Media Bits and Bytes – October 29, 2024
- Trump’s Plans for the Media
- Anticipatory Obedience: Major Dailies Withhold Endorsements
- Communication Rules for Activists
- AI vs the Status Quo
- Steering NPR Rightward
- Disability Rights are Technology Rights
- Editing Jewish Currents
- Brazil Plays Hardball Against Musk
- UnitedHealth Has Major Data Breach
- Appreciating David Burnham
By David Folkenflik
NPR
On the campaign trail and in interviews, Trump has suggested that if he regains the White House, he will exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him. More specifically, Trump has pledged to toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he didn't like.
Anticipatory Obedience: Major Dailies Withhold Endorsements
By Lois Beckett
The Guardian
When two American billionaires blocked the newspapers they own (Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post) from endorsing Kamala Harris this month, they tried to frame the decision as an act of civic responsibility. Veteran journalists and media critics are saying the two billionaires, among the richest men on the entire globe, are performing “anticipatory obedience” to Donald Trump.
Communication Rules for Activists
By David Fenton
Bucks County Beacon
Why have progressives been so much less effective at public communications than the right? Partly because people on the left look down on the idea of “selling” ideas. People on the right who go to business school and who have mastered marketing, communications, and cognitive science, have triumphed by using communications principles we pioneered in the ‘60s, then largely abandoned.
AI vs the Status Quo
• Abusing the Election By Barbara A. Trish, The Conversation
• Breaking Copyright Law By Lucas Ropek, Gizmodo
• Exacerbating Inequality By Craig Aaron, Free Press
• Human and Environmental Costs By Sarah Jaffe, In These Times
• Unimaginable Advancements in Robot Capabilities By Raúl Limón, EL PAÍS
By Julie Hollar
FAIR
The CPB providing funding to National Public Radio to hire editors that will make sure its programming adheres to standards that include “objectivity,” “balance” and “the obligation to include diverse viewpoints.” NPR staffers have every right to be worried about that. How will the new editors define these terms?
Disability Rights Are Technology Rights
By Cory Doctorow
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The needs of people with disabilities are especially idiosyncratic and fine-grained. Everyone deserves and needs the ability to modify, improve, and reconfigure the assistive technologies they rely on. But the same tech companies that devote substantial effort to building in assistive features often devote even more effort to ensuring that their gadgets, code and systems can’t be modified by their users.
By Arielle Angel
New Left Review
Currents was founded as the American Communist Party’s magazine for the Jewish community, in 1946. It was then called Jewish Life. After 1956 and the Khrushchev speech, that project fell apart; some felt betrayed by the way the magazine had stuck to the Party line. So they relaunched it as Jewish Currents, which they conceived as a magazine for a ‘community, not a party’.
Brazil Plays Hardball Against Musk
By Cecilia Rikap and Cédric Durand
Jacobin
The clash between Elon Musk and Brazil highlights a dilemma that goes much deeper than social media. It’s about the complexities of a sovereign nation regulating a digital space overwhelmingly ruled by US corporations. The broader transformations of the digital landscape in the past decades underscore that it’s not enough to just “let the market rule.”
UnitedHealth Has Major Data Breach
By Zack Whittaker
TechCrunch
A ransomware attack earlier this year on UnitedHealth-owned health tech company Change Healthcare likely stands as one of the largest data breaches of U.S. health and medical data in history. At least 100 million people are now known to be affected by the breach.
The Pinnacle Gazette
Remembered fondly by many, his legacy lives on through countless journalists who adhere to the principles he modeled. The community of investigative journalism is mourning the loss of one of its greats.