Media Bits and Bytes – September 17, 2024
- Trump Gets a Pass – Again
- Movement Media Organizations Are Coming Together
- Age Limits for Social Media
- The Worst Magazine in America
- The Business Crisis of Local TV
- Project 2025 Coverage
- Russian Influencers
- When to Update Your Apple System
- Cyberboss: AI and Class
- Signal and Surveillance Capitalism
By Parker Molloy
The New Republic
Journalists have a responsibility to consistently remind the public of these lies in future coverage. Every article about Vance should mention his willingness to spread xenophobic misinformation. Every piece on Trump should reference his history of transgender fearmongering. These lies should color all future coverage of these candidates, becoming an integral part of their political identity.
Movement Media Organizations Are Coming Together
By Maya Schenwar and Lara Witt
Truthout
The Movement Media Alliance (MMA) is a newly formed coalition of grassroots-aligned, social justice-driven journalism organizations committed to accurate, transparent, accountable, principled and just media. Members include Truthout, Prism, In These Times, Convergence, Waging Nonviolence, Scalawag, Inquest, The Real News Network and Haymarket Books.
By Josh Taylor
The Guardian
The prime minister of Australia’s plan to impose an age limit for teenagers to access social media kicked off a debate this week over what the age should be, whether a ban is feasible and if the restriction would be good for kids. While experts in mental health and other industries warn it could force kids into less safe situations, the teens who are affected have largely been absent from discussions.
By Nathan A. Robinson
Current Affairs
The ideological suppositions that predominate (with exceptions) in The Atlantic’s pages are morally repugnant. But the arguments themselves are also shoddy and unpersuasive, purely as pieces of reasoning.
The Business Crisis of Local TV
By Richard J. Tofel
Second Rough Draft
Pew reports that more than 20% of the people who said in 2018 that TV was their preferred source of local news have now shifted to digital. Newspapers also continue to shrink, of course, although radio is holding steady (and is now tied with newspapers as a preferred source!). Those numbers for local TV news are likely to get worse over time.
By Ray Levy Uyeda
Prism
Project 2025 is an attempt to withhold political power from the classes of people who stand to benefit from accurate climate change information and who would otherwise be the most motivated to use that information to mitigate climate impacts. But you wouldn’t be able to tell that from most media coverage.
• Hard Soft Power By Catherine Luther and Brandon Prins, The Conversation
• RT and Tenet Media By Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen, Columbia Journalism Review
• Meta Bans Russian State Media By Kelvin Chan, Associated Press
When to Update Your Apple System
As promised, Apple has released the initial versions of all its 2024 operating systems. If you aren’t already running a beta of the X.1 releases that support Apple Intelligence, you could consider upgrading. But should you?
By Craig Gent
openDemocracy
Digital technologies appear to be changing the world of work at a fundamental level. Left unchecked, they may well lead to forms of work that are increasingly stressful, injurious and dehumanising. What unites the GrubHub rider’s app with the largest Amazon fulfilment centre is a shared technology.
Signal and Surveillance Capitalism
By Andy Greenberg
Wired
Signal started 10 years ago as a virtuosic hacker project that was pushing against a dominant paradigm that was almost universally celebrated by everyone at the time: the surveillance business model. Now it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.