Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was released from Russian captivity on Thursday as part of the largest prisoner swap between Russia and Western nations in decades. Gershkovich had been imprisoned for nearly 500 days and was recently sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony.

Gershkovich was arrested in March 2023 while on assignment in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Russian authorities claimed he was obtaining information for the CIA, though the allegations against Gershkovich are widely assumed to be false and have been denied strenuously by the Journal. 

Gershkovich was released around 11:20 a.m. Eastern time at an airport in Ankara, Turkey. Several other prisoners were also released, including Russia-critical journalists Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, and American former Marine Paul Whelan, who had been imprisoned since 2018. Russian hit man Vadim Krasikov, who was imprisoned in Germany after receiving a life sentence for killing a Chechen rebel, was released back to Russia as part of the deal.

In total, the swap involved two dozen prisoners from at least six countries, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"The exchange is emblematic of a new era of state-sponsored hostage-taking by autocratic governments seeking leverage over rivals. It was negotiated as tensions soared between Russia and the West over the war in Ukraine," the Journal reported on Thursday. "It also offers sobering evidence of the asymmetry between the U.S. and Russia in this new, piratical order. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin can order foreigners plucked from restaurants and hotels and given lengthy prison sentences on spurious charges—something an American leader can't do."

While this is the largest prisoner swap the U.S. has engaged in in recent years to free citizens imprisoned in Russia, it isn't its first. In December 2022, WNBA player Brittney Griner was released in a swap for notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout after being held for almost nine months on drug charges. While securing the release of Griner, Gershkovich, and other American citizens from wrongful Russian captivity is vital, it may also work to incentivize Russian authorities to continue jailing Americans on false charges.

"The deal that secured their freedom was a feat of diplomacy," President Joe Biden said shortly after Thursday's prisoner swap. "Some of these women and men have been unjustly held for years. All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over….I will not stop working until every American wrongfully detained or held hostage around the world is reunited with their family."

The post <i>Wall Street Journal</i> Reporter Evan Gershkovich Released From Russian Captivity appeared first on Reason.com.

When Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry started in this magazine’s New York office in 1979, she was issued the standard tools of the trade: notebooks, purple-colored pencils for making edits and corrections on page proofs, a push-button telephone wired into a WATS line for unlimited long distance calling, and an IBM Selectric typewriter, “the latest and greatest technology, from my perspective,” she recalled recently.

And she put that typewriter through its paces. “In this period she was doing deep and outstanding reporting on major Silicon Valley startups, outposts, and institutions, most notably Xerox PARC,” says Editorial Director for Content Development Glenn Zorpette, who began his career at IEEE Spectrum five years later. “She did some of this reporting and writing with Paul Wallich, another staffer in the 1980s. Together they produced stories that hold up to this day as invaluable records of a pivotal moment in Silicon Valley history.”

Indeed, the October 1985 feature story about Xerox PARC, which she cowrote with Wallich in 1985, ranks as Perry’s favorite article.

“While now it’s widely known that PARC invented history-making technology and blew its commercialization—there have been entire books written about that—Paul Wallich and I were the first to really dig into what had happened at PARC,” she says. “A few of the key researchers had left and were open to talking, and some people who were still there had hit the point of being frustrated enough to tell their stories. So we interviewed a huge number of them, virtually all in person and at length. Think about who we met! Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Alvy Ray Smith, Bob Metcalfe, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, Richard Shoup, Bert Sutherland, Charles Simonyi, Lynn Conway, and many others.”

“I know without a doubt that my path and those of my younger women colleagues have been smoothed enormously by the very fact that Tekla came before us and showed us the way.” –Jean Kumagai

After more than seven years of reporting trips to Silicon Valley, Perry relocated there permanently as Spectrum’s first “field editor.”

Over the course of more than four decades, Perry became known for her profiles of Valley visionaries and IEEE Medal of Honor recipients, most recently Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. She established working relationships—and, in some cases, friendships—with some of the most important people in Northern California tech, including Kay and Smith, Steve Wozniak (Apple), Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell (Atari), Andy Grove (Intel), Judy Estrin (Bridge, Cisco, Packet Design), and John Hennessy (chairperson of Alphabet and former president of Stanford).

Just as her interview subjects were regarded as pioneers in their fields, Perry herself ranks as a pioneer for women tech journalists. As the first woman editor hired at Spectrum and one of a precious few women journalists reporting on technology at the time, she blazed a trail that others have followed, including several current Spectrum staff members.

“Tekla had already been at Spectrum for 20 years when I joined the staff,” Executive Editor Jean Kumagai told me. “I know without a doubt that my path and those of my younger women colleagues have been smoothed enormously by the very fact that Tekla came before us and showed us the way.”

Perry is retiring this month after 45 years of service to IEEE and its members. We’re sad to see her go and I know many readers are, too—from personal experience. I met an IEEE Life Member for breakfast a few weeks ago. I asked him, as an avid Spectrum reader since 1964, what he liked most about it. He began talking about Perry’s stories, and how she inspired him through the years. The connections forged between reader and writer are rare in this age of blurbage and spew, but the way Perry connected readers to their peers was, well, peerless. Just like Perry herself.

This article appears in the August 2024 print issue.

If ExTwitter is the bastion of free speech, you would think that it would allow for the publishing of newsworthy documents revealing a politician’s funding briefings, right? Apparently not when that politician is politically aligned with Elon Musk, whose commitment to open discourse appears to be about as floppy as the Cybertruck’s giant windshield wiper.

It’s been a little while since we’ve had one of these posts, but it remains important: Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist” and repeatedly insists that he bought Twitter and turned it into ExTwitter to “bring back” free speech. However, over and over again we see him delete speech, often on ideological grounds.

Remember, Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist.”

He also claims, bizarrely, that free speech means “that which matches the law” (which seems to contradict his claims above about disobeying orders from governments to block certain speech).

He also repeatedly claims that ExTwitter “will fight for your freedom to speak” and that “Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends.”

But, of course, the second someone semi-powerful whom Elon agrees with is aggrieved, well, down go the tweets. Witness the situation faced by reporter Pablo Manriquez, who ended up with the briefing notes that some poor schlub of a Ted Cruz staffer accidentally left somewhere to be picked up.

