AI’s vulnerability to misinformation creates a crucial and growing need for skeptical, independent journalists. AI and its technological cousins could provide new tools for journalists to fill this need more effectively, efficiently, and better than ever if journalists embrace it and don’t react the way many initially did to the introduction of the Internet.
Read MoreTrump should get his day in court. He is, after all, the first ex-president to be indicted. What gives me pause are fears that other important news stories will be overshadowed by the flood of media attention that will inevitably flow Trump’s way. Get ready for monotonous TV camera shots of the New York courthouse where Trump will be arraigned and breathless babble from broadcast news stars. The stories I’m more interested in are Chicago’s mayor’s race and the election of a Supreme Court Justice in Wisconsin.
Read MoreSince Tyshawn Lee’s murder in November 2015, at least 600 other children under the age of seventeen have been killed by guns in Chicago. The violence is relentless; it happens in Chicago almost every weekend. Nationwide, we average 1,839 kids killed by guns every year. I feel horrible for the victims and families in Nashville. But the tragedies around the country are starting to seem numbingly like one more weekend on the South and West sides of Chicago.
Read MoreThe anticipated indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a grandstanding stunt by a politically ambitious New Yorker that plays right into the hands of another New York politician now living on the east coast of Florida, the mecca of GOP royalty. This is the wrong case at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.
Read MoreAn interesting issue is what will the profit seeking hedge funds and newspaper chains do if they adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning? Journalists need a way to work on their own, not for companies like Gannett. AI systems and machine learning could blaze that trail. Richard Boyd says the nation’s best hope is to figure out a way to arm individual reporters with machine learning and artificial intelligence systems that have common goals with journalists.
Read MoreOne of the great values journalists bring to the news is editing or curating in the lingo of the online world. Seasoned professionals in newsrooms around the world spend their days doing something that I don’t have the time to do: Reading all the news and using journalistic judgment to shape what’s important and what’s not.
Read MoreAI systems unquestionably carry profound implications for journalism, but they are even more sweeping for the world at large. In one form or another, many individual and businesses already use artificial intelligence techniques for tasks that once employed humans in field ranging from finance to health care. More change is coming, though, faster and sooner than most people realize.
Read MoreIt would be nice if reporters focused on the negative impact of celebrity on politics. But our news shows seem inundated with political operatives who masquerade as journalists, all in hot pursuit of the TV camera and name recognition in case they get another shot at grabbing the brass ring. We are saturated with people whose only goal in life seems to be fame. I had my fifteen minutes and I hated it.
Read MoreHarvard professor Thomas Patterson says much of the funding needed for local news and public radio will have to come from major private donors who have the financial muscle to shoulder the burden of providing a vital service to communities around the nation. Local news is as fundamental to American democracy as the Founding Fathers, many of whom were journalists writing under pen names.
Read More“Nearly a billion restless people, the UN says, are ricocheting today between and within the world’s national borders. This represents the largest mass migration, forced or voluntary, in the 300,000-year story of our species,” Paul Salopek writes in a National Geographic story to memorialize the anniversary. History — as scribbled by smug homebodies — often assigns these wandering souls a glib label: losers.”
Read MoreThe various sites and propaganda platforms remind me of the pamphleteers that prevailed in journalism’s early days. Would some anonymous “content” guard at Twitter or Facebook have published Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” call to arms in the dawn of our democracy? We raise delicate questions when we talk about slapping controls on the media.
Read MoreHad a vigorous local press not been sidelined by financial distress engineered by Silicon Valley, the thinking went, voters might have known about George Santos’ deception before Election Day instead of afterwards. He might have lost. The trouble with that thinking: A local paper did expose Santos, months before the election, and it didn’t seem to make a difference.
Read MoreMcCarthy should have done the right thing and backed out of the race for Speaker. That would require something Kevin lacks: Integrity. Instead, he selfishly hung in there and got the job by giving the right-wingers want they wanted, more power, thereby diminishing the job he coveted. The man’s unprincipled. I can’t even begin to imagine the lies spread during the fifteen votes it took for him to win the gavel.
Read MoreLying is nothing new on the campaign trail, but congressman elect George Santos set a new record for being a fake. About the only thing he didn’t fabricate was his imagination! The New York Times exposed Santos, an openly gay Republican, in an investigative piece that detailed the sordid history of lying during a race he ran — and won — in a district that President Biden carried by a hefty margin only two years ago.
Read MoreThey are crimes for certain, taking civilian lives in a military conflict has been viewed as criminal behavior now for decades, murder in fact. But that doesn’t mean a court in The Hague or anywhere else is going to step in and prosecute the perpetrators. Even if the International Criminal Court has the will power to make a case, we may see it suffer the same fate as Serbia’s Milosevic, who died in his cell before a verdict was reached.
Read MoreUkrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told a joint session of Congress that the war would not end soon. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with 500,000 troops, the Russian Army used some of the same scorched earth tactics it’s using today. As it withdrew toward Moscow it burned Russian crops and villages, making it difficult for Napoleon to sustain his army. Sound familiar? By the time he left he only had about 100,000 troops left.
Read MoreReagan’s relentless drive to cut taxes set in motion an unraveling of the tax code that spanned four decades. The cuts made the fortieth president a Republican hero. Less publicized is the role those tax cuts played in the nation’s descent into inequality and the indelible mosaic of a red and blue America. James B. Steele, a distinguished journalist and author, has documented the role that tax policy played in creating inequality in America.
Read MoreThe Dems need a good, strong candidate for president, someone with executive experience. In other words, they need a governor like the one where I live in Cary, North Carolina. I like our governor, Roy Cooper, a Democrat who’d make a fine candidate. He’s won two times in a state that the Republicans have sliced up in gerrymanders so badly that the state’s political map is now at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case.
Read MoreI worked at the Des Moines Register when the Iowa caucuses first appeared on the political stage. None of us really knew how to cover these eccentric gatherings. Jim Flansburg, the Register’s colorful top political reporter, sat me down and explained the whole caucus process. Then he sent me to a cover one. I didn’t find the caucus representative of much. But I was a young reporter.
Read MoreGiven the nature of human curiosity, most readers will click on the “dog-floating-on-the-ice-in-Lake-Michigan” story before they open a thoughtful take on Chicago’s budget. If abused, the exercise will simply lead to a loss of respect among readers who will think editors prioritize fluff over substance. Giving readers less and charging them more for papers full of fluffy clickbait is not a winning formula.
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