Media Bits and Bytes – July 8, 2025
- The Dark Enlightenment
- CBS Grovels to POTUS
- NYT: Knives Out Attack on Mamdani
- Social Media and Protest Summer
- ICEBlock App
- AI and Bias
- The System Works For Soham Parekh
- The Film Industry’s Cowardice on Palestine
- Media Matters Sues FTC
- Bill Moyers
By Rebecca Gordon
TomDispatch
Government agencies have many ways of keeping tabs on us today. The advent of cellular technology has made it so much easier to track where any of us have been, simply by triangulating the locations of the cell towers our phones have pinged along the way. Even TV detectives can locate a private video camera with a sightline to the crime and get its owner to turn over the digital data.
CBS Grovels to POTUS
• $16M Extortion Payoff By Harry Litman, Talking Feds
• It Gets Worse By Li Zhou, Huffpost
NYT: Knives Out Attack on Mamdani
By Liam Scott
Columbia Journalism Review
The New York Times published a story that cited hacked documents at Columbia University showing that New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani identified as “Black or African American” on his college application. The paper granted the source of the hacked documents anonymity. That person is a known enthusiast of race science.
Social Media and Protest Summer
By John Herrman
New York Magazine
This week’s protests have been visible on social media, but their portrayals are fragmented, strange, and to people on the ground, often absurdly divorced from reality. If social media used to work for activists, or at least could, now it’s more effectively used against them.
By Claire Duffy
CNN
Joshua Aaron has worked in and around the tech industry for around two decades. He built his first app — a blackjack game — at computer camp when he was 13. His newest app is designed for a very different purpose: to let users alert people nearby to sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their area.
By Andrew Deck
Nieman Lab
A new policy at Law360, the legal news service owned by LexisNexis, requires that every story pass through an AI-powered “bias” detection tool before publication. The policy was announced after an executive accused the newsroom of (negative) bias in its Trump administration coverage.
The System Works For Soham Parekh
By Amanda Silberling
TechCrunch
You got into Y Combinator, raised $20 million from a16z, and then exited to Meta? That’s cool, I guess. But did Soham Parekh apply to work at your startup? There is now a new badge of honor for startup founders: your proximity to one previously unknown Indian software engineer named Soham Parekh.
The Film Industry’s Cowardice on Palestine
By David Ehrlich
IndieWire
In a bleeding-heart business that prides itself on the sensitivity it brings to difficult stories, a business in which people are regularly festooned with awards for shining a light on the darkest corners of human civilization, the Palestinian genocide has become uniquely taboo.
By Jack Nicastro
Reason
Undeterred by federal courts striking down lawsuits on Media Matters’ reporting, the FTC issued a sweeping civil investigative demand (CID) to the nonprofit that probes the nonprofit's finances, editorial process, newsgathering activities, and affiliations. Media Matters argues that the commission's CID falls outside the scope of its authority.
Bill Moyers
• The Legendary Journalist Spoke Truth to Power By John Nichols, The Nation
• He Showed What Public TV Could Be By Julie Hollar, FAIR
• Breaking Media Climate Silence By Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, Columbia Journalism Review
• What the Obits Missed By Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones