Airports in Europe account for more emissions than Latin America, the Middle East and Africa combined. NEW research from global affairs thinktank ODI Global, in partnership with T&E (Transport & Environment) and with data provided by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), reveals the climate and air quality impacts ... [continued]
In New Mexico, a local journalism tax credit was years in the making As state legislatures across the country face tight budgets and competing priorities, local journalism is gaining traction. This legislative session, more states are introducing and passing policies aimed at supporting local newsrooms, from direct funding to workforce programs. One approach is emerging more frequently…
In mid-February, The New York Times ignited a storm of criticism with a piece about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a security conference in Munich.The article was critical (the headline included the phrase “with some stumbles”) but the anger it provoked was caused by a verbatim quote that included repeated “ah”s, “um”s, and “uh”s. We all speak like that while thinking out loud, but even the Times’ own Guidelines on Integrity indicate that “The writer should, of course, omit extraneous syllables like ‘um’ and may judiciously delete false starts.” Was this sloppiness? A hit piece on AOC? Or was this a signal of something deeper about how mainstream news edits quotes? I dove in with some code, genAI, and theories to try and find out more about this kind of “quote cleaning.” What I found suggests that including “um” is incrediblyrare and opens up deeper questions about how quotes operate in news to normalize some speakers and scrutinize others.
The Politics of Quotes in News
It’s typical, and even helpful, for journalists to tidy up a direct quote for better readability. We teach this in journalism schools and many media outlets codify this in editing policies (as those Times guidelines demonstrate). That said, the practice is largely invisible: I doubt most readers think about whether the words in quotes exactly match every sound the speaker uttered. This kind of quote cleaning is an editorial choice, and like all others, it embeds values. In this case those values are likely to reflect underlying ideas about what counts as articulate, authoritative speech. Who sounds smart? Who sounds right?
This isn’t a surprising comment in the context of our racialized politics. Black Speech and Spanglish are often used by political leaders in those communities, yet seem to show up less often in news quotes. Any multi-cultural person knows the norms of code switching in language to match the dominant audience expectations. A high-profile recent example is Kamala Harris, who was criticized as being inauthentic because she spoke using different vernaculars to differing audiences.
These anecdotes suggest a pattern where high-status white politicians often get their quotes cleaned up as a matter of course, but others who don’t belong to that dominant group might not receive the same treatment. AOC sits at the latter group, as a Latina progressive women. This editing from the Times lands differently with that in mind.
Can Data Help Us Understand This?
To investigate this specific example, I decided to see how often “um” and “ah” were included in quotes in the most visited US online news site on the same day that article was published (Feb 13, 2026). Conveniently, when we want to answer questions like these we have a wealth of technologies at hand to help. Specifically, with my colleagues Meg Heckman and Elisabeth Hadjis, I just published a paper in News Research Journal about using genAI prompts to extract quotes from news stories (something traditional machine learning doesn’t do well). I remixed methods from that older work to answer this question about just how rare including those utterances was that day.My analysis included 36,045 quotes across 8,066 articles published by those 45 news sources on Feb 13th. From those quotes, just eight quotes included “um”; one was from AOC while the rest were non-politicians. That’s just 0.02%! Even less, just three stories, included “ah”; none from politicians. I can confidently conclude that including “um” or “ah” in a quote from a high-profile politician on Feb 13th was a very statistically rare choice.
The quote in question from a New York Times story about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comments at a security conference in Munich in February that included “uh”s and “um”s.
Of course, since I don’t have raw transcripts for all those stories I can’t tell you how many dialectical markers, code-switches, and instances of non-standard grammar were removed. I’d be curious to investigate this more for politicians who carry multiple identities, to see if there are keywords from a dialect indicative of code switching that I could track across how they’re quoted in news stories. Consider this an invitation to explore more: my little experiment suggests that we have the tools to answer these kinds of questions.
How’d I do this?
Curious to try this kind of thing yourself? Here’s a bit more about how I found these results. I remixed our prior approach from that paper with a set of the most-visited online US news sources, the Media Cloud online news archive, a revised prompt for genAI, evaluation with the DSPy library, and a small set of duct-tape scripts to see what the data said about how normal, or not, that quote was. I’m a hesitant generative AI user, so at each step where I used it I tried to be thoughtful about how to check the validity of the results it gave me. I call this my “genAI-last” approach; I try to use any other reasonable computational methods before falling back to genAI to help me solve some research analysis problem.
