Lewis Clephane, founder of the Republican Party: "In those days it was a crime to be called a Republican, and every man who was then known as a Republican was denounced as an Abolitionist. We have fought the battle." Its first platform: 1/
archive.org/details/birtho…
Clephane recounts fears of insurrectionists almost prevented Lincoln's inaugural parade; the party prevailed. He also notes how an insurrectionist mob attacked the Republican "Wide Awakes." Yes, woke. Ironies aplenty. 2/

Shorter Sulzberger: First they came for Black, Latino, LGBTQ, Muslim, immigrant, pregnant, & poor people--their rights & their speech--but now that Trump could come for us... 1/
How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America (Gift link)
wapo.st/3ZfmRNg Here, A.G. sets up a strawman. No, we critics are not asking The Times to "cast aside neutrality and directly oppose Trump". We are asking The Times to give Trump's peril to *other* people the kind of attention he gives it here regarding danger to news media 2/

Study the #BrokenTimes home page this Sunday morning. You wouldn't know there was just a historic and momentous Democratic convention. No week in review. No reflection. Guess Sunday papers aren't want they used to be. Meanwhile, how does the #MurdochJournal followup on this historic week? By giving its lead story this Sunday to Donny finally coming out to play:

Of course, the #BrokenTimes chooses to cast Biden's speech & the convention in a negative light. He gave the speech he deserved and earned, not defending his record but defending democracy. And why focus on Hillary's failure when she energized the night? 1/ Peter Baker isn't a political reporter. He thinks himself the mindreader. Having kicked Joe to the curb, Baker and the #BrokenTimes kick him once more, ignoring the substance of his speech, not covering his historic accomplishments. 2/
nytimes.com/2024/08/20/us/…

What "press"? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch's fascist media? No. She can choose many ways to communicate her stands with others outside the old press and with the public directly. The old press can and should be bypassed.
Kamala Harris must speak to the press
Margaret Sullivan
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… Look at the press' behavior. When given a chance to ask questions, they sound like they're in a lockerroom, seeking quotes, not policy. This does nothing to inform the electorate. I know the argument about testing a candidate: but the press as currently configured aims for game & gotcha.

This is the lead story in The Times, at the same time that stock premarket indications are green. The story reports nothing; doesn't even predict anything. It says something bad could happen, which is always true. This is journalism wishing for chaos. That's not journalism. There is so much else to lead a newspaper with. The Times is broken. 1/
Getaloada the story:
"Investors are braced for potential turmoil." Aren't they always?
"In spite of this sober optimism after such a dizzying week, nervousness remains about where the economy could go next, rather than where it is now." WTF does that even mean?
This is bullshit.

The Post rewrote this headline and made it worse insofar as it backed farther away from just telling the truth: Trump made a racist attack on Harris. "Contest into new phase"? That is the editors' attempt to say less: i.e., nothing. The Post is broken. 1/

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/1818831033871052960

The Post's headline yesterday is so abhorrent that it should lead to editors losing jobs. This infamous 2020 headline in the Inquirer led to its editor losing his job. 2/

What the fuck, MSNBC? You preempted your excellent weekend programming, @TheWeekendMSNBC and @AliVelshi, and now you've silenced @Morning_Joe in favor of your anodyne streaming news cos-play called Now? This is when we need the analysis and conversation these shows bring us (yes, with controversy; that is how public discourse works through it: with discussion). It is shocking that NBC/Comcast do not understand their own company's programs and raison d'etre. Bring back @JoeNBC and @morningmika. They may drive me crazy sometimes, but we need the dialog they enable. Did some numbnuts NBC/Comcast/Universal executive decide an assassination attempt was a good time to promote its foundering streaming show? (I feel like we're living in AppleTV's Morning Show. UBS>NBC.) Or did this essentially Republican megacorporation decide to silence liberal voices? That's my theory and that's nothing short of election interference.

In this defensive @NewYorker reaction to @JoeBiden (finally) criticizing the press that has been criticizing him, @jaycaspiankang shares an important insight about the falling power of the press, but I come to a different conclusion... 1/
newyorker.com/news/fault-lin… Kang says that media are weakened and that's what makes it easy for Trump and now Biden alike to attack them. I say what it shows is that as media realize they have lost the agenda, their response is to shout louder and more often. That is what we see every day in the @NYTimes. 2/

Oh, Lord: The anodyne AP journalism of Buzbee to be replaced--in the design of the Murdochian henchman Will Lewis--by a Murdochian WSJ editor, then, as bad if not worse, a Telegraph editor. The crisis in US national journalism worsens!
washingtonpost.com/pr/2024/06/02/… I can't parse what the "third newsroom" is but it sounds very 2015--SEO, social, pivot to video--just as AI threatens to be a new web. I am worried that serving "Americans who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed" is code for Post as Murdoch.

