2025-03-13 On March 7, education reporter Hannah Dellinger published a story on the experiences of Michigan LGBTQ+ students since Donald Trump took office. Dellinger spoke to several students who have seen a rise in hate speech at school after the president signe …›
2025-03-12 NICAR — the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting1 — is one of my favorite annual journalism conferences, even if I haven’t been in a few years. That’s because it’s uniquely easy to benefit from even without attending …›
2025-03-11 Let’s start at the end. The acknowledgements of Murder the Truth, a startling and deeply researched new book by New York Times journalist and editor David Enrich, thanks the Times’ “unflappable” in-house lawyer. The business investigations unit …›
2025-03-11 If you care about public media and have read any news mentioning the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025, chances are it’s been something scary / depressing / grim about how the president wants to defund it (not a new threat, but one that fee …›
2025-03-11 Earlier this year Meta announced the end of its U.S. fact-checking program and many fear the company will soon withdraw funding from its partners in other countries too. Funding from American philanthropic organizations is also drying up. According t …›
2025-03-10 Over the past year, AI chatbots have been widely criticized for how poorly they cite news publishers, and how little traffic they drive to the publishers they do cite properly. ChatGPT has often been at the center of this conversation. Last summer, I r …›
2025-03-06 Politico Pro is a high-priced item ($12,000 or more annually!) that is targeted at a demanding audience of lobbyists, agency staffers, corporate execs, industry think-tankers, and oligarchs either real or aspiring. It attempts to give high-leverage int …›
2025-03-06 Generative AI hype has launched newsroom experiments around the world. Even though many of these early applications have become cautionary tales, the hype has endured for over two years since OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT. In many ways, this is fami …›
2025-02-06 In an endless game of lobbyists’ Whac-A-Mole, it’s a new year and here is new legislation trying to save the news. Except it’s not new. First, from Oregon, comes a rehash of bad legislation written by newspaper hedge-fund lobbyists, v …›
2025-01-21 For 25 years now, the Edelman PR company has issued its Trust Barometer. This year, it’s all about grievances. It’s Festivus every day, the world around. Six in 10 people in the survey “hold grievances against business, government, and th …›
2025-01-18 Two days to go until the fascist oligarchy comes to power in the United States and this is how our once-greatest newspaper, The New York Times, is covering what could end in the fall of American democracy. To The Times, all the world’s Trump …›
2024-11-09 Every current and common explanation for the reelection of Donald Trump — whether inflation or immigration, culture wars or campaign tactics, blaming Harris or Biden or the party — elides its true and root cause: racism. The U …›
2024-11-06 Nevermind every other theory or tactical complaint about what happened in this election. Kamala Harris did everything she possibly could to win. The fault is not hers. The fault is in our nation. We must come to the realization that Ameri …›
2024-10-28 How weathercasters and FEMA workers became the favorite new targets of right-wing conspiracy-mongers. …›
2024-10-17 Rupert Murdoch’s media have been a key source of moral panic about the internet and technology — see, for example, this from his Times declaring that phones are “dope” that imprison us all in an epidemic of addiction causing cognitive …›
2024-09-19 It is as if the editorial department at The Washington Post woke up one morning asking, in headlines I will quote below, “What are we doing wrong?” I will start by trying to answer the question for them, The New York Times, CNN, and the res …›
2024-09-11 As often as I am disappointed in and critical of them lately, I will not cancel my subscriptions to The New York Times or The Washington Post. They should be so lucky, for I will stay on their cases. I also wish to support the good reporting that stil …›
2024-09-06 As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris. This is a mome …›
2024-08-29 I’ve long said that Rupert Murdoch is the single most malign influence in English-speaking democracy. He executes his strategy in small ways that add up. Here is an example: how a trope is born across Murdoch’s worldwide empire. Here is the edi …›
2024-08-22 A deal has just been struck in California by Assembly member Buffy Wicks that averts what could have been, in my opinion, disastrous legislation written by lobbyists to benefit primarily incumbent, investor- and hedge-fund-controlled news media in …›
2024-08-18 Since I’ve been constantly criticial of The Times and its coverage of the election, here is a thread from the socials in which I note a Sunday morning of positive coverage of Kamala Harris leading the paper online: Well knock me over with …›
