"CEO said a thing!" journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.
The Media Can't Stop Propping Up Elon Musk's Phony Supergenius Engineer Mythology
"CEO said a thing!" journalism is now utterly pervasive, and includes parroting billionaire and CEO claims with a total disregard for whether or not anything being said is actually true.
“CEO said a thing!”
A blistering guide to what lazy journalism too often looks like
The Era Of The Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of
Journalistic Malpractice: No LLM Ever ‘Admits’ To Anything, And Reporting Otherwise Is A Lie
Over the past week, Reuters, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, CNBC, and a parade of other outlets published headlines claiming that Grok—Elon Musk’s LLM chatbot (the one that once referred to itsel…
Whoops, The Tech Press Mythologized Another Unethical Asshole
Lazy access journalism is pathologically obsessed with helping unremarkable, unethical weirdos cultivate elaborate supergenius engineer mythologies while covertly undermining the public interest.
Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena
<p>Download the pdf here. Executive Summary Despite growing interest, the effects of AI on the news industry and our information environment — the public arena — remain poorly understood. Insufficient attention has also been paid to the implications of the news industry’s dependence on technology companies for AI. Drawing on 134 interviews with news workers […]</p>
News Not Slop
Unionized journalists across North America have come together to sound the alarm: Media companies are implementing artificial intelligence in ways that damage the credibility of the journalism on which you rely.
NewsGuild president writes to ProPublica management: Get serious on AI — ProPublica Guild
Artificial intelligence is guaranteed to shake up journalism in varied and unexpected ways. This could be a moment in which experienced journalists leverage a powerful new tool to produce even bigger and better investigations. Or it could be one in which management pivots to yet another new technolo
The LA Times’ AI ‘bias meter’ looks like a bid to please Donald Trump | Margaret Sullivan
The paper’s billionaire owner, who barred it from endorsing Kamala Harris, is leaving human journalists out of the equation
Meta says it will end fact-checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump
CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the company's previous content moderation policies "censorship," repeating talking points from President-elect Donald Trump and his allies.
Exclusive: It’s bots vs. reporters at the AP
The tensions inside the wire service reveal a broader conflict playing out across the media over how AI should be applied within journalism.
About — Crackdown Podcast
Garth Mullins—Crackdown’s Host and Executive Producer—is a longtime activist and drug user as well as a member of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and the BC Association of People on Methadone. Crackdown was born out of the idea that journalism can be rigorous, fair, and meet the expectations enumerated in the Canadian Association of Journalists, while also containing a clear and transparently-stated point of view. We believe that journalism can and should seek to serve the public good. We believe that journalism need not be produced by people who are distant from the topics and communities they are covering. And we believe that - rather than hiding behind a mask of “objectivity” - journalism is most truthful when it clearly communicates its point of view to the audience.
FOLLOW-UP REPORT: Alpha School Speaks!
Citizen journalism in action
The Liar’s Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability?
This study addresses the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians "crying wolf"' over fake news. Strategic and false claims that stories are fake news or deepfakes may benefit politicians by helping them maintain support after a scandal. We posit that this benefit, known as the "liar's dividend," may be achieved through two politician strategies: by invoking informational uncertainty or by encouraging oppositional rallying of core supporters. We administer five survey experiments to over 15,000 American adults detailing hypothetical politician responses to stories describing real politician scandals. We find that claims of misinformation representing both strategies raise politician support across partisan subgroups. These strategies are effective against text-based reports of scandals, but are largely ineffective against video evidence and do not reduce general trust in media. Finally, these false claims produce greater dividends for politicians than alternative responses to scandal, such as remaining silent or apologizing.
personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.
personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.
