Academics have spent generations warning about what happens when you let journalism and media consolidate in the hands of rich people and corporations. As this season’s election coverage demonstrated, the end result is usually a lazy simulacrum of journalism that looks like real reporting, but tends to reflect ownership interests and (usually) lacks the courage to challenge wealth and power.
The coverage tends to be feckless and shallow. It tends to hew toward false ideological symmetry (what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere“). It tends to give short shrift to issues like labor and consumer rights, and extra attention and credence to corporatist beliefs. It very often demonstrates sexist, classist, and racist bias. It’s generally not subtle.
When white male billionaires jump into the news business they are conditioned to see none of this. Most of the time, as we’ve seen with outlets like Politico (run by German billionaire CEO Mathias Döpfner) they’ll generally whine about “bias,” but believe most of the bias in journalism is coming from “the left” end of the ideological spectrum (too much “divisive” coverage about class and race issues).
To fix this incorrectly perceived bias they’ll generally shift news coverage further rightward. We’ve seen it at CNN, CBS, and even “progressive” Comcast-owned MSNBC, which have responded to authoritarianism by becoming even less critical of the right wing. That includes the Los Angeles Times, which, under the ownership of billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, is kissing up to Trumpism and Elon Musk.
“Soon-Shiong said major publishers have so far failed to adequately separate news and opinion, which he suggested “could be the downfall of what now people call mainstream media.”
But again, their idea of “fixing” that bias (as we’ve also seen at The Messenger or Semafor) usually involves kissing up to Republicans, and making their coverage even more feckless in a way that doesn’t offend advertisers, readers, or event sponsors. A lot of the eroded trust in media is because major consolidated outlets don’t tell the truth, not because they’re “too opinionated.”
And they don’t tell the truth because the truth is going to upset people. It risks reducing ad engagement. It risks losing some readership. It risks upsetting advertisers. It risks upsetting sources or event sponsors. But most importantly the truth risks upsetting rich billionaires if the stories ask questions like “why do billionaires exist” and “why don’t rich people pay enough taxes.”
More recently, Soon-Shiong has proposed using “AI” (half-cooked language learning models that lack genuine understanding) to “fix” bias in the newsroom. He recently proposed using AI to magically remove all bias in an article with the click of a button:
“Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who acquired the Times in 2018, told CNN political commentator Scott Jennings — who will join the Times’ editorial board — that he’s been “quietly building” an AI meter “behind the scenes.” The meter, slated to be released in January, is powered by the same augmented intelligence technology that he’s been building since 2010 for health care purposes, Soon-Shiong said.
“Somebody could understand as they read it that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he said on Jennings’ “Flyover Country,” podcast. “And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias and then that story automatically, the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story and then give comments.”
Of course since AI is mostly a simulacrum of knowledge, it can’t “understand” much of anything, including bias. There’s no possible way language learning models could analyze the endless potential conflicts of financial or ideological interests running in any given article and just magically fix it with a wave of a wand. The entire premise is delusional. It’s a sales pitch for Soon-Shiong’s software and competency.
It sounds like a more glorified version of what Newsweek is doing. Newsweek was purchased by Republicans and hollowed out some time ago, and is now a shell of its former self. It recently launched an adorable “bias meter” that lets readers complain if an article is biased, then demonstrates a little meter indicating whether the article has bias:
The random opinions of passersby upset because an article challenges their priors is, of course, in no way scientific. You might as well have a “pixie dust meter” for all the good something like this accomplishes. What this does accomplish is distract the readership from the real bias generally at major outlets owned by out of touch rich people: bias toward corporate power and in favor of the extraction class.
We’re seeing in real time how rich, right wing men are buying up newsrooms and hollowing them out like pumpkins, replacing real journalism with a feckless mush of ad-engagement chasing infotainment and gossip simulacrum peppered with right wing propaganda. It’s not at all subtle, and was more apparent than ever during the last election cycle.
Republicans have long worked the refs, accusing absolutely any criticism of (often unpopular) Republican ideology as having a “liberal bias.” That’s evolved in the internet era into declaring that any content moderation of race-baiting right wing propaganda or hate speech is “censorship.” It’s all part of the same game designed to work the refs and erode informed consensus.
You may recall last December when we wrote about the somewhat shocking news that an Indian court had ordered Reuters to take down an entire article investigating a company, Appin and its founder Rajat Khare, that were accused of running a giant “hacking for hire” operation. Ten months later, that article is back online with a new editor’s note:
Editor’s note: This article, originally published on Nov. 16, 2023, was removed fromReuters.comin response to a temporary injunction issued by a New Delhi district court on Dec. 4, 2023. Before publication, a group calling itself the Association of Appin Training Centers had filed suit to prevent the report from running. The association accused Reuters of damaging the reputations of training centers and their students, an allegation Reuters disputes. After publication, the court granted a temporary injunction, and Reuters took down the story while it appealed. On Oct. 3, 2024, the district court vacated its injunction. The article has now been reposted here, with an update in paragraph 14 to note that there’s no suggestion that bona fide students of the training centers were involved in hacking.
Appin had gone around using various law firms (including the infamous speech suppressors at US law firm Clare Locke) to demand publications remove articles or mentions of Khare. Some, such as Lawfare (which absolutely knows better), caved and took down or redacted their stories. Others (like us) refused to be bullied.
I was able to get my hands on the recent Indian court order that dismissed the original injunction. Experts in Indian law had told me last year that the kind of injunction that forced Reuters to take down its story were unfortunately common. They were based not on a full review of the situation, but rather the courts were often willing to take an “injunction first, investigate later” approach to things, which could take some time, given how busy the courts are.
