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Media Bits and Bytes – February 18, 2025

Use media to fight

Electronic Frontier Foundation
  1. Using Media to Fight 
  2. Keeping Government Data Online
  3. The Antoinette Lattouf Termination Case
  4. Suing DOGE
  5. What We’ve Learned from Bluesky’s Rise
  6. The AP Ban and Free Speech
  7. New FCC Chief’s Agenda
  8. Moment of Truth for NPR and PBS
  9. Washington Post Kills ‘Fire Musk’ Ad
  10. Countering Disinfo: Curiosity is Key

 

Using Media to Fight 

By Dan Froomkin
Heads Up News

We should reach out and make connections with others, help them when we can, and protect them when it’s necessary. Those are wonderful aspirations, but they are a bit vague. So in addition to pointing you toward some great resources, I’ve put together an eclectic list of somewhat more concrete things you can do to resist the Trump agenda.

Keeping Government Data Online

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By Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen
Columbia Journalism Review

Journalists are in a position to spotlight the changes and deletions of federal data and who may profit from them. Some newsrooms have even jumped into the archival action themselves.

The Antoinette Lattouf Termination Case

By Michelle Mini
Independent Australia

Democratic freedoms, employee rights and public trust in the national broadcaster are all on trial in ‘Antoinette Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation’ trial. Lattouf, who is of Arab descent, believes she was sacked from her role as an ABC radio presenter because of her race and the fact that she publicly opposed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Suing DOGE

By Jason Kelley
Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders have filed a lawsuit today asking a federal court to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing the private information of millions of Americans that is stored by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and to delete any data that has been collected or removed from databases thus far. 

What We’ve Learned from Bluesky’s Rise

By Ryan Cooper
The American Prospect

One bright spot in the bleak year of 2024 was the rise of Bluesky. As someone who relied greatly on Twitter for news and my career—OK, I may have been somewhat addicted—before Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a snake pit of neo-Nazi filth, it was nice to see a Twitter-like replacement rise to relative prominence.

The AP Ban and Free Speech

By Rex Huppke
USA TODAY 

The AP serves a global audience. President Donald Trump can call the Gulf of Mexico what he wants, but that doesn’t mean the world has to follow suit, and the AP is right to not cave to a faux-patriotic president’s lame-brained attempt at branding.

New FCC Chief’s Agenda

By Yanni Chen
Free Press

As a sitting commissioner, Brendan Carr didn’t have to go through the Senate confirmation process when then-President-elect Donald Trump tapped him to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr has been staking out increasingly extreme and harmful positions over the past year or so in a transparent bid for the chairmanship in a Trump administration. 

Moment of Truth for NPR and PBS

By Michael Swerdlow
Columbia Journalism Review

For better or worse, public and government action is needed to ensure the necessary and consistent level of investment in journalism. But the current model for funding public broadcasting is broken.

Washington Post Kills ‘Fire Musk’ Ad

By Alexander Bolton
The Hill

The Washington Post this week backed out of a “Fire Elon Musk” advertising order that was to run as a wrap on some of its Tuesday  editions, according to Common Cause. The group said it signed a $115,000 agreement with the Post to run the ad that would have covered the front and back page of the Tuesday paper, as well as a full-page ad with the same theme inside the paper. 

Countering Disinfo: Curiosity is Key

By Kurt Sampsel and Mónica Guzmán
PEN America

Practicing curiosity – which involves suspending certainty, questioning our judgments and our conclusions, and exercising humility in a culture that seems to want us to walk around with confidence – is the key to unlocking clear views of what’s really dividing us. It’s also extremely important for building trust where trust has dried up.