The Ledes

Monday, July 21, 2025

New York Times: “William L. Clay, who became the first African-American elected to the House of Representatives from Missouri, co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus and forcefully promoted the interests of poor people in St. Louis and beyond in his 32 years on Capitol Hill, died on Thursday in Adelphi, Md. He was 94.” 

New York Times: “Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the actor who rose to fame as a teenager playing Theo Huxtable on 'The Cosby Show' in the mid-1980s, died in Costa Rica on Sunday. He was 54. Warner drowned while swimming at a beach on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, The Associated Press reported, citing the country’s Judicial Investigation Department.” 

The Wires
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The Ledes

Sunday, July 20, 2025

New York Times: “The Cram fire in central Oregon, which is threatening 653 structures, most of them homes, has grown to more than 95,000 acres, making it the largest wildfire of the year so far in the United States.... Moister air and calmer winds are expected to blunt some of the fire’s growth over the weekend. It was 49 percent contained as of late Saturday night local time, according to InciWeb, a government site that tracks wildfires.” 

New York Times: “Torrential rain in parts of the Washington, D.C., area on Saturday led to flash flooding and prompted water rescues in Maryland and Virginia, the authorities said. More than five inches of rain fell in some densely populated Washington suburbs like Silver Spring on Saturday. Several major roads in Montgomery, Prince George’s and Anne Arundel counties in Maryland, as well as in Fairfax County in Virginia, were impassable on Saturday evening. In northwest Washington, D.C., parked cars were inundated with floodwaters.”

AP: “A vehicle rammed into a crowd of people waiting to enter a performance venue along a busy boulevard in Los Angeles early Saturday, injuring 30 people and leading bystanders to attack the driver, authorities said. The driver was later found to have been shot, according to police, who were searching for a suspected gunman who fled the scene along Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood.... Twenty-three victims were taken to hospitals and trauma centers, according to police. Seven were in critical condition, the Los Angeles Fire Department said in a statement.... The driver, whose gunshot wound was found by paramedics, was also taken to a hospital.”

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INAUGURATION 2029

Marie: I don't know why this video came up on my YouTube recommendations, but it did. I watched it on a large-ish teevee, and I found it fascinating. ~~~

 

Hubris. One would think that a married man smart enough to start up and operate his own tech company was also smart enough to know that you don't take your girlfriend to a public concert where the equipment includes a jumbotron -- unless you want to get caught on the big camera with your arms around said girlfriend. Ah, but for Andy Bryon, CEO of A company called Astronomer, and also maybe his wife, Wednesday was a night that will live in infamy. New York Times link. ~~~

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts. 

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

Friday
Aug052011

Where Are the Media?

Commenter Denis Neville Dissents:

Marie Burns (yesterday) is “cautiously optimistic -- if not entirely confident -- that the media, in one form or another, would be the catalyst that once again put an end to the darker forces that threaten us.”

Where are today’s media watchdogs that have the stature and credibility of Murrow or Cronkite? Today’s media is not what it used to be, nor is its audience. Content and quality of major television news networks reduced and their audiences much smaller; newspapers with quality journalists shrinking and disappearing; libraries and book stores closing; and only a tiny area of the Internet with quality hard news (including RealityChex).  Despite our communications revolution, or because of it, there is an ever shrinking audience as fewer and fewer citizens consume less and less news, and an absence of hard news about the complex issues of today that citizens need in order to hold government and business accountable. Instead there is only crime, celebrities, scandal, and soft news. How many people have access to quality media sources?  During these hard times, how many can afford them? How many in our attention deficit society are paying attention to our attention deficit media? Or even care as they struggle just to survive?

The New York Times? The politically subordinate Times reported on the Guantanamo Bay documents from WikiLeaks, but refused to call torture by its name and would not use the word in reference to waterboarding.

The Washington Post? a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street, trying again to win yet another Pulitzer for bad reporting, as Dean Baker likes to say.

MSNBC?; Establishment liberalism is allowed. But being too hostile to the political and financial powers is a definite no-no. No corporate employee will survive if he or she fails to adhere to the prevailing ethos and the interests of the corporation. Recall how GE and MSNBC executives forced Keith Olbermann to stop criticizing Fox News personalities as part of a deal that GE and Murdoch’s News Corp agreed to in order to safeguard their non-media interests. Look what happened to Cenk Uygur. MSNBC, which very much considers itself "part of the establishment," demands that its on-air personalities reflect that status. How many journalists practice self-censorship? How many purposefully avoid reporting anything that might be perceived as being adversarial to the political and financial establishment?  How many are themselves a part of that elite establishment?

Bill Moyers in a recent interview with Rachel Maddow explained that

the corporate climate that prevails at large media companies significantly restricts and constrains what can be said. A form of self-censorship arises based on knowledge of what the corporate culture will and will not tolerate. I served time at CBS News seven years in all. I was here at MSNBC for the launch of it 15 years ago. I worked at NBC. But I saw in every one of those environments the growth of the shadow of self censorship... I happen to know that when I was here, Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger did their best to mute my influence on The Nightly News because of the freedom and independence Andy Lack, who was then the president of NBC News, had given me. It's up there all the time, like gathering storm clouds…I must say out of the Murdoch scandal has come a reminder of the importance of a free and independent press.  The journalists who have been dogging this story for the last six years worked for The Guardian, which is one of the great newspapers in the western world. The Guardian is run by a trust -- a public trust, set up by the founding family to make sure that The Guardian would always be commercially and editorially independent. We have been reminded that in the end, democracy depends upon maybe even just a few independent voices, free of any party or commercial allegiance.

Where has our media been in uncovering Murdoch and Fox news in our nation?  Not at MSNBC.

Naomi Wolf has warned about the erosion of democracy and fascism creeping into America. She feared that Americans could not see the warning signs:

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree -- domestically -- as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government -- the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors -- we scarcely recognize the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of ‘homeland’ security -- remember who else was keen on the word ‘homeland’ -- didn't raise the alarm bells it might have. It is right beneath our very noses.

The warning bells are ringing…the Obama administration is trumping the Bush administration in spades closing our open society; repressive laws and militarism; the influx of corporate money into politics, swamping it with special interests that buy influence for policies and politicians; runaway inequality and class warfare; aggressive union busting tactics by business and government to break labor unions and prevent workers from organizing; an economic collapse and an erosion of stability with millions of home foreclosures and shredding of social services, turning a financial crisis into a social crisis; a right-wing populist movement that puts economic terrorism and its own agenda before the interests of the nation, that wants to crush its opponents, that is managed and manipulated by shadowy political operatives and financed by a few billionaires (Koch brothers) who support their warped version of radical populism; armed militias to deal with the exaggerated fears of immigrants; deep polarization with hateful rhetoric; contempt for human rights because of the fear of enemies and the need for security; the approval of torture, summary executions, assassinations, and indefinite imprisonment of prisoners without due process; so-called enemies (Muslims) turned into scapegoats in a patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe; the squelching of any debate; a nation controlled by lobbyists and private interests, Wall Street, the military-industrial complex etc., etc.

Senator Huey Long of Louisiana once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.”

This process is already far along in the USA.

It does not require a lurid march on Washington to take root. “The best propaganda is that which works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative,” wrote Joseph Goebbels. Most Germans never noticed the early Nazi transformation of German society.

The really dangerous American fascist ... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection. - Henry A. Wallace, New York Times, April 9, 1944

So, Ms. Burns, how has the media catalyst been doing so far in dealing with these darker forces that now threaten us?