Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
D.C. police detained a gunman on Dec. 4, who had walked into Comet Ping Pong, a popular Northwest Washington restaurant and music venue. Police said no injuries were reported. (Faiz Siddiqui,Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post) A feedback loop of half-baked rumors and willful misinformation whips a corner of the Internet into such a frenzy that someone…
Despite beating Facebook in the early PR battle against fake news, Google is still indirectly helping fund publishers that intentionally spread misleading information. Google’s digital infrastructure touches nearly everything on the internet, including fake-news websites. So unlike tech companies with less reach, Google requires much more than mere blacklists to block fake news publishers from…
The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner has drawn censure from both sides of the political aisle, as well as a Senate hearing that looked into the potential for the combined company to become a monopoly. But if we are going to examine media monopolies, we should look first at Silicon Valley, not the…
Time Magazine’s annual “Person of the Year” announcement is, year after year, grossly misunderstood. Time Magazine is clear on its sole criterion – “the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year” – yet, do a simple search on Twitter and you will find countless people who seem…
The prominence of fake and misleading news has shed light on how programmatic advertising and Facebook increasingly power the web, determining what readers see. Since then, Google and Facebook have vowed to stop serving ads to those shady corners of the internet. But that doesn’t stop bogus stories from making their way onto top-tier publishers, which…
This month, I spent a week surrounded by bright, well-meaning journalism and tech thinkers. Session after session, day after day, conversations kept coming back to these questions: How do we restore trust in media? How do we reach Middle America? What do we do about fake news? Here’s my prediction for 2017. It’s the safest…
Screenshot via YouTube Listen. I am not going to try to unpack and critique the bonkers Rogue One review published by the New Yorker’s Richard Brody today. I do not even know where to begin. I am just going to blockquote some portions down below this paragraph, and I invite you to join me in…
When Hulk Hogan faced off in court against the Web site Gawker, earlier this year, it was easy to become distracted by the rococo tawdriness of the spectacle. After all, the case centered on the leak of a surreptitiously videotaped sexual encounter between Hogan, the professional wrestler, and the wife of his erstwhile best…
storytext President-elect Donald Trump still has not held a news conference, a break from tradition that is keeping reporters and the public in the dark about the transition to his administration. Going back at least to 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected, no president-elect has waited so long after the election was decided to speak…
A top aide to Donald Trump says a Wall Street Journal editor was “sexist” for mocking the president-elect’s meeting with Carly Fiorina Monday. Bret Stephens, the Journal’s deputy editorial page editor, weighed in online after Trump huddled with the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and GOP White House hopeful. He called me ugly. He won. I kissed up….