Media Bits and Bytes — September 1, 2026
- Meta Settles in Child Safety Case
- TV Weatherman Tells Which Way the Wind Blows
- Left Media Now
- Karen Attiah Gets Her Job Back
- Slop and Slime
- The Data Center Proletariat
- Understanding the Hugging Face Hack
- FCC: How to Fight Back
- Normalizing Trump Attacks Democracy Itself
- Defend Autistici Inventati
Meta Settles in Child Safety Case
By Chris Stokel-Walker, The Guardian
As this is a negotiated settlement – and one in which no one wins, but Meta certainly doesn’t lose – not everyone has been won over. While attorneys general from 48 US states agreed to Meta’s proposition, Florida’s representative has publicly rejected the deal and intends to continue pursuing Meta.
TV Weatherman Tells Which Way the Wind Blows
By Evan Porter, Upworthy
John Morales, a meteorologist and hurricane specialist with NBC6 in South Florida, was reporting on an upcoming storm when he suddenly shifted gears, right in the middle of the broadcast. Instead of his usual weather map, he laid out stark realities about severe understaffing of the National Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Left Media Now
New Media Ecosystem By Ali Swenson, The Associated Press
Movement Journalism By Uyiosa Elegon, Columbia Journalism Review
Karen Attiah Gets Her Job Back
By Sonel Cutler, Mother Jones
The Washington Post, which was ordered this week to reinstate Karen Attiah, the opinion columnist it fired last year for her social media posts in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The decision is a major win for Attiah, who, alongside the union that represents Post employees, spent the past year fighting her termination through a union grievance process.
Slop and Slime
AI Slopper in Chief By Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian
Investing in Pink Slime By Sam Howard, NewsGuard
By Antonio Casilli and Nermeen Shaikh, Democracy Now!
Human workers make automation possible. Recognizing the value of their contributions to these digital infrastructures is the first step toward worker reparation and rebalancing the current power dynamics.
Understanding the Hugging Face Hack
By Gary Marcus and Zack Korman, Marcus on AI
In July, in an incident that has the whole AI community on edge, OpenAI’s AI systems hacked Hugging Face, and on July 21 OpenAI came out and revealed that they were responsible for the attack. This was made possible by the fact that OpenAI had disabled the normal guardrails that prevent this sort of thing in order to test the model’s cybersecurity capabilities.
By Margaret Sullivan, American Crisis
Brendan Carr’s FCC knocked down one of the last guardrails keeping Trump-aligned media from taking over even more of local TV. They voted to get rid of the longstanding rule that keeps a single media corporation from owning stations that reach 40 percent of the country or more. There would be no more cap, the FCC commissioners voted, but rather a case-by-case review.
Normalizing Trump Attacks Democracy Itself
By Dan Froomkin, Press Watch
The media normalization of Trump and Trumpism isn’t just bad journalism. It also jeopardizes the future of our country. If voters do not viscerally grasp the breadth and severity of the problems Trump has caused, they may not understand the urgency and scale of what it will take to fix them.
By The Harbor Rat Report, Sabot Media
Today we were made aware that the US Government has targeted a small, volunteer-run, technology collective from Italy with disproportionate sanctions as anyone can read in the Treasury Department Statement, the State Department Statement and the related Executive Order. We strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense.