing all of those things incredibly well.
Weiss’ first major move was to host a town hall with a right wing opportunist nobody was actually interested in. Her second major move? To effectively kill a major 60 Minutes story about the president’s concentration camps. More specifically, to derail a 60 Minutes story focusing on the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a brutal prison in El Salvador (CECOT).
CBS announced they were “postponing” the story, which had already seen multiple layers of fact checking and legal review, just three hours before it was poised to broadcast. Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi was understandably pissed off, and shared a must-read complaint with her colleagues about Weiss’ ham-fisted effort to undermine the network’s journalism:
Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:
It’s quite a letter, which leaked almost immediately:
News Team,
Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.
If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient. If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast.
We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.
These men risked their lives to speak with us.
We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.
We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it.
When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.
I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight. Sharyn
Before killing the segment, Weiss had recommended numerous changes, including adding a new interview with Trump’s unhinged racism-czar Stephen Miller, and replacing the term “migrants” more frequently with words like “illegals.” You know, to be fair and balanced:
“Ms. Weiss first saw the segment on Thursday and raised numerous concerns to “60 Minutes” producers about Ms. Alfonsi’s segment on Friday and Saturday, and she asked for a significant amount of new material to be added, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions.
One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.
Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally, two of the people said.”
Alfonsi notes that the 60 Minutes team had already asked for comment from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. She also noted that Weiss had basically implemented a “kill switch” for any journalism the Trump White House finds inconvenient.
One presumes they found this particular story extra problematic not just because it exposes the Trump administration’s brutal and unconstitutional industrialized racism machine, but because it humanized Venezuelans at a time when the administration is trying to inflame racial tensions to justify its illegal, militaristic pursuit of Venezuelan precious metal and oil resources.
CBS, of course, wasn’t exactly a bastion of independent, hard-nosed journalism before Weiss and Ellison came to town. The network’s very first response to authoritarianism was to hire more right wing voices. Like many media outlets, it had already been compromised by generational bullying by the U.S. right wing, designed to discredit all factual opposition of right wing ideology for having a “liberal bias.”
Weiss was just hired to finish the job.
The latest paper-edition of the Onion satirical newspaper put it pretty well:
This should not have surprised anybody who has been paying attention. As noted previously, Weiss doesn’t have any actual experience in journalism (certainly not enough to warrant the promotion). She’s an opportunistic, contrarian-for-contrarianism’s-sake troll who built a blog dedicated to culture war grievance and lazy engagement bait.
Billionaires hired Bari Weiss to inflame cultural divides, disorient the public, and undermine journalism. They fire real journalists and replace them with Weiss (and others like her) to divide and distract the electorate from the actual causes of most U.S. dysfunction: usually unchecked corporate power, extreme wealth disparity, corruption, and our increasingly sociopathic, technofascist billionaire class.
Weiss part of an army of fake journalists employed by U.S. billionaires for this purpose (aided in some instances by hostile foreign intelligence), and despite the agenda never being subtle, the consolidated corporate media (the remnants of which Ellison is steadily trying to buy up and dominate) is utterly incapable of being honest with itself about any of it. Quite by design.
I see a lot of commentary pointing out that “Bari Weiss isn’t very good at journalism,” which distracts from the point that she wasn’t hired for journalism. She was hired to blow smoke up the ass of establishment right wing power, whether that’s Trump’s concentration camps or Netanyahu’s industrialized murder of toddlers.
If Weiss gets fired sometime next year it won’t be because she’s a terrible journalist that undermined the outlet’s already sagging credibility, it will be because she’s a clumsy propagandist and a ratings bore.
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.
At the heart of this enshittification (at least the more recent mergers involving AT&T and Discovery) has sat Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav. Like the AT&T execs before him, Zaslav has seen absolutely zero accountability for this chaos, and, in fact, has been repeatedly rewarded with a series of massive compensation packages that in absolutely no way reflect his competency.
