- The Bell is Tolling for Public Broadcasting
- CBS and Colbertgate
- Against Fascist Infiltration in Digital Space
- AI Plunges Ahead
- NYPD, FDNY and Columbia Cross a Line
- Internet Access is a Lifeline for Gazans
- Trump vs MAGA Mediaverse
- ICE Has Your Medicaid Data
- Why Musicians are Leaving Spotify
- Library Cuts and the Digital Divide
The Bell is Tolling for Public Broadcasting
By Mark Thiessen and David Bauder
Associated Press
The House, Senate and White House eliminated nearly $1.1 billion that had already been appropriated for NPR and PBS. Trump had called for the cuts, saying public media’s news programming was biased against him and fellow Republicans, and threatened GOP members of Congress with primary challenges if they didn’t fall in line.
By Jeff Cohen
Common Dreams
Colbert is funny. What’s not funny is that our country’s democratic experiment is on the verge of collapse—and it has less to do with Trump than with the capitulation of corporate liberals and corporate centrist institutions to Trump. The lesson to be learned from today’s political reality is that big corporate institutions don’t care about democracy or free speech.
Against Fascist Infiltration in Digital Space
By Paulo Antunes Ferreira
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
The left must move beyond regulatory solutions to embrace radical alternatives: the democratic socialisation of digital infrastructure and the citizen-led creation of alternative networks as acts of technological disobedience and class struggle.
AI Plunges Ahead
• When AI Becomes the Primary Learning Tool By Rizwan Virk, The Conversation
• Asimov, a New Kind of AI Agent... By Will Knight, Wired
• ... And Another One in ChatGPT By Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch
NYPD, FDNY and Columbia Cross a Line
By Samantha Maldonado
THE CITY
A city fire marshal used FDNY’s access to a facial recognition software to help NYPD detectives identify a pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia University, circumventing policies that tightly restrict the Police Department’s use of the technology. The protester, Zuhdi Ahmed, is now a 21-year-old pre-med CUNY student going into his senior year of college.
Internet Access is a Lifeline for Gazans
By Hend Salama Abo Helow
Truthout
On June 8, Israeli forces bombed the core internet infrastructure in both the north and south of Gaza. The Strip went dark. No messages in, no messages out. It didn’t end with internet blackouts. Israel jammed all telecommunications. For us, the internet wasn’t a luxury — it was a lifeline, a way to transfer funds during the liquidity crisis, a fragile system holding back hunger.
By Emily Bell
Columbia Journalism Review
Trump is now confronting the outcome of a media ecosystem he invented, one based on panicky, consensus-squashing conspiracy theories. The replacement of “difficult” journalists in the White House press room with supposedly supine MAGA influencers is now causing the Trump presidency more existential strife in five days than he’d encountered in five years of scrutiny from legacy media.
By Leah Feiger, Makena Kelly, Vittoria Elliott and Matt Giles
Wired
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are getting access to the personal data of nearly 80 million people on Medicaid in order to acquire “information concerning the identification and location of aliens in the United States.”
Why Musicians Are Leaving Spotify
By Daniel Alexis
Midnight Rebels
Artists are removing their music from Spotify because CEO Daniel Ek invested heavily in an AI weapons company. This action links long-standing frustration over low artist pay with the ethical concerns of streaming profits funding “AI battle tech,” sparking a debate about platform capitalism.
Library Cuts and the Digital Divide
By Sam Drysdale
Franklin Observer and Medway Monitor
Summer reading programs, English language classes, online research databases used in public schools across the state, free newspaper archives, e-book access, and GRE and career prep resources are on the chopping block as a cut to federal funding is poised to hit Massachusetts libraries.
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