Media Bits and Bytes - Who's on first edition

Encryption exclusion; Google takes over; Trump trumps networks; The mystery of Jacobin; Librarian of the future

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Black Americans and Encryption: the stakes are higher than Apple v FBI

By Malkia Cyril
March 21, 2016
The Guardian
In the current fight between Apple and the FBI, black perspectives are largely invisible, yet black communities stand to lose big if the FBI wins. A federal judge in California is set to rule on Tuesday whether the FBI will be granted a request compelling Apple to unlock the iPhone of a San Bernardino shooter.
While seemingly about protecting national security – the same rationale used to justify 20th century surveillance of MLK, the Black Panther Party and others – this case is about much more. It could establish a legal precedent used to suppress the growing movement for black lives that is deposing public officials and disrupting the daily assault on black people in cities across the country.
 

The New Mind Control

By Robert Epstein
February 18, 2016
Aeon
Google has become the main gateway to virtually all knowledge, mainly because the search engine is so good at giving us exactly the information we are looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the list it shows us after we launch our search – the list of ‘search results’.
That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results; few people look at other results pages, even though they often number in the thousands, which means they probably contain lots of good information. Google decides which of the billions of web pages it is going to include in our search results, and it also decides how to rank them.

How Donald Trump Bent Television To His Will

By Kyle Blaine
March 18, 2016
Buzzfeed
Staffers at the five major television networks are grappling with what role their organizations may have played in amplifying Donald Trump’s successful campaign of insults, generalizations about minority groups, and at times flat-out lies.
Conversations with more than a dozen reporters, producers, and executives across the major networks reveal internal tensions about the wall-to-wall coverage Trump has received and the degree to which the Republican frontrunner has — or hasn’t — been challenged on their air.


Inside Jacobin: How a Socialist Magazine is Winning the Left's War of Ideas

By Dylan Matthews
March 21, 2016
Vox
Jacobin has in the past five years become the leading intellectual voice of the American left, the most vibrant and relevant socialist publication in a very long time. And in 2016 it's bigger than ever, thanks to Bernie Sanders, who's making his millions of supporters curious about what democratic socialism actually means. That's an opportunity that Jacobin is seizing to great effect, even if Sanders isn't far enough left for their taste.

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Can Carla Hayden Reinvent the Library of Congress?

By Alex Duner
March 25, 2016
US News & World Report
Last month President Barack Obama nominated Carla Hayden to be the next librarian of congress with the hope that she'll lead the Library of Congress into the digital age. If confirmed, she'll bring her philosophy of democratized access to information to the post, and take steps to establish a technologically nimble organization that serves not just lawmakers and donors, but all Americans.
Though the Library of Congress is active on social media, Hayden could undertake efforts to engage with the public at a deeper level, create tools for app developers to work with the library's resources and improve relations between the Library of Congress and local libraries across the country. The overall goal would be to make the Library of Congress more relevant to the general public — not just to people who can visit the library's physical holdings on Capitol Hill. She could reprioritize the Library of Congress' budget and focus on improving the IT infrastructure the GAO found sorely lacking.