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.
Earlier this year, we wrote about outspoken financier Bill Ackman’s threat to sue Business Insider over articles regarding accusations by the publication that Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, had plagiarized parts of her dissertation years ago. The timeline and context of what happened here is important because Ackman continues to ignore it.
Ackman got upset about activity by students at his alma mater, Harvard, in response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th. He then helped orchestrate a campaign to oust Harvard’s new President, Claudine Gay, because of what he viewed as her insufficient response to antisemitism on campus. While those initial efforts went nowhere, the situation gained more attention when some nonsense peddlers of the grifter class found examples of what they called plagiarism, but which many academics felt were inadvertent errors in weak paraphrasing, or inadvertent failure to properly cite sources.
For example, one of the people Gay was accused of plagiarizing came to her defense, noting that while it may have been technically improper, it was over minor bits and not the heart of what she was writing:
The plagiarism in question here did not take an idea of any significance from my work. It didn’t steal my thunder. It didn’t stop me from publishing. And the bit she used from us was not in any way a major component of what made her research important or valuable.
So how serious a violation of academic integrity was this?
From my perspective, what she did was trivial—wholly inconsequential. That’s the reason I’ve so actively tried to defend her.
This effort continued for some time, with Ackman again being a leading voice, perhaps recognizing that what he failed to accomplish by complaining about her handling of antisemitism, he could eventually accomplish through piling on and promoting the claims of plagiarism. And it worked. Soon after, Gay lost her job as President of Harvard.
Around that time, Business Insider published its first piece about Neri Oxman, Ackman’s wife, noting that her dissertation at MIT was also found to contain some plagiarized passages. The article was pretty explicit that it was not accusing Oxman of some inherent unethical behavior, but rather noting the similarities between what she had done and what Gay had done:
Like Oxman, Gay was found to have lifted passages from other academics’ work without using quotation marks while citing the authors.
Gay’s plagiarism was seen by some academics, including many of those she plagiarized, as relatively inconsequential.
George Reid Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the people Gay plagiarized, told the New York Post that what Gay did “happens fairly often in academic writing and for me does not rise to the level of plagiarism.”
That is, the entire point of the article was to highlight the parallel situations between Gay and Oxman. It was to emphasize that inconsequential copying or inadvertent failure to properly cite something minor in an academic paper happens all the time.
The point was not that Oxman was terrible. The point was to highlight Ackman’s double standard. Indeed, Business Insider wrote an entire article comparing the accusations against both Gay and Oxman while highlighting Ackman’s noticeably different approach to each.
“Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote in a post on X following Business Insider’s report on Oxman’s plagiarism.
That’s a starkly different approach from the one he took toward Gay after she stepped down as president earlier this week. At the time, Ackman said she should be fired from Harvard’s faculty entirely because of what he called “serious plagiarism issues.”
“Students are forced to withdraw for much less,” he posted on X. “Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
However, the instances of Oxman’s and Gay’s plagiarism have more similarities than differences, according to experts and an internal analysis.
At no point that I’ve seen in this ongoing ordeal has Ackman acknowledged that. Rather, he has gone on rant after rant after rant, combined with threats to sue people for their free speech (while pretending to be a free speech absolutist), pretending that the point of the Business Insider articles was to smear Oxman to punish Ackman for his support of Israel.
A few weeks ago, Ackman promised to sue and has hired Libby Locke of the firm Clare Locke to issue a massive (and massively ridiculous) threat letter to Axel Springer/Business Insider, demanding corrections and retractions of various articles. It’s a Gish gallop of a threat letter. Responding to every single bit of nonsense in the threat letter is beyond the scope of my time, and even so this article is going to be ridiculously long.
Just as an aside, no one who hires Clare Locke is a “free speech absolutist.” Clare Locke (and especially partner Libby Locke) are immensely proud of their ability to threaten media outlets to kill stories (and they’re not as effective as their media portrayal would have you believe). That’s the opposite of free speech absolutists. They are speech suppressors. Their website kinda brags about this:
Sending a 77-page “demand letter” is ridiculous and suggests that you don’t have a clear ask or a clear explanation. Ackman, over on ExTwitter, admits that the letter was written on purpose to be turned into a complaint:
It will not go unnoticed that the demand letter reads remarkably similarly to the pleadings of a lawsuit. If needed, we can convert the demand letter into a complaint and file a lawsuit, which I hope is unnecessary
The letter is long, repetitive, and silly. It does not engage with the actual purpose of the Business Insider articles, to compare Gay’s inadvertent failures to cite with Oxman’s similar mistakes in a manner that highlights how Ackman’s freakout over Gay suggests a huge double standard. Instead, it opens by arguing that Business Insider and the reporters and editors who worked on these articles are antisemitic and targeted Ackman because of his pro-Israel views.
Ackman’s criticism, particularly of Claudine Gay, the former president of his alma mater, Harvard, did not sit well with Katherine Long (an Investigative Reporter at Business Insider), John Cook (Business Insider’s Executive Editor), and Henry Blodget (Business Insider’s Founder and Chairman), who have publicly expressed anti-Zionist and purportedly antisemitic views.
It then goes on at great length (and great repetitiveness) to claim that it’s not plagiarism if it wasn’t done on purpose. Really.
As confirmed by Business Insider and the common definition of plagiarism, plagiarism requires an intent to steal or defraud. Unintentional citation mistakes and honest errors are not considered plagiarism as the word is commonly understood
Now, there are two major problems with this. First of all, as noted here (but not in anything from Ackman), if that’s the case, then it appears Gay did not plagiarize either. And, again, that was the whole point of the Business Insider articles.
But, secondly, yes, you can absolutely plagiarize without intent to do so. The letter plays a very sloppy game of “use the definition we want at different times throughout our argument.” Note that even in the quote above, Locke’s letter says “as the word is commonly understood.” But… that’s not true. As commonly understood, inadvertent plagiarism… is still plagiarism. It might not be as serious. But it’s still plagiarism.
And the most incredible bit is that the letter admits that itself. Much later in the letter, it argues that Oxman couldn’t have done anything terrible because of MIT’s guidelines on plagiarism at the time. The letter, early on, states the following:
As MIT itself plainly explains in advising students of its academic standards, plagiarism “does not include honest error.” MIT also recognizes that “unintentional” plagiarism is not considered academic misconduct. In other words, honest mistakes happen, but those simple errors do not count as academic misconduct.
But, again, the whole point was that Gay appeared to have committed similar unintentional acts of plagiarism, yet Ackman demanded her head over them.
Either way, later on in the complaint letter, they show snippets from MIT’s guidebook which… read quite differently in context. They do not at all seem to be suggesting that unintentional plagiarism is not plagiarism. Rather, they seem to be stating that unintentional plagiarism is still very much plagiarism, and that’s why one should be very careful to not even engage in unintentional plagiarism. Here’s page 12 of the letter, in which it seems pretty clear that MIT is saying “don’t plagiarize, even if it’s unintentional,” but where Oxman/Ackman/Locke seem to be pretending it’s saying “meh, as long as you didn’t mean it, you’re fine.”
Notice, clearly in there, that MIT is not saying that “accidental” and “unintentional” plagiarism is fine. Both of the clips above are trying to help students understand why accidental plagiarism is still wrong and how they need to learn how to properly do academic writing by citing sources and writing up things by yourself.