Manriquez went to ExTwitter, home of “free speech,” to report on what he got his hands on in a nice thread of posts with images of all the documents. Or maybe not:

Yeah, that image is the current entirety of Pablo’s nine post thread. Only the first and last tweets are shown, and all seven in the middle — the ones that at one point showed the documents in question — have been removed because, the screenshot shows, “This Post violated the X Rules.”

I went through “The X Rules” and couldn’t find anything this credibly violated. The closest would have to be the rule against publishing “private information.” But that rule describes private information as things like “home phone number and address.”

Going through the more detailed policy on private information, I still don’t see anything that could possibly qualify with this data dump. It also claims that the company takes into account what type of info is being shared, who is sharing it, and why. All of those would suggest this did not violate the policy, as it’s information in the public interest, being shared in a reporting fashion, in a manner that does not really violate anyone’s privacy, nor put anyone at risk (except of embarrassment).

Now, it is true that a few of the documents show the phone number of the Cruz staffer who will be tagging along for the meetings. So, arguably, you could say that would trigger a privacy violation as well. But not all of the removed tweets had that. And I just did a quick search on the staffer’s name and “phone number”, and the top Google result shows the exact same phone number. So it’s not exactly “private” information. Some of the docs also show some other phone numbers, or the names of family members, but nothing that seems particularly sensitive. Indeed, much of it appears to be copied from public bios that mention the family members.

But, fine, if Musk/Cruz defenders want to insist that this is obviously still a violation of the policy on private information then… wouldn’t the same be true of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

I can see no world in which the information from Hunter Biden’s laptop is not more private than some briefing notes regarding Ted Cruz being told to ask Ron Lauder to donate the maximum possible, a combined $119,200 to his various campaign and political PACs. It’s a nice way to “legally” donate way more than what the public believes are the official limits on individual campaign donations.

Anyway, Musk’s attempt to block these tweets from being shared didn’t work very well. The ThreadReader app captured them all, and I’ll include them below as well (though I’ll blur out some info to be nice, not because I think it needs to be blurred). Meanwhile, both Newsweek and Business Insider reported on the details of the documents, highlighting how newsworthy they are.

To be clear: there’s nothing nefarious in these docs. I can guarantee that every Senator has similar briefing notes revealing similar requests for money. It is, however, revealing to the public how the fundraising game is played, as the Business Insider piece notes. And that makes it extremely newsworthy.

Publishing these docs may be embarrassing, but they break no laws. So, Musk’s claims of his definition of free speech matching the laws is already shown to be bullshit.

And, of course, as we’ve always said, it’s Musk’s platform. He is absolutely free to have whatever rules in place he wants and to delete whatever content he thinks should be deleted. That’s part of his own free speech rights.

But the same was true of Twitter before Musk took it over. It wasn’t an “attack on free speech” when Twitter removed some content that violated its rules, nor is it one when Musk does it.

It would just be nice if Musk and/or his fans would recognize that he’s no more of a “free speech” warrior than the old Twitter was. Indeed, as we’ve highlighted, the old Twitter was actually willing to stand up to more government demands and push back on real attacks on free speech way more often than Musk’s ExTwitter has.

I’ve noted more than a few times that the primary problem with U.S. journalism is the fact that most major media outlets are owned by out of touch billionaire brunchlords who genuinely don’t understand the modern media environment, can’t see their own gender, race, or class biases, and often have absolutely no earthly fucking idea what they’re actually doing.

You can see this very clearly at places like Politico, where political coverage often takes a feckless “both sides” approach to factual reality. This “view from nowhere,” as NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen dubbed it, presents everything from fascist insurrection to climate changes as a perfect symmetrical debate between two valid sides.

It’s a timidity and aversion to the actual truth, born from a fear of upsetting sources, advertisers, event sponsors, and those in power. And, because this kind of journalism is incapable of clearly calling out fascism and bigotry, it’s being broadly abused and exploited by authoritarians.

Current Politico owner Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no idea this broken media paradigm even exists, much less any inkling on how to fix it. The same appears to go for former Politico owner Robert Allbritton, who recently started a new journalism finishing school profiled last week in the Washington Post.

The underlying organization is called the Allbritton Journalism Institute. AJI in turn runs what they’re calling a “teaching hospital for journalism” dubbed NOTUS, or News of the United States. Journalists I know tell me NOTUS is doing some good work, though WAPO kind of buries a claim that the nonprofit may have been launched as a way for Allbritton to get back into media without violating his noncompete.

But the Washington Post report on the project raises a few red flags, beginning with a claim by Allbritton that he created the project because there apparently just aren’t any good journalists out there to hire:

“Allbritton believes there’s a dearth of good reporter candidates out there, and a need for the real-world training once provided by places like Politico, which he sold in 2021.

“Talking to a ton of senior-to-mid-level execs in media, the constant refrain is: ‘I can’t find great people,’” he said in an interview. “It’s really hard to hire good people.”

There’s actually an over-abundance of quality journalists out there thanks to record layoffs caused, in large part, due to rampant misspending and incompetence among the brunchlord set (see the Vice and The Messenger shitshows as just the latest examples). I’ve lost track of the number of phenomenally talented editors and journalists I know who have been shitcanned in recent years.

Later in the article, Allbritton starts to explain in detail precisely what he thinks is wrong with most modern journalists, and while he couches his language a bit, it starts to become pretty clear that his primary concern is all the damn wokeness:

“There was definitely a kind of a woke kind of shift that took place within newsrooms,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it’s radical. It’s not. But there’s some social-warrior believers in there. I’m not sure they use their voices, but definitely believers. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s good to have an opinion. But it does make it a little harder to get to the truth if you’re coming in there with either a liberal bias or a conservative bias.”

There’s some nice tap dancing there, but the use of “woke” and “social-warrior believers” (SJWs) as pejoratives indicates that the real thing Allbritton doesn’t like about modern journalism is all the damn class, gender, and race awareness. Albritton claims he wants a journalism finishing school that reflects “a variety of political ideologies,” and yet here’s the kind of folks WAPO says are getting fellowships:

“This year’s cohort of fellows is diverse and includes students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the news industry, including a fellow who attended a Christian college and one who served as an artillery officer in the U.S. Army for seven years.”

Yes Christianity and the military, two woefully underrepresented segments of American society.

So, look, any money being doled into journalism is good. And I’m sure the NOTUS fellows are doing some decent work. I hope they’re being paid a living wage with high-end luxuries like health care and time off, and I also hope that this entire effort isn’t shuttered in six months after it’s revealed that Allbritton blew the entire budget on outsized compensation and lavish brand parties a la Sports Illustrated.