It appears that’s what happened. Once the court finally looked at the issue (albeit nearly a year after forcing the article down), they realized that it did not make sense to suppress it and allowed it to come back.
The court here even notes that the Indian Supreme Court has more or less said that courts shouldn’t issue an injunction against publication, so long as the journalism organization “intends to justify” what they wrote, and that what they wrote is “a matter of public interest.”
Quoting from some English decisions, the Hon’ble Supreme Court further indicated that the Court will not restrain the publication of an article, even though it is defamatory, when the defendant says he intends to justify it or to make fair comment on a matter of public interest.
The court then notes that since some of the concerns are about students of the Appin training centers feeling maligned, and Reuters agreed (as in the note above) to clarify that they were not implying actual students of the training centers were involved in any hack-for-hire scheme, the court deemed that the injunction should be dismissed and the article could be put back online:
From the arguments of parties and also from the available record I am unable to find any justification to issue interim injunction against publication of articles or published articles. However, during the course of arguments, Ld. Counsel for defendant no.1 to 4 (i.e. the main contesting parties) have assured that his clients are not interested in maligning the reputation of students and also the plaintiff association which came into being only in the year 2022 and that the articles will have necessary clarificatory massage incorporated therein. In such circumstances, binding such defendants with the assurances so given, it is held that as at present, the plaintiff has not been able to show any prima facie case to make interference in the process of journalism.
The interim injunction application of the plaintiff is dismissed.
It does seem somewhat crazy, though, that this article was unavailable for nearly a year when the court is saying that it can’t “find any justification” for an injunction, and that the Supreme Court has already established that the courts should not restrain the publication of an article.
And yet, the courts did exactly that for almost a year.
Of course, now that the article is back again, it seems likely to get renewed attention to the whole thing. So, if Rajat Khare’s lawyers want to contact us and reveal other things they insist he had nothing to do with (even things no one was reporting on), feel free to reach out.
Or maybe Khare and his lawyers can just respond to the allegations, rather than trying to suppress speech.
Attacking the media through lawfare techniques (yes, it’s ironic that a publication named Lawfare caved to this nonsense) is unfortunately common. It’s ridiculous, stressful, and resource-intensive for the publications and reporters involved. Thus, it’s good to celebrate and highlight the victories when they come through. Congrats to Reuters for succeeding here.
Like Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Daily Caller, Breitbart, Daily Wire, and other parts of the ever-growing right wing disinfo machine, Sinclair publishes a rotating crop of shallow infotainment, peppered with oodles of misleading fear-mongering over crime, homelessness, and immigration.
Sinclair executive Chairman David Smith recently purchased what’s left of the Baltimore Sun (much to the chagrin of ex-staffer David Simon), and it’s going just about as you’d expect. It’s only been a few months, but staffers there are already becoming angry about the fact that the paper is now publishing anti-immigrant and anti-trans right wing propaganda dressed up as serious news and analysis.
A statement by the Baltimore Sun Guild says the paper’s “ethical standards have been tossed aside under new ownership,” and points to a May editorial by new Sun co-owner Armstrong Williams that called the transgender movement a “cancer”:
“It was not the first time that The Sun’s ethical standards have been tossed aside under new ownership. In the opinion pages, co-owner Armstrong Williams has used offensive language to describe transgender people, flouting the best practices once adhered to by The Sun. In a May 8 column, he likened the “transgender movement” to a “cancer,” and used the terms “biological male” and “biological female” to exclude transgender people, which AP style instructs journalists to avoid.”
The Conservative movement’s not subtle goal is to buy up what’s left of traditional journalism (and once popular social media companies) and fill it with propaganda that consistently tells right wingers exactly what they want to hear: namely that all of their ugliest impulses are, in fact, correct. And, more importantly, that minorities, women, Jews, and immigrants are to blame for the entirety of societal ills.
You could argue that what happens to a dying newspaper isn’t worrying. But it’s part of a broader trend, and in response to fascism, the U.S. journalism editorial Overton window is clearly shifting steadily rightward.
Most of the money in media right now is in either feeding this fact-optional Conservative victimization and outrage complex (see: Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Russell Brand, etc. etc.), or in creating sloppy “AI”-powered engagement chasing news infotainment simulacrum that distracts and defunds real reporting. Sometimes a fusion of both.
These trends are all sanctioned by billionaire media owners threatened by the kind of hard-nosed journalism that meaningfully critiques wealth, power, and systemic discrimination. Their goal is to take the brand corpse of what used to be U.S. journalism, fire all the real journalists, and stock them with bobble-headed sycophantic center-right propagandists whose sole purpose is to create a giant, automated, gushingly pro-greed, ad-engagement outrage circlejerk masquerading as news.
There has been a welcome shift toward worker-owned journalism outlets and direct-to-consumer newsletters (the ones not being written by Nazis, anyway), but it’s not clear these efforts can survive billionaire lawsuits, much less counter the problem at scale. If you’ve read global history books, it’s all enough to make you nervous.
We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and automate lazy and mindless ad engagement clickbait.
The result has been a keystone-cops-esque parade of scandals where a long line of traditional brands (CNET, Gannett, Sports Illustrated) have been hollowed out and turned into superficial and badly automated engagement and infotainment mills.
But “AI” has also spurred the creation of countless new pseudo-news websites. Outlets that basically use AI to scour the web for journalism and press releases, then reconstitute them into an aggregated mush that sort of looks like original news. This mindless, automated SEO engagement chasing redirects money that should be going to quality journalism and analysis to a sort of dull simulacrum.