Page 13 of the letter provides even more examples of this, where they seem to think it is absolving Oxman and revealing Business Insider’s ill-intent, when it really just seems to show that Oxman/Ackman/Locke don’t understand what they’re looking at:
Those are all clearly explanations for how to avoid that kind of “botched paraphrasing” which it appears both Gay and Oxman may have engaged in.
Notably, this demand letter leaves out the line right after those two screenshotted selections above, which proves that Libby Locke is omitting important context. Here, see it for yourself:
“In any event, even if the plagiarism is unintentional, the consequences can still be very painful.”
And then it explains why it might be painful:
Plagiarism in the academic world can lead to everything from failure for the course to expulsion from the college or university.
Plagiarism in the professional world can lead, at the very least, to profound embarrassment and loss of reputation and, often, to loss of employment. Famous cases of plagiarism include the historian Stephen Ambrose (accusations about six of his books have been made, most famously about The Wild Blue) and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (who ended up asking the publisher to destroy all unsold copies of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys). Such plagiarism may be accidental, but its consequences are the same as for intentional plagiarism.
The threat letter leaves out all of this context and seems to pretend that MIT is suggesting that such unintentional plagiarism is fine. When the very document they’re quoting from says the exact opposite.
And what’s funny is that throughout the 77-page letter, Locke keeps insisting that omissions by Business Insider that distort the meaning of things are clearly defamatory and/or evidence of actual malice. Yet Locke engages in identical behavior.
The next page of the letter actually drives this point home (though again, the letter’s author does not appear to recognize this) by including a screenshot of the MIT Academic Integrity handbook that explains how to avoid “inadvertent plagiarism.”
All of that undermines Oxman’s argument, but the letter seems to think it boosts it. That’s because it confuses what counts as “research misconduct” with what counts as plagiarism. Looking at the MIT documents in context suggests that they are talking about two different things: what counts as plagiarism (which could include accidental or inadvertent copying and missed citations) and what counts as misconduct for which sanctions make sense, which requires intent.
But none of that really matters for the point that the Business Insider piece was trying to make: comparing Gay’s conduct (which Ackman insisted was a horrible, fireable offense) to Oxman’s (which Ackman continues to insist was no big deal).
On the very next page of the letter, it (falsely) suggests all this proves that Oxman’s “inadvertent” failure to properly cite somehow was not problematic. Even as the very documents they screenshot say the literal opposite. It also claims that “quoting one part of an article without quoting another part which might tend to qualify or contradict the quoted part is evidence of actual malice” even though that’s the same thing this letter does in this very section.
Business Insider’s purpose in excluding references to these portions of MIT’s Academic Integrity Handbook and academic misconduct policies in its articles on Dr. Oxman is clear: Including them would have debunked the notion that Dr. Oxman had committed intentional plagiarism and academic fraud, and Business Insider wanted to create the false impression that Dr. Oxman committed intellectual theft.
Business Insider’s wholesale omission of MIT’s policies and procedures contradicting its preconceived narrative was deliberate, and it is further evidence of Business Insider’s actual malice towards Dr. Oxman and Ackman. Indeed, the law holds that “quot[ing] one part of an article without quoting another part which might tend to qualify or contradict the part quoted” is evidence of actual malice. Goldwater, 414 F.2d at 336; see also Eramo, 209 F. Supp. 3d at 872 (“[D]isregard[ing] contradictory evidence” is supportive of actual malice.); Murray, 613 F. Supp. at 1285 (“It would be unjust and nonsensical to allow the defendant to rely on the report for certain purposes and to ignore it for others.”).
Once again, it’s unlikely that anyone with half a brain reading the BI pieces would think they were accusing Oxman of anything particularly nefarious. They were simply comparing what she had done to what Gay had done and noting the similarities.
There’s so much more that’s silly about this threat letter that there’s no way to go through it all, so I’m going to skip some of it and give highlights of other parts.
There’s an entire section whining about the use of the word “marred” in one of BI’s headlines, claiming that because it was only inadvertent, it couldn’t have been “marred.” I shit you not:
Given that the only instances of alleged plagiarism Business Insider identified in this article were only four paragraphs with eight missing quotation marks and one instance in which Dr. Oxman failed to cite an author she cited extensively elsewhere in her 330-page dissertation, it is wildly inaccurate to characterize her dissertation as “marred” (i.e., ruined or spoiled) “by plagiarism.”
Except they’re using a… weird definition of marred. It’s most commonly “damaged or spoiled to a certain extent; made less perfect.” As such, even small defects (such as those described) sure would seem to count as marred. My articles are often marred by typos, but that doesn’t mean that every word is a typo. And, either way, the use of the word “marred” is, in no world, anywhere close to the standards of defamation.
Then we get to the whole “citing Wikipedia” nonsense. Ackman had argued on ExTwitter back when this first came about that at the time of Oxman’s dissertation Wikipedia was still new and there weren’t general agreements on citing it, but that’s… nonsense. On multiple levels. First off, it wasn’t that new. Wikipedia was widely known and widely used at that point. Second, even if there wasn’t agreement on how to cite Wikipedia, that did not change the simple fact that it was still very much widely considered plagiarism to copy directly from it without citation/quotation. The lack of understanding of how to cite Wikipedia is a separate issue from the question of copying without attribution.
I had thought that once a lawyer got their hands on this fight, this argument would die a sudden death, but apparently the law firm of Clare Locke has no problem pushing totally specious arguments, because that makes it in here too:
Business Insider, however, intentionally omitted that MIT’s Academic Integrity Handbook at the time Dr. Oxman wrote her dissertation in 2009 and 2010 did not address—much less require— citation to Wikipedia, which itself is a collaborative resource with no single author to whom ideas could be attributed, and which at the time of her dissertation was of relatively nascent origin. In fact, Wikipedia was so inchoate that MIT had not yet developed or published any guidance on how researchers should use Wikipedia. Only later—several years after Dr. Oxman’s dissertation was published—did MIT revise its Academic Integrity Handbook to include a prohibition on citing Wikipedia for academic work. In 2009 and 2010, when Dr. Oxman wrote her dissertation, no such prohibition existed.
Note the shift here between citing and copying without attribution. Those are two separate things that this letter seeks to conflate. Even if MIT hadn’t published policies on how to cite Wikipedia, it has zero impact on whether or not copying directly from Wikipedia might be considered plagiarism. It still was. And it’s ridiculous to suggest that people didn’t think that to be the case in 2010.
There’s a whole section complaining that BI could not possibly call out Oxman for plagiarism unless it did an “inquiry or investigation into Dr. Oxman’s mental state to support such a finding.” To which I will just say… did Bill Ackman conduct such an “inquiry or investigation into Dr. Gay’s mental state” to support the many statements he made about her alleged plagiarism?
Or do we just admit that the billionaire gets to live by different standards than he seeks to impose on others?
After BI published its initial article, Oxman posted some tweets admitting that she had failed to properly put quote marks in certain sections:
Any reasonable read of this is that Oxman is admitting to not quoting things she should have quoted, which… is plagiarism, even by the definitions that were quoted earlier in the threat letter. Thus, BI published a new article saying that she admitted to plagiarism. The threat letter is apoplectic in insisting that she didn’t admit to plagiarism, and only to omitting quotation marks, which is fucking crazy.
Shortly after the first article was published at 2:28 PM on January 4, Dr. Oxman acknowledged in a post on X that, in “four paragraphs” of her 330-page dissertation, she did not “place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting work,” and in one sentence she paraphrased an author but inadvertently did not cite him. She apologized for these errors. She did not, however, admit to plagiarism, intentional or otherwise. Three hours and 30 minutes later, Business Insider published a follow up article falsely claiming in its inflammatory headline that “Neri Oxman admits to plagiarizing in her doctoral dissertation after BI report.”91
Business Insider knew that when it published this article that its statement was false— Dr. Oxman had not admitted to plagiarism. Business Insider read and included a link to Dr. Oxman’s post in the article, but it purposefully mischaracterized Dr. Oxman’s post in the headline creating the false impression that Dr. Oxman had admitted to intellectual theft.
I’m still amazed at the chutzpah here. I’ve read Oxman’s tweet multiple times, and it’s pretty clear that she is admitting to plagiarism, though saying it was inadvertent. But, again, (1) inadvertent plagiarism is still considered plagiarism (including by MIT) and (2) it’s the same sort of thing that Dr. Gay was accused of, which was the whole point of BI’s efforts.
There’s another whole section on all of the Jeffrey Epstein stuff which I won’t get into (Oxman had a very, very distant connection to Epstein via the MIT Media Lab where she worked, and which Epstein infamously had donated money to, though apparently unrelated to her work). But the letter (which I’ll note claims to be on behalf of Oxman and not Ackman) whines quite a bit about BI stating that Ackman had sought to “pressure” then Media Lab director Joi Ito not to name Oxman in response to a media inquiry. It also whines about BI’s claiming that the Boston Globe had “uncovered” emails between Ackman and Ito, when (according to this letter) Ackman had sent them willingly to the Boston Globe.
But, the emails he forwarded sure do look like “pressuring” Ito. I guess it depends on your definition of “pressure” but the entire point of the email was asking Joi not to name Oxman and giving a bunch of reasons why he shouldn’t. That sure sounds like it meets one of the common definitions of pressure: “the act of trying to persuade or force someone to do something.” The threat letter, instead, seems to think “pressure” must involve threats of some kind, which… is not what the word means. And, remember, the threat letter itself talks about the use of “common definitions” (quoted above).
The letter says that Business Insider “falsely” claimed that Oxman and Ackman (who again, the letter does not purport to represent) “did not dispute the facts” in the BI articles, and then points out that this is false, because… of Ackman’s silly rant about citing Wikipedia:
In just one example, at 9:57 PM on January 5, just a few hours after Business Insider published its article falsely accusing Dr. Oxman of plagiarizing from Wikipedia and other sources, Ackman posted on X disputing that using Wikipedia for definitions is plagiarism. He asked rhetorically, “How can one defend oneself against an accusation of plagiarizing Wikipedia … Isn’t the whole point of Wikipedia that it is a dynamic source of info that changes minute by minute based on edits and contributions from around the globe? Has anyone (other than my wife) ever been accused of plagiarism based on using Wikipedia for a definition?” 110 Among other challenges to Business Insider’s reporting, Ackman directly disputed the notion that Dr. Oxman’s inclusion of definitions from Wikipedia in her dissertation was plagiarism.
But… that’s not disputing the facts. That’s disputing the interpretation of the facts (it’s also silly).
Much of that section is just a hilarious list of Bill Ackman not refuting any of the facts to the actual reporters or editors of the piece, but reaching out to various super rich executives somewhat associated with Business Insider, who assured him they were looking into things. That is not the same thing as “disputing the facts” to the actual journalists. That’s whining to the rich in hopes they’ll smack down the poor reporters who dared to make you look silly.
There are five (five!) pages that are just screenshots of Ackman’s (again, not officially represented in the letter) WhatsApp messages to Axel Springer boss Mathias Dopfner “disputing” the stories, but basically none of what is disputed is actual provably false statements of fact. They pretty much all appear to be differences of opinion on how things were portrayed in the BI stories. That’s not defamation. And it’s not even disputing the underlying facts — which is all BI claimed.
Hilariously, the only response from Dopfner to Ackman is a short email, which does not agree to anything that Ackman claimed. It just says “Thanks for your e-mails. Very helpful input to clarify things during the investigation” and then notes that because Ackman had announced plans to sue BI, his general counsel had (correctly) told him not to communicate with Ackman anymore:
Then we get to “actual malice.” On its website, Clare Locke declares itself “the leading defamation law firm in the United States.” I guarantee you that Libby Locke knows what “actual malice” means in the context of a defamation lawsuit. And it is not “they didn’t like the plaintiff” or “they were biased against the plaintiff.” Yet, Libby Locke seems to not care what the legal definition of actual malice is in their laughably wrong section on actual malice.
Business Insider never had any interest in journalistic integrity or the truth when reporting on Dr. Oxman. From the outset, its reporting was tainted by its progressive political bias and the desire of its anti-Zionist reporters and editors to smear a prominent, Jewish advocate and his family for speaking up against former Harvard President Gay. The Business Insider employees primarily responsible for this attack have a history of unethical conduct and have publicly expressed their anti Zionist and/or purported antisemitic views.
Beyond being fucking ridiculous, it’s also got nothing to do with actual malice. Actual malice means that the statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false.” Also, “reckless disregard” doesn’t mean that you were just sloppy or lazy. It means that the speaker had serious doubts about the truth of the statements but published them anyway. The Supreme Court has been quite clear that it doesn’t mean biased reporting. And it doesn’t even mean mere negligence in reporting.
For there to be actual malice, BI’s reporters would have to fundamentally know (or have very strong beliefs) that what they were publishing was false, and then publish it anyway. But, they’ve (rightly) stood by their reporting. And Ackman, repeatedly, is only complaining about their interpretation of the facts, not the underlying facts themselves.
The letter then goes on to trash the reputation of Henry Blodget, BI’s founder, who had talked to Ackman early on when Ackman was first freaking out about the stories (hilariously, Blodget suggested Ackman could write for BI at one point, and in return he gets trashed). Blodget is, of course, easy to trash. He somewhat infamously settled with the SEC for publicly pumping up dot-com era stocks, while privately trashing those stocks. Some of us still remember all that.
The letter also tries (pathetically) to trash the reputations of the reporters and editors who worked on the BI stories, including digging editor John Cook’s self-admitted story about how as a teenager in the 1980s he was suspended from high school for publishing an obnoxious underground newspaper (I too published an underground newspaper in high school, and it was also obnoxious, but also I didn’t get suspended, in part because I wrote the back page of the first issue that was an entire article about how the First Amendment works, citing numerous Supreme Court cases on why the school couldn’t take action against those of us who wrote the paper… which was, perhaps, a preview of what my life was to become).
But what does that have to do with actual malice? Fuck all! It’s just Ackman burning bridges for show — and potentially as a threat to try to convince others not to report on his wife, or he’ll trash your reputation too (come at me, Bill).
The letter then moves on to misleadingly claim that Business Insider was trying to get Oxman fired. Again, this misunderstands what seemed pretty obviously to be the point of the articles: to compare Ackman’s response to the accusations around Gay as compared to his wife. The letter makes a big deal of Insider’s reporter, Katherine Long, asking in her initial email to Ackman if he expects Oxman to lose her job (Long, at the time, mistakenly believed that Oxman was still at MIT, when she had left a few years earlier):
In context, it’s obvious why Long asked this question. Since Ackman had pushed so strongly for Gay to lose her job at Harvard, it’s a kind of obvious question for a reporter to ask about Ackman’s wife (who they thought was still at MIT) given the whole point of the exercise was to showcase Ackman’s selective outrage and differential treatment of Gay compared to his wife.
