Tag: media

News Publishers Try To Sic the Government on Google AI

Google’s pivot to artificial intelligence has news publishers freaking out—and running to the government.

“Agency intervention is necessary to stop the existential threat Google poses to original content creators,” the News/Media Alliance—a major news industry trade group—wrote in a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It asked the agencies to use antitrust authority “to stop Google’s latest expansion of AI Overviews,” a search engine innovation that Google has been rolling out recently.

Google’s plain old top-of-page links to news outlets or other informational sites are disappearing in many searches. Now much of this prime search-results real estate is taken up by what Google is calling AI Overviews.

Overviews offer up short, AI-generated summaries paired with brief bits of text from linked websites. (If you haven’t used Google in a while, try it now and see for yourself.)

The results have been far from perfect (would you like some glue with that pizza?) and leave a lot of room for skepticism and interpretation. (This past weekend, Overviews fed me seemingly contradictory advice about baby fevers within a two-paragraph span.) But that’s also often true of what you would find from an old-school list of links and snippets. And Google has been inching away from link-prominent results for a while now, featuring brief bits of (non-AI-generated) content in response to many search queries and in the form of Q&A text throughout link pages. So the recent appearance of AI-generated text answers wasn’t even immediately noticeable to me.

But newspaper and magazine publishers sure are noticing.

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Alvin Bragg’s Office Accused of Leaking Trump’s Potential Sentence to ‘The View’ — Likely to Recommend a Year Behind Bars for Trump at Rikers Island

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is backed by Soros, is now under fire for allegedly leaking sensitive sentencing information about former President Donald Trump to the far-left media.

In the wake of a trial widely criticized as a sham, where Trump was convicted on all 34 felony charges in a ‘hush money’ scandal, sources suggest that DA Bragg’s office may recommend Trump serve a year at the notorious Rikers Island.

Judge Merchan told jurors they did not have to agree on a crime—a practice unheard of in US history. The jury only had to agree that something bad happened.

This, of course, is completely unconstitutional. This was clearly the greatest travesty of justice in American history.

So now we have a convicted US President with 34 felony counts, and NO ONE knows what crime President Trump committed!

The sentencing was set for July 11—three days before the Republican convention!

Now, ‘The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin, who seemed quite pleased with the developments, shared on the air that she had spoken with someone from Bragg’s office.

She described them as ‘street fighters,’ who indicated that Bragg might push for a tough one-year imprisonment, primarily to ensure Trump faces the daunting conditions of Rikers Island.

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Reuters: Trump Supporters Want ‘RIOTS And Violent Retribution’ After Verdict

Reuters says that it has conducted a “review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.”

The piece continues, “Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.”

The article then quoted one comment that stated “Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” referring to the judge, and adding “Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete.” 

The piece quotes another comment on Gateway Pundit, that states “Time to start capping some leftys. This cannot be fixed by voting.”

The article quotes several more comments calling for violence, but admits that some have since been removed.

Reuters also charges that since the 2020 election Trump “loyalists have responded with a campaign of threats and intimidation targeting judges and court officials.”

The article also quotes Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has recently published a book on “far right terrorism.”

Ware charges that Trump has an “ironclad ability to mobilize more extreme supporters to action, both at the ballot box and through violence.”

“Until and unless he accepts the process, the extremist reaction to his legal troubles will be militant,” Ware added.

This all comes after Joe Biden labelled violent BLM protests “peaceful” and contrasted them to January 6th protesters “storming” the capitol.

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Corporate media is ramping up the fear about bird flu ahead of the vote on WHO’s pandemic plans

Health officials are issuing very ominous warnings about the potential for an H5N1 (bird flu or avian influenza) pandemic among humans at the same time that the WHO is preparing for a vote on the global pandemic treaty at the 77th World Health Assembly at the end of this month. 

The global pandemic treaty will give the World Health Organisation far more authority than it had during the last pandemic, and a lot of people are deeply concerned about how that power will be used during the next major health crisis. 

As you will see below, two more human cases of the bird flu have just been confirmed.  If the bird flu mutates into a form that can spread easily from human to human, that will create an enormous amount of fear, and the death toll could potentially be catastrophic.  In such an environment, what sort of extreme measures would the World Health Organisation decide to institute?

