“Concerns over an AI bubble bursting have grown lately, with analysts recently finding that it’s 17 times the size of the dotcom-era bubble and four times bigger than the 2008 financial crisis.” Hang onto your butts. This “correction” is gonna hurt. futurism.com/artificial-i...

While Bari Weiss faces skepticism inside CBS News, former colleagues describe her management style to Status as chaotic and abrasive—raising questions about how she’ll lead one of America’s most storied newsrooms. Details in @status.news: www.status.news/p/bari-weiss...

My take on Substack exploring why trust in media outlets reporting is sagging historically, and why changes like CBS News is doing, putting Trump and conservative-friendly executives in charge of a traditional journalism outlet, isn't the answer. READ: https://loom.ly/2p_hMP0

One thing about American's widespread distrust and disapproval of the Supreme Court is that mainstream news coverage mostly doesn't dwell on stuff like standing, so people don't even begin to grasp how rigged the Court truly is www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10...

NVIDIA and OpenAi: Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“ @bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Just a little more than three weeks left to apply for Lehigh's TT Assistant Professor of Media Law and Policy opening. facultyjobs.lehigh.edu/node/1183 It's a great job, open to scholarly approach, and seeking a real focus on media & tech, even beyond current discourse around AI.

Today, a look at the role the media has played in climate obstruction, with @maxboykoff.bsky.social and Melissa Aronczyk: drilled.media/podcasts/dri...

Just looking around at the top folks in media and politics who are my age and a little older, and realizing that one of the lessons folks in elite educational spaces were quick to learn 20-25 years ago was the power of being obsequious without immediately seeming so.

You can sort of see the asymmetry in media today -- when the Republicans shut down the government Republican media springs into propaganda mode, when the Democrats do it supposedly left media debates whether its the right fight.

Been thinking a lot about Raymond Williams’s “Culture & Technology” essay where he critiques the liberal account of technological disruption: organic progress, rather than conscious choices by capital. Just imagine if the money we are flushing into data centers went to railways or solar panels.

One of the constant strands in the history of the university, dating back to its medieval origins, is the attempt of authorities - especially religious authorities but not exclusively - to control what can and cannot be taught.

One of genealogies of Media Studies is that many early methods began as advocacy strategies of 1940s media reform, in the attempt to change broadcast regulation to allow for more educational channels. Put differently, Media Studies originated as a research movement to build US Public Media.

Some big implications for journalism, too, where reporters often mistake trending posts as a reasonable reflection of public opinion.

My department at Lehigh is hiring for an assistant professor of media law and policy, with an emphasis on media and tech. It’s a great gig, with a broad approach to scholarship and research agenda. Happy tonfield anuly questions. apply.interfolio.com/173289

My department at CU Boulder is hiring BOTH an Assistant Professor of Journalism AND an Associate/Full Professor of Journalism Studies. I am on the search committee for the Associate job. Happy to answer questions or direct you to the right people. Links in this thread.

advisory to academic workers from @aaup.org @uam-umd.bsky.social www.aaup.org/news/advisor...

Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

“Debate Me” culture is not organic, endemic, or apolitical. This mode of high jacking discourse is and has been central to a 30-year conservative training program that has produced untold numbers of people to do this for every reason but “civil discourse”

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

"The moves deepened concerns among many US media critics and observers of authoritarianism that press freedoms in the US were undergoing capitulation to the Trump administration’s rightwing authoritarian leanings." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... I'd put it stronger than "concern" but yes.

Sometimes it's nice to remember that even Marcus Aurelius was like "you don't have to comment on everything bro"

Mis/dis information is (and always has been to some extent) the water, not the shark. Critics of mis/dis info seem to be under the illusion that anyone has the agency to stop any of this. There's no going back to some "before time" of rational deliberation.

For no reason, here is an article I wrote in 2017, about the right's disingenuous use of free speech to target leftists. The tactic has been obvious for a decade, and it's unforgivable that orgs haven't adapted (it's almost like they agree with the bad faith). www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/...

Consider the possibility that the reason Nate Silver & Noah Smith are mad about Blueskyism is that they’ve largely failed to attain any virality on Bluesky except when they complain about Blueskyism. This algorithm has basically defeated useful narcissism, while reviving hyperlinks.

