Media Bits and Bytes – March 18, 2025
- Crypto and the Far Right
- The Media the Left Needs
- The Online Ecosystem Leans Right
- Trump’s Scorched Earth Media Policy
- China and the RedNote Surge
- Bezos Goes to Work on Washpost
- AI and Cinema
- How Hollywood Embraced Torture Scenes
- Data Colonialism
- Trade War Coverage
By John Feffer
Foreign Policy in Focus
Back in 2021, Donald Trump called cryptocurrency “a disaster waiting to happen” and a “scam.” As he got closer to regaining the White House, however, Trump changed his mind, probably as a result of the millions of dollars that flowed into his campaign coffers from industry donors. To the delight of these donors, Trump promised to make the United States the cryptocurrency capital of the world.
By Anthony Nadler and Reece Peck
Jacobin
The Right’s growing success with working-class voters wasn’t won with policy papers or think tanks; it was built through media that speaks their language. If the Left wants to compete, it needs to build a media ecosystem that resonates.
The Online Ecosystem Leans Right
By Kayla Gogarty
Media Matters for America
This analysis was based on 320 online shows with a right-leaning or left-leaning ideological bent. We found that right-leaning online shows dominate the ecosystem, with substantially larger audiences on both politics/news shows and supposedly nonpolitical shows that we determined often platformed ideological content or guests.
Trump’s Scorched Earth Media Policy
By Sara Fischer
Axios
Once considered a bastion for free expression, America's record on press freedoms has fallen to a historic low, according to Reporters Without Borders. Under Trump's second presidency, the press is "under siege," the group argues. Trump is targeting traditional media sources at a moment of tremendous vulnerability for the industry.
By Rohit Sharma, Nikhil Prashar and Kashish Kunden
The Diplomat
The Chinese platform RedNote quickly gained traction among TikTok’s displaced users. However, what appeared to be a natural shift for users was, in fact, a carefully orchestrated relocation backed by an apparent influence campaign, which raises significant concerns about digital privacy, influence, and security.
Bezos Goes to Work on Washpost
By Andrew Rosenthal
Columbia Journalism Review
Every big shot of American industry has prattled on about free markets that apply only to them. The Post has surrendered its position in the national debate to, I guess, an unending stream of commentary about the purity of late-stage capitalism and so-called libertarian ideals. How can you define bias in any other way?
By Aaron Timms
The Baffler
The Brutalist represents AI’s most meaningful incursion to date into the sanctum of Serious Cinema. Historically, technology has been a boon to creativity. But AI is a different beast from color film, or the Louma crane, or the hand-held camera: it’s steroidal, aesthetically corrupting, and unlike these earlier advances it confronts the filmmaker with real ethical questions.
How Hollywood Embraced Torture Scenes
By Richard Beck
Verso Books
Saw, 24, and The Passion of the Christ came from two different media and three different genres, but each of them presented its audience with a world in which torture was effective, inevitable, and above all necessary. The fantasy that unites them isn’t that the right side always wins; it is that heroes can do evil things without compromising their moral integrity, so long as they are forced to do them.
By Chinmayi Arun
Lawfare
Colonialism’s inherited inequalities order where people are in data’s value chain. In addition to data colonialism’s informational harms, people such as exploited data workers and physical laborers, who are often erased from discussions of the data economy, experience material harms.
By Dan Froomkin
Press Watch
It is only traditional-media reporters – their common sense outweighed by their self-righteous refusal to engage in anything remotely like partisan political judgements – who make the trade war sound like something that came about for legitimate reasons.