A diagram of the data pipeline used for this investigation.
I began by defining what media sources I cared about. The seed here was the Times, so I thought it made sense to focus on some reasonable set of large mainstream online news outlets. Media Cloud has a collection of “Most Visited” news websites from January 2026, based on SimilarWeb data as published monthly by the PressGazette. I can’t really speak to the full methods they use to collect their numbers, but SimilarWeb data is widely used and the list looked reasonable to me. This particular list from Media Cloud was already filtered for other work for US-based publications, which worked well because I wanted to look at American editorial norms.
With that list of publications in hand, I used the Media Cloud web-based search tools and API to pull all stories from those websites on Feb 13, because I just wanted a one-day snapshot for this short blog post. Then I remove duplicate stories based on if there was a story with the same title from the same outlet on that day, because often the same story is published at multiple URLs. That left me with 8,066 unique stories.
In parallel, I iterated on creating a genAI prompt and evaluation set that’d help me extract quotes from stories and attribute them to speakers. An earlier version of that News Research Journal work we presented at the 2024 Computation + Journalism Symposium gets more into details about why, but there isn’t really an off-the-shelf open solution for extracting and attributing quotes. In general for this kind of work with AI models it is important to (1) define your task, (2) build a ground-truth evaluation dataset, and (3) create an evaluation and scoring rubric. To start the genAI eval I pulled a handful of stories and identified quotes and speakers by hand; this would be my evaluation dataset to see how well different prompts and models worked. To test things I used DSPy, is a great Python library for iterating on and evaluating genAI prompts. An existing account on the cloud-based Groq model provider let me run test prompts against this evaluation set with various genAI models. I iterated with Claude, ChatGPT, and Geimini on refining the prompt for specific genAI models, and ended up seeing best performance on a prompt that Claude expanded for the llama-3.3-70b-versatile open source mode (recall and precision both over 0.95). If this was a more developed project, I would have evaluated against more hand-labelled ground truth data and evaluated multiple runs of the same data (because genAI models aren’t consistent, by design).
With a prompt and dataset in hand, I then just needed to run the prompt against each story. Here at Media Cloud we have an internal-for-now data pipeline tool called “Sous Chef” for this, so without too much effort I was able to get the results back as a CSV of quotes with related story metadata. I used some simple code in a Python notebook to exact and identify quotes with “um” or “ah” in them, using Spacy to tokenize the terms (see the code and data). For each of these stories I went back to read it to make sure the quote and speaker identified by the AI model were correct.
This process took me about a day of work, split across a week of divided attention. This array of tools really has put this kind of quick media investigation within reach and presents very exciting opportunities to learn about norms in the news.
So what?
Why does it matter if editors and journalists “clean up” speech like this? I spoke with long-time Boston Globe editor Mary Creane to get her take. Creane started by noting that in news it’s “not our job is not to make people look stupid; on the other hand our job is to present people as they are.” As a rule, she said she would “never change their quote.” Instead, if the choice was made to remove an “um“ or “ah”, she would use ellipses to make clear that some words in the quote had been taken out.
Creane emphasized the difference between speaking well and making a good point. Former vice-presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin, for instance, claimed to be a foreign policy expert because you can see Russia from Alaska, which Creane noted was “not ungrammatical, but points out a weakness.” In situations where the speaker you want to quote is speaking poorly, but making a relevant point, an alternative is to paraphrase. In a very classic sense Creane believes that as journalists “our job is to say ‘here’s all the information, make of it what you will.’” When it comes to editing quotes appropriately, the core question for her is “if we’re not fair, if we don’t have integrity, then who are we?”
For me, this integrity was lacking in how the Times quoted Ocasio-Cortez. The quote used was aligned with the critical tone of the article, but intentionally broke policy and norms to portray her as ill-equipped due to the form of her comment, not the substance.