But the letter treats this as an attempt to make Oxman lose her job and seems outraged. Which is fucking hilarious given Ackman’s tirades trying to get Gay fired from her job.
Business Insider’s Coverage Of Dr. Oxman Was Motivated by Its Desire To Get Dr. Oxman Fired by MIT.
Almost no one could possibly think this is what Long was trying to do. It seems blatantly obvious that she was simply seeing if Ackman felt his wife should face the same treatment that he helped engineer for Gay.
There’s also some just incredible hubris in the letter, in that it reveals Ackman petulantly demanding in text messages to Blodget that the articles be taken down while the promised investigation on the reporting occurred (which would be an extraordinary step that would have brought Streisand Effect levels of extra attention to the claims) and Ackman seems to think that BI’s refusal to accede to his demands when Blodget promised he was “working” on the issue is somehow more proof of malice (when the more sensible, and likely accurate, reason is that BI investigated, found that the story still held, and there was no reason to take it down).
There are also about eight whole pages of the letter going on (at ridiculous length) about what an amazing, brilliant, and famous person Neri Oxman is, which is hilarious since when all this started and people pointed out to Ackman that defamation against public figures involves a high bar (that high bar being the real actual malice, not the pretend one in this letter) Ackman tried to argue she wasn’t a public figure:
So, according to Bill Ackman, she’s not a celebrity academic or a public figure, but the threat letter on her behalf has eight pages lauding all of her accomplishments, awards, public exhibitions including at top museums around the world, the description in the NY Times of how she’s “a Modern-day da Vinci” and more. So, I guess they’re not even going to try to argue that she’s not a public figure.
There’s also a ridiculous number of words describing the alleged “harm” all of this has had, failing to recognize that if Ackman hadn’t made such a big deal of all of this, the story likely would have died out after a day or two as people got a good laugh at Ackman’s hypocrisy and moved on. Instead, his continued talking about it, and now sending this letter have only guaranteed that many more people are aware of all of this. If there’s any harm (and that seems unlikely) much of it should be pinned on Ackman’s inability to let this go.
On the final page of this opus, we get the “demands.”
Axel Springer and Business Insider must mitigate the damage they have caused by correcting their libelous reporting, issuing statements setting the record straight, making a sincere and meaningful public apology to Dr. Oxman and Ackman, and creating a fund to compensate other victims of Business Insider’s libelous reporting and to discourage their inappropriate conduct in the future. (Dr. Oxman is seeking no compensation for herself to make available additional resources for other victims.) Failure to take these steps will expose Axel Springer and Business Insider to substantial legal liability and will be further evidence of actual malice directed toward my client.
This is nonsense. I’m quite sure BI’s general counsel is not worried about this. Nothing in the letter indicates anything close to the level that would be defamation. The only real question — and the likely real intent of the letter — is whether or not all the rich folks that Ackman called up and texted during this whole mess, including Dopfner, Henry Kravis, and Axel Spring board member Martin Varsavsky, decide to just go along with this to hush up the mouthy rich guy so they won’t have to deal with more of this nonsense.
At this point, it’s pretty clear that Oxman (and Ackman) have no actual defamation case here. They have a lot of noise and bluster. And sometimes that’s enough to get a publication to back down (which Clare Locke seems to want you to believe they can produce in every case). But it would be a fucking shame and an embarrassment if Axel Springer/BI caved here, and would put all of its future reporting in question by showing that they could be bullied by specious, vexatious legal threats.
In Ackman’s tweet revealing this letter, he claims that he hasn’t sued first because “people we highly respect” had told him that Axel Springer was “perhaps the strongest long-term supporter of the state of Israel of any media organization, and also an important advocate against antisemitism.” What that has to do with anything in the letter, I do not know.
In the end, this is just more censorial bullshit. It’s hilarious that Ackman presents himself as a “free speech absolutist” when he’s doing this shit to seek to pressure (as it’s commonly defined!) BI into removing these stories. It misses the entirety of the point of these articles and pretends they’re about attacking Oxman, when it’s obvious to anyone outside of Ackman’s immediate sphere that the intent was to highlight the very, very different treatment Ackman gives to the accusations against Gay and Oxman.
Indeed, this very letter demonstrates that point to a much greater level. All this letter does is call that much more attention to Ackman’s disgusting double standard. When it’s someone he doesn’t like for other reasons, he’s willing to play up the plagiarism claims and push for them to lose their job. When it’s his wife, he tries to burn down an entire media outlet.
All this letter shows is that Bill Ackman is a censorial hypocrite.
As we survey the rubble that once was the U.S. journalism industry, a common refrain involves lamenting that “online journalism just isn’t profitable.” But as the recent collapse of outlets like Sports Illustrated and The Messenger illustrate, the real culprit often isn’t that journalism isn’t profitable, it’s that U.S. media is predominantly run by utterly incompetent individuals who fail upward into positions of power.
Last week’s collapse of Vice media came as no surprise given years of stories about waste and excess by a rotating crop of terrible management. Also unsurprising is that most of the postmortems (usually written by people employed in the U.S. media sector who would like to remain so and don’t want to offend ownership by being honest) involve lots of vagaries as to responsibility.
There was a lot of ambiguous finger pointing at the supposed inherent impossibility of making money in online journalism. Most breakdowns just parroted the soulless, AI-esque memo to staff by CEO Bruce Dixon without context, blaming ambiguous externalities and the supposedly unavoidable unprofitability of running a silly old website in the TikTok and Twitch era:
“As we navigate the ever-evolving business landscape, we need to adapt and best align our strategies to be more competitive in the long term...We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand. However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously.“
As usual, you have to go over to independent media outlets like Defector to find something vaguely resembling the truth: that Vice was run into the ground by a rotating crop of utterly incompetent trust fund failsons who created unrealistic, hype-fueled company valuations, hoovered up exorbitant salaries, implemented numerous incoherent strategy pivots, and set giant piles of money on fire on a rotating crop of increasingly stupid ideas:
“The band of worthless but extravagantly overcompensated executives who seized the Vice ship from its previous regime of worthless but extravagantly overcompensated executives have decided that the business’s new direction will be in content licensing and re-emphasized social media channels, and that’s that.”
Numerous Vice editors and staff writers were paid salaries as little as $35,000 a year in New York City (you’d find retirement or financing a home purchase easier with a career at fucking Quiznos). At the same time, executives, clearly incapable of any sort of coherent strategic vision, gobbled up massively outsized compensation not at all commensurate with their workloads or performance:
“The exorbitant pay of the executive team responsible for steering Vice Media into urgent financial disaster and thus into the hands of private equity: Vice chief communications officer Jonathan Bing took home $640,000 in salary and bonuses in the 12 months prior to Vice’s bankruptcy filing; chief operating officer Cory Haik took home $726,000; executive vice president Subrata De was paid $779,000; chief marketing officer Nadja Bellan-White hauled in $835,000.”
Even as the company was facing bankruptcy and freelancers and staffers were either fired without severance or (like myself and other Vice freelancers) watched huge segments of their incomes instantly evaporate, legal filings illustrated how Vice executives were handed $11 million dollars — for doing arguably little to nothing — from May 2022 to May 2023.
This, somehow, often gets distorted into the “unforeseen challenges facing modern online media ventures today” by a feckless press pretending to ascertain what went wrong without pissing off management.