2024-08-13 Margaret Sullivan — whom I greatly respect and with whom I almost always agree — wrote a Guardian column asserting that “Kamala Harris must speak to the press.” Go read it first. I disagree. That resulted in a thread on th …›
2024-07-24 On MSNBC this morning, I watched Elise Jordan’s focus groups from Green Bay, Wisconsin — the first after the nomination of Kamala Harris. I was honestly shocked that, after the start of this unprecedented presidential campaign by a Black and A …›
2024-07-13 The New York Times et al wish Joe Biden would go gentle into that good night. I wish mass media would instead. Here is a post from a thread: In this defensive New Yorker reaction to Joe Biden (finally) criticizing the press that has been critic …›
2022-05-11 As Australians prepare to head to the polls, political parties and politicians of all stripes have stoked fear-fuelled narratives about China in a bid to secure votes. During last week’s National Press Club Debate, Defence Minister Peter Dutton was d …›
2022-03-13 The challenge of monitoring, understanding, defining and responding to mis- and disinformation is exacerbated during election campaigns. This report outlines tactics used by agents of disinformation to undermine elections as observed by First Draft’s …›
2022-02-21 I remember the first time I met a person with AIDS. I was sitting at a reception desk, looked up, and saw a thin man with lesions on his face. […] The post How the ‘first rough draft of history’ can be revised and reimagined appeared first on …›
2021-12-03 False claims and conspiracy theories about the new Covid-19 variant Omicron emerged online after the variant was reported by South Africa to the World Health Organization (WHO) on November 24. The WHO said the variant has had a large number of mutation …›
2021-11-22 As the United States is poised to roll out its Covid-19 vaccine booster program for all adults, misleading information on social media around this latest development is likely to become the focal point of the next round of vaccine misinformation. Alrea …›
2021-11-22 False comparisons have again been drawn between Nazi Germany and Covid-19 pandemic measures, this time prompted by the introduction of a lockdown for people in Austria who are not fully vaccinated. About two million people in Austria, or one-third of t …›
2021-11-12 Vaccine misinformation concerning the coronavirus spike protein has again picked up in recent days. Vaccine skeptics and deniers have weaponized this medical term to deter people from trusting Covid-19 vaccines, which have been proven effective and saf …›
2021-11-12 Last week Pfizer published interim trial results for its experimental Covid-19 antiviral pill, Paxlovid, which the company said reduced the chance of hospitalization or death for some adults by almost 90 per cent. The US pharmaceutical giant’s analys …›
2021-11-06 Several videos of anti-vaccine medical workers recording themselves being suspended or fired from their jobs at healthcare facilities have generated significant interest in the past few days. Most physicians and healthcare workers in the United States …›
2021-11-06 Australia will begin offering Covid-19 vaccine booster shots to eligible members of its adult population on November 8. News that the country’s medicines regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), had provisionally approved the Pfizer vac …›
2021-10-29 News headlines about a UK-based Australian actress who suffered a stroke “after getting Covid vaccine” or “after getting the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine” overly emphasized a single incident without providing important context about the rarity of …›
2021-04-29 What does the rise of live, audio-based social media mean for identifying and moderating misinformation? We’ve taken a look at the platforms and their moderation policies, and offer some key takeaways for journalists and misinformation researchers. ( …›
2018-06-19 Each week, MediaShift will list upcoming online trainings and courses for journalists and media people – with a focus on digital training. We’ll include our DigitalEd courses, as well as those from Mediabistro, NewsU, and others. If we’re …›
2017-10-10 This week, Research Director Jonathan Albright has published a number of articles on research about Russian ad networks and their influence during the 2016 election. Look at Jonathan’s dataset, and follow him on Medium, for more. Research The Was …›
2017-08-09 The Tow Center is pleased to announce that on Tuesday, September 19th, we will be hosting our Journalism Educator’s Symposium – an event designed to help build a community of interest and exchange around new approaches and best practices to …›
2017-06-07 We have witnessed the first wave of artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism in the form of chatbots, automated story generation, and machine learning techniques applied to news. The big tech companies have pushed AI to the center of their product st …›