“Zaslav will receive $30 million in “golden parachute” compensation, along with $537 million in equity, for a total of $567 million in a transaction-associated pay, per the Wednesday filing. Zaslav has led Warners since it formally merged with Discovery in 2022 following a $43 billion spinoff from then-owner AT&T.”
Now you might be inclined to say something like, “well he’s being justly compensated by the extraction class for his successful efforts to cannibalize the brand and usher it through a series of consolidative deals that were in the best interests of shareholders.”
But that’s not really true.
The endless chaos created by “growth for growth sake” mergers may provide temporary stock boosts and tax breaks, but it simultaneously has generated no limit of ill will among consumers (something Zaslav sometimes pretends to recognize), massive stock fluctuations, a huge talent drain, lots of wasted money and time, significant animosity among creatives, and significant harm to core brands (like HBO and CNN).
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, or 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.
This, of course, won’t end here. Whichever company (CBS or Netflix) buys Warner Brothers will initially promise an ocean of new “consolidative synergies” before inevitably cutting, burning, and slashing resources, staff, and product quality to try and pay off debt from more pointless M&A and goose earnings frustrated by frustrated customer churn and saturated streaming growth.
Thanks to mindless deregulation of the markets and our adoration of artifice, there’s no financial incentive to do anything differently or learn from experience, which results in these folks engaging in the same behavior over and over again. At least until a truly severe market crash occurs, at which point, guys like Zaslav will be nowhere to be found and well insulated from the real-world harm they helped cause.
But most of the day got hung up on a very simple question: is the FCC an independent agency, or is it dutifully bound to obediently do whatever the president wants without question? If you’re new to this, the answer is supposed to be the former, but Carr, ever the dutiful Donald Trump earlobe nibbler, really struggled with this line of questioning all day long:
LUHAN: Is the FCC an independent agency?CARR: I think th—L: Yes or noC: There's a test for this in the la—L: It's yes or no, Brendan! On your website, it simply says, man, 'the FCC is independent.' This isn't a trick questionC: The FCC is notL: So is your website lying?C: Possibly
This was apparently such a sensitive line of questioning for Carr and the Trump FCC that it actively changed its website during Carr’s testimony to falsely state the agency was no longer independent:
Just so people understand: Carr has always been shameless liar and opportunist, whose underpinning legal and “intellectual” logic for what he’s doing will just randomly change, at whim, to justify his actions. Republicans, and a lot of our press, will then work tirelessly to normalize this as serious adult policymaking.
Something important to note that highlights Carr’s hypocrisy: back during the net neutrality wars in 2014, Barack Obama publicly stated that he supported imposing some basic rules, which was perfectly normal and legal. At the time, Republicans positively freaked out, insisting that the president’s vocal support was among the greatest indignities ever conceived and violated FCC independence.
“President Obama’s one minute and 57 second video was the culmination of an unprecedented and coordinated effort by the Executive Branch to pressure an independent agency into grabbing power that the Legislative Branch never said it had delegated.”
That FCC independence had been somehow destroyed because Obama legally vocally supported net neutrality has been a central talking point for Republicans for years now. It was the centerpiece of phony Republican congressional inquiries and reports for the better part of a decade.
Yet here you have a Republican president openly ordering the FCC to censor critics, journalists, and entertainers. And Carr, shamelessly trying to now claim the FCC serves entirely at the whim of the president:
KIM: I want to read you a quote & see if you agree with it. 'Congress long ago determined that the FCC is an independent expert agency.' Is that correct? CARR: Senator, there has been a sea change in the law & approach since I wrote that sentenceKIM: Yes you did. You said it in front of Congress
This is who Carr is (and who modern Republicans are). For decades they’ve wanted to have their cake and eat it too. When it’s time to implement even modest oversight of predatory telecom monopolies or media giants, folks like Carr will insist the FCC is just a helpless puppy with no authority. When it comes time to offload TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends, censor journalists critical of their mad king, or bully comedians, suddenly the FCC has all the authority in the world.
