On the Media

On the Media The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger examine threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.

There’s been a lot of talk about “democratic backsliding.” But what about “democratic resilience”? w/@zackbeauchamp.bsky.social lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

On the Media The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger examine threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.

“We've had an actual debate for 70 years over when and how to use the most lethal weapons…. Are we in that situation? Do we have an executive we can trust with the future of the world?”
Catch Brooke’s interview with @sivav.bsky.social on AI-powered weapons: lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

A federal judge in DC rules that Kari Lake was not lawfully appointed and that actions she took as the claimed head of USAGM "shall have no force or effect," including last August's RIFs at the Voice of America.

Evidence Grows That Google's AI Overviews Have Eviscerated the Media Industry Google's AI overviews have eviscerated the media landscape, with some top publications losing up to 97 percent of their web traffic.

Welp. The internet had a nice run.

Some outlets have lost over 90% of their traffic since the "AI" summaries rolled out.

"...the four worst-hit publications [now] get less monthly web traffic combined than the r/ChatGPT subreddit gets on its own."

On the Media The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger examine threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.

A look at the unusual contract battle between the US government and Anthropic, the maker of the AI tools embedded in many of its systems, with @alanrozenshtein.com lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

The Ellisons Prepare to Expand Their Media Empire | On the Media | WNYC Studios Media capture, media danger, and media power

🎧 Must listen ep of @wnyc.org’s @onthemedia.bsky.social:
➡️ CPJ CEO @jodieginsberg.bsky.social on the record journalist killings in 2025
➡️ Craig Renaud on his film, “Armed Only With a Camera,” about his brother who was killed reporting on the front lines of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

On the Media The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger examine threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.

“It's not impossible to imagine that one of the norms in countries like the United States, where democracy has come under threat by a major political faction, is ping-ponging between authoritarianism and democracy" - @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

This week on @onthemedia.bsky.social you can hear me discuss horrible things being horrible. Have a great weekend!

👍🏻 Great episode and a MUST listen about threats to democracy, ethics of AI targeting in Iran, and dangerous future of automated warfare. Fascinating interview with Zack Beauchamp about countries who have experienced democracy backslide and what we can do to protect our own democracy.

On the Media The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger examine threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.

The US military used AI tools for real-time targeting in its strikes on Iran, even as the government feuded with the maker of those tools. Hear more from Brooke’s convos with @sivav.bsky.social and @alanrozenshtein.com: lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

The AI-Powered War Machines Are Here | On the Media | WNYC Studios The US military used AI tools for real-time targeting in its strikes on Iran. On this week’s On the Media, what recent conflicts can tell us about AI-powered weapons and the dangerous...

I might not know what to say about the world right now, but I'm grateful @onthemedia.bsky.social and @brookegladstone.bsky.social know who can speak to the madness. Another excellent episode. Thank you,  Siva Vaidhyanathan, @alanrozenshtein.com, and @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social.

Really appreciated the opportunity to talk to @brookegladstone.bsky.social @onthemedia.bsky.social about the Anthropic-OpenAI-Pentagon mess. www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

📻 Tune into this week’s show, featuring: @sivav.bsky.social, @alanrozenshtein.com, and @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

Grammarly is using our identities without permission Grammarly’s AI stole my boss’s identity.

lol this absolutely sucks

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Welcome to Bluesky @doctorow.pluralistic.net !!!

Chart showing in many countries, people see their fellow citizens as morally good.

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country.

The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: www.pewresearch.org/...

👀

The international boycott of ChatGPT has absolutely exploded.

2.5M people have already joined, and this is just the beginning.

Go to quitgpt.org.
Cancel your subscription, delete your account.
And tell at least one person why.

My op-ed: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The White House just posted a video mixing real footage from the Iran strikes with a killstreak animation from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

x.com/WhiteHouse/s...

MOSKOWITZ: I want to give you a chance to answer on the record Rep. Kamlager-Dove's question about sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski

NOEM: The tabloids you are quoting are insane

MOSKOWITZ: So it's a no?

NOEM: You say conservative women are stupid or sluts. I am neither.

This very brief message will begin appearing on 9NEWS during NBC Nightly News and other programs.

I appreciate 9NEWS/TEGNA making space for a quick word about journalism in this moment and what our @nexton9news.bsky.social team tries to accomplish.

A New Doc Questions The Legacy of "To Catch A Predator" | On the Media | WNYC Studios “To Catch a Predator” aired on television as a segment of NBC’s Dateline in the early 2000's. Men would be lured into talking online to a decoy posing as a child then would show up at...

On the podcast today, a new interview with the director of "Predators," a 2025 documentary about one of the most popular and influential true crime shows ever: www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

KAMLAGER-DOVE: At any point in your tenure at DHS, have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski?

NOEM: You're peddling tabloid garbage

K: You should be able to answer if someone asks if a federal official is sleeping with their subordinate

NOEM: It's garbage

K: It's about your judgment

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina is up on stage as the last event of the day. He cites being anti crypto, anti prediction markets and anti gambling as why Democrats are losing young men. Messina is on the board of Blockchain .com and lobbied for the American Gaming Association

CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar t...

New from 404 Media: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples' movements, according to an internal DHS document. Shows for the first time DHS tracked phones via process for putting ads in ordinary apps—video games, fitness apps, many more www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-i...

This interview is essential helpful for understanding the stakes and potential outcomes of the accelerating oligarchic capture of US media. My first experience as a grad student was visiting the CEU (RIP) in Budapest in 2010 and everyone knew even then that media capture was central to Orban plan.

New York Times runs in-house ad asking listeners to “support any news organization dedicated to original reporting” The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has voiced a new ad encouraging listeners to support any news organization dedicated to original reporting — even if it's not the Times. It's Sulzberger's...

"Not asking you to click on any link, just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand, fact-based reporting."

A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, urging people to support "original reporting" wherever they find it.

www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/new-...

Strongly suggest listening to this week's #OnTheMedia. Three very important stories from the breath of this moment in history. This story about #BrentRenaud is deeply moving. I want to watch the full documentary. We've got to stare what's happening in the face so we can respond like humans.