Here’s the thing that annoys me.

There’s an ocean of problems with journalism, but the idea that there’s just too damn much woke progressivism is utter delusion. U.S. journalism generally tilts center right on the political spectrum. It’s generally corporatist and pro-business to a comical degree. Often it’s too feckless to meaningfully critique wealth and power. Routinely it traffics in engagement-chasing distraction, not knowledge.

The tech press, in particular, operates basically as an extension of tech company marketing departments. There certainly is occasionally good journalism (ProPublica’s exploration of the Supreme Court, Reuters’ investigations into Tesla), but by and large the folks in charge of major U.S. media institutions are building a badly automated ad-engagement ouroboros for which the truth is a pretty distant fucking afterthought.

This all directly reflects the bias and interests of an out of touch billionaire extraction class that’s either blind to its own biases, or desperate to pretend they don’t exist. In the wake of Black Lives Matter and COVID there was some fleeting recommendations to the ivy league establishment media that we could perhaps take a slightly more well-rounded, inclusive approach to journalism.

In response, the trust fund lords in charge of these establishment outlets lost their fucking minds, started crying incessantly about young journalists “needing safe spaces,” and decided to double down on all their worst impulses, having learned less than nothing along the way. Reading Allbritton’s lamentations about the wokes you don’t really get the sense he learned much of anything from the voyage either.

There’s a reason U.S. journalism is falling apart. There’s a reason journalists are increasingly crafting their own newsletters or building smaller, journalist-owned news outlets. And (unless you’re a Matt Taibbi type looking to exploit the modern right’s bottomless victimization complex) it has very little to do with diabolical wokeism, or the handful of progressive voices begging for journalism that doesn’t suck.

"In 2016," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe writes, quoting Democracy Docket's Marc Elias, "Donald Trump seemed to pull an inside straight by narrowly winning" Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin "while losing the popular vote by 3 million. We now know Trump committed 34 felonies to win that election. Without these crimes, he seems almost certain to have lost to Hillary Clinton. She would have been sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. She would have filled two Supreme Court vacancies and enacted her legislative agenda."*

Since those 34 felonies involved falsified business records that were produced in 2017, that claim is logically impossible. Yet this gloss on the former president's New York conviction echoes similarly puzzling claims by many smart and ostensibly well-informed observers. In their eagerness to embrace the prosecution's dubious "election fraud" narrative, they nonsensically assert that Trump retroactively ensured his 2016 victory by disguising a 2017 hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services.

Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from telling her story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006. When Trump paid Cohen back in 2017, prosecutors said, he caused the falsification of business records to cover up the arrangement with Daniels by misrepresenting the reimbursement as compensation for legal work. However you view that misrepresentation, it obviously had no impact on the outcome of the election. Yet Tribe, Elias, and other people bizarrely insist that it did.

"Two years shy of this country's 250th birthday," Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said on CBS last Sunday, "12 New York jurors have convicted former president Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election." The dates of those records—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries—ranged from February 14, 2017, to December 5, 2017. All of them were created after Trump was elected. You might expect that a historian would pay attention to chronological consistency.

You might expect the same from editorialists at major newspapers. Yet according to a May 30 Washington Post editorial, the jury found Trump "guilty of felony falsification of business records in order to influence the 2016 election." A New York Times editorial published the same day likewise claimed the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." Barring time travel, of course, nothing Trump did in 2017 could have "influence[d] the 2016 election" or "prevent[ed] voters from learning about" that "sexual encounter" before they cast their ballots.

The same temporal difficulty is apparent in news coverage of Trump's trial. "Prosecutors will attempt to make the case that Trump falsified business records to tip the 2016 race," Al Jazeera said in April. "Trump faces 34 felony counts alleging that he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information to influence the 2016 presidential election," NPR reported a week later.

Judging from some accounts of the trial's outcome, prosecutors succeeded in proving that the 2017 records reached back in time to influence the 2016 election. "Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election," NPR reported. The subhead of a Times story published the day after the verdict said, "The former president was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 campaign." The Associated Press reported that the jury found Trump "guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex."

These confounding characterizations reflect the bait and switch at the heart of the case against Trump. "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in January. "It's an election interference case." In his opening statement, lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo claimed the case was about "election fraud, pure and simple."

There was nothing "pure and simple" about the case, which did not involve "election fraud" at all. Although the prosecutors repeatedly insinuated that there was something inherently criminal about trying to hide potentially damaging information from voters, that is not true. And although they averred that Cohen's payment to Daniels amounted to an illegal campaign contribution under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), that interpretation of the statute is controversial. In any case, fronting the hush money did not constitute "election fraud," which is usually understood to mean interfering with the casting, counting, or reporting of votes.

Trump was not charged with violating FECA by soliciting Cohen's "contribution." The Justice Department declined to bring that case, probably because it would have been hard to prove that Trump "knowingly and willfully" violated the statute, given the fuzziness of the distinction between personal and campaign expenditures. Even if the deadline for prosecuting Trump under FECA had not passed, Bragg would have no authority to enforce that statute. So instead he resorted to an elaborate workaround that relied on various possible combinations of interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent.

The FECA claim was just one of three dueling theories for treating Trump's alleged falsification of business records as a felony rather than a misdemeanor. The other two theories did not hinge on the assumption that the Daniels payment was illegal. And since the jurors were told they did not have to settle on any particular theory, it is not clear which one they found most compelling. Even if they split three ways on that crucial point, they were still allowed to reach a guilty verdict.

All of this is pretty confusing, so it is not surprising that many people have inaccurately described the meaning of the verdict, especially since Bragg and his underlings repeatedly misrepresented the nature of the case. But it is surprising that so many people who should know better have described the verdict in a way that could not possibly be true.

*CORRECTION: This post has been revised to clarify that Tribe was quoting Elias.

The post Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017 appeared first on Reason.com.

We’ve noted repeatedly how the primary problem with U.S. media and journalism often isn’t the actual journalists, or even the sloppy automation being used to cut corners; it’s the terrible, trust fund brunchlords that fail upwards into positions of power. The kind of owners and managers who, through malice or sheer incompetence, turn the outlets they oversee into either outright propaganda mills (Newsweek), or money-burning, purposeless mush (Vice, Buzzfeed, The Messenger, etc., etc.)