When it comes to financing Vice journalism and keeping the lights on, the problem wasn’t the people doing the actual fucking work. Nor is it the costs of doing actual journalism. As noted previously, The equally incompetently managed The Messenger burned through fifty million fucking dollars in less than a year; enough to fund any competently managed modest newsroom for the better part of a decade.
But again, if you read most mainstream analysis of the Vice collapse, executive incompetence is either downplayed or simply nowhere to be found. Instead, the collapse of Vice, like most mismanaged modern U.S. media companies, is often left causation free, somehow the unfortunate, unforeseen consequence of ambiguous externalities in the thankless job of informing the public about factual reality online.
Hey, maybe it was all the fault of those dastardly wokes.
While Vice does have a well-earned reputation for quirky hipster engagement bait (Transhumanist Alien Ketamine!), the outlet also did oceans of excellent journalism. Especially at outlets like Motherboard, where Joseph Cox was a wrecking ball on the cybersecurity beat. Several of the sub-brand’s best editors and writers wisely smelled the looming carrion and left last year to create the excellent 404 Media.
Yes, making money in journalism is difficult. The journalism advertising market has cratered, and the public’s attention span is now fractured across an ocean of quick-dopamine-hit video apps and social media apps where mindless engagement bait is now god.
But as academics like Victor Pickard have long argued, U.S. journalism should have always been viewed as a nonprofit or minimally profitable public service in need of creative (potentially even public) funding by anybody even semi-competently interested in its long-term survivability.
Instead, a rotating crop of hedge fund bros, VCs, and bankers decided to treat an essential cornerstone of functional U.S. society like a disposable napkin. A hollow, purely extractive and self-serving pursuit of mindless engagement at impossible scale. That this brutal exploitation opened the door to abuse by authoritarians keen on undermining the very concept of a shared reality never entered their thick skulls.
At the same time, our federal media policies have been abysmal failures, with policymakers routinely turning a blind eye to mindless consolidation and the impact it has on media diversity. Efforts to create alternative funding for independent journalism have also been feckless and incoherent, never stepping close to the same priority reserved for the latest tech hype bubble or cryptocurrency scam.
The result is has been the birth of a hollow, privacy-violating, engagement-based infotainment apparatus at a scale never seen on Earth. A system where all the financial incentives point in twisted directions, drowning us in wave upon wave of automated gibberish and partisan propaganda that’s way more profitable — and more consistently financed — than journalism ever was.
Now, the same “leaders” that caused the collapse of Buzzfeed, Vice, and The Messenger want to use AI to create an even moremindless engagement ouroborus that shits out advertising money at impossible scale with an utter disregard for audience, information quality, journalism, foundational reality, or the broader public interest.
U.S. journalism isn’t entirely hopeless (though it sure felt like it last week as we all rushed to archive years of work before deletion by an extraction class utterly disinterested in preservation or history).
There are still community-driven outlets like Techdirt. There are still outstanding outlets like ProPublica genuinely interested in challenging American wealth, corruption, and power. Some journalists have found a path to profitability and building direct reader readerships through newsletters (albeit not without some ugly wrinkles). The Motherboard folks who left to form 404 Media say, strangely enough, that without a cavalcade of trust fund failsons leeching resources, their journalism should prove profitable.
But putting the future of journalism in the hands of individual newsletter authors and smaller outlets without the financial resources to fend off narcissist billionaires (virulently and routinely angry that you’ve told the truth) raises more than a few questions about scale and sustainability.
More broadly, there’s simply no financial incentive to fix or reform any of the underlying rot in an industry peppered by people who view journalism as a purely extractive profit-taking exercise. The kinds of folks that make $835,000 incompetently implementing a new hare-brained pivot every seven months in the pretense they’re helping very much like things the way they are.
So, barring some unforeseen innovation, or a transformative epiphany by those with wealth and power (a segment not always keen on independent journalism that critiques wealth and power), this is, with fleeting exception, precisely how things will remain until the wheels come completely off.
Last month we noted how deteriorating quality over at Google search and Google news was resulting in both platforms being flooded by AI-generated gibberish and nonsense, with money that should be going to real journalists instead being funneled to a rotating crop of lazy automated engagement farmers.
This collapse of online informational integrity is happening at precisely the same time that U.S. journalism is effectively being lobotomized by a handful of hedge fund brunchlords for whom accurately informing the public has long been a distant afterthought.
It’s a moment in time where the financial incentives all point toward lazy automated ad engagement, and away from pesky things like the truth or public welfare. It costs companies money to implement systems at scale that can help clean up online information pollution, and it’s far more profitable to spend that time and those resources lazily maximizing engagement at any cost. The end result is everywhere you look.
The latest case in point: as hustlebros look to profit from automated engagement bait, The Verge notes that there has been a rise in automated obituary spam.
Like we’ve seen elsewhere in the field of journalism, engagement is all that matters, resulting in a flood of bizarre, automated zero-calorie gibberish where facts, truth, and public welfare simply don’t matter. The result, automated obituaries at unprecedented scale for people who aren’t dead. Like this poor widower, whose death was widely (and incorrectly) reported by dozens of trash automation sites:
“[The obituaries] had this real world impact where at least four people that I know of called [our] mutual friends, and thought that I had died with her, like we had a suicide pact or something,” says Vastag, who for a time was married to Mazur and remained close with her. “It caused extra distress to some of my friends, and that made me really angry.”
“Google has long struggled to contain obituary spam — for years, low-effort SEO-bait websites have simmered in the background and popped to the top of search results after an individual dies. The sites then aggressively monetize the content by loading up pages with intrusive ads and profit when searchers click on results. Now, the widespread availability of generative AI tools appears to be accelerating the deluge of low-quality fake obituaries.”
Yes, managing this kind of flood of automated gibberish is, like content moderation, impossible to tackle perfectly (or anywhere close) at scale. At the same time, all of the financial incentives in the modern engagement infotainment economy point toward prioritizing the embrace of automated engagement bait, as opposed to spending time and resources policing information quality (even using AI).
As journalism collapses and a parade of engagement baiting automation (and rank political propaganda) fills the void, the American public’s head gets increasingly filled with pebbles, pudding, and hate. We’re in desperate need of a paradigm shift away from viewing absolutely everything (even human death) through the MBA lens of maximizing profitability and engagement at boundless scale at any cost.
At some point morals, ethics, and competent leadership in the online information space needs to make an appearance somewhere in the frame in a bid to protect public welfare and even the accurate documentation of history. It’s just decidedly unclear how we bridge the gap.
Early last year new journalism outlet named “The Messenger” launched to great fanfare.
The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the outlet launched with $50 million in backing and a lot of chatter about how it was going to revolutionize U.S. journalism. Finkelstein claimed he wanted to build “an alternative to a national news media” that “has come under the sway of partisan influences,” insisting there was an easy path toward becoming one of the biggest news outlets online with over 100 million readers monthly and $100 million in 2024 revenues.
The news outlet didn’t even last a year.
After several weeks of reports that the outlet was running out of cash, this week The Messenger announced it would be shutting down entirely. In an email to staff, Finkelstein blamed “economic headwinds” on the news outlet’s collapse:
“The industry has faced extraordinary challenges this past year. The economic headwinds have left many media companies fighting for survival. Unfortunately, as a new company, we encountered even more significant challenges than others and could not survive those headwinds. I am grateful to you and the partners who believed in our mission and came on board over the past seven months, but the reality is that we needed more capital to move forward successfully.“
There’s zero admission of any strategic missteps in the statement. No ownership of mismanagement. All of the problems were apparently caused by ambiguous externalities. Now, all that’s left of the website and a year of work is a blank page.