Recently we saw a flood of similar stories about such companies. One such story focused on NewsBreak, a Chinese-backed app that’s now the most downloaded news app in the U.S. Like these other outlets, Newsbreak just basically scours the web for existing stories and press releases, jumbles them together into something that vaguely looks like journalism, then poops it out at incredible scale.
“…no such shooting took place. The Bridgeton, New Jersey police department posted a statement dismissing the article – produced using AI technology – as “entirely false”.
“Nothing even similar to this story occurred on or around Christmas, or even in recent memory for the area they described,” the post said. “It seems this ‘news’ outlet’s AI writes fiction they have no problem publishing to readers.”
Real journalism is hard and time consuming. It requires actually talking to human beings. It requires digging through court filings. It requires comparing the opinions of multiple experts with a litany of different biases to get to the truth. That’s absolutely not what these outlets are doing, and it’s a direct byproduct of basing the entirety of our truth and information systems on ad engagement.
This was already a problem before LLMs. LLMs have just supercharged the industry’s worst tendencies. “AI” certainly could theoretically help journalists with research, analysis, editing, transcription, and administrative work. But instead it’s largely being used as a way to automate engagement clickbait at unprecedented scale, which further undermines trust in — and the financing of — real reporting.
In this case it took Newsbreak four days before it corrected the story. And the outlet has a history of at least 40 such stories (that we know of) since 2021. Amusingly, this most recent error came after AI scraped false stories written by another shoddy AI-driven infotainment mill named FindPlace.xyz, which was busted also making up stories using fake author bylines.
Whatever this monstrosity we’re building is, it’s most decidedly the complete opposite of what journalism actually needs. And if it continues apace without some kind of meaningful trajectory shift, the cost to history, collective understanding, and an informed public will be incalculable.
While “AI” (language learning models) certainly could help journalism, the fail upward brunchlords in charge of most modern media outlets instead see the technology as a way to cut corners, undermine labor, and badly automate low-quality, ultra-low effort, SEO-chasing clickbait.
As a result we’ve seen an endless number of scandals where companies use LLMs to create entirely fake journalists and hollow journalism, usually without informing their staff or their readership. When they’re caught (as we saw with CNET, Gannett, or Sports Illustrated), they usually pretend to be concerned, throw their AI partner under the bus, then get right back to doing it.
This week another similar venture, Hoodline, is facing similar criticism. Hoodline was created in 2014 to fill the growing void left with the death of quality news. (aka “news deserts”). Executives there apparently thought the best way to do that was to create fake “AI” local journalists to write a lot of low-quality aggregated crap — without adequately informing readers about it:
“…until recently, the site had further blurred the line between reality and illusion. Screenshots captured last year by the Internet Archive and local outlet Gazetteer showed Hoodline had further embellished its AI author bylines with what appeared to be AI-generated headshots resembling real people and fake biographical information.
“Nina is a long-time writer and a Bay Area Native who writes about good food & delicious drink, tantalizing tech & bustling business,” one biography claimed.”
We’ve noted repeatedly how the death of local news is a real issue. Gone are most local newspapers, and in their place have been seeded a rotating crop of right wing propagandists pretending to be local TV news (like Sinclair Broadcasting) or fake “pink slime” propaganda rags (usually also almost exclusively coming from the right wing) pretending to be local newspapers.
This has not only resulted in a more ignorant and divided public, but has had a measurable impact on electoral outcomes. It also results in far fewer real gumshoe journalists covering local courts and city hall proceedings, something corrupt officials adore.
And while trying to fix this problem is a noble and thankless calling, Hoodline is clearly going about it the wrong way. They’re not using LLMs to genuinely improve things, they’re using LLMs to create a sort of simulacrum of real local journalism, and hoping nobody could tell the difference. Instead of helping journalism, that undermines the public’s already shaky trust in an already struggling sector:
“Employing AI to help local journalists save time so they can focus on doing more in-depth investigations is qualitatively different from churning out a high amount of low-quality stories that do nothing to provide people with timely and relevant information about what is happening in their community, or that provides them with a better understanding of how the things happening around them will end up affecting them,” [Felix] Simon told CNN.
Again there are a bunch of things LLMs can help journalists with. Editing, transcription, digging up court documents, data analysis, easing administrative burdens, etc. But then, of course, that value proposition has to be weighed against the immense water and power suck of AI during a period where increased climate destabilization is putting unprecedented strain on long-neglected infrastructure.
And is that kind of a value proposition worth it if what’s being created is just derivative dreck?
If you look at what Hoodline is producing (here’s our local version for Seattle) the content is exclusively aggregating press releases and reporting from elsewhere without much if any original reporting or intelligent analysis. They’re effectively injecting themselves into the news bloodstream to redirect ad revenue that could go to real reporting outlets to their shoddy, (badly) automated simulacrum.
Hoodline has since shifted things around slightly and now uses a small “AI” badge to indicate the article was written with the help of LLMs. But how much help, and whether the authors are actually real people with any meaningful understanding of local events they’re covering, remains decidedly unclear.
It’s been a few years since I last did a “Let me rewrite that for you” post. This idea was first suggested by the brilliant press critic Dan Froomkin. Basically, when he finds a bit of journalistic malpractice, he rewrites it the way a good journalist would, to show why the original was so wrong. The last time I did it was about some misleading coverage of the documents released by Frances Haugen by The Washington Post.