Despite all the change driven by social media, online news is still a strong driver of public understanding and shapes perceptions of those in power. This example says something about what types of voices we amplify and showcase in society, and where and when everyone is allowed to speak as their true self. That’s important beyond just research, because it is a statement about inclusivity, which we should all be aware of.I think it’s good news that the tools we can use to study the influence of news at scale are finally within reach.
Humans may have returned to Britain far earlier than scientists once believed — not long after the last ice sheet began retreating. New evidence suggests people were already moving into the British Isles around 15,200 years ago, tracking herds of reindeer and horses across a landscape that was suddenly becoming warmer and greener.
Four demand-side measures could save EU car drivers €30–74 billion per year. The shock at the pump The US-Israel war on Iran has sent oil prices to levels not seen since the 2022 energy crisis. With the Strait of Hormuz currently blocked — through which roughly 20% of global oil ... [continued]
21 Spanish organisations are urging Madrid to back political commitment with an economic one ahead of the June EU Transport Council. Geopolitical oil premium costs passengers up to €88 per long-haul flight, 29 times more than ReFuelEU compliance. A broad coalition of over 21 companies, trade associations and industry bodies ... [continued]
Facility would require more power than entire state uses and suck up vast amount of water in drought-stricken area
A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.
The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.
Failure to secure an agreement on Weights and Dimensions file would create uncertainty for operators investing in zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles. IRU and T&E call for urgent political support to secure a compromise in the ongoing trilogue negotiations on the Weights and Dimensions Directive, in coordinated letters sent to European Commissioner ... [continued]
The Anderson Valley Advertiser has attracted a cult following by collapsing the walls between neighborhood news and outsider fascination, writer and commenter, fact and fiction.
The naturalist is venerated as a cuddly Paddington Bear, but he’s more than that. Don’t let the superficial backslaps obscure the political critique he makes
The excesses the capitalist system has brought us have got to be curbed somehow. Ordinary people worldwide are beginning to realise that greed does not actually lead to joy. Our economic system has been based on the profit principle: you have to come out at the end of the year having made a profit, and the bigger profit you have made, the better it is. In the short term that works, but it ends with disaster.
At this point, I should make a confession. The above sentiments are not mine at all. In fact, they were pilfered, purloined, shoplifted from a far more erudite radical thinker than myself. So, quiz time: which incendiary leftwing firebrand spoke these words? Zack Polanski? Antonio Gramsci? Ash Sarkar? At the very least, you would probably assume that, in the current climate, anyone daring to utter these dangerous fringe sentiments would be cast to the margins of our cultural life, only occasionally being let out for the purposes of getting shouted at on the Jeremy Vine show.
Researchers have uncovered unexpectedly high levels of silicone-based pollutants called methylsiloxanes floating through the atmosphere across cities, rural regions, and even forests. Much of the pollution appears to come from vehicle emissions, likely linked to engine oil additives that survive combustion and escape into the air. Scientists say humans may inhale more of these compounds daily than other notorious pollutants like PFAS or microplastics.
One of the great things about automotive recalls is they can give us insights into historical vehicle sales. This is especially the case with Tesla, where we sometimes lack specific sales data we’d like to see. News out this week regarding the company’s Cybertruck reveal a shockingly low figure. Now, ... [continued]
55 companies and industry trade associations have written to the EU to express support for the ETS2 Leading European companies, including TRATON, Vattenfall, and Danfoss, alongside civil society and environmental organizations, have united to form the European ETS2 Action Alliance. This new coalition aims to ensure the rapid and effective ... [continued]
SACRAMENTO — Today, the Trump administration finalized its rescission of the BLM Public Lands Rule, eliminating much-needed modern safeguards for America’s public lands through a process that limited public participation and ignored clear public opposition. The decision advances a broader effort to weaken public land protections while prioritizing extractive industries, like drilling, ... [continued]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is filming a new reality TV show with his family to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary while Americans are struggling to keep up with high gas prices and surging inflation. The costs of the so-called ‘Great American Road Trip’ the Duffy family has been filming ... [continued]
Phoenix, AZ — Today, organizations including Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, Chispa Arizona, and Solar United Neighbors, expressed disappointment in Governor Katie Hobbs’s announcement of her support for the Desert Southwest Pipeline, a methane gas pipeline that will stretch over 500 miles through three states — Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona — ... [continued]
A new study examines the ‘industrial opportunity cost’ of proposals to weaken EU car CO2 targets. Spurred by the growing electric car market, much investment into EV production, batteries and components has been announced. But this is now at risk as the EU debates its car CO2 rules that will define ... [continued]
UTVs tend to get used very differently depending on where they’re operated. In some cases, they’re weekend machines: short runs, light loads, and relatively easy terrain. In others, they’re used almost every day, hauling tools, climbing uneven ground, or covering longer distances across properties. In my experience, it’s really in ... [continued]
HVS was not a fringe hydrogen truck company with a sketch and a slogan. It had a serious ambition, a real engineering team, public support, private funding, partnerships, prototypes, and a target market that sounded plausible enough: zero-emission heavy-duty freight. Hydrogen Vehicle Systems wanted to build fuel-cell trucks for a ... [continued]
I’ve been covering the electric vehicle industry for 14 years. Different topics or themes tends to dominate the EV story for significant periods of time. You had the Nissan LEAF era, the social media buzz around the Tesla Model S, the booming Tesla Model 3 launch, the explosion in EV ... [continued]
India is one of the hottest nations, which fuels intertwined financial, health and labor risks, experts say.