In recent weeks, negotiators have been feverishly working to finalise the global pandemic treaty.  The following comes directly from the official WHO website:

Governments of the world today agreed to continue working on a proposed pandemic agreement, and to further refine the draft, ahead of the Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly that starts 27 May 2024.

Governments meeting at the World Health Organisation headquarters in Geneva agreed to resume hybrid and in-person discussions over coming weeks to advance work on critical issues, including around a proposed new global system for pathogen access and benefits sharing (i.e. life-saving vaccines, treatments and diagnostics); pandemic prevention and One Health; and the financial coordination needed to scale up countries’ capacities to prepare for and respond to pandemics.Governments agree to continue their steady progress on proposed pandemic agreement ahead of the World Health Assembly, WHO, 10 May 2024

Here in the United States, the corporate media has been strangely quiet about this treaty, but it is a really big deal.

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Israel’s censorship of the AP is a cautionary tale for the US

Philosophers consider slippery slope arguments to be logical fallacies. But those philosophers haven’t met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. 

It took Israel about three weeks after banning Al Jazeera — due to purported national security risks stemming from its Qatari funding — to use the same law as a pretext to censor the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news agencies. 

Fortunately, Israel quickly reversed course after pressure from the U.S. and press organizations. But the ordeal should serve as a cautionary tale for President Biden and U.S. lawmakers and prosecutors. They keep empowering future administrations to harass the media — apparently trusting them, against all historical evidence, to use restraint.  

And if (more like when) the U.S. government does abuse its new powers against the press, the superpower is not likely to back off in response to international pushback like Israel did. Otherwise Julian Assange would be a free man. 

Israel’s justification for the raid was that the AP broke the law by providing images to Al Jazeera, which is among numerous clients worldwide that receive video feeds from the AP. There was no allegation that any image endangered national security, but officials nonetheless seized the AP’s equipment, killing its live feed and temporarily stripping millions of people of a view inside Gaza. 

Perhaps Israeli authorities saw transparency itself as a national security threat. The U.S. should be able to relate — officials who once sought to censor the Pentagon Papers on security grounds now acknowledge the government’s real concern was embarrassment. 

Israel has shut the international press out of Gaza (in addition to killing at least 100 journalists). Some even floated sanctioning the country’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, for criticizing the current government. Biden’s administration is reportedly concerned about journalists turning public opinion against Israel by exposing the devastation the Israel-Gaza war has caused. 

With that backdrop, who could’ve predicted that Israel wouldn’t stop with Al Jazeera once it started censoring news outlets? Well, other than press freedom advocates everywhere. 

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Newsgate: Reporters Caught Coordinating With Political Hacks

In my last post, “When Beat Reporters Act Like They Work for the Agency They’re Supposed to Cover,” I outlined why some reporters, such as NBC Justice Reporter Ryan Reilly, seem to carry water for those they cover rather than act as independent journalists. 

And I promised this eye-opening follow on.

Inside documents and leaks have given us graphic glimpses into the transactional journalism practiced by reporters at prominent national news groups. It amounts to our own industry scandal: Our Newsgate.

Compromised reporting has always existed as a result of covert collaborations between reporters and political interests—Democrats and Republicans alike. Some of the most exemplary hard evidence available happens to be heavy on reporters with Democrat ties. Much of it came during the scandal-ridden 2016 presidential campaign when candidate Donald Trump upended politics and ran against Hillary Clinton, who was also running against Bernie Sanders for the Democrat nomination. As you’ll see, much of the political establishment and establishment media seemed to be working on Team Hillary.

It can be argued that some individual accounts provided here can be rationalized and are not serious breaches of ethics. But taken as a whole, it’s easy to see how we as journalists have done a poor job protecting ourselves from being co-opted by organized interests, often ones that are paid and politically-motivated. Whether we realize it or not, they’ve figured out how to exploit the media and use us to publish their propaganda. It implies a broad and growing trend that has seriously undermined the credibility of the news industry.

Opinion reporters and those who work for obviously ideological news groups are entitled to publish party propaganda. It’s one matter to provide viewpoint journalism. But it’s quite another for us to pretend to be independent journalists while acting as a tool of any interest, or publishing narratives or talking points upon suggestion or demand, without disclosing we’re doing just that.

