What we witnessed last night wasn’t a debate — it was a reality TV show. It’s no secret that President Joe Biden performed badly, while former President Donald was in his element. The nation needs to remind itself that this was a fleeting moment. We need some historical perspective and a reality check on all the calls to put someone else at the top of the Democratic ticket. Contrast the spectacle and associated fundraising spree we witnessed last night with a real televised debate such as the first one between two candidates for the White House in Chicago on September 26, 1960.

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As everyone wrings their hands about the potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence, companies worldwide are moving at lightning speed to integrate sophisticated AI technology into their businesses. Less than six months ago, more than a thousand technology leaders and researchers, including industry giants such as Elon Musk, signed a letter urging a moratorium on technological advances. They said, “We’re locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy even more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or control.”

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In a new twist, though, Osnos delivers LBJ and McNamara in a digital world format for storytelling, the way podcasts do with audio. He supplements his story with a fascinating audio clip of his discussions with McNamara over the manuscript Osnos edited for the former defense secretary’s memoir. McNamara died in 2009. You can access the audio at platformbooksllc.net. The audio is a behind-the-scenes view. Readers rarely experience the crucial give and take between a writer and editor recorded in the audio clip. In crafting his narrative, Osnos relied heavily on “hundreds of pages of transcripts and tape recordings” from his extensive discussions with McNamara in the editing process.

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Silicon Valley loves to tout its expertise in disrupting legacy company business models to force technological change. The Valley’s intellectual elite don’t have much to say about what happens when their technological transformations create more harm than good. Steven Brill skillfully scrutinizes the less flattering scenario of major internet powers in his new book, The Death of Truth, and he paints an unflattering picture. The thrust of Brill’s subtitle pretty much sums it up: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World -- and What We Can Do.

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Most, if not all, of the stories NewsGuard cited for flaws, represent reports that generated controversy when they were published over the last several years. On their own, each story could be considered a flub like many that characterize standard newsroom operations. Taken together, the flawed stories paint a disturbing trend of drifting away from basic journalistic principles highly valued by journalists and editors alike.

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How much freedom do you have in reporting the news?

Wesam: ⁠⁠ I have freedom to a certain point, which means we can’t report the whole truth accurately. The freedom to report whatever we see wasn’t the case either before or during the war. As journalists, we self-sensor ourselves. Unfortunately, we have many parties that may punish any journalist that is honest and real. For me personally, since I am working for an American network, I experience trouble a lot. Many people look at me suspiciously and may harm me if I report about the whole truth.

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When you start work, what is the first thing you see everyday?

“Before leaving for work, I bid my children and wife farewell as if it were the last time, for I do not know if I will return to them or not. Upon arriving at work, I check that my colleagues are well and review the list of victims' names in case I know one of them or have lost a dear one. I also see the lines of displaced people standing every day since morning, whether to get water or bread, or in line to receive aid. The life of the displaced has turned into queues for the mere basics of living, including treatment at the hospital's gate, where there's a line to see a general doctor amidst the shortage that the city of Rafah suffers in clinics and hospitals.” – Saif Alswaitti

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The deficit in research funding has an enormous impact on the way ME/CFS is treated, or more accurately is not treated, by the medical community writ large. Physicians around the country simply lack the body of scientific knowledge needed to learn about the disease, to diagnose it and how to ease the suffering of patients until someone develops a cure.  “The reason that patients [have been] minimized for so long is because it’s very, very clear that this complex chronic illness doesn’t fit in this neat package of ‘Here’s an X-ray. You’ve got a broken tibia,’” says David Putrino, director of Mount Sinai’s center for complex chronic illness, who has been working with patients with Long Covid since early in the pandemic. “What we are finally proving, though, is that categorically. something is going wrong in the bodies of these people.” As he has gained more experience with the condition, he no longer believes a single medical trigger explains the full range of symptoms.

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The latest example of the linguistic duel came when President Biden publicly confused the leader of Egypt with the president of Mexico. Critics pounced, citing the mistake as evidence that the eighty-one year-old Biden was too old to occupy the White House for another four years. Biden’s defenders angrily responded with a “he does it, too” defense, pointing to similar verbal stumbles by Biden’s likely opponent, the seventy-seven year-old former President Donald Trump. He recently confused his Republican primary opponent Nikki Haley with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat and former Speaker of the House. Is this behavior really the way we want to experience the contest for the nation’s highest office? If so, we’re destined to descend into a giant game of gotcha journalism with snarky reporters focused on irrelevance. Let’s emphasize what the candidates have done, not what they say.

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Johnson and his thin Republican majority in the House, egged on by Donald Trump, the front runner for the GOP presidential nomination, oppose doing anything. Their answer to the problem is a political stunt calling for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas. Like political puppies, the hard right of the Republican party want to reward their big dog with a bone -- an issue he can use to bludgeon Biden in the upcoming election. This is cynical politics. Immigrant kids on the streets pay the price for a political game that also would deny aide to Ukrainians trying to fight Russia. Let’s not forget. Trump had four years in the White House to fix an immigration issue that has festered for years. He produced nothing but bluster. I’m not wild about Biden’s plan, but at least he has one. Do you think Trump and his howling hounds will succeed?