This time, I’m going to focus on a NY Times article by Maggie Astor and Rebecca Davis O’Brien. They’re politics reporters, and that often means that they’re covering the politics and not the facts when it comes to the fundamental details of what they’re reporting on. And that’s a problem. It leads to typical “view from nowhere” reporting, where you report what people are saying but not whether or not what they’re saying is true. And in this election season (especially) there should be no place for that. Learn how to report the truth, not just what candidates are saying.
The article is about RFK Jr, the perpetual crank and conspiracy-peddling independent campaigner for President, whose own family has rightly called out his bullshit and dismissed his nonsense campaign.
But what struck me was the article’s explanation of why RFK thinks Biden is somehow “more dangerous to democracy” than Trump. RFK (wrongly) thinks the Biden administration worked with social media to “censor” him:
But according to the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it is President Biden who poses the greater threat to American democracy — a view that Mr. Kennedy shares with Mr. Trump himself, and that democracy experts called “absurd” and “preposterous.”
Such a perspective is possible because Mr. Kennedy, who has founded his political career on promoting vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about the government, sees the Biden administration’s efforts to curtail the spread of misinformation as a seminal issue of our time. Censorship, as he calls it, overpowers all other concerns about the political system.
Mr. Kennedy’s stance drew fresh scrutiny this week after he said in an interview on CNN, “President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent.” He repeated himself on Fox News on Tuesday, saying that a president like Mr. Biden was “a genuine threat to our democracy.”
So, yes, these three paragraphs acknowledge RFK’s propensity for conspiracy theories and do say “censorship, as he calls it.” But you know what the best way is to drive home to users that RFK is full of shit and spewing conspiracy theories? It’s to maybe debunk the core argument in the article, the extremely misleading conspiracy theory that President Biden “has used the federal agencies to censor political speech.”
Because it simply didn’t happen. And nowhere does the article ever make that clear. It’s “the view from nowhere.” RFK Jr. said this, and we’re just going to repeat it. Let the reader figure it out for themselves whether it’s actually true or not.
Again, I recognize that these are political reporters, but part of reporting is doing the actual research. Any actual research would show that this thing that RFK is claiming, this one piece of evidence that is central to his claim that Biden is “worse than Trump,” happens to be something that simply did not happen.
We’ve gone over this before. Any reporter at the NY Times has the resources to look this up. As the article notes, RFK Jr. was spewing conspiracy theories and anti-vax nonsense. Some of that violated the rules of various social media sites, and they took appropriate action under their own rules not having anything to do with any government official, which is very much protected activity. Much of this happened during the Trump administration.
Of course, RFK Jr. lost his shit each time this has happened. In 2020, he tried suing Facebook for suspending his anti-vax org from the site. 2020. Back when Trump (not Biden) was President. He claimed it was a 1st Amendment violation because Adam Schiff had publicly complained about anti-vax nonsense on Facebook while also complaining about Section 230. That case was laughed out of court.
Plaintiff has not shown that the government so “insinuated itself into a position of interdependence” with Google or that it “exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement” to Google that give rise to state action.
The court noted that even RFK admitted that he has no evidence “that the government coerced” social media platforms.
RFK also tried suing Elizabeth Warren. He claimed that she colluded with Amazon and Jeff Bezos to “modify algorithms” and hide his conspiracy theory-laden book about COVID-19. At least that time, he tried to sue a government official, rather than an internet site. But, no, the court easily rejected that one. Multiple times. Here’s the 9th Circuit pointing out that (again) RFK could show no actual impact from Warren sending an angry letter. Basically it sounds like Amazon just didn’t promote his book, because his book is nonsense.
With respect to Amazon, there is no evidence that the company changed its algorithms in response to Senator Warren’s letter, let alone that it felt compelled to do so. The plaintiffs point to the fact that, several weeks after receiving the letter, Amazon notified Chelsea Green Publishing that it would not advertise The Truth About COVID-19 even though it had promoted other Chelsea Green books in the past. This fact is unilluminating because no evidence suggests that Amazon ever advertised the plaintiffs’ book before receiving the letter. Absent such evidence, it is far more likely that Amazon’s decision not to advertise the plaintiffs’ book was a response to widespread concerns about the spread of COVID-19 misinformation rather than a response to Senator Warren’s letter.
As for the First Amendment claims:
We conclude that the plaintiffs have not raised a serious question as to whether Senator Warren’s letter constituted an unlawful threat in violation of the First Amendment. Her letter requested, but did not demand, that Amazon reevaluate its business practices regarding COVID-19 misinformation and report back any changes. The absence of a specific demand is unsurprising given that Senator Warren lacks direct regulatory authority over Amazon in this matter. There is no evidence that Amazon or any other bookseller perceived the letter as a threat, and the “potentially unlawful” language does not fundamentally alter the analysis because Senator Warren never stated or otherwise implied that there would be any adverse consequences if Amazon failed to comply with her request.
RFK Jr. filed three separate cases alleging First Amendment violations because Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon exercised editorial discretion he didn’t like (some of it during the Trump administration). Every court rejected the claim as ridiculous. The NY Times mentions none of that.
Then, as the very problematic Missouri v. Biden found some success through judge shopping, he tried to glom onto that case. First, very late in the game (i.e., just last Spring), he filed his own lawsuit against Biden using the same judge shopping process Missouri used to get the same judge. The complaint is basically a bunch of unproven nonsense. Then he tried to consolidate the case with the Missouri case that was already moving. So far that one’s on hold while we wait for the Supreme Court to rule in the Murthy case, which is the version of the Missouri case that reached the Supreme Court.
