Media Bits and Bytes — March 3, 2026
- Warner Takeover is Not a Done Deal
- The Anthropic Affair
- When the Media Covers War
- The Menace(s) of Big Tech
- Left Media Workers Are Opening Physical Spaces
- AI Warnings
- Misogyny and Social Media Abuse
- Substack’s Nazi Problem
- Reviewnaissance
- Third World Newsreel: 60 Years
Warner Takeover is Not a Done Deal
By Coral Murphy Marcos, The Guardian
Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said his office will investigate a possible merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, hours after Netflix backed away from a planned takeover. Any acquisition of Warner Bros would require approval from regulators in the United States and Europe, including the US justice department’s antitrust division.
By Ravikash Bakolia, Seeking Alpha
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 saw a partial outage after the company said that Claude’s consumer-facing services, such as claude.ai and its apps, were facing partial outages. On Friday, President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI tools, canceling more than $200M in contracts. War Secretary Pete Hegseth described the company as a national security “supply chain risk.”
By Margaret Sullivan, American Crisis
This is a huge story, and the public is hungry for information. But it means that you’re seeing far less about some of the things Trump wants to blot out from existence. Far less about his appearance in the Epstein files, about the corruption of the Justice Department. Far less about his wildly inappropriate role in the future of CNN and his broader effort to control the news industry.
• Going to War By Timothy Karr, Free Press
• Bypassing Democracy By Vanessa Oliveira, Tribune
Left Media Workers Are Opening Physical Spaces
By Ella Fassler, Truthout
PM Press has joined a small, quietly growing ecosystem of leftist media workers and publishers opening physical spaces, alongside outlets like The Kansas City Defender in Missouri, and publishers like Binch Press in Providence, Rhode Island; OR Books in New York City via the Francis Kite Club; and Haymarket Books in Chicago.
AI Warnings
• The Left is Missing Out By Dan Kagan-Kans, Transformer
• A Losing Bet for Working People By Martin Hart-Landsberg, Socialist Project
• AI Is Writing (But Not Reporting) the News By Riddhi Setty, Columbia Journalism Review
• Anti-AI Takes to the Subways By Joseph Mogul, Prism
• Marx and the Bubble By Elliot Goodell Ugalde, The Conversation
Misogyny and Social Media Abuse
By Anonymous, The Guardian
I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps.
For several years Substack has been accused of coddling white supremacy and fascist ideology for cash. And despite several major scandals and a mass defection of ethical authors, there’s little serious indication that’s going to change.
By Carolina Abbott Galvão, Columbia Journalism Review
There’s a world where the art of the review is alive and well—and printed on cheap, single-color newsprint. If the review sections of newspapers are closing down, there’s a sense that this moment could make room for a meatier, weirder kind of criticism.
Third World Newsreel: 60 Years
Video by Laura Flanders and Friends
It’s almost unheard of for an independent media collective to survive as long as Third World Newsreel has. Since 1968, they have chronicled some of the most pivotal movements in human history and continue to expand on their collection of over 700 titles.