One step into admission of reality, one foot stuck in undermining truth. Note "swarmed" to characterize protesters; animalistic metaphors for human activity convey that people are out of control, perhaps dangerous mass. Locusts & angry bees "swarm." People gather in righteous, brave witness.

If you let Media & Political Elite debate justification of a given murder, you are implicitly agreeing that all of the murders & terror & violence is not their goal, but an unfortunate side-effect that happened when they were trying to accomplish some other goal. But, there is no other goal.

Message to fellow journalists (and anyone claiming to be one): do not “police-involved shooting” executions in broad daylight. Obfuscating language like that is completely journalistically unnecessary and, even worse, sanitizes reality. Words have meaning. Use the right ones.

From this moment forward (and before, but clearly now): -If you work for ICE. -If you vote for money for ICE. You are complicit. This is the gestapo. You're on the wrong side. You can't pretend not to know.

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

Finally, some good news!

It's my old saw that I keep coming back to: the current working definition of "objectivity" means a journalist isn't allowed to describe what's obviously going on.

The first draft of the @nytimes.com story on Trump's bizarre speech in Davos does not mention (at the time I'm posting) he kept confusing Iceland and Greenland. Instead, it pretends it never happened. This is what 'sanewashing' and 'grading Trump on a curve' means. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/u...

The TikTok trend of people flying to other countries for full day-long health assessments and treatments for the cost of a local spa day would say otherwise.

"People share false claims to signal in-group allegiance...The value of sharing lies not in providing accurate information, but in serving as social currency that reinforces group identity and cohesion." How should journalism respond to this environment? theconversation.com/why-people-b...

I really, really, really want journalists to similarly consider other language for describing what ICE is currently doing in Minnesota. It is clearly no longer "immigration enforcement." It's not even "law enforcement."

Good scoop by @liamjscott.bsky.social: People seeking jobs at Stars and Stripes, which Congress guaranteed editorial independence, are being asked how they would advance administration priorities. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

A key to writing headlines in 2025 is putting any attribution FIRST so it doesn't get cut off when shared on a variety of platforms and devices, because otherwise your outlet states it as fact 🙃

It's time for media to stop defaulting to describing ICE's actions as "immigration enforcement operations" and "deportations." They are no longer using the legal procedures aligned with those words and have moved far outside the bounds of their mandate.

This is what I fear most, news orgs reacting to the loud minority of chronically online commenters yelling about "liberal bias" and moving yet again rightward to appear "balanced."

I'm glad that the big papers with the resources of forensic visuals teams are doing this work, but news media needs to get faster and more willing to say what we can all plainly see via video evidence while the narrative is spreading and solidifying, not the day after.

Yes, yes, yes. I was critical of NYT coverage yesterday and still am, but this is the correct framing. The problem is, this (framing, not vid production) needs to happen IMMEDIATELY bc the evidence spread far prior to the official statements.

[internal screaming] You can report on these so-called “opposite views” (newsworthy bc the president is making things up!) without presenting those views as equally valid. It is not that hard. Why can’t the NYT do it.

Genuinely interested in what epistemology NYT operates under at this point. What materials do they consider evidence? Who is allowed to verify what happens in photographs and videos? Because it seems like they limit it to those involved speaking their motives aloud and anything else is "unverified."

cnn hitting all the passive voice/"officials say" markers with flying colors. again, there is eyewitness video. you do not need to cover things this way.

stenography for DHS is not reporting, it's complicity. printing the agency's statements without adding the context of the many other demonstrably false statements the agency has issued under near-identical circumstances is propaganda laundering. bsky.app/profile/mske...

Journalists, we need to stop immediately using the frame provided by "authority figures" until proven wrong when it's in their interest to lie AND they've provably done it before on the same topic. Start with the MANY eyewitness accounts. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Dear media covering Homeland Security's killing of a woman in Minneapolis, Homeland Security has routinely lied about violence against the public. It was caught lying repeatedly in Chicago. A federal judge determined that Homeland Security lied. Share any government statements with that context.

"Critics call it harassment" is a fantastic example of How We Got Here: journalists continuing to describe attacks by groups with power on people with less power as a debate with two equally good-faith sides, despite one side being driven by unfounded conspiracy theories.

What in the Gestapo is going on in Grand Rapids? Watch this activist get arrested *mid-interview* for speaking out against U.S. action in Venezuela.

Oh my god. These non-random small-sample focus groups have always been terrible in design and execution. But… c’mon. The SAME PEOPLE?

love that software developers are advertising AI functionality in every single app now and it's up to you to try to figure out if they mean "this has spellcheck" or "everything you create in this app will sync in real-time to sam altman's personal laptop" or something in between

Missing the deadline = breaking the law.

Exactly the sort of tyrannical behavior that the Constitution was written to prevent. See the Fourth Amendment in particular.

Verb nitpick of the day: We don't have to use "wins" and "winner" re: the giving of a non-competitive (and made up) award, created to appease a powerful leader at a critical time for the award-giving organization. "Awarded" works just fine.

Heavy on the "people feel judged/criticized when you make different choices than them." Explains a lot of our current political moment, in fact!

I have been WAITING for something like this. Great work.

Weird. Nothing on the @nytimes.com homepage about the President of the United States calling for the execution of members of the opposition in response to their political speech.

Pretty much all affordability discourse could benefit from just posting this chart. If you're in the better off America, all the luxury goods you want in excess are for the most part much cheaper. If you're in the poorer America, most of the shit you need to live/grow is more expensive.

In any sane universe, the President of the United States calling a female reporter "piggy" would be front page news incurring outrage across the board.

"Suggested Trump knew of conduct" "White House denies it" like if you wanted to retire the tamest possible headline... By contrast the emails that they ran the 4 column Clinton headline on turned out to be literally nothing - a cache of emails that had already been released months before

The ability to be "objective" or "neutral" about secret police disappearing kids would, in any rational system, be disqualifying. That the opposite is true is an indictment of journalism, and one reason that the mainstream media is distrusted.

Scams undermine democracies and free enterprise by eroding general mutual trust. Meta’s business model incentivizes people to financially exploit each other.

I have felt absolutely bonkers saying this for years at this point, especially re: journalism. If you have to check its work because it can't be trusted, and then fix whatever it does wrong, HOW would it save time???

As always, the story is how and why the media – particularly prominent broadcasters such as the BBC – are making certain choices as to which individuals, ideas, and views are platformed and how these are framed to the public. The path ahead will be shaped by such decisions. The water we swim in...

Great, and who controls the data in this app?

A "ceasefire" isn't the time between strikes. Newsrooms need to reckon with how they'll determine when that word is no longer useful.

you mean IN OPPOSITION TO scientific evidence. He isn't speaking about simple unknowns, he's speaking in *contradiction to* existing evidence. That's a huge difference that media continues to get wrong about public figures lying.

Congress must vote for SJRes76 and reverse EPA's dangerous rule to delay the common-sense methane protections. Strong standards to #CutMethane are necessary to cut waste, create jobs & boost energy security.

Yep, this phrasing implies that slowing down or moving with intention on this would be a "waste."

"Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory" www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Warped priorities: 17 NYT news stories on the Louvre jewel heist (so far); 3 NYT news stories on 7 MILLION PEOPLE attending No KIngs Day events (including one on late-night comedians and one on Trump's "brown liquid" video.)

but at least she didn't say "deplorable," right?

This is a bullshit headline in the New York Times. There’s no “uprising” in Chicago. Rather, Chicagoans are peacefully defending themselves against ICE violence. Use of the term “uprising“ is just what the Trump regime wants to excuse a further fascist crackdown in Chicago.