Good! @JoeNBC is excoriating the NYT/Sienna poll and the attention it gets. It warps. Yes. At moments such as this, I quote the late James Carey about how polls--all polls--preempt the public conversation they are intended to measure. From my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis. 1/

Importantly, @JoeNBC is excoriating not just the poll but the Times reporting around it, quoting voters who've never voted. That is not journalism.

Today I'm releasing a major paper on California's Journalism Preservation Act (& its federal cousin, JCPA): its weaknesses; the history of news & copyright; newspapers' long history of fighting new technologies & competitors--and alternative solutions. 1/
drive.google.com/file/d/1HHcDuU… CJPA & JCPA are the latest from a long history of efforts by the news industry to diminish fair use and extend copyright for their exclusive benefit. Their must-carry clauses also, in my opinion, violate the 1st Amendment by requiring platforms to carry their speech. 2/

"Most managers see AI as an existential threat," says @risj_oxford. That is because they think they are in the content business. In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I argue content is a print-era notion now fully commodified. Journalism is service.
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-media… I say here it is time to give up on old news, to stop throwing good money & effort after bad. The first step in building a new journalism is to imagine it post-content (not dependent on scale & copyright): a journalism of service, community, collaboration.
medium.com/whither-news/i…

In re copyright & AI, I've been thinking about authors. This essay says "'author' in its modern sense is a relative recent invention." A lovely quote on the book: "It does not contain thoughts; these must arise in the mind of the comprehending reader." 1/
jstor.org/stable/2738129… Christian Sigmund Krause: "I can read the contents of a book, learn, abridge, expand, teach translate it, write about it, laugh over it, find faults with it, deride it, use it poorly or well...But the one thing I should be prohibited from doing it copying or reprinting it?" 2/

I wish I could celebrate news of the departure of the single most malign influence in English-speaking democracy, Rupert Murdoch, but I fear Fox will only be worse under son Lachlan & that this is a means to solidify his power before Dad's death. 1/
bbc.com/news/business-… We have Rupert Murdoch to curse for giving us Trump, Brexit, and a right-wing news monopoly in much of Australia. I also blame him for launching media's war against the internet--because he was pissed off he failed so badly online, a story rarely told. 2/

At the dawn of computers, newsrooms thought their "content" is what made them valued, so they each needed special "systems" to "manage" it. They commodified content until it lost value; so did their CMSes.
axios.com/2023/07/18/vox… I trained the Chicago Tribune newsroom on its first CMS in '74 (I was young but yes I'm that old). They next designed their own special CMS and it was so special papers almost didn't get out & they assigned their investigative task force to investigate their own system.

I dropped everything to read A.G. Sulzberger's essay on objectivity; you should, too. It is intelligent, reasoned, candid, fair, well-written. I won't quibble with small points. One large point: I think he conflates "independence" with "objectivity." 1/
cjr.org/special_report…

https://twitter.com/PostBaron/status/1658179609253273629

Independent from what? From government and power? Absolutely. That is why access journalism can be so insidious. Independent from journalists' own business interests? Yes. That is why I find their attacks on the internet, which gives overdue hearing to many, troubling. 2/

There are so many open letters about AI, I'm starting to wonder whether AI's writing them. The latest protests AI learning from art to make art. But how has art ever been made? I'd hate to see this be a hardening of copyright's restrictions on creation. 1/
artisticinquiry.org/AI-Open-Letter The letter's language is emotional: "This is effectively the greatest art heist in history... Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists." Oh, my. 2/

In his well-told chronicle, @pierce of The Verge gets the origin story of Google AMP right like no report I've seen. And I was there at the start (in Finland!). I'm in here: 1/
theverge.com/23711172/googl… Google was and still is right about one thing: Media fucked up the web with their gawdy digital gewgaws and unbearable overdose of ads and promotions and interruptions. News media made the web as pokey, painful, and unappealing as an overdue shit. 2/

.@JoeNBC: I said I would share research on youth and social media. A family crisis intervened; apologies for the delay. Here are useful links. A long 🧵and 📸 /1

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/1639207503484407809

To start: Here's a good overview from London's @theipaper reviewing research and "misleading tactics" from Jon Haidt, Jean Twenge & John Burn-Murdoch. "A lot of the evidence is shaky and unclear." 2/
inews.co.uk/news/technolog…

Springer's Döpfner loves to play the contrarian bad boy and bad boys get in trouble....
‘I’m all for climate change’: Axel Springer CEO faces heat over leaked messages theguardian.com/world/2023/apr… The taz--Springer's bête noire--is saying 'told ya so' under the headline "the monster we made."
Die „Zeit“ veröffentlicht persönliche Nachrichten von Springer-Chef Mathias Döpfner. Die Empörung ist groß. Zu kurz kommt, wer ihn mächtig gemacht hat. taz.de/Enthuellung-ue…