Very often these collapses are framed with the narrative that doing journalism online somehow simply can’t be profitable; something quickly disproven every time a group of journalists go off to start their own media venture without a useless executive getting outsized compensation and setting money on fire (see: 404 Media and countless other successful worker-owned journalistic ventures).

Of course these kinds of real journalistic outlets still have to scrap and fight for every nickel. At the same time, there’s just an unlimited amount of money available if you want to participate in the right wing grievance propaganda engagement economy, telling white young males that all of their very worst instincts are correct (see: Rogan, Taibbi, Rufo, Greenwald, Tracey, Tate, Peterson, etc. etc. etc. etc.).

One key player in this far right delusion farm, failed Presidential opportunist Vivek Ramaswamy, recently tried to ramp up his own make believe efforts to “fix journalism.” He did so by purchasing an 8 percent stake in what’s left of Buzzfeed after it basically gave up on trying to do journalism last year.

Ramaswamy’s demands are silly toddler gibberish, demanding that the outlet pivot to video, and hire such intellectual heavyweights as Tucker Carlson and Aaron Rodgers:

“Mr. Ramaswamy is pushing BuzzFeed to add three new members to its board of directors, to hone its focus on audio and video content and to embrace “greater diversity of thought,” according to a copy of his letter shared with The New York Times.”

By “greater diversity of thought,” he means pushing facts-optional right wing grievance porn and propaganda pretending to be journalism, in a bid to further distract the public from issues of substance, and fill American heads with pudding.

But it sounds like Ramaswamy couldn’t even do that successfully. For one thing, Buzzfeed simply isn’t relevant as a news company any longer. Gone is the real journalism peppered between cutesy listicles, replaced mostly with mindless engagement bullshit. For another, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti (and affiliates) still hold 96 percent of the Class B stock, giving them 50 times voting rights of Ramaswamy.

So as Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge notes, Ramaswamy is either trying to goose and then sell his stock, or is engaging in a hollow and performative PR exercise where he can pretend that he’s “fixing liberal media.” Or both. The entire venture is utterly purposeless and meaningless:

“You’ve picked Buzzfeed because the shares are cheap, and because you have a grudge against a historically liberal outlet. It doesn’t matter that Buzzfeed News no longer exists — you’re still mad that it famously published the Steele dossier and you want to replace a once-respected, Pulitzer-winning brand with a half-assed “creators” plan starring Tucker Carlson and Aaron Rodgers. Really piss on your enemies’ graves, right, babe?”

While Ramaswamy’s bid is purely decorative, it, of course, was treated as a very serious effort to “fix journalism” by other pseudo-news outlets like the NY Post, The Hill, and Fox Business. It’s part of the broader right wing delusion that the real problem with U.S. journalism isn’t that it’s improperly financed and broadly mismanaged by raging incompetents, but that it’s not dedicated enough to coddling wealth and power. Or telling terrible, ignorant people exactly what they want to hear.

Of course none of this is any dumber than what happens in the U.S. media sector every day, as the Vice bankruptcy or the $50 million dollar Messenger implosion so aptly illustrated. U.S. journalism isn’t just dying, the corpses of what remains are being abused by terrible, wealthy puppeteers with no ideas and nothing of substance to contribute (see the postmortem abuse of Newsweek or Sports Illustrated), and in that sense Vivek fits right in.

Sylvia Gonzalez, a former Castle Hills, Texas, city council member, plausibly alleges that she was arrested on a trumped-up charge in retaliation for conduct protected by the First Amendment. So does Priscilla Villarreal, an independent journalist in Laredo, Texas. But in backing up that claim, Gonzalez, whose case will soon be decided by the Supreme Court, faces a problem that Villarreal does not: It is hard to say how often people engage in the conduct that police cited to justify her arrest, which involved putting a petition in her personal folder during a city council meeting. Villarreal, by contrast, was arrested for asking questions, something that journalists across the country do every day.

Last January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit nevertheless ruled, in an opinion by Judge Edith Jones that provoked four sharp dissents authored or joined by seven of her colleagues, that Villarreal's arrest was not "obviously unconstitutional." Thirteen briefs supporting Villarreal's petition for Supreme Court review—submitted by an ideologically diverse mix of groups and individuals, including organizations ranging from the Manhattan Institute to the Constitutional Accountability Center—underline the chilling implications of that astonishing conclusion.

"No right is more fundamental to the practice of journalism than the one the Fifth Circuit declined to recognize: the right to ask public officials for information," a brief submitted by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 21 news organizations notes. They urge the Supreme Court to resolve the "chilling uncertainty" created by the appeals court's decision and "reaffirm the fundamental proposition that '[a] free press cannot be made to rely solely upon the sufferance of government to supply it with information.'"

Villarreal, who is represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is asking the Supreme Court to uphold that principle, which her arrest blatantly violated. Her alleged crime, the Institute for Justice notes, consisted of "peacefully asking a police officer to corroborate information for two developing stories—a routine due-diligence and newsgathering practice used by journalists across the country." The two stories, which Villarreal posted on her locally popular Facebook page, involved a public suicide and a fatal car crash. Villarreal asked a Laredo police officer to confirm information about those incidents that Villarreal had received from other sources. By doing that, police and prosecutors claimed, Villarreal committed two felonies.

To justify those charges, police cited Section 39.06(c) of the Texas Penal Code, an obscure, rarely invoked law that applies to someone who "solicits or receives from a public servant" information that "has not been made public" with the "intent to obtain a benefit." The claim that Villarreal had violated that law was absurd for several reasons.

First, Section 39.06(c), which deals with "misuse of official information," is part of a chapter addressing "abuse of office." Its roots go back to a 1973 law that applied to "a public servant" who "acquires or aids another to acquire a pecuniary interest in any property, transaction, or enterprise that may be affected by" information that "has not been made public" but to which "he has access in his official capacity." The statute also covered "a public servant" who "speculates or aids another to speculate on the basis of the information." Over the years, legislators broadened the definition of the offense, reclassified it as a felony, and expanded the law beyond government officials. But in light of its history and statutory context, Section 39.06(c) is clearly aimed at curtailing official corruption, not journalism.