As is par for the course for U.S. journalism, those who will be hit hardest by managerial incompetence are the actual writers and editors, who had to learn about the company’s shutdown from other news outlets. Several Messenger reporters took to social media to document the carnage, noting they were kicked off of internal slack comms before anybody in management could be bothered to tell them the news:
Managers couldn’t even be bothered to communicate severance, health insurance, or other essential employment particulars before the site and all comms went dead:
It’s certainly true that it’s difficult to make money off of journalism given the rise of social media, slowdowns in the news ad market, and other factors (the stuff outlets like Axios or Politico like to focus on exclusively). Less discussed by major outlets is that the folks leading these companies genuinely don’t know what they’re doing or understand the modern media environment they operate in.
Much like Politico, Semafor, Axios, the New York Times and other prominent modern journalism outlets of the day, The Messenger’s coverage generally suffered from what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” or a sort of timid, pseudo-objectivity that fails to prioritize the sole function of journalism: getting to the actual truth.
Many Messenger reporters who thought they were being hired to do real reporting had complained for much of the last year about how they were being forced to suddenly chase ad impressions by crafting low-quality aggregated engagement bait more akin to infotainment than journalism.
Such journalism is a direct reflection of millionaire or billionaire media owners who don’t want to offend sources, advertisers, or event sponsors with bold, truth-telling journalism that has actual teeth. So what you get instead is a sort of journalism simulacrum that fails to critique wealth, corruption, or power with any real consistency, since the wealthy and powerful owners very obviously don’t want that.
The idea that the affluent out of touch gentleman behind The Hill — itself a longstanding purveyor of clickbait and timid “both sides” journalism — was going to single-handedly change modern reporting was always laughable. Especially given that Finkelstein had made it abundantly clear he didn’t learn much from the last decade of Trumpism, or understand how authoritarians exploit the kind of pseudo-objective, “both sides” journalism he remains fascinated by.
Such executives and owners are very obviously terrible at their jobs, hoovering up outsized executive compensation while competent reporters and editors are laid off in historic droves. The collective result has been a steady erosion of public trust in journalism. The best in the industry get relegated to the fringes, while the worst in the industry fail ever upward into greater positions of prominence.
If you’ve spent any time in journalism, it’s completely wild to think about what a small team of smart, hungry journalists and editors could do with $50 million. It’s enough to staff a team of hard-nosed ProPublica-esque journalists for the better part of the next decade.
Instead, $50 million was set on fire in a purposeless quest for bland infotainment at scale by men who don’t know what they’re doing, don’t understand the industry they work in, and have no foundational idea how the information environment has shifted in the last two decades.
Like so many rich media executives (see: Politico owner and CEO Mathias Döpfner), Finkelstein was seemingly incapable of seeing most of the fatal flaws in modern U.S. journalism, because at best they don’t impact him personally and at worst he actively benefits from them.
He can’t see the inherent class, race and gender biases in most newsrooms, the steady erosion of trust caused by feckless “both sides” reporting, the underlying flaws with the engagement-baiting advertising models that can violently derail efforts to genuinely inform the public, or the way well-funded authoritarian propagandists exploit these failures for messaging and recruitment traction.
He’s not alone; recall when Semafor decided to launch a “trust in news” symposium by hosting right wing propagandist Tucker Carlson, then bristled at the idea this wasn’t helping? As the NYT op-ed section ably demonstrates on a daily basis, a growing number of outlets are primarily interested in culture war engagement bait disguised as intellectualism. Mindless engagement is king.
This kind of scale-chasing incompetence by visionless brunchlords is why we’ve seen such a massive push toward independent newsletters, or smaller, journalist-owned media outfits (see: 404 Media’s creation by the Motherboard team fleeing the Vice bankruptcy). Outlets that aren’t mindlessly obsessed with infotainment at scale, cultivating a loyal local audience and trust one day at a time by telling the truth.
Journalism is still obviously hard to fund and sustain. There’s no limit of financing challenges. But we’ve been so distracted by shitty AI or get-rich NFT schemes, we’ve only really just started to have real conversations about creative funding options, or how to isolate independent journalism from capitalism’s baser instincts (Professor Victor Pickard has a good recent read on this).
It’s a radical idea, but we could make meaningful progress if we clawed journalism from the hands of affluent, out of touch brunchlords, and put it back under the control of diverse, hungry journalists and editors who actually understand the news industry and media environment they work and exist in.
First Amendment principles are nothing new. A ton of precedent has been established that firmly limits what the government can do to stop someone from saying something (and, less often, to force someone to say something). Prior restraint is pretty easy to recognize.
And yet, every so often, a judge decides to rewrite the First Amendment from first principles. It’s a great method for innovation. Not so much for court orders. As much as litigants dread hearing a judge call an argument “novel,” judges should be similarly wary of having one their own described the same way.
Someone screwed up and handed journalists documents that were still under seal in ongoing litigation. That really should only be a problem for the person who handed over the documents. It should have nothing to do with the recipient, especially when it’s clear it was a mistake, rather than an attempt to bypass a court order.
A federal judge on Friday ordered The Oregonian/OregonLive not to publish information from documents it obtained last week from an attorney in a high-profile sex discrimination lawsuit against Nike and told the news organization to return or destroy the records.
The attorney, Laura Salerno Owens, who represents the plaintiffs in the case, sent a file of documents to a news reporter on Jan. 19. She subsequently asked The Oregonian/OregonLive to return them and the news organization declined.
She filed a sealed motion late Thursday with the court, asking in the title of the motion that “inadvertently disclosed” documents be returned. The Oregonian/OregonLive was not provided a copy of the motion.
As one of the paper’s editors points out, this is some bullshit.
“Prior restraint by government goes against every principle of the free press in this country,” said Therese Bottomly, the editor and vice president of content for The Oregonian/OregonLive. “This is highly unusual, and we will defend our First Amendment rights in court.”
And yet Judge Jolie A Russo does not see it that way. There’s no written order that further explains the judge’s rationale for bypassing the First Amendment. All anyone has at the moment is a lengthy docket entry that says The Oregonian (which is not a party to this litigation) is somehow subject to the court order sealing these documents.
ORDER issued by Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo: The Court is aware that certain documents marked “Confidential” and “Attorneys’ Eyes Only” have been inadvertently disclosed by plaintiff’s counsel to the Oregonian via e-mail dated January 19, 2024 and that the Oregonian refuses to return the documents. The Oregonian (as party-intervenor Oregonian Media Group) inserted itself as a party-intervenor in this case for the purpose of obtaining disclosure of these and other documents. This Court granted disclosure of the documents at issue on January 5, 2024 (ECF 403 ) which had previously been subject to a protective order. However, the Ninth Circuit stayed the Order pending appeal (ECF 408 ) and the Oregonian is a party to that appeal. Accordingly, the operative protective order requires parties to this litigation to not disclose such inadvertently disclosed documents. (ECF 82 ). Therefore, plaintiff’s motion requesting return of inadvertently disclosed documents and requesting expedited consideration (ECF 410 ), to which defendant joins, is Granted. In order to assure non-disclosure, the Oregonian is Ordered as follows: return the inadvertently disclosed documents by January 31, 2024; agree not to disseminate that information in any way; and to destroy any copies in its possession.