So, to summarize, RFK Jr. has filed at least four nonsense lawsuits (possibly more, but that’s all the free research the NY Times gets from me) pushing these theories that the government violated his First Amendment rights when private web companies decided that his harmful conspiracy theory nonsense might violate their rules. So far, no court has found such claims even remotely credible.
Then you have the Murthy case, which he hopes to combine his case with. As we’ve been noting the whole time, it’s based on a near total misreading and misrepresentation of what actually happened. It takes strands of public statements by public officials, combined with communications for other purposes, and assumes that it’s found some smoking gun of the government “directing,” social media to pull down content, despite no evidence that it ever actually happened. At all.
Every example shown involved plaintiffs and/or judges taking quotes entirely out of context and misrepresenting what it actually said. In some cases, the quotes were fabricated by adding in or removing words to change their meaning.
Both Democrat and Republican appointed Supreme Court Justices expressed widespread skepticism about the case when it was heard, with multiple Justices (again, across the spectrum) calling out fundamental false claims by the states.
In other words, there is zero evidence to support the claim. None. Zero. RFK is delusional or he’s just making shit up when he claims that “President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent.”
And if you’re the NY Times, you have to call that out.
You don’t get to “he said/she said” your way through this. Yet that’s what these reporters do. While they note the Supreme Court’s skepticism, that’s as far as they go with it:
Mr. Kennedy has long said that the government’s engagement with media companies and tech platforms — to prevent the spread of disinformation or illegal materials or, in Mr. Kennedy’s case, the arguments he and his allies made against vaccines — amounts to illegal censorship, an argument that was met with skepticism at the Supreme Court last month.
Again, a perfect opportunity to point out that none of it happened. Or to point to the failed lawsuits. But, nope.
So, NY Times, let me rewrite that for you:
For years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been pushing unfounded and unsupported misinformation and conspiracy theories against the government. He continued that tradition in arguing that the Biden administration is a bigger threat to democracy than the Trump administration. This is based on unsupported claims that have been rejected by multiple courts, regarding how his own words have faced moderation from private social media companies.
Mr. Kennedy has filed multiple lawsuits alleging that the government has sought to suppress his words, all of which have failed to gain traction. In each case, the companies themselves have indicated that they made their own decisions regarding Mr. Kennedy’s accounts, which have frequently violated their rules, and were treated accordingly.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has a proven track record of election denial. This includes filing dozens of lawsuits to stop a fairly conducted election, followed by an unconstitutional attempt to prevent the 2020 election results from being counted. This also includes encouraging his fans to storm the Capitol to prevent the election from concluding.
Mr. Kennedy’s claims appear as fanciful as his theories on various aspects of medicine and health.
But, of course, the NY Times would never print something like that. They’d rather make sure their pages are open to Republican Senators pushing for the use of the US military on people protesting the police murdering a black man.
All the news that’s fit to print, but not enough room for the simple truth.
For the last eight years or so, one thing has become quite clear: the media has been effectively unable to deal with Donald Trump and Trumpism. He is unique to our political system. He has no shame, is willing to lie without concern, convince himself that his lies are true, and will stop at nothing to win, including fomenting violence and direct attempts to overturn an election.
Much of this was obvious from even when he ran in 2016, and the media had no idea how to deal with it. They assumed a “business as usual” stance. Journalism professor Jay Rosen has long called it out as “the view from nowhere” reporting. That’s when journalists report on what politicians are saying, not whether or not what they’re saying is true.
It demonstrates itself worst of all in the form of false equivalencies, which the modern GOP has embraced with gusto.
No matter what the evidence of what Donald Trump has actually done, Republicans will come up with a fake story of what they pretend are Democrats doing the same thing. Donald Trump fought the certification of the vote in 2020? Well, didn’t supporters of Hillary do the same thing in 2016? (No, the answer is no. A few random people talked about, and there was basically zero effort to follow through). Donald Trump was caught enriching himself, his family, and his businesses during his presidency with corrupt business deals? The GOP claims that Biden did the same with Hunter Biden and China. Except that didn’t happen, and the GOP’s main “witness,” a guy with ties to Russian intelligence, was arrested for making it all up.
The “view from nowhere” allows reporters to report on “what each side says” not what is the actual truth. It gives a false equivalence to wildly outrageous and nonsense claims, with claims that you might not always agree with, but are at least within the spectrum of normal democratic dialogue.
There are many reasons to not like Joe Biden’s policies. I think he’s wrong on almost everything I write about. His tech policy positions are mostly ludicrous. He strongly supports KOSA, a bill that will do real harm to kids online. His understanding of how the First Amendment works is mixed up. And going back to his time in the Senate and as VP, he was always a Hollywood-supporting copyright maximalist.
But, Donald Trump would be just as bad, if not worse, on all of those things, and he wants to overthrow US democracy and install himself as a dictator with unchecked power, and to punish anyone who disagrees with him. He wants to break the law with impunity, throw away basic democratic norms, and treat large segments of the population as less than human.
And all that kinda matters.
Chris Quinn, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has published a Letter from the Editor that tries to lay this out to readers of that paper, with the clear and absolutely accurate title: Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts. In it, Quinn points out that he had trouble writing the piece because he knows it’s going to upset fans of Donald Trump. But, it has to be called out:
This is a tough column to write, because I don’t want to demean or insult those who write me in good faith. I’ve started it a half dozen times since November but turned to other topics each time because this needle hard to thread. No matter how I present it, I’ll offend some thoughtful, decent people.
The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.
The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.
This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.
The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.
There’s much more in the letter, but that’s the crux of it. It’s not partisan to point this out. It’s being factual. And, of course, some Trump supporters will whine about “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but the only “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is the response from some of his fans to deny the reality of what they know has happened.