Here's how I put it on the Ezra Klein Show four years ago: "The news system isn’t really designed for public understanding. It’s designed to produce new content every day." www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/p... Which is to say: any "fix" has to be systemic too.

Our ability to comprehend daily events has been corrupted by a toxic info environment where political & attentional dynamics distort & manipulate our “collective sensemaking” processes. Our “official” sources are now products of that same environment. Reality fractures, along with the social fabric.

WPSU was a family favorite in our little village, where we had access to only 12 channels! Such a loss. An embodiment of the shared threat to public media and public education.

This is the first NPR/PBS station I've seen that's going out of business as a result of the federal rescission: radio.wpsu.org/2025-09-11/p...

"But while Weiss is widely understood as a provocateur, what is less well understood is how she has used the Free Press to empower rightwing factions within established elite institutions... www.theguardian.com/media/ng-int... Necessary reading if you have followed her rise.

Larry Ellison just became the world's richest man. He's in talks to lead an acquisition bid of Tiktok and his son just completed a takeover of Paramount/CBS. By year's end, he will likely be in control of legacy media and the largest social media platform. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The Crimson, scooping every news outlet not run by undergraduates working in between classes, gets into how court orders mandating return of research funding have been flaunted, and makes a clear case for contempt proceedings against DOGE officials. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

blogged for @thenation.com about bari weiss taking over at cbs news. it would be great not to live in a world where being the worst person imaginable doesn't get you fame fortune and power. alas. may cbs staffers revolt and may her tenure be short and failed! www.thenation.com/article/soci...

This tactic - pressuring corporations financially until they put a regime friendly voice in charge - is exactly how Orbán took over the free press in Hungary

"Blueskyism" helped make The Onion one of the largest newspapers in the world in less than a year. If we had spent all of our time on Twitter, we'd be poorer, dumber and terminally ill with internet poisoning. He's just angry he's wasting away over there in a nazi agnostic lane that doesn't exist.

i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.

why would most americans see crime as a major problem in large cities

the most useful thing LLMs can is force us to do is to reconsider the way we use linguistic dexterity as a proxy for intelligence

"You cannot have the rise and consolidation of authoritarian power without some type of news media mobilization in support of that project," says @krforde.bsky.social.

me last week: “There was, and is, no external crisis facing the United States. But for reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.”

Read it and weep. open.substack.com/pub/michaelh...

it is literally impossible for many journalists to understand that the average dem voter doesn't love licking the boot as much as they do

Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa used 1 BILLION gallons of water in 2024 - enough to supply all of Iowa's residential water for five days. Researchers in water law and policy explain how companies rarely tell the public exactly how much water data centers consume:

POLITICO compiled a list of all the Washington Post staffers who have left in the past eight months. It’s at least a hundred names, many of them among the biggest names in journalism. This is the fastest erosion of a major outlet ever.

This is not the slightest bit surprising and it began prior to Trump coming back to power. As the idiot AG of Missouri was pursuing Missouri v Biden, Stephen Miller’s America First Legal sued me and my colleagues with the same forum-shopped judge and plaintiffs. Wake up: it’s a machine.

Wow: this decision in favor of Media Matters includes all sorts of key details concerning the Trump admin’s coordinated assault on the First Amendment. For example: Steven Miller “seemingly” ordered Attorneys General in Missouri and Texas to go after MM. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

“Our system of higher education cannot do these crucial things with leaders who undervalue the humanities, who fail to broaden our approach to the liberal arts beyond the scientistic vision of higher education pioneered in the 19th century.” www.chronicle.com/article/they...

again, what is interesting to me about this stuff — beyond the obvious fact that what trump wants is propaganda — is that it is grounded in a political theory which holds trump to be the sovereign will of the nation, who can impose his demands on every aspect of the nation's society

Pleased to share new research from my colleague John Vilanova on the breaking news coverage 2021's Astroworld tragedy. He reaffirms that news framing & analysis often presumes danger is inherent Black cultural events & gatherings, centers blame on Black culture. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....