Second, the Texas Penal Code defines "benefit" as "anything reasonably regarded as economic gain or advantage." What "economic gain or advantage" did Villarreal allegedly seek to obtain by asking a cop about a suicide and an accident? According to the arrest affidavits, it was an increase in her Facebook traffic. Jones' opinion, which drips with contempt for Villarreal's "journalistic style," notes that she "boasts over one hundred thousand Facebook followers and a well-cultivated reputation, which has engendered publicity in the New York Times, free meals 'from appreciative readers,' 'fees for promoting a local business,' and 'donations for new equipment necessary to her citizen journalism efforts.'" This sweeping definition of "benefit" would apply to any journalist who attracts readers and/or earns money by publishing information that previously "has not been made public."

Third, Section 39.06 defines "information that has not been made public" as "any information to which the public does not generally have access" that is also "prohibited from disclosure" under the Texas Public Information Act (TPIA). The arrest affidavits did not address the latter requirement at all. The 5th Circuit suggested the information that Villarreal obtained was covered by Section 552.108(a)(1) of the TPIA, which says government officials do not have to disclose information when doing so might compromise an ongoing investigation. While law enforcement agencies frequently invoke that vague provision, the information it covers is not "prohibited from disclosure." The TPIA explicitly gives agencies the discretion to release information even when they are not required to do so.

The MuckRock Foundation, which "has helped thousands of journalists, professionals, and ordinary citizens request, share, and understand public records," notes that Laredo's reading of Section 39.06(c) would lead to "the absurd result of imposing liability not only on those who seek 'confidential' information, but on those who request information that the government may, but need not, make public." Under that interpretation, anyone who asks for information that is deemed to be covered by a TPIA exception is committing a felony. As a brief from half a dozen journalists (including me) explains, Texas agencies that don't want to disclose information frequently seek support from the state attorney general's office, which in 2015 "issued over 7,000 rulings based on § 552.108(a)(1) alone." Yet the thousands of people whose TPIA requests are rejected each year have never been "arrested or prosecuted for their requests."

Laredo cops investigated Villarreal for months, so they had plenty of time to consider whether their interpretation of Section 39.06(c) was reasonable. So did the prosecutors who signed off on the case. Yet they did not even bother to present a plausible argument that Villarreal's conduct met the elements of this offense, and they were unfazed by the obvious First Amendment problems with criminalizing basic journalism. The charges were ultimately dismissed by a judge who deemed Section 39.06(c) unconstitutionally vague.

These cops and prosecutors—who, like Jones, were irked by Villarreal's "journalistic style"—were determined to pin charges on her without regard to statutory requirements or constitutional constraints. Yet according to the 5th Circuit, they cannot be held accountable for their vindictive lawlessness because it was not "clearly established" that arresting a journalist for practicing journalism was unconstitutional. Since they supposedly had no way of knowing that, they received qualified immunity.

The Supreme Court grafted qualified immunity onto 42 USC 1983, a federal law that authorizes people to sue government officials who violate their constitutional rights. The doctrine is supposedly designed to protect officials from unanticipated liability for "split-second" decisions in situations where they have little opportunity for careful reflection. That rationale, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation notes, does not apply to the sort of "intentional and slow-moving infringement of First Amendment rights" that Villarreal's case exemplifies. The protections offered by Section 1983, the brief says, "come to nothing where state actors may purposefully infringe First Amendment rights and then rely on prolix state law to trigger qualified immunity, claiming they did not know any better."

In this case, that claim is risible. "Villarreal's arrest obviously violated the Constitution," the Institute for Justice notes. "No reasonable government official would think the First Amendment permits criminalizing plain speech or routine journalism."

Contrary to what the 5th Circuit held, the Young America's Foundation and the Manhattan Institute say, it has been "clearly established for over 50 years" that "journalists and citizens" have a First Amendment right to "ask questions of their government officials." The Supreme Court has upheld that right in a line of decisions beginning with Branzburg v. Hayes in 1972. In that case, the Court rejected the idea that "news gathering does not qualify for First Amendment protection," without which "freedom of the press could be eviscerated."

Seven years later in Smith v. Daily Mail, the Court ruled that West Virginia violated the First Amendment when it prohibited newspapers from publishing the names of juvenile offenders without judicial permission. The justices held that the First Amendment protects "routine newspaper reporting techniques" and that the government may not "punish the truthful publication" of "lawfully obtained" information. As dissenting 5th Circuit Judge James E. Graves Jr. noted, the Supreme Court "has made clear that the First Amendment protects the publication of information obtained via 'routine newspaper reporting techniques'—which include asking for the name of a crime victim from government workers not clearly authorized to share such information."

These longstanding precedents are not the only reason the cops who arrested Villarreal should have known better. As the brief I joined points out, police officers across the country are accustomed to fielding questions from reporters, and department policies frequently encourage them to "work in cooperation with the media," as a general order to Washington, D.C., officers puts it. "Based on the TPIA, police department regulations, officer training on responding to press inquiries, and personal experience dealing with reporters," the brief says, "a reasonable officer would know that journalists are permitted to ask police officers the names of accident and suicide victims. A reasonable officer would know that reporters ask for such information every day."

You might think that Villarreal's arrest, which relied on a quirky reading of a little-used law, poses little realistic threat to journalists in Texas or elsewhere. But the briefs supporting Villarreal emphasize that police can always find an excuse to arrest journalists who annoy them. The brief I joined describes a couple of examples: the 2023 arrest of NewsNation reporter Evan Lambert for "trespassing" by covering a governor's press conference in Ohio and the 2020 arrest of radio reporter Josie Huang for "obstructing a peace officer" by using her phone to record an encounter between protesters and Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies.

"Retaliatory arrests have become an increasingly common occurrence," the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) notes. "This trend is a byproduct of the ever-growing size of modern criminal codes." Thanks to those proliferating prohibitions, Justice Neil Gorsuch has observed, "almost anyone can be arrested for something." A cop "who may be inclined to punish a disfavored speaker—such as a journalist, as here—can therefore readily find a minor offense they committed and use that to justify an arrest," LEAP says. If police are emboldened to harass journalists this way, it warns, retaliatory arrests will become even more common.

That threat is especially acute for reporters who do not have the backing of a professional news outlet. Independent journalists Avi Adelman and Steven Monacelli, who "have been arrested or detained by police officers while reporting on law enforcement's public performance of their duties," note that increasingly strict police control of information may force a reporter to rely on the sort of "backchannel source" that Jones condemned Villarreal for using. "If using alternative sources exposes journalists to the risk of official retribution," Adelman and Monacelli warn, "journalists will become little more than conduits for government public relations copy."

