We have a specific thread on the NYT, but not really about the media in general (news media or otherwise)… Sort of a meta discussion on the media and how it shapes our society…
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Disinformation is one thing, but I think a bigger problem is … I guess you could call it sanewashing, but I think it goes beyond that. The sanewashing of Trump is an example, but I think the broader issue is just the reporting of things all public figures do and say as if those people are doing and saying those things in good faith. Dana Bash’s interview with … well anyone really, but especially JD Vance yesterday is a good example. She kept asking him where he was getting his information about the pet eating Haitians, and he just keeps going on about his problem with immigrants killing and raping children, and then he all but admits to making the whole thing up, and Bash just doesn’t know how to respond to that. She hems and haws and stutters but doesn’t directly and unequivocally call him out, and it came across weak AF. And sure, a lot of outlets are reporting that as Vance admitting he made it up, but he denied that when Bash finally sort of got that final question out, and said he wasn’t making it up, he just meant he was talking about it to bring attention to it.
We need a Mike Wallace. We need an Edward R. Murrow. We need someone, anyone, who will directly challenge these assholes on their bullshit. Instead, we get an endless parade of weak interviewers who think they have to give “both sides” equal time and opportunity, and who operate under the assumption that their interview subject is going to deal in good faith, when that just obviously isn’t true.
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Here’s from one of the ‘good guys’ in media, Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones:
The other day, I asked ChatGPT—which one-third of Americans say they use to get information—a question about a major political story that happens to be close to home for Mother Jones. I asked: “What was the 47 percent issue about?” And here was its answer:
The “47 percent story” refers to a controversial comment made by Mitt Romney, who was the Republican nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 election. In a private fundraising event that was secretly recorded and later leaked to the media, Romney stated that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government support, believe they are victims entitled to benefits, and consequently, would vote for then-President Barack Obama.
Accurate, sure, but with one glaring omission: any reference to Mother Jones, which uncovered and reported the story. The summary contained no links to our reporting. When I asked ChatGPT to “tell me more about what Romney said,” it provided a lot of additional detail and quotes, but still no reference to who first broke the story.
In all, it took the AI less than two seconds to provide a thorough summary of the story. By contrast, it took David Corn months to get that scoop. He dug into Romney’s background in the hedge-fund world, found links to companies that exported American jobs to China, and eventually tracked down the secret video of a private fundraising event. Along with a team of colleagues, David verified the video’s authenticity, reported additional context, and wrote the story that changed the 2012 election.
OpenAI didn’t do any work to report the “47 percent story.” They simply hoovered it up—along with many thousands of other Mother Jones stories—to train ChatGPT. And that’s not all. Not only did Open AI use our journalism without pay or permission, they also built the AI in such a way that would not tell users where that journalism comes from or who owns it. Our reporting is copyrighted, but you would never know it from ChatGPT.
This is how tech companies have always operated: They build first, take what you want, and ask permission later. Or never, because rules are for suckers, right?
It’s clear that very soon, the way most people get information, including news, will be through an interaction with AI. Reading articles, let alone perusing websites like MotherJones, will become a rare thing, much like listening to LPs or watching movies in a theater. With a giant robot poised to strangle the news industry, Mother Jones faced a choice: capitulate or fight for our rights. We’re fighters, and so this summer, we filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its biggest shareholder, Microsoft.
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Excellent, especially the last bit. I kept thinking as I was reading that, “Sue these fuckers. Sue their companies right out of existence, and their owners right out of their 3 or 4 mansions.”
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Panem et circenses; bread and circuses.
Most mainstream media is most certainly the latter these days.
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… it’s hard to believe one third of Americans even know what ChatGPT is 
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Yeah, that statistic smells like Pulled Out of Ass.
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[Omar Wasow: ““For years, right-wing internet influencers—self-described trollies—have deliberately aimed to use ‘shitposting’ to get the mainstream media to cover their favorite topics.”” — Bluesky (bsky.app)]
[J.D. Vance’s Admission Shouldn’t Shock You—They’ve Done This for Years | The New Republic]
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I’m of half a mind that Tromp and Vance are spreading the racist shite to intentionally distract voters from the anti-abortion shite. Voter anger about the former doesn’t seem as high as voter anger about the latter, especially among white people (who still constitute the majority).
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My guess is “Push polling”, in the form of an online box: “Do you use AI to get information online? Yes/No”. What it’s measured is that among those who read the question and felt like answering, a third use AI tools. I suspect that most people looked at it, thought “Huh?” and didn’t bother clicking.
But maybe the kids these days use ChatGPT a lot, and they’re the main online users, and the one-third figure is about right? Hard to tell, from my information bubble.
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Debord is perhaps best known as among the principals of the Situationist International, a group and movement that emerged in the late 1950s out of several avant-garde artistic and social tendencies. The group’s name implies the conscious creation of situations to free spaces of daily life from the alienation and falsity of the existing order, characterized by the spectacle as Debord describes it. (This emphasis on the deliberate recapture of autonomy in everyday life is also an echo of Stirner, as we shall see.) Debord offers a comprehensive update on the traditional Marxist theory of alienation, further developing and broadening the notion to describe “the world of the autonomous image.” Here, alienation is not confined to productive and consumptive aspects of life, but is a pervasive fact of social reality, as he puts it, “a social relation among people, mediated by images.” We are separated not only from active control over our own time and the products of our work, but from other people and our communities, culture, political participation, leisure and entertainment, and even from ourselves and our relationships with ourselves.
The Society of the Spectacle evinces a series of striking parallels with The Ego and Its Own, frequently cited as “the most revolutionary [book] ever written.” Debord opens his book with a quote from Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), which is notable, among other reasons, because Stirner dedicates a large part of The Ego and Its Own to a critical analysis of Feuerbach’s philosophy. In the passage quoted by Debord, Feuerbach is critical of the modern world’s preference for illusion, favoring “the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality.” Feuerbach argues that we should endeavor to uncover the true essences underneath mere symbols and representations. But for Stirner, Feuerbach thus holds onto the fundamental mistake of seeking out a fixed and grounded target that does not exist, only swapping the Christian god out for a new universal of human nature, identified with Gattungswesen(translating to “species-being” or “species-essence”). Stirner denies that there is a universal Gattungswesen to be accessed or retrieved, and claims that Feuerbach is actually constructing a new illusory device for the repressive subjectification of the individual.
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