By Kiley Price
Every one of the world’s 50 hottest cities was located inside India at the end of April—a global weather-tracking anomaly, according to a major air-quality monitoring platform.
Emerging Pacific Ocean heat, combined with ongoing human-caused global warming, is a grim recipe for deadly climate extremes. Heat alone already kills more than 500,000 annually.
By Bob Berwyn
Scientists said this week that a developing El Niño is likely to amplify heatwaves, droughts and floods this year, but warned that the long-term warming caused by burning fossil fuels remains the main driver of climate extremes.
Rather than pleas to save the planet, the billionaire, a Democrat is pushing a message of affordability in his campaign to become California’s governor.
Meta must comply with Italian law requiring it to negotiate with and fairly compensate news publishers for the the use of their content, according to a ruling by the Europe’s highest court on Tuesday.
The decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) found that EU copyright law doesn’t prohibit individual countries from setting up systems that give news publishers power to negotiate compensation terms and regulatory bodies the authority to enforce national law.
The ruling comes after Meta sued Italy’s national telecommunications regulatory agency (AGCOM) in Italian court in 2023. Italy had enacted EU copyright directives into national law in 2021, and in 2023, it granted AGCOM the authority to request traffic and advertising data from platforms related to news content, intervene in negotiations between publishers and platforms, and fine platforms that didn’t comply with its orders. The law also allows AGCOM to define benchmarks for for fair compensation, while platforms only pay for news content they use and are not allowed to restrict the visibility of publishers’ content during negotiations. Publishers have the right to refuse the use of their content or provide it for free.
Courthouse News Service described Italy’s rules as one of “Europe’s toughest systems for making platforms negotiate over news content powering feeds, search results and online traffic.” Meta claimed that EU copyright laws were meant to protect publisher content, not create “a regulator-backed bargaining system with mandatory negotiations, transparency obligations and penalties hanging over tech companies,” according to Courthouse News Service. The Italian court referred the case to the CJEU, which heard the case in February 2025.
The ruling on Tuesday rejected those claims, saying the law was designed to allow publishers to charge for the use of their content, recoup the costs of news production, and preserve a free press.
“At a time when AI systems and platform interfaces increasingly intermediate access to journalism, this ruling sends a very clear signal: quality journalism has value, and dominant platforms cannot simply appropriate it on their own terms,” Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
“The rights established in Article 15 imply, by their nature, that publishers of press publications may make the authorization of those uses subject to any remuneration which they deem appropriate,” the judgment reads. “…Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 is intended to ensure that those publishers may recoup the investments required by the production of those publications with such a remuneration. In those circumstances, an information society service provider cannot validly argue that a national legislature fails to have regard to that directive when it establishes a system intended to ensure fair remuneration for those publishers.”
The ruling also refuted Meta’s claims that the law hinders competition and its ability to conduct business in the country. Instead, the court said the law aims to level the playing field between publishers and platforms by requiring the platforms to provide financial data about their use of news content — information publishers didn’t previously have access to.