Jones dismissed the idea that Villarreal is "a martyr for the sake of journalism." She seems to think independent reporters like Villarreal don't qualify as "real" journalists because they don't follow the rules that "mainstream, legitimate media outlets" do. In addition to criticizing Villarreal's use of a "backchannel source," a standard journalistic practice, Jones faulted her for "capitaliz[ing] on others' tragedies to propel her reputation and career," which is an apt, if cynical, description of what professional reporters routinely do. These criticisms make you wonder if Jones has ever watched the local news or noticed that "mainstream, legitimate media outlets" often carry stories that cite anonymous government sources.

Contrary to Jones' take, the critics who are urging the Supreme Court to overrule the decision she wrote include "mainstream, legitimate media outlets" such as ABC, NBC, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. It is possible they know a little bit more about how journalism works than Jones does.

The post These Strange Bedfellows Want SCOTUS To Remind the 5th Circuit That Journalism Is Not a Crime appeared first on Reason.com.

Will AI kill the five-paragraph essay? To find out, I asked my ninth grade English teacher.

The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to compose a simple thesis and defend it in a methodical, easily graded package. It's literature analysis at its most basic, and most rigid, level.

A typical five-paragraph essay asks students to pick a simple thesis, usually from a list of prompts, and compose a short introductory paragraph, followed by three paragraphs each laying out a different piece of supporting evidence, followed by a final paragraph—usually beginning, "In conclusion…."

Critics argue this assignment kills student creativity and turns writing into an exercise in pure drudgery. I tend to agree, remembering my time spent composing five-paragraph essays as soul-rending—forcing me to focus on sticking to a formula and a restrictive prompt rather than actually analyzing the books I was reading.

But the sudden ubiquity of large language models such as ChatGPT threatens to upend this status quo.

"I am *shocked* by how good OpenAI's new chat" is, University of Toronto professor Kevin Bryan tweeted after the first release of ChatGPT. "You can no longer give take-home exams/homework."

To test this hypothesis, I sat down in front of ChatGPT and gave it a classic freshman-year English prompt: "Please write me an approximately 500-word, five-paragraph essay discussing the role of Newspeak in controlling the people of Oceania in George Orwell's novel, 1984. Please use MLA formatting and include 1–2 quotes per paragraph."

In response, it spit out an—ahem—six-paragraph, 588-word essay.

"In George Orwell's dystopian novel '1984,' the ruling Party of Oceania employs Newspeak as a potent tool for controlling the thoughts and behaviors of its citizens," the essay begins. "Newspeak, a language designed to limit freedom of expression and thought, serves as a mechanism for the Party to maintain its authoritarian rule and suppress dissent. Through the manipulation of language, the Party effectively restricts the ability of individuals to articulate dissenting ideas, ultimately consolidating its power over the population."

And then I sent it to my ninth grade English teacher.

Corey Craft taught English at the Alabama School of Fine Arts for nine years and now serves as an instructor in the school's creative writing department. A decade ago, I first read 1984 for his class.

"I'd give this essay a mid-level B—an 85," he told me. "Is the content OK? Sure. It's a little surface-level…but it gets the major points right."

Yet he also noted the essay's impressive vocabulary—phrases such as "linguistic manipulation" and "reshape historical narratives"—would sound some alarm bells. "There are words and concepts used in this paper that I would find suspicious coming from the average ninth grader," Craft added.

ChatGPT also made another glaring fumble—producing a six-paragraph essay, despite my multiple attempts to rephrase the prompt so it would stick to just five paragraphs.

While the typical ninth grade cheater might not be clever enough to fix these mistakes—Craft says he sometimes sees plagiarism where students have copy-pasted text without changing the font or text color—it's only a matter of time before tools such as ChatGPT work out these kinks.

Much to the chagrin of the five-paragraph essay's harshest critics, myself included, it doesn't look like ChatGPT will spell the end of the assignment. While five-paragraph essays are achingly dull, they do serve a simple purpose—they match the median student's ability level, even if it means leaving behind the significant minority of kids who can barely read by eighth grade and infuriating a small cohort of nerds who end up getting degrees in Renaissance literature.

There simply isn't an obvious alternative to the five-paragraph essay—and certainly not one that is somehow immune from inevitable AI mimicry. In a ChatGPT-saturated world, teachers will likely resort to giving students handwritten, in-class five-paragraph essays instead of ditching the assignment entirely—even if this is "more of a pain for the student to complete and more of a pain for the teacher to grade," Craft notes.

In short, rather than reshape writing instruction, educators will find new, less technology-dependent ways to keep doing the same thing.

"That may take trial and error," Craft says, "but that's part of the fun of the job."

The post Rethinking the 5-Paragraph Essay in the Age of AI appeared first on Reason.com.

Prosecutors in Texas last week dismissed the criminal case against a journalist who, in 2021, was arrested, strip-searched, and jailed for filming police. But his lengthy legal battle is in some sense just beginning and once again demands we probe the idea that real journalists are entitled to a different set of rights than the public.

That's because Justin Pulliam, the man in question, is a citizen journalist. He is not employed by an outlet. Rather, he publishes his reporting to his YouTube channel, Corruption Report, which, true to its name, is unapologetically skeptical of state power and supportive of transparency.

The Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office (FBSCO) has allegedly been vexed by his audacity. In July 2021, Pulliam was expelled by police from a press conference because they alleged he did not qualify as media, and in December of that same year, he was arrested for videoing police at a mental health call, despite that he had stationed himself about 130 feet away from the interaction. Officer Taylor Rollins demanded Pulliam move back even further, and he obliged, although he continued to film the deputy speaking to other bystanders at the scene (none of whom were arrested).

That didn't end well for Pulliam, who was charged with interfering with police duties. (According to his complaint, Officer Ricky Rodriguez, who assisted with the arrest, told another cop at the jail that the ordeal would teach Pulliam a lesson "for fucking with us.") In April 2023, a jury was not able to reach a verdict in the case, with five jurors wanting to acquit and one urging to convict. It took law enforcement more than a year to decide not to pursue the case further.

One wonders if the Fort Bend government is smartly allocating resources in support of public safety when it doggedly went after a case because someone filmed them. Yet at a deeper level, it's worth asking if law enforcement would have taken the case to trial at all had Pulliam worked for a formal media outlet. My guess is no.

