Media Bits and Bytes — March 17, 2026
- FCC Head Threatens News Licenses
- CNN: Hegseth Pisses Pants, Blows the Game
- The AI Hardware Crunch
- Court Challenges Federal Media Takedown
- Quit ChapGPT Now!
- Moloch Miller and Mass Surveillance
- The World Where Gamers Live
- Labor and AI
- MAGA: Are the Online Influencers Deserting?
- How to Get the Truth About the Iran War
FCC Head Threatens News Licenses
By Tom Jones, Poynter Institute
To quote former CNN journalist Don Lemon after his recent arrest in Minneapolis for reporting on a protest: “Process is the punishment.” In other words, Carr and the administration might make the broadcasters go through the arduous work of defending themselves, and that is the real punishment. Such threats are also meant to intimidate the media and how it conducts future reporting.
CNN: Hegseth Pisses Pants, Blows the Game
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday used his Pentagon press briefing to attack the media, singling out CNN and saying that the sooner Paramount CEO David Ellison “takes over that network, the better.”
By Jackie Snow, Quartz
For three years, the defining hardware story of artificial intelligence has been a GPU shortage. Now a second shortage is emerging alongside it, and this one has caught the industry genuinely off guard. The humble CPU, the generalist processor that has powered computers for decades, is suddenly in desperately short supply.
Court Challenges Federal Media Takedown
By Jem Bartholomew, Columbia Journalism Review
A federal judge ruled that Kari Lake, who has been leading the United States Agency for Global Media—which oversees congressionally funded news outlets including Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia—was elevated to the position of acting CEO unlawfully. The judge declared her mass layoffs at VOA and others last year null and void.
By Rutger Bregman, The Guardian
Employees of ICE have used a screening tool powered by ChatGPT. The same company behind your friendly chatbot is helping the government decide who to hire for deportation raids. Meanwhile, ChatGPT supplier OpenAI is burning through money at one of the fastest rates in corporate history.
Moloch Miller and Mass Surveillance
By Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams
More than 90 civil society groups are calling on senior Democratic lawmakers to not reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Stephen Miller, Trump’s xenophobic deputy chief of staff, supports extending the program that empowers federal agencies to surveil and collect the data of noncitizens abroad without a warrant.
By Owen Hatherley, New Left Review
Despite the enormous scale of the industry – which generates between $200 and 300 billion a year – video games are still widely assumed, not always inaccurately, to be a form largely calibrated to the tastes, libidos and impulses of the sort of angrily entitled adolescent males that today are often referred to as ‘incels’.
By Keith Brower Brown, Labor Notes
When it comes to new A.I. and automation schemes from management, workers can refuse to let non-union contractors take charge. An army of consultants has sprung up to advise bosses on A.I. implementation for hospitals and schools, grifting millions from actual education and care.
MAGA: Are the Online Influencers Deserting?
By Bhagyashree Garekar, The Business Times
The dedicated tribe of online influencers who helped build Trump’s 2024 Make America Great Again coalition are now loudly attacking the war with a mix of isolationist and anti-Israel themes. These shifting, inconsistent narratives are rapidly shaping what millions of Americans are coming to believe about the war.
How to Get the Truth About the Iran War
By Lady Liberti, The American Pamphleteer
Firsthand information from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Qatar, the UAE, and the wider region leaks out in fragments—short videos, eyewitness clips, and scattered reports circulating online. Some are turning to social platforms simply to see what is happening on the ground. This patchwork approach can work—but only if we understand how to separate raw signals from verified reporting.