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Artifact burst on to the scene about a year ago. It promised to provide a large online platform where journalists could post their stories, broaden their audience, and enhance revenues, assuming Artifact’s AI-enabled tools found value in – and an audience – the content. I wasn’t too impressed by their initial efforts, but I decided to use Artifact and give it a chance. It was designed to capitalize on machine learning to customize the reader’s feed and fashion a news report. It didn’t take me too long to pull the plug. Most of the content tended to be superficial and shallow. Artifact’s lack of journalistic quality raises a larger point, though. As Ben Thompson, the technology blogger and an early Artifact enthusiast recently said, “maybe there’s just not enough good content on the internet!”

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I’m not alone in saying Trump’s actions disqualify him and that he should be kicked off the ballot. That’s what the Colorado Supreme Court said. Even legal scholars who are members of the conservative Federalist Society, such as William Baude of the University of Chicago, and Michael Stokes Paulson of the University of St. Thomas, agree. No matter how much Trump tries to weasel out of the controversy, he broke the law and should pay for his crimes just like the insurrectionists who prompted legislators to write Section Three: Confederate soldiers who rebelled against the United States in the Civil War. Trump doesn't deserve the right to run for the highest office in the land. He gave that away on January sixth.

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Jack Smith has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the matter and to schedule oral arguments early this year. The high court should rule quickly before the election heats up. Trump also should be tried soon so voters know before the elections whether a candidate for the nation's highest public office violated laws in our constitution, democracy's most sacred document. Until those charges are settled, he should not be on the ballot. Being treated equally is a crucial principle of our democracy. The law says anyone who tries to overthrow the government should not hold high public office. Trump and his supporters must be shown that laws are not things they can obey when they feel like it. The rule of law should prevail. He should only be on the ballot once he and Jack Smith have their day in court.

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A recent Telegram post shows how easily the twin enemies of truth – deceit and propaganda – fill the gaps created by heavy-handed censorship of the media in a bloody, directionless war that has killed thousands of innocent people and displaced millions of others. If there’s a void in solid, professionally edited media, the Telegram post shows how purveyors of propaganda will rush to fill it. We will probably see much of the same thing in America as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway. To say that the post, titled 72 Virgins – Uncensored, is problematic is to state the obvious. Less well known to audiences around the world are the policies that make legitimate media vulnerable to the credibility gaps that make the propaganda pervasive.

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News coverage of the drama over Sam Altman’s ouster as CEO of OpenAI overshadows the most important question we should be asking about artificial intelligence: How can we oversee a technology expanding at the speed of light while the public’s still in the dark?  Ever since the board of OpenAi fired Altman on November seventeenth, media coverage focused on the corporate soap opera that prompted the decision to fire and then rehire Altman. Speculation dominated coverage of the company and its board until the New York Times recently published a definitive piece on Altman, exposing the backstabbing and deceit that prompted the board to act.

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Even this far away from the election, there are signs around the country that Trump’s influences are already affecting how the Republican Party will behave. Those Republicans who were loudly supportive of Trump’s election theft claim did not fare well in the midterm elections. But I don’t think they learned their lesson. His influence played out in the House Republican's stumbling effort to elect a new speaker, after tossing out the first one. Trump’s current theme is that Joe Biden is a threat to Democracy. Watch how that starts popping up all over as the campaign proceeds. Trump will be trying to offset the fact that he is the one formally accused of trying to stage a coup. Message echoing is a common tactic, and the man knows how to make echoes.

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Generative AI is a revolutionary technology that will change the world and is evolving at lightening speed. With the capitalists in charge, the speed of AI development will probably accelerate as will its offspring, ChatGPT. For-profit operations are nimbler and lure better talent to wrestle with evolving technologies with so much potential. I witnessed how seeking investors is much easier than asking for donations. There’s a downside to the capitalist approach, though. Dangling the prospects of huge profits on the horizon is a powerful incentive to diminish the importance of the social consequences of AI, which can be significant.

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I experience the war through the eyes of Marwan Athamneh who manages the Jerusalem bureau of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), where I am chairman of the board. Every day Athamneh monitors the conditions of MBN journalists in Gaza, the West Bank, the northern and southern borders of Israel and the conditions in Jerusalem, where tensions between Arab citizens of Israel and Israelis run high. When he can get to the office, Athamneh runs studios for Alhurra, the main MBN broadcast outlet that airs its reports in Arabic. He also struggles to keep up with the logistical needs of MBN war correspondents.  

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My Israeli friend and I enjoyed lunch and conversation on a sunny patio crammed with holiday tourists who had flocked to booths adjacent to the restaurant for a street fair where children could get face paints. I couldn’t imagine how the scene of such a joyous reunion would be shattered within days. We struggled to overcome the banter from nearby tables as we caught up on years past, on common friends and shared experiences. We took a short walk to her office before we bid a fond farewell. My Palestinian friend picked me up and drove me through a city he calls home and one I had visited often.

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Censorship and government control of the media characterize all markets Middle East Broadcasting Networks serve to one degree or another. In some places, breaking the rules set by government media officials can lead to time in a jail cell or even a death sentence. Dubai and the UAE, the confederation of Arab enclaves in which the city is located, are a bit different, though. You can say practically anything you want about anybody as long as the subject doesn’t involve the Sheikhs that control the place.

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