Now, there’s a bit of text in there that attempts to portray The Oregonian as a party to this litigation because it intervened in the past with its attempts to get various sealed documents unsealed. This does not make The Oregonian a “party” to this litigation. This is still between the original plaintiffs and Nike and that protective order only affects those parties.
If Judge Russo wants to treat The Oregonian as a party to this litigation, then the judge should have had someone from the paper present when they considered the plaintiff’s attempt to obtain an order requiring the return of mistakenly distributed documents. If the paper’s a party, it should have been given a chance to present its counterarguments, rather than just be handed a docket order telling it that (1) it’s a party as far as the judge is concerned for the purposes of this order only, and (2) it needs to comply with a protective order that originally only covered the original set of litigants.
The Oregonian is under no obligation to comply with an unlawful court order. But the downside is that even if it’s unconstitutional, the court can still punish the paper for publishing these documents or simply refusing to give them back. The person who made the inadvertent disclosure faces no legal ramifications for their actions. And rightly so, since this appears to have been an honest mistake.
But the beneficiary of an honest mistake shouldn’t be forced to comply with an order that violates the First Amendment. And yet, the paper is the only entity in this three-way that’s likely to be punished for inadvertently obtaining something it shouldn’t have because a judge clearly didn’t think this thing all the way through before deciding the entity with the strongest claim to First Amendment protections should be the only one subjected to prior restraint.
When we last checked in with what’s left of Sports Illustrated, its owner, The Arena Group, had just got done baring its ass as part of a giant ‘AI’ related scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a great idea to create a bunch of fake, AI-generated writers to shit out lazy, uninteresting clickbait, without really telling any of the folks that create actual journalism at the company.
When busted, Arena Group executives blamed everyone but themselves.
Sports Illustrated’s fortunes got even bleaker last week, when it was revealed that 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), had 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.
To hear ABG CEO Jamie Salter tell it, Arena Group tried to change the terms of the licensing deal and lower its payments mid-stride. Salter says they may still be able to strike a deal with Arena, or they may find another renter. But when it comes to sports reporting and Sports Illustrated, it doesn’t really matter at this point — as the brand has already largely become a zombie of its former self.
“Earlier today, The Arena Group gave notice over email that it would be conducting layoffs at Sports Illustrated. A statement from the Sports Illustrated union revealed that “a significant number, possibly all” of the magazine’s staff would be losing their jobs as the result of Authentic Brands Group’s decision to revoke The Arena Group’s license to the SI brand.”
Over the past six years Sports Illustrated has been tossed around between a rotating crop of dodgy international middlemen for whom journalism was an afterthought. SI was acquired in 2018 by what was left of Meredith Publishing as part of a purchase of what was left of Time, Inc. (which founded the magazine in 1954), then had its intellectual property sold to Authentic for $110 million a year later.
All the while, the output and quality of the end product and brand steadily declined, resulting in a media outlet that’s now more interested in hawking supplements and affixing its brand to casino deals than doing any sort of cogent sports reporting. It’s a not dissimilar trajectory to other major media brands like Newsweek, which was hollowed out like a pumpkin and now traffics in right wing conspiracy theories.
Sports Illustrated’s decline runs in parallel to the ongoing, continuing collapse of real journalism and the whole accurately informing the public thing–which has never been much of a money maker. There were a record number of media layoffs last year, as trust fund brunchlords and the incompetent stewards of a dying press hustle and jockey to make a quick buck shuffling bloated brand corpses around.
It’s more profitable to make a quick buck striking acquisition deals and pointless mergers for the tax breaks — generating automated clickbait and bullshit at historic scale and using what’s left of popular brands to sell junk — than it is to pay real reporters a living wage to create quality journalism. The end result of that lazy mindset is everywhere you look. And it seems to be getting worse.
Despite a lot of lip service, we’ve never really spent a whole lot of time actually trying to find creative new funding options for real journalism at any meaningful scale. Certainly nowhere near the time and effort put into get rich quick tech fads like NFTs. The stewards of what’s left have no interest in real journalism, or funding it. They’re in it to make a quick buck off the fading remnants of a dying industry, cutting corners, firing employees, and pursuing easy money wherever possible.
As a result journalism — sports or otherwise — is steadily being replaced by a parade of automated gibberish, clickbait, well-funded propaganda, and marketing, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find anybody with the ethics and resources interested in reversing — or even combating — the trajectory.
Now the broader problem with Google News quality control seems to have gotten worse with the rise of “generative AI” (half baked language learning models). AI-crafted clickbait, garbage, and plagiarized articles are now dominating the Google News feed, reducing the already shaky service’s utility even further:
“Google News is boosting sites that rip-off other outlets by using AI to rapidly churn out content, 404 Media has found. Google told 404 Media that although it tries to address spam on Google News, the company ultimately does not focus on whether a news article was written by an AI or a human, opening the way for more AI-generated content making its way onto Google News.”
As we’ve seen in the broader field of content moderation, moderating these massive systems at scale is no easy feat. Compounded by the fact that companies like Google (which feebly justified more layoffs last week despite sitting on mountains of cash) would much rather be spending time and resources on things that make them more money, instead of ensuring that existing programs and systems actually work as advertised.
But the impact of Google’s cheap laziness is multi-fold. One, sloppy moderation of Google News only helps contribute to an increasingly lopsided signal to noise ratio as a dwindling number of under-funded actual journalists try to out-compete automated bullshit and well-funded propaganda mills across a broken infotainment and engagement economy. It’s already not a fair fight, and when a company like Google fails to invest in functional quality control, it actively makes the problem worse.
For example, many of automated clickbait plagiarism mills are getting the attention and funding that should be going to real journalism operating on shoestring budgets, as the gents at 404 Media (whose quality work ironically isn’t even making it to the Google News feed) explore in detail. For its part, Google reps had this to say:
“Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced. Automatically-generated content produced primarily for ranking purposes is considered spam, and we take action as appropriate under our policies.”
Except they’re clearly not doing a good job at any part of that. And they’re not doing a good job at that because the financial incentives of the engagement economy are broadly perverse; aligned toward cranking out as much bullshit as possible to maximize impressions and end user engagement at scale, and against spending the money and time to ensure quality control at that same scale.
It’s not entirely unlike problems we saw when AT&T would actively support (or turn a blind eye to) scammers and crammers on its telecom networks. AT&T made money from the volume of traffic regardless of whether the traffic was harmful, muting any financial incentive to do anything about it.
This isn’t exclusively an AI problem (LLMs could be used to improve quality control). And it certainly isn’t exclusively a Google problem. But it sure would be nice if Google took a more responsible lead on the issue before what’s left of U.S. journalism drowns in a sea of automated garbage and engagement bait.
Early last year new journalism outlet named “The Messenger” launched to great fanfare.
The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the new news empire launched with $50 million in backing and a lot of chatter about how it was going to revolutionize U.S. journalism. Finkelstein claimed he wanted to build “an alternative to a national news media” that “has come under the sway of partisan influences,” insisting there was an easy path toward becoming one of the biggest news outlets online with over 100 million readers monthly.
Yeah, about that.
Fast forward to 2024 and The Messenger currently ranks somewhere around #195 among all U.S. news sites, roughly on par with some local Texas broadcast news stations. But there are also reports that the outlet is facing “dire financial straits” after failing to achieve any of its promised metrics.