It is difficult to reconcile those two things. Journalism is, after all, an activity, consisting of collecting information and reporting it to the public. That venture is not exclusively available to people working at a full-time newsgathering organization, and the strength of the First Amendment should not hinge on whether or not you are on a media outlet's payroll. Even if Pulliam didn't consider himself a journalist at all—citizen or otherwise—his right to film the government employees he pays with his taxes should remain intact. It certainly shouldn't come at the expense of his freedom.

Whether or not he will be able to make that case before a jury in civil court is yet to be determined. Last June, Judge David Hittner of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas allowed Pulliam's federal lawsuit to proceed, declining to award the defendants qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields state and local government actors from such claims if their alleged misconduct was not already "clearly established" in the law. 

"The Individual Defendants assert no case law to support their proposition that an indictment precludes a claim for first amendment infringement," wrote Hittner. "Indeed, based on the facts alleged in the complaint, it appears Pulliam was singled out and arrested for exercising his rights under the First Amendment."

Pulliam, however, is not in the clear. He will next have to convince the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which has considered a similar case in recent months: that of Priscilla Villarreal, the citizen journalist in Laredo, Texas, who police arrested in 2017 using an obscure statute criminalizing the solicitation of nonpublic information if there is the "intent to obtain a benefit." If that description sounds a lot like standard journalism—seeking information not yet public—that's because it is. But despite attracting some strange bedfellows in her defense, Villarreal has not fared well in court.

While her case is not identical to Pulliam's, they both raise very similar questions, particularly as it relates to the idea that a certain class of journalists should get more rights than others. "Villarreal and others portray her as a martyr for the sake of journalism," wrote Judge Edith Jones in her majority opinion dismissing Villarreal's suit and giving qualified immunity to the police. "That is inappropriate," according to Jones, because Villarreal, who posts her reporting to her popular Facebook page Lagordiloca, is not a "mainstream, legitimate media outlet." Her free speech rights are suffering as a result.

The post This Journalist Was Arrested, Strip-Searched, and Jailed for Filming Police. Will He Get Justice? appeared first on Reason.com.

Enlarge / This is essentially the kind of water heater the author has hooked up, minus the Wi-Fi module that led him down a rabbit hole. Also, not 140-degrees F—yikes. (credit: Getty Images)

The hot water took too long to come out of the tap. That is what I was trying to solve. I did not intend to discover that, for a while there, water heaters like mine may have been open to anybody. That, with some API tinkering and an email address, a bad actor could possibly set its temperature or make it run constantly. That’s just how it happened.

Let’s take a step back. My wife and I moved into a new home last year. It had a Rinnai tankless water heater tucked into a utility closet in the garage. The builder and home inspector didn't say much about it, just to run a yearly cleaning cycle on it.

Because it doesn’t keep a big tank of water heated and ready to be delivered to any house tap, tankless water heaters save energy—up to 34 percent, according to the Department of Energy. But they're also, by default, slower. Opening a tap triggers the exchanger, heats up the water (with natural gas, in my case), and the device has to push it through the line to where it's needed.

Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Seemingly overnight, artificial intelligence went from a far-future science fiction technology to a real thing that is supposedly on the verge of ushering in utopia and/or killing the human race. Lost in the shuffle of this discourse is serious discussion of what AI technology can actually do and what real-world effects it is having.

Explaining actual AI products is the core of Timothy B. Lee's excellent Substack newsletter Understanding AI. Lee, a journalist (and occasional Reason contributor), refreshingly covers AI like a normal newsworthy subject. His articles include a nice range of original reporting on the companies and nonprofits producing AI, service journalism on how ChatGPT compares to Gemini, even-handed analysis of the legal and regulatory questions AI has inevitably provoked, and explainer articles on what even is a large language model.

The biggest takeaway is that, for all the boosterism and doomerism, AI will be a normal-ish technology that will have normal-ish impacts on the world. One of Lee's best entries is a deep dive into how AI has affected one of the industries where it already predominates: language translation. Turns out that prices for translation have fallen and companies consume more translation services. That's an unambiguous win for consumers.

The labor effects are more mixed. Some translators are specializing in more complex legal and medical translations the machines can't quite nail (and where mistakes create huge liabilities). Nonspecialized translators are either using AI to boost their productivity or dropping out of the industry.

Love AI or hate it, falling prices, rising consumption, and increased specialization sounds like the normal process of technological advancement under free-ish markets.

The post Review: <i>Understanding AI</i> Helps Separate the Sci From the Fi appeared first on Reason.com.

The Los Angeles Press Club on Thursday announced the finalists for the 66th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards, recognizing the best work in print, online, and broadcast media published in 2023.

Reason, which is headquartered in L.A., is a finalist for 14 awards.

A sincere thanks to the judges who read and watched our submissions, as well as to the Reason readers, subscribers, and supporters, without whom we would not be able to produce impactful journalism.

Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a finalist for best technology reporting across all media platforms—print, radio, podcast, TV, and online—for her November 2023 print piece, "Do Social Media Algorithms Polarize Us? Maybe Not," in which she challenged what has become the traditional wisdom around the root of online toxicity:

For years, politicians have been proposing new regulations based on simple technological "solutions" to issues that stem from much more complex phenomena. But making Meta change its algorithms or shifting what people see in their Twitter feeds can't overcome deeper issues in American politics—including parties animated more by hate and fear of the other side than ideas of their own. This new set of studies should serve as a reminder that expecting tech companies to somehow fix our dysfunctional political culture won't work.

Science Reporter Ronald Bailey is a finalist for best medical/health reporting in print or online for "Take Nutrition Studies With a Grain of Salt," also from the November 2023 issue, where he meticulously dissected why the epidemiology of food and drink is, well, "a mess":

This doesn't mean you can eat an entire pizza, a quart of ice cream, and six beers tonight without some negative health effects. (Sorry.) It means nutritional epidemiology is a very uncertain guide for how to live your life and it certainly isn't fit for setting public policy.

In short, take nutrition research with a grain of salt. And don't worry: Even though the World Health Organization (WHO) says "too much salt can kill you," the Daily Mail noted in 2021 that "it's not as bad for health as you think."

Managing Editor Jason Russell is a finalist in print/online sports commentary for his August/September 2023 cover story, "Get Your Politics Out of My Pickleball," which explored the emerging fault lines as the government gets involved in America's weirdest, fastest-growing sport:

Pickleball will always have haters—and if its growth continues, local governments will still face public pressure to build more courts. Some critics think the sport is a fad, but strong growth continues for the time being, even as the COVID-19 pandemic ends and other activities compete for time and attention. There's no need to force nonplayers to support it with their tax dollars, especially when entrepreneurs seem eager to provide courts. If pickleball does end up as an odd footnote in sporting history, ideally it won't be taxpayers who are on the hook for converting courts to new uses.