There’s absolutely zero legal coherence to any of it. It’s kakistocracy. It’s authoritarianism at the hands of the dimmest, least ethical people imaginable. It’s frequently illegal. And it’s embarrassing.
One downside of the day’s focus on FCC independence is that Congress didn’t really pressure Carr on any of the other ethically problematic and illegal things he’s been doing, whether it’s a fake “investigation” into public media, his abuses of the merger approval process to require that companies be more sexist and racist, or his complete decimation of FCC consumer protection and media consolidation limits.
Apparently, Jared Kushner and his investment firm Affinity Partners didn’t like the attention the partnership was generating, and have announced their tactical retreat:
“The dynamics of the investment have changed significantly since we initially became involved in October,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to believe there is a strong strategic rationale for Paramount’s offer.”
And by “dynamics,” Affinity means that the the president’s son-in-law partnering with Saudis and the planet’s second-richest technofascist billionaire to gobble up the remnants of dying U.S. corporate media was generating a few too many negative headlines for their liking.
The $108 billion hostile takeover bid is still being backed (for now, apparently) by the Saudis. And, of course, it’s still the brainchild of right wing Trump billionaire ally Larry Ellison, who will assuredly receive favorable treatment should the dispute wind up being settled by the Trump DOJ or Trump-corrupted courts.
For his part, Trump is trying to pretend Ellison isn’t a close ally and massive campaign donor, because, one can only presume, he assumes you’re all very stupid:
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that ’60 Minutes’ has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before,” Trump wrote. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”
The whole fracas puts Democrats in a bit of a bind. In an ideal world with functioning regulators, you’d advocate for the rejection of all additional media consolidation, because these deals — whether Netflix or Paramount — routinely result in mass layoffs and higher prices for consumers.
But because Congress and U.S. regulators no longer function due to corruption (despite a lot of pretense to the contrary), it’s unlikely that all deals will be blocked. And while Netflix is certainly no saint, keeping consolidated corporate media ownership out of the hands of extremist authoritarian zealots hell bent on dismantling democracy with propaganda is pretty clearly the better option.
Which means that Democrats and organizations keen on actually helping (and keeping U.S. Democracy semi-operational) are probably better off finding common cause with Netflix. There’s dogshit Netflix homogenized consolidation, which is definitely bad, and then there’s authoritarian state television dominated by the planet’s second richest techno-fascist asshole, which is significantly worse
We’ve already explored at length how Bari Weiss was hired by the billionaire Ellison family to make CBS even more friendly to billionaires and authoritarians after their embarrassing capitulation to (and bribery of) U.S. autocrats. This isn’t really a pivot real people were actually asking for, it’s simply extension of the right wing extraction class’s assault on informed consensus and real journalism.
And while Weiss likes to pretend she’s shaking things up at CBS with audience-focused innovation, most of her early moves have fallen completely flat. Like Weiss’ recent new town hall effort, whose inaugural episode featured a softball interview with right wing activist Erika Kirk. The interview was pretty much what you’d expect, with lots of downplaying of Charlie Kirk’s role as a radical, divisive, inflammatory bigot.
But as we’ve noted previously, the U.S. media market is already well-saturated with news organizations focused on telling affluent, white, right wingers what they want to hear. In Weiss’ case, the new CBS is a gambit to make men like Donald Trump, Larry Ellison, and Benjamin Netanyahu happy. The actual, real-world interest in this bizarre pseudo-journalistic kayfabe is arguably very limited.
As Weiss quickly found out, as her inaugural chat was relegated to a hollow ratings hour filled with ads for products like the Chia Pet:
“The news special aired at 8 p.m. on Saturday, one of the least-watched hours in broadcast TV. And that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top advertisers appearing to support the show. During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.”
Mainstream advertisers are reticent to affix themselves to absolutely anything deemed remotely off-putting, whether that’s an exposé on mass shootings, or a softball interview with the grieving wife of a right wing propagandist paid by U.S. billionaires to sow division and stall consensus-oriented reform.