There is no view from nowhere. There is no “both sides” to Quinn’s piece. There is simply “we need to tell the truth,” even if that upsets some people.
And that’s exactly the way to cover Trump. Journalists and editors need to call out the actual risks here. They need to call out the actual crimes he is accused of and how they are not, in anyway, equivalent to what Biden has done. They need to end the “view from nowhere” where reporters just write what politicians say, rather than whether or not it’s actually true.
And they need to put it all in context. One of the reasons why Trump gets away with all this is because he does it so publicly and so relentlessly that it’s impossible to put it into context. It’s impossible to see the big picture for what it is: his (and his fans’) desire for an authoritarian strongman state, where they get to punish their perceived enemies.
That’s not how democracy works. And, it behooves the media to finally start calling out Trump for what he is. Kudos to Quinn and the Cleveland Plain Dealer for doing so.
Hopefully, others in the media will follow. Let truth be the north star.
As the Vice and Messenger collapse just got done illustrating in glorious technicolor, the problem with online U.S. journalism isn’t that it’s inherently unprofitable. The problem is usually that the worst, least competent, shallowest people imaginable routinely fail upward into positions of management, then treat the brands they acquire like disposable napkins.
That’s certainly been the case over at Sports Illustrated, which isn’t so much even a media organization anymore as much as it is a bloated brand corpse being exploited by a visionless extraction class, with a largely nonexistent interest in the company’s original function: sports journalism.
That was first exemplified when the magazine got in hot water for using AI to create fake journalists and lazy clickbait, without telling its actual human writers. Then it fired most of those writers while simultaneously hosting lavish “brand parties” celebrating the brand’s descent from meaningful sports journalism organization to a hollow placeholder hawking cheap supplements and casinos.
Sports Illustrated’s fortunes got bleaker early this year when The Arena Group, which had actually only been renting the Sports Illustrated brand as part of a 10-year deal with Authentic Brands Group (ABG), failed to make a quarterly $3.75 million payment to continue licensing it. That resulted in a revocation of the branding license and no limit of additional chaos for the already imploding company.
Mr. Peled said Minute Media was focused on “short-form sports content creation,” making video, audio and text for consumption on mobile devices. It owns Fansided, which features articles and podcasts for sports fans and for several years was owned by Sports Illustrated’s former publisher, Time Inc.
…Mr. Peled said he also wanted to continue Sports Illustrated’s tradition of in-depth journalism.
“It’s an exception to our core strategy, but it’s not the first time we’ve done that,” Mr. Peled said.
Sure thing, buddy.
This is happening all over media and journalism. Companies, hedge funds, VCs and executives that have zero interest in journalism are buying media companies, hollowing them out like pumpkins, then basically waving the corpses around like empty marionettes as they push the shallowest content imaginable in pursuit of unlimited growth and bottomless ad engagement.
Most of these folks envision a future where (badly) AI automated dreck gets pumped out at impossible scale as part of a massive, senseless engagement infotainment ouroboros that shits out advertising money with limited effort and even less meaningful thought. Others are keen on dismantling real journalism then filling the void with propaganda, distraction, and bad faith simulacrum.
The folks still interested in actually doing journalism are either fired, or relegated to starting their own newsletters or building smaller, cash-strapped news organizations that may or may not survive legal assault by petulant billionaires angry that somebody might have told readers the truth.
I had certainly been curious to see how those who had been triumphantly trumpeting this case as proof of a grand “censorship industrial complex” would respond to how the hearing went. Most seem to be in varying states of denial. Many seem angry, insisting that the Justices just didn’t understand or didn’t look at the details (when the reality appears to be the opposite).
Some, instead, focused on the very problematic comments from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that seemed to suggest she was leaning way too far in the other direction. These comments suggested that maybe the government should have more leeway in pressuring private companies to take down speech. As we called out in our original writeup, this line of questioning did seem extremely problematic. However, there is a more generous interpretation: that she was noting that the determining factor is if it can pass strict scrutiny or not, and the argument from the states didn’t even leave room for that possibility. That is, it wasn’t necessarily support for coercive behavior, but rather pointing out that there could, in theory, be cases where coercive power is allowed if it passes strict scrutiny (I have problems with that theory, but if she’s just pointing out that Missouri’s test doesn’t leave that open, it’s a fair point).
But Skorup’s NRO piece is just bizarrely disconnected from reality. It comes across as what one would write if you had not actually read any of the briefings in the case, nor listened to the oral arguments, but rather simply imagined what might have happened based on a very distorted, and not very factual, understanding of the case.
First of all, the framing is simply incorrect. It starts out like this:
In oral arguments on Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice urged the Supreme Court to let government officials, including federal law-enforcement agencies, tell social-media company officials, in secret, what content to delete.
Except… that’s not even close to true. The DOJ’s position was actually that they had not told social media companies what to delete. They expressly admitted that if they had done that, it would be a First Amendment violation. Like, literally, here is what the Principal Deputy Solicitor General said in the oral arguments:
…we don’t say that the government can coerce private speakers. That is prohibited by the First Amendment.
The DOJ explicitly admitted that if it was trying to coerce private speakers, that would violate the First Amendment. They repeatedly pointed out that there was no actual evidence presented in the case that it had coerced anyone. So it’s both bizarre, and wrong, to claim that the DOJ “urged the Supreme Court to let government officials… tell social-media company officials, in secret, what content to delete.”
No one made that argument at all. Skorup and the National Review are lying to their readers.
And it gets worse.
