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On the Media

@onthemedia.bsky.social

A weekly radio show and podcast on all things media produced and distributed by WNYC Studios — onthemedia.org Hosted by @brookegladstone.bsky.social & @micahloewinger.bsky.social

28,602 Followers  |  788 Following  |  482 Posts  |  Joined: 10.06.2023
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Posts by On the Media (@onthemedia.bsky.social)

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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...

04.03.2026 09:03 — 👍 760    🔁 442    💬 39    📌 43
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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...

04.03.2026 22:12 — 👍 1136    🔁 472    💬 211    📌 562
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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.

04.03.2026 20:24 — 👍 1450    🔁 362    💬 245    📌 117
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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.

04.03.2026 00:11 — 👍 554    🔁 97    💬 18    📌 6
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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...

04.03.2026 21:12 — 👍 7    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0
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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

04.03.2026 20:14 — 👍 3714    🔁 1036    💬 342    📌 186
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.

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).

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.

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

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

06.09.2025 08:13 — 👍 3784    🔁 1898    💬 110    📌 390
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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

02.03.2026 21:23 — 👍 840    🔁 179    💬 129    📌 326
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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...

03.03.2026 14:07 — 👍 1155    🔁 715    💬 31    📌 117

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.

03.03.2026 04:01 — 👍 12    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0
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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-...

03.03.2026 00:01 — 👍 199    🔁 75    💬 14    📌 8

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.

02.03.2026 19:46 — 👍 8    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0
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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 been four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Filmmaker Craig Renaud reflects on his Oscar-nominated doc, “Armed Only with a Camera,” which describes the legacy of his brother, the first American journalist killed by Russian forces in Ukraine: lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

02.03.2026 17:05 — 👍 8    🔁 3    💬 1    📌 1
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Hey, cool. @lastweektonight.com just did a segment using reporting I did w/ @farooqumar.bsky.social

Oliver was talking about body cams--and how law enforcement agencies have often undermined their potential

The same body-cams Dems are centering that ICE reforms on

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP4_...

02.03.2026 16:24 — 👍 712    🔁 164    💬 4    📌 7
Brandon Straka: I’m at the Pentagon this morning for a briefing with 
@SecWar
 
@PeteHegseth
 on the Iran strikes. Session starts in 10 minutes.

Brandon Straka: I’m at the Pentagon this morning for a briefing with @SecWar @PeteHegseth on the Iran strikes. Session starts in 10 minutes.

Here's a Jan. 6 rioter posing with a press pass before Pete Hegseth's press conference, just to give you a sense of the type of "journalists" who were in the Pentagon briefing room this morning.

02.03.2026 14:35 — 👍 3297    🔁 1442    💬 124    📌 76
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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.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 2025 was the most violent year for journalists in three decades. Hear where, and why, reporters and media personnel are under threat lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

02.03.2026 14:05 — 👍 15    🔁 4    💬 1    📌 0
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The money behind the new Iran War In private calls over the last several weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman urged President Trump to attack Iran.

1. According to multiple reports both Saudi Arabia and the UAE lobbied Trump to attack Iran.

Both countries have increased their influence with Trump by investing billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

02.03.2026 13:39 — 👍 2081    🔁 1150    💬 127    📌 175

This is basically my argument in my new @wired.com essay — we haven’t even finished dealing with the downstream consequences of the LAST upheaval in Iran: www.wired.com/story/5-big-...

02.03.2026 02:52 — 👍 177    🔁 54    💬 10    📌 4
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It appears a hospital in Teheran has now been hit.

www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

01.03.2026 21:17 — 👍 650    🔁 332    💬 78    📌 91
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Polymarket defends its decision to allow betting on war as ‘invaluable’ Everything is gambling now, even human suffering.

Polymarket defends its decision to allow betting on war as ‘invaluable’

28.02.2026 20:50 — 👍 630    🔁 208    💬 121    📌 376
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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.

Filmmaker Craig Renaud on his Oscar-nominated short, “Armed Only with a Camera,” a tribute to his brother, the first American journalist killed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine: lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

01.03.2026 18:05 — 👍 18    🔁 4    💬 1    📌 0
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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.

“Media capture,” is a phrase scholars have been using to describe the phenomena of public interests losing possession of the press to political and corporate players. @victorpickard.bsky.social on why the American system was set up to be snatched away from the start lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

01.03.2026 15:00 — 👍 34    🔁 14    💬 0    📌 1
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The Man With a Plan to Reshape Broadcast TV | On the Media | WNYC Studios Late night host Stephen Colbert has accused CBS of spiking an interview for fear of backlash from the Federal Communications Commission. On this week’s On the Media, hear about the MA...

Listen to the full conversation here: www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

01.03.2026 14:52 — 👍 7    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0
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Donald Trump’s FCC has been coming after the broadcast networks for their so-called political biases. @brookegladstone.bsky.social spoke with the conservative lawyer behind it all.

01.03.2026 14:50 — 👍 52    🔁 21    💬 4    📌 2
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You Burned the City Just before the US entered World War II, CBS held a dinner for Edward R. Murrow. It's more important than ever to read the words spoken that night: a testimony to the power of witnessing.

"You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead — were all men’s dead — were mankind’s dead — and ours." Archibald MacLeish, Dec. 2, 1941. continuous-wave.beehiiv.com/p/you-burned...

01.03.2026 13:41 — 👍 24    🔁 12    💬 1    📌 4
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Hell Gate We are a subscriber-funded, worker-owned news outlet about New York City, named for the city's sturdiest (and handsomest) bridge over its most treacherous currents.

Just about 24 hours are left in our Hell Gate "Welcome to Fear City" T-shirt sale! Grab an annual Believer subscription for 25% off the usual price, get a slick tee. Don't wait! hellgatenyc.com/hell-gate-t-...

01.03.2026 04:45 — 👍 10    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0
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X Is Drowning in Disinformation Following US and Israel’s Attack on Iran WIRED has reviewed hundreds of posts on X that promote misleading claims about the locations and scale of the attack.

NEW: X Is *drowning* in disinformation following US and Israel’s attack on Iran. WIRED has reviewed hundreds of posts on X that promote misleading claims about the locations and scale of the attack.

read @davidgilbert.bsky.social:

28.02.2026 22:43 — 👍 1344    🔁 548    💬 54    📌 78
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Why Apple’s move to video could endanger podcasting's greatest power - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Apple is adding video support to its podcasting apps — that’s great. But the way it’s doing so might jeopardize the openness that’s kept podcasting from getting enshittified like every other form of media. It’s not too late for them to fix this. anildash.com/2026/02/28/a...

01.03.2026 01:52 — 👍 213    🔁 53    💬 9    📌 4
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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 headline finding is this was another record year for journalist killings after the record that we saw in 2024. 129 killed worldwide which is more than any year since CPJ began collecting data back in 1992.” - CPJ CEO @jodieginsberg.bsky.social lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

28.02.2026 20:10 — 👍 15    🔁 7    💬 0    📌 0