Weiss, a shameless opportunist without much actual journalism experience, made all manner of proclamations when she was hired about how she was going to “shake things up,” solve CBS’ perceived bias, and restore journalistic rigor. Yet her very first major move not only involved platforming herself, it involved elevating a fringe, right wing activist who isn’t particularly of interest to most normal people.
Again, she had the opportunity here to platform any of the amazing scientists, academics, artists, thinkers, athletes and doers America has on offer, and settled on a fringe right wing activist of fleeting interest to CBS’ actual news audience.
Larry Ellison’s efforts to dominate what’s left U.S. media should be extremely alarming, but there’s a single, solitary bright spot: there’s very little evidence anybody involved in this strange collection of trolls, brunchlords, and nepobabies has any actual idea what they’re doing.
The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There have been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess.
Earlier this year, we noted how Politico was among the major media companies rushing to embrace AI without really thinking things through or ensuring the technology actually works first. They’ve implemented “AI” systems –without transparently informing staff — that generate articles rife with all sorts of gibberish and falsehoods (this Brian Merchant post is a must read to understand the scope).
Politico management also recently introduced another AI “report builder” for premium Politico PRO subscribers that’s supposed to offer a breakdown of existing Politico reporter analysis of complicated topics. But here too the automation constantly screws up, conflating politicians and generating all sorts of errors that, for some incoherent reason, aren’t competently reviewed by Politico editors.
Actual human Politico journalists are understandably not pleased with any of this, especially because the nontransparent introduction of the new automation was in direct violation of the editorial union’s contract struck just last year. So unionized Politico employees spent much of this year battling with Politico via arbitration. And they just won a key battle in the fight, the first of its kind:
“The arbitrator ruled that Politico officially violated the collective bargaining agreement by failing to provide notice, human oversight, or an opportunity for the workers to bargain over the use of AI in the newsroom.
“If the goal is speed and the cost is accuracy and accountability,” the arbitrator wrote in his decision, “AI is the clear winner. If accuracy and accountability is the baseline, then AI, as used in these instances, cannot yet rival the hallmarks of human output, which are accuracy and reliability.” He also confirmed that the report-building product contained “erroneous and even absurd” AI-generated materials.
Politico leadership have made all sorts of crazy claims in the run up to this ruling, including Politico deputy editor-in-chief Joe Schatz claiming that AI can’t and shouldn’t be held to the same ethical standards as actual journalists, because it was technically created by programmers and not journalists.
In a statement, unionized Politico workers hope this sets a precedent at other news organizations:
“We are going to continue holding the line. This ruling is a great example of the important role unions play in ensuring workers have a say over working conditions–including the rollout of new technologies. I hope it emboldens our colleagues at other news shops across the country fighting AI deployments that similarly degrade ethical standards, and I hope it sends a message to managers at POLITICO and news executives everywhere that adopting new technology cannot come at the cost of accuracy and accountability.”
These aren’t “AI doomers.” They’re people who believe AI can be a useful tool, they just want it implemented competently and transparently, within the lines of existing union agreements.
There are, of course, caveats. Most U.S. journalists aren’t protected by a union, and we live in a country where labor regulators are being steadily lobotomized. And Politico itself, owned by yet another weird rich, Trump-friendly zealot, engages in a lot of false equivalency (“both sides,” “view from nowhere”) journalism with or without the help of undercooked automation.
By and large it’s pretty clear what the extraction class ownership of U.S. media want to build: a lazy, badly-automated, clickbait engagement ouroboros that shits out ad engagement and subscription money without the pesky need to pay so many annoying humans for things like health insurance. A system that basically just props up all of billionaire-ownerships’ laziest priors without interference by the plebs.
But, if nothing else, it’s refreshing to see some effective, organized resistance against the rushed implementation of under-cooked automation by the kind of rich assholes for whom informed consensus and the public interest are the very last thing on their minds.