The plaintiffs presented damning evidence, including internal government emails and testimony from government officials. They documented federal officials’ immense pressure on social-media companies, including profane emails and vague threats from White House officials to Facebook officials to remove vaccine “disinformation,” as well as messages from the FBI to several social-media companies with spreadsheets of accounts and content that the agency wanted removed. The FBI followed up on its requests at quarterly meetings with companies, keeping internal notes of which companies were complying with FBI demands. Perhaps the messages were innocent — we may never know because the FBI used encrypted communications and has not revealed their contents.
This is not what happened at all. Again, we’ve gone through pages and pages of evidence presented in this case and, as we’ve highlighted over and over again, there was no “damning evidence”. There were situations where the plaintiffs in the case took things out of context, or completely misrepresented the context.
The whole thing about the FBI sending “spreadsheets of accounts and content that the agency wanted removed,” is something that did not happen in the way presented. That would be clear if one had looked at the actual evidence or actually listened to the oral arguments. Fletcher explained the spreadsheet situation during the arguments:
… for example, when the FBI would send communications to the platforms saying, for your information, it has come to our attention that the following URLs or email addresses or other selectors are being used by maligned foreign actors like Russian intelligence operatives to spread disinformation on your platforms, do with it what you will.
Indeed, as Yoel Roth later described in writing about this, this kind of information sharing was simply as presented: “we’ve found these things, do what you want with it if you find it useful.” It was not seen as even remotely coercive nor a list of “what accounts to remove.” Efforts at dealing with large-scale foreign intelligence operatives frequently meant tracking the content to identify the source of a foreign influence campaign, not just taking content down upon receipt.
In several others, the FBI passes lists of accounts that they “believe are violating your terms of service” or “may be subject any actions [sic] deemed appropriate by Twitter.” The FBI fastidiously—and I would argue conspicuously, in the evidence presented—avoids both assertions that they’ve found platform policy violations, and requests that Twitter do anything other than assess the reported content under the platform’s applicable policies.
Receiving and acting on external reports is a core function of platform content moderation teams, and the essential nature of this work is an independent evaluation of reported content under the platform’s own policies. The fact, cited in Missouri v. Biden, that platforms only acted on approximately half of reports from the FBI shows clearly that the standards platforms applied were not wholly, or even mostly, the government’s.
Finally, it does not withstand factual scrutiny that platforms were so petrified of adverse consequences from the FBI that they uncritically accepted and acted on information sent to them by the government. The Twitter Files themselves document clearly at least two instances in which, presented with low-quality information or questionable demands, Twitter pushed back on the FBI’s requests. In one case, the FBI passes on a request—seemingly from the NSA—that Twitter “revis[e] its terms of service” to allow an open-source intelligence vendor to collect data from the Twitter APIs to inform the NSA’s activities. This request is arguably as close to jawboning as any interaction between Twitter and the FBI gets; yet, in response, I summarily dismissed not only the request for a meeting to discuss the topic, but the entire premise of the request, writing, “The best path for NSA, or any part of government, to request information about Twitter users or their content is in accordance with valid legal process.” The question was not raised again.
If you look at the actual emails from the FBI (which have been released), you see that Roth is exactly correct. They are clear that this is just information sharing, and they all involve accounts that were claimed to be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The FBI is explicit: “For your review and action as deemed appropriate.” Not “take it down.” Just “here’s what we found, do what you want with it.”
And the report in which those emails are released, from Jim Jordan’s committee in the House, admits that “Meta did not immediately take noticeable action against these accounts.” This again highlights that nothing in these communications were deemed by either side as demands for removals.
Other emails from the FBI, including ones to Twitter, also follow this pattern. In one highlighted exchange in the report, the FBI emailed Roth a list of potential Russian disinformation spreaders, and Roth called out that some appeared to not be Russian at all, but rather American and Canadian. This is not what you’d expect him to do if he was being told to just pull those down and feared retaliation if he pushed back. Roth asked for more context, and the FBI responded that it didn’t have anything else to provide and noted, again, that it was totally up to Twitter how to handle the information:
During the oral arguments, the Justices seemed reasonably confused as to how this bit of information sharing was problematic. Justice Barrett seemed surprised when asking Louisiana’s Solicitor General why the FBI shouldn’t be able to share such information. This led him to admit that yes, he thinks in retrospect that the FBI “absolutely can identify certain troubling situations like that for the platforms and let the platforms take action.”
You would think that an article talking about the oral arguments would… maybe point that out? Instead, it insists that the FBI’s actions must have been censorial, when even the states admitted to the Justices that maybe it wasn’t that bad.
Another example of a misrepresentation of the record, that we highlighted, was where the plaintiffs took an email from Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci, in which Collins suggested that they needed to address some misleading information about COVID by responding to it. Collins said “there needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”
The word “published” was removed in the hands of the states and the district court. It was said that Collins demanded “there needs to be a… take down of its premises,” which the court said was proof that Collins demanded the information be taken down. That was false.
Skorup and the National Review engage in similarly misleading selective quoting.
Take this paragraph:
However, there are clear signs many U.S. government officials want to censor topics far beyond just vaccines, and that they view American minds as a theater over which their legal authority extends. For instance, the director of a federal cybersecurity and infrastructure agency noted at a 2021 event that the agency was expanding beyond protecting dams and electric substations from internet hackers to exerting “rumor control” during elections, saying, “We are in the business of critical infrastructure. . . . And the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure.” A White House national climate adviser stated at an Axios event: “We need the tech companies to really jump in” and remove green energy “disinformation.”