The company only saw $3 million in revenue compared to $38 million in losses. It now only has around $1.8 million on hand, and things are looking decidedly shaky. First to go, as always, are the employees that had nothing to do with the company’s actual strategic failures:
“This week the company is laying off roughly two dozen employees, including those who covered national politics, science and technology. It is raising money from investors to maintain its operations through this year. On Tuesday, Richard Beckman, a founder who was a long-serving executive at the magazine company Condé Nast, announced he was leaving the company.”
There were several prominent journalists drawn to the promise of a news outlet that did things differently. One problem: the outlet didn’t actually do anything differently. It wasn’t long after launch that employees began to complain that site leaders were prioritizing mindless aggregated clickbait over real reporting or meaningful, original analysis.
Much like Politico, Semafor, Axios, and other prominent modern journalism outlets of the day, The Messenger’s coverage also generally suffers from what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” or a sort of timid, pseudo-objectivity that fails to prioritize the sole function of journalism: getting to the truth.
Such journalism is a direct reflection of millionaire or billionaire media owners who don’t want to offend sources, advertisers, or event sponsors with bold, truth-telling journalism that has actual teeth. So what you get instead is a sort of journalism simulacrum that often fails to critique wealth, corruption, or power with any real consistency, since the wealthy and powerful owners very obviously don’t want that.
The idea that the affluent out of touch gentleman behind The Hill — itself a longstanding purveyor of clickbait and timid “both sides” journalism — was going to single-handedly change modern reporting was always laughable. Especially given that Finkelstein had made it abundantly clear hadn’t learned much from the last decade of Trumpism.
Like so many rich media executives (see: Politico owner and CEO Mathias Döpfner), Finkelstein was seemingly incapable of seeing most of the fatal flaws in modern U.S. journalism, because at best they don’t impact him personally and at worst he actively benefits from them.
He can’t see the inherent class, race and gender biases in most newsrooms, the steady erosion of trust caused by feckless “both sides” reporting, or the underlying flaws with the engagement-baiting advertising models that can violently derail efforts to genuinely inform the public.
He’s not alone; recall when Semafor decided to launch a “trust in news” symposium by hosting right wing propagandist Tucker Carlson, then bristled at the idea this wasn’t helping? As the NYT op-ed section ably demonstrates on a daily basis, a growing number out outlets are primarily interested in culture war trolling disguised as intellectualism. Engagement is king. Risk-taking journalism is an afterthought.
News outlets owned by trust fund brunchlords aren’t generally interested the truth. They’re interested in insider gossip and controversy and slurping up the ad engagement that results. That, very obviously, has made them violently susceptible to a surging authoritarian movement that makes its bread and butter through propaganda, engagement trolling, and outrage amplification.
Journalism at its best should easily puncture these illusions, but time and time again (as we just saw with the NYT’s participation in the right wing propagandist’s bad-faith assault on academic institutions over trumped-up plagiarism accusations), these kinds of dominant media outlets actively participate in the charade. They can’t see or report on the field accurately (or refuse to), and the public has noticed.
But such executives are also just inherently terrible at their jobs, hoovering up outsized executive compensation while competent reporters and editors are laid off in droves. The collective result has been a steadily eroding public trust in journalism, while the best in the industry are relegated to the fringes and the worst in the industry fail-ever upward into greater positions of prominence.
We need a revolution when it comes to the creative funding of independent journalism. But such efforts have been hard to come by in a country that often prioritizes get-quick scams over substance and real reform. One potential option is greater public funding of journalism; a concept that often works well overseas (when properly firewalled from government meddling) but has become a non-starter in the U.S. after years of demonization by the U.S. right wing.
One excellent trend has been a shift away from an almost-mindless obsession with scale back toward smaller media outlets owned and operated by the actual people making the news.
Newsletters (unfortunately including the ones operated by engagement-seeking Nazi normalizers) continue to thrive, and we’ve seen numerous writers and editors tired of managerial incompetence build their own ventures (see: the Vice Motherboard folks fleeing the idiotic Vice bankruptcy to create 404 Media).
But by and large real journalism, especially of the integrity-oriented, independent variety, remains on life support, and the folks in real positions of influence see little financial incentive to engage in meaningful introspection anytime soon. As a result, real U.S. journalism is being supplanted by feckless journalistic simulacrum, engagement trolling, and rank, well-funded authoritarian propaganda.
The banal will never capture as much attention as the lurid.
I’m sure that this opening sentence will be seized upon by the many critics of my posts criticizing cops. So be it. Just be aware that we expect our public servants to be banal at almost any cost. That’s a sign of competence and restraint. Anything lurid suggests a critical failure.
But back to the point at hand: politicians, the media, and a variety of “think about the children” groups are always insistent the current year is the worst year, in terms of criminal activity. This persistent narrative not only enriches already affluent cop shops, but it allows citizens to see the worst in people at all times, especially if those people are of a different race, religion, socioeconomic status, or don’t appear to be beholden to outdated ideas about the two sexes.
Cops are always eager to portray the current criminal climate to be the worst ever. And that’s really fucking weird. You’d think cops would want to celebrate crime decreases because it might indicate they’re actually doing their jobs. Instead, they act like “tough on crime” politicians, amplifying any blip in crime stats to insist this this why they need more funding/armored vehicles/forfeiture money/surveillance tech.
But the facts speak for themselves. And they speak clearly and coherently because they’re based on facts handed over to the DOJ and compiled/collated by the FBI. There’s no plausible deniability here. The only hitch is that there’s not more participation in the FBI’s crime data program.
So, despite what you may have heard from TikTok and/or your local newscasters, this is not the most dangerous time to be alive. To capitalize on your death wish, you’d need to go back at least 40 years. In some cases, you’d have to hit the “four score and seven years ago” mark. The latest stats show we’re still enjoying historic lows in violent crime rates and it would likely take another pandemic to change that.
Detroit is on track to record the fewest murders since the 1960s. In Philadelphia, where there were more murders in 2021 than in any year on record, the number of homicides this year has fallen more than 20 percent from last year. And in Los Angeles, the number of shooting victims this year is down more than 200 from two years ago.
These major cities aren’t outliers. The NYT points out that, in some cases, rates remain higher than they were pre-pandemic. But in several cities, homicide rates have dipped back down to historic lows, indicating several cities are safer than they’ve been in several decades.
The city of Detroit is on track to record the lowest number of homicides since 1966, a remarkable milestone even given its substantially smaller population today.
Even cities commonly depicted as criminal playgrounds — like New York City and Chicago — are seeing double-digit drops in homicide rates. There are, of course, outliers where crime rates remain unchanged. But overall, the FBI’s latest crime data report says something positive about the state of nation — a message you won’t likely be hearing from police officials and legislators who leverage fear to sell fascism.
[A]s 2023 comes to a close, the country is likely to see one of the largest — if not the largest — yearly declines in homicides, according to recent F.B.I. data and statistics collected by independent criminologists and researchers.
But here’s one thing that hasn’t changed. Crime rates may be dropping but police officers are more violent than ever, according to data collected by Mapping Police Violence:
The problem with these facts is that they’re always undersold by the people who have the most power or the most market share. As our own Karl Bode pointed out on Bluesky, the problem with truth isn’t that it’s the uncomfortable or not easily understood. It’s that truth can’t compete with well-funded misinformation.
As long as someone can capitalize on the mere fact that violent crime exists, this will always be a problem. But when they come at you, at least you can arm yourselves with facts like these — facts that can’t easily be dismissed because they’re not coming from some activist group, but rather directly from the Justice Department. We are, by no means, almost freed from the scourge of violent crime. But we’re in much better shape than people are being led to believe.