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AP Admits Noncitizens Vote In U.S. Elections While Insisting It’s No Big Deal

In a hit piece skeptical of the Republican-led Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote, the Associated Press (AP) acknowledged that foreign nationals have been caught “illegally registering and even casting ballots.” But that fact doesn’t stop Democrats and their media allies from opposing safeguards like the SAVE Act that threaten the advantages Democrats gain from loose election laws.

“The specter of immigrants voting illegally in the U.S. has erupted into a leading election-year talking point for Republicans. They argue that legislation is necessary to protect the sanctity of the vote as the country faces unprecedented levels of illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border,” the AP’s Ali Swenson wrote.

“Voting by people who are not U.S. citizens already is illegal in federal elections and there is no indication it’s happening anywhere in significant numbers,” Swenson insisted. But nine paragraphs later, she conceded that “there have been cases over the years of noncitizens illegally registering and even casting ballots.”

Swenson suggested these instances aren’t a big deal because “states have mechanisms to catch” such illegal voting. But in fact, the federal government has prevented states from requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

Federal voter registration forms do not require documentary proof of citizenship. Instead, each individual who registers to vote must simply check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. In other words, our elections hinge on the honor system.

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Media spreads false claim that Tucker Carlson launched a show on Russian TV

Multiple media outlets have been criticized after they spread a false claim that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson had launched a new show on Russian television. 

In response to a Newsweek article published on the topic, originally claiming that Carlson was working with Rossiya 24 on a show, Tucker Carlson Network investor Neil Patel wrote, “The Tucker Carlson Network has not done any deals with state media in any country.  Whoever is currently pretending to be the old Newsweek brand would know that if they had checked with us before printing like news companies are supposed to do.” 

The “show” in question is state-owned Rossiya 24 pulling footage from Carlson’s YouTube page and airing that on television translated to Russian. 

Newsweek originally wrote that a Russian paper “said that the show is part of a joint project with Carlson TV, in which he will interview figures and politicians who have “alternative views to the mainstream.”

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“Act of madness”: Israeli officials seize AP equipment, cut live feed of Gaza

Israeli officials seized broadcasting equipment belonging to the Associated Press on Tuesday, arguing it was used to provide images to Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem bureau was shuttered earlier this month following the passage of a new foreign broadcast law.

Why it matters: Press advocates have warned that the law creates a dangerous precedent for censoring independent news outlets in the region amid the ongoing war with Hamas.

  • Israeli lawmakers passed the measure last month, empowering the country’s communications minister to take action against any foreign media network that it can prove poses a national security risk.
  • Tuesday’s seizure has already garnered sharp criticism, with Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid calling it “an act of madness.”

Driving the news: Officials seized AP’s equipment in the southern town of Sderot on Tuesday afternoon, arguing the global news agency had violated the new law by providing a live feed of northern Gaza to Qatar-based Al Jazeera, AP reported.

  • According to the Israeli Ministry of Communications, the confiscated equipment includes a camera, tripod, live modem and two microphones.

AP reported that it “complies with Israel’s military censorship rules, which prohibit broadcasts of details like troops movements that could endanger soldiers.”

  • “The live shot has generally shown smoke rising over the territory,” it reported.
  • “The Qatari satellite channel is among thousands of clients that receive live video feeds from the AP and other news organizations,” it added.
  • The seizure of the equipment followed a refusal by AP to adhere to an order from Israeli officials last week to cut the live feed.

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Dems CENSOR Viral Parody Music Video Exposing Joe Biden’s Cognitive Decline

Allies of Joe Biden appear to be attempting to scrub a viral parody music video highlighting Jee Biden’s cognitive decline.

Trump on Friday posted to Truth Social a parody music video of Tom Petty’s hit song “Free Falling” mocking Biden’s many gaffes.

The “Keeps Falling” video features Biden collapsing on stage, stumbling up the steps of Air Force One, aimlessly wandering around and creepily sniffing women and children.

But by Sunday, the video was removed across the X platform with a disclaimer that read, “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”

The viral video was created by comedian and Fox News Saturday Night host Jimmy Failla, from his album “The More You Joe” produced by “C’Mon Man Records.”

It’s highly unlikely Failla would have made the copyright complaint given he shared the video on Thursday while boasting of “big accounts” that also shared it on social media.

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