In a shock development - AI companies are failing to benchmark what matters in newsrooms. More excellent work from our Tow Center research team @klaudia.bsky.social and @aisvarya17.bsky.social

AI is insensitive to threats to press freedom and creates new ones for good measure

Joan Donovan is one of the foremost experts on the extremist online subcultures around Charlie Kirk’s killing - well worth paying attention to these details. Online platforms are (surprise) not so far on the right’s list of radicalizing forces….

For those with long memories, I believe the AI hype cycle has reached the ‘Boo.com’ stage of hypergrift

I’m sorry guys it was me. I signed Donald Trump’s name in my good pal Jeff Epstein’s birthday book. I was in college and it seemed like a fun gag. I thought people would like it

Look if you’re shaving pennies off dollars to run an AI podcast bot farm, one way to boost profits would be to have the operation run by Albanian teenagers and not a former Wondery executive. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

‘A nightmare 7th inning’ …does not really cover this situation

In a very dark time there is nothing quite like spending 5 minutes at the end of a meeting introducing colleagues to the concept of Sylvanian Family Drama TikTok accounts….

Exhibit B: cover-ups are as potent as lies. Awaiting clarification on this…might be some time

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool

Exhibit A. Newsrooms that pursue stories despite legal threats from the President. WSJ produce the ‘birthday message’ from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein . Awaiting the CBS/FreePress/Skydance robust follow up

In fairness Google (YouTube) also handed out shiny ‘gold disc’ type awards to the likes of Alex Jones in the past, so excitement about hosting extremist grift is nothing new

Let the record show ….

Illinois has banned AI therapy, making it the first state to regulate the use of AI in mental health services. www.engadget.com/ai/illinois-...

Ask Google Overviews if this statement from Liz Reid is accurate…because it reads like the most audacious piece of corporate gaslighting blog.google/products/sea...

17 drug companies just got this letter. We're now on to White House vs pharma in addition to White House vs auto OEMs, White House vs dropshippers, White House vs the construction and hospitality industry, etc.

Another banger from @klaudia.bsky.social - and by ‘banger’ I mean detailed look at the latest slew of research and reporting into the ways Google Overviews is strangling reporting www.cjr.org/analysis/tra...

It seems to be contagious. Now the Sun is also having to correct it heavily biased coverage of net-zero in response to, you know, actual facts...

The rise of the ‘Super Journalist’ or as we like to call them, just er ‘good journalists’ Jim Van Der Hei trying to make fetch happen www.axios.com/2025/07/22/j... Jim VandeHei: Rise of Super Journalists

"Joblessness among highly educated [young adults] everywhere from the US to the UK and beyond has climbed above the overall unemployment rate for the first time on record" on.ft.com/412S3zk

The rescission bill has passed the Senate. Once it passes the House, as expected, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's budget will be zeroed out for the first time since 1967, back when TV stations still broadcast in black and white.

Muzzle speed today: Senate votes to stop funding for public media Colbert Show cancelled for ‘purely financial reasons’ Executive order to target ‘woke AI’ (Grok’s Hitler fan account presumably exempted) …

The ‘may every day be another wonderful secret’ chapter is now open

Flipping the kill switch on swathes of journalism is apparently not enough for some people….

‘Purely financial ‘ is doing so much heavy lifting here

One of the great paradoxes of the modern world, and the way a tiny number of individuals hold sway over vast reserves of wealth and now political power, is that truth be told …PayPal is rubbish, even by the mediocre standards of payment apps

NYT ‘standards’ editor. Okay, some journalistic standards for ya : flimsily reported with ‘newsworthy’ stated as a fact, without evidence. And fails in its basic journalistic mission to answer the question of ‘doesn’t this breach your own standards?’

So pleased to see this. Varsha Bansal developed this story and interview in our class on Information Warfare Reporting - thanks to @wired.com for publishing and Jo Ellis for standing up to disinformation

A thing that makes that Times story especially odious is that Zohran Mamdani's father was LITERALLY expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin's fascist effort to scapegoat Asian Ugandans as not really African www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Me to one of my sons : ‘if you want to write a first person essay in the NYT about what it’s like to be a Bronx Science student who ends up at a liberal arts college because your ‘child of a professor’ status held no sway with Columbia admissions ….NOW IS THE TIME’

so let me get this straight—the NYT accepted hacked information given to them by a substack white supremacist to be used against a mayoral candidate?

The Mamdani ‘college admissions’ coverage in the NYT is beyond shoddy. Despite three bylines (how many reporters does it take to lift hacked material from a eugenicist’s blog?) the story omits context about the admissions process that would further undermine their own crass take.

Here are some details from TPM about the source who worked with the NYT to attack Zohran Mamdani that could maybe have made it into their piece. talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things...

London

Sunday

404 are the best

The main thing broken about London is its godawful ‘local’ newspaper

BREAKING: Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were fatally shot in a "politically motivated" shootings at their homes in Minnesota, officials said. The suspect, who is still at large, allegedly impersonated a police officer with a uniform and a cruiser. nbcnews.to/3HV9A5L

All the worst people in a collective flop sweat

It took just 15 years to get from Citizens United to this

‘words in car’ on the Miller household commute tonight

‘A meeting in the Oval Office’ ……

I'm just glad one of these men has the nuclear codes and the other has all our personal data.

Fwiw, I do not think this is what Tim Berners Lee had in mind

…To think how much time I wasted in seminars in the oughts on how ‘storytelling’ was going to save us, and now the military industrial narrative complex is threatening (what’s left of) civilization

This feels like an end of season episode ….

Anyone who followed the NetChoice v. Paxton challenge to Texas's must-carry law (the one the S Ct ruled on in Moody) will be deeply disoriented by the Fifth Circuit's new en banc ruling, in Little v Llano, that it's OK for govt to remove books from libraries. 1/ reason.com/wp-content/u...

A case study in textbook authoritarianism: Day by day, we’re seeing the Justice Department effectively decriminalize and wave away crimes by Trump’s friends and instead selectively focus investigatory resources on Trump’s adversaries and enemies. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/crime-is-n...

Ohio State has over three thousand at the moment, representing around 6% of the student body. Congrats to all the American families who will get to pick up the tab now.