“Only information society service providers possess the information enabling the economic value of online use of press publications to be assessed, such as the revenues generated by or expected from such use, with the result that publishers of press publications are in a weaker negotiating position than those providers as regards the determination of the remuneration at issue,” the ruling reads. “Furthermore, the obligation to refrain from limiting the visibility of publications in search results during negotiations between those providers and those publishers serves to prevent pressure being exerted on those publishers or the economic value of the use of their press publications being concealed.”
Biden’s Public Lands Rule ensured protecting or rehabilitating federal land would be as legitimate a use as mining, logging or drilling. Republicans and developers said it was a threat to the principle of “multiple use.”
By Wyatt Myskow
The Trump Administration on Tuesday finalized its repeal of the Bureau of Land Management’s Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, better known as the Public Lands Rule, which gave conservation activities on federal land equal priority with extractive uses like mining and logging. It’s the latest in what is now a long series of decisions from the Trump administration to prioritize industry use of the nation’s public lands.
Axios says we're scaling sin. They are correct, at least in the sense that anything in excess can be bad for you, and doing costly and unnecessary things, en masse, is very bad.
They talk about weed, gambling, and porn: weed because it has been widely legalized, gambling because anyone with a phone can do it, and porn because AI is exceptionally good at it, and there are boundless sources for it.
I think gambling is the worst of those. For two reasons, beyond being costly and addictive.
One is that college and pro team sports have become addicted to it. I'll bet (without money) that half the money spent on flagship sports podcasts is spent by FanDuel, DraftKings, and other sportsbooks. The percentage on live games is less, but I'll bet close to 25%.
The other is that the sportsbooks fuck you in ways Las Vegas does not. As I wrote in Online Sports Betting is for Losers, Soon as you do well, they cut you off. Really. If you lose money, you're golden—for them. If you win money (meaning you bet better than the house), you're gone.
That this is called "gaming," and "fun" is just nuts. With real games, you can win. With online gambling, you have to lose.
He likes it
Most of this post by @kixelated (Luke Curley) is over my head, but I was sent to it by one of the Internet's parents, to whose head I bow.
Reuters has an article out titled “Tesla’s robotaxi rollout features Texas-sized wait times.” Youch — stinger. Of course, as I’ve reminded readers in the past, less than a year ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted that Tesla robotaxis would probably be covering half of the US population by the end ... [continued]
Hyundai electric vehicles are getting an update that enables a new FIFA World Cup 2026™ Display Theme in their infotainment systems. Well, it’s not only Hyundai EVs — a few non-EVs are getting the option as well. Also, one of the company’s EVs (one being pulled out of the US ... [continued]
I’ve said it before many times — even a decade ago when EV range was much lower and EV charging stations were much less abundant: range anxiety is massively overhyped and seems to plague non-EV drivers much more than EV drivers. As one reader explained it, it’s really anxiety about ... [continued]
In Tanzania’s capital Dar es Salaam, researchers are using drone mapping to track malaria’s changing spread after years of declining cases. Nick Ferris reports
Addressing the rising tide of “no comment” could help the industry solve its dual crises of declining trust and rising hostility Public figures refusing to comment for news stories is now the norm — not the exception — according to the results of a new national survey. Conducted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute in partnership with research firm SmithGeiger…
Someone once told me electric vehicles are just like gas vehicles but simply use electricity. This view is false for many reasons. Electric vehicles have many benefits, gas and diesel vehicles do not. The battery packs in electric vehicles can be used to supply electricity to local grids when EVs ... [continued]
I just wrote an article yesterday about some reasons why BYD sales have been down this year and the potential for a huge jump in sales in coming months. There are a lot of ifs, ands, and buts … but it does seem like there’s strong potential for a big ... [continued]
As the global auto industry rapidly shifts toward EVs, new analysis warns that Europe risks forfeiting a major industrial opportunity. Scaling back EU car climate rules would put a potential 34 Northvolt-sized battery factories at risk. That’s according to a new T&E report which models the ‘industrial opportunity cost’ of weakening EU ... [continued]
Today we mark the formal introduction of Ford Energy. For the better part of a year, we have operated quietly to build a foundation for this business. We haven’t just been planning; we have been executing — securing supply chains, readying our manufacturing sites and aligning our technology with the massive ... [continued]