Notice how carefully the quote marks are used here to imply that government officials were pushing for websites to “remove” content, but that’s not actually stated in any of the actual quotes. If you look at the actual event, the “national climate advisor” (who has no authority to regulate or punish companies in the first place) was saying that disinformation about climate change is a real threat to the planet, and that she’s hoping that tech companies don’t let it spread as far. She wasn’t talking to the companies. She wasn’t threatening the companies. This is classic bully pulpit kind of talk that is allowed on the “persuasion” side of the line.
As for the quote above it, again, when put back into context, it shows the exact opposite of what Skorup falsely implies. It’s CISA director Jen Easterly who did talk about “cognitive infrastructure,” but in context, she talks about “resiliency” to disinformation, including making sure people have more access to accurate info. Literally nothing in the discussion suggests content should be removed:
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” Easterly said.
“We are going to work with our partners in the private sector and throughout the rest of the government and at the department to continue to ensure that the American people have the facts that they need to help protect our critical infrastructure,” she added.
As for the whole “rumor control” effort by CISA, Skorup doesn’t seem to realize that it was set up in 2020 by the Trump administration. It was about providing more info (more speech) not removing speech. Everything about what is presented in the article is inherently misleading.
Each time Skorup presents some of the evidence, he uses selective quotation to hide what was actually being talked about:
Department of Homeland Security documents obtained and released by U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley show a 2022 plan to “operationaliz[e] public-private partnerships between DHS and Twitter” regarding content takedowns. Further, red flags are present at the social-media companies: Many hire former federal officials to their “trust and safety” teams, and others have created online portals to fast-track government agencies’ content-takedown requests.
Again, it helps to look at the source documents here to understand what’s actually being discussed. The out of context line about “operationalizing public private partnerships” was entirely about the (yes, stupidly named and poorly explained) Disinformation Governance Board, which never actually did anything before being disbanded. And from the notes, the “operationalize” bit is clearly about figuring out what information (again, more speech!) Twitter would find useful in dealing with mis- and disinformation, not “what content should be taken down.” Furthermore, these were prep notes for a meeting a DHS official was having with Twitter, with no evidence that Twitter ever seriously considered working with DHS in this manner.
Facts matter. Skorup is misrepresenting them almost whole cloth.
But, what’s really perplexing is that Skorup’s version of what happened at the Supreme Court does not come even remotely close to what actually happened at the Supreme Court. Justices from Amy Coney Barrett to Sonia Sotomayor to Brett Kavanaugh to Elena Kagan all called out these kinds of errors in the states’ arguments.
Skorup mentions none of that.
Instead, he falsely claims that the DOJ “urged the Supreme Court to let government officials, including federal law-enforcement agencies, tell social-media company officials, in secret, what content to delete.” That simply did not happen. They repeatedly agreed that if that had happened it would be a problem, but focused much of the discussion on how that had not actually happened.
Honestly, reading Skorup’s piece, it felt as if it had been written prior to the oral arguments and without reading any of the relevant briefs in the case. And, maybe that’s because it had been. In researching this piece, I came across a surprisingly similar piece also written by Skorup that made many of the same claims… over a year ago. Before the case had been even decided by the district or appeals courts. Before the problems with all the evidence were widely documented. It’s almost as if he took that piece and rewrote it for the National Review, without bothering to check on anything.
This seems like a form of journalistic malpractice that you’d think the National Review would not support. But, alas, these days the National Review apparently doesn’t much care about facts or accuracy so long as a piece agrees with the narrative it wishes to push.
We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and automate lazy and mindless ad engagement clickbait.
The folks rushing to implement half-cooked AI at places like Red Ventures (CNET) and G/O Media (Gizmodo) aren’t competent managers to begin with. Now they’re integrating “AI” with zero interest in whether it actually works or if it undermines product quality. They’re also often doing it without telling staffers what’s happening, revealing a widespread disdain for their own employees.
After CNET repeatedly published automated dreck, Wikipedia has taken the step of no longer ranking the formerly widely respected news site as a “generally reliable” news source. As Futurism notes, the website’s crap automated content crafted by fake automated journalists increasingly doesn’t pass muster:
“Let’s take a step back and consider what we’ve witnessed here,” a Wikipedia editor who goes by the name “bloodofox” chimed in. “CNET generated a bunch of content with AI, listed some of it as written by people (!), claimed it was all edited and vetted by people, and then, after getting caught, issued some ‘corrections’ followed by attacks on the journalists that reported on it,” they added, alluding to the time that CNET’s then-Editor-in-Chief Connie Guglielmo — who now serves as Red Ventures’ “Senior Vice President of AI Edit Strategy” — disparagingly referred to journalists who covered CNET’s AI debacle as “some writers… I won’t call them reporters.””
Of course CNET was already having credibility problems long before AI came on the scene. The website, like many “tech news” websites, increasingly acts more of an extension of gadget marketing departments than an adult news venture. CNET editorial standards have long been murky, as exemplified by that whole CES Dish Network award scandal roughly a decade ago.
Things got worse once CNET was purchased by Red Ventures, which has been happy to soften the outlet’s coverage to please advertisers, and, like most modern media companies, sees journalism not as a truth-telling exercise, but as a purely extractive path toward chasing engagement at impossible scale.
That sentiment is everywhere you currently look, as a rotating crop of trust fund failsons drive what’s left of U.S. journalism into the soil. These folks see journalism as an irrelevant venture, and they’re keen to turn it into a sort of automated journalism simulacrum; stuff that looks somewhat like useful reporting, but is predominantly an unholy fusion of facts-optional marketing and engagement bait.
It’s great to see the folks at Wikipedia take note and act accordingly.