Reporter C.J. Ciaramella is a finalist in magazine investigative reporting for his October 2023 cover story, "'I Knew They Were Scumbags,'" a nauseating piece on federal prison guards who confessed to rape—and got away with it:

Berman's daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.

Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.

Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is a finalist in magazine commentary for "Biden's 'Marijuana Reform' Leaves Prohibition Untouched," from the January 2023 issue, in which he disputed the notion that President Joe Biden has fundamentally changed America's response to cannabis:

By himself, Biden does not have the authority to resolve the untenable conflict between state and federal marijuana laws. But despite his avowed transformation from an anti-drug zealot into a criminal justice reformer, he has stubbornly opposed efforts to repeal federal pot prohibition.

That position is contrary to the preferences expressed by more than two-thirds of Americans, including four-fifths of Democrats and half of Republicans. The most Biden is willing to offer them is his rhetorical support for decriminalizing cannabis consumption—a policy that was on the cutting edge of marijuana reform in the 1970s.

Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward is a finalist for best magazine columnist for "Is Chaos the Natural State of Congress?" from the December 2023 issue, "Don't Just Hire 'Better Cops.' Punish the Bad Ones," from the April 2023 issue, and (a personal favorite) "Bodies Against the State," from the February 2023 issue:

Governments do unconscionable things every day; it is in their nature. But not all transgressions are equal. In the wake of the Iran team's silent anthem protest, an Iranian journalist asked U.S. men's soccer captain Tyler Adams how he could play for a country that discriminates against black people like him. What makes the U.S. different, he replied, is that "we're continuing to make progress every day."

The most perfect and enduring image of a person weaponizing his body against the state was taken after the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The unknown Chinese man standing in front of a tank didn't have to hold a sign for the entire world to know exactly what the problem was.

Reporter Christian Britschgi is a finalist for best long-form magazine feature on business/government for "The Town Without Zoning," from the August/September 2023 issue, in which he reported on the fight over whether Caroline, New York, should impose its first-ever zoning code:

Whatever the outcome, the zoning debate raging in Caroline is revealing. It shows how even in a small community without major enterprises or serious growth pressures, planners can't adequately capture and account for everything people might want to do with their land.

There's a gap between what zoners can do and what they imagine they can design. That knowledge problem hasn't stopped cities far larger and more complex than Caroline from trying to scientifically sort themselves with zoning. They've developed quite large and complex problems as a result.

Associate Editor Billy Binion (hi, it's me) is a finalist for best activism journalism online for the web feature "They Fell Behind on Their Property Taxes. So the Government Sold Their Homes—and Kept the Profits," which explored an underreported form of legalized larceny: governments across the U.S. seizing people's homes over modest tax debts, selling the properties, and keeping the surplus equity.

Geraldine Tyler is a 94-year-old woman spending the twilight of her life in retirement, as 94-year-olds typically do. But there isn't much that's typical about it.

Tyler has spent the last several years fighting the government from an assisted living facility after falling $2,300 behind on her property taxes. No one disputes that she owed a debt. What is in dispute is if the government acted constitutionally when, to collect that debt, it seized her home, sold it, and kept the profit.

If that sounds like robbery, it's because, in some sense, it is. But it's currently legal in at least 12 states across the country, so long as the government is doing the robbing.

Senior Producer Austin Bragg, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, Producer John Carter, and freelancer extraordinaire Andrew Heaton are finalists for best humor/satire writing across all broadcast mediums—TV, film, radio, or podcast—for the hilarious "Everything is political: board games," which "exposes" how Republicans and Democrats interpret everyone's favorite games from their partisan perspectives. (Spoiler: Everyone's going to lose.)

The Bragg brothers are nominated again in that same category—best humor/satire writing—along with Remy for "Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor Swift Parody)," in which lawmakers find culprits for the recent uptick in thefts—the victims.

Deputy Managing Editor of Video and Podcasts Natalie Dowzicky and Video Editor Regan Taylor are finalists in best commentary/analysis of TV across all media platforms for "What really happened at Waco," which explored a Netflix documentary on how the seeds of political polarization that roil our culture today were planted at Waco.

Editor at Large Matt Welch, Producer Justin Zuckerman, Motion Graphic Designer Adani Samat, and freelancer Paul Detrick are finalists in best activism journalism across any broadcast media for "The monumental free speech case the media ignored," which made the case that the legal odyssey and criminal prosecutions associated with Backpage were a direct assault on the First Amendment—despite receiving scant national attention from journalists and free speech advocates.

Associate Editor Liz Wolfe, Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Video Editor Danielle Thompson, Video Art Director Isaac Reese, and Producer Justin Zuckerman are finalists in best solutions journalism in any broadcast media for "Why homelessness is worse in California than Texas," which investigated why homelessness is almost five times as bad in the Golden State—and what can be done about it.

Finally, Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Video Editor Danielle Thompson, Video Art Director Isaac Reese, and Audio Engineer Ian Keyser are finalists in best documentary short for "The Supreme Court case that could upend the Clean Water Act," which did a deep dive into a Supreme Court case concerning a small-town Idaho couple that challenged how the Environmental Protection Agency defines a "wetland"—and what that means for property rights.

Winners will be announced on Sunday, June 23 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Subscribe to Reason here, watch our video journalism here, and find our podcasts here.

The post <em>Reason</em> Is a Finalist for 14 Southern California Journalism Awards appeared first on Reason.com.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been imprisoned in London for five years, while Texas journalist Priscilla Villarreal was only briefly detained at the Webb County Jail. But both were arrested for publishing information that government officials wanted to conceal.

Assange and Villarreal argue that criminalizing such conduct violates the First Amendment. In both cases, the merits of that claim have been obscured by the constitutionally irrelevant question of who qualifies as a "real" journalist.

Assange, an Australian citizen, is fighting extradition to the United States based on a federal indictment that charges him with violating the Espionage Act by obtaining and publishing classified documents that former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked in 2010. He has already spent about as much time behind bars as federal prosecutors say he would be likely to serve if convicted.

President Joe Biden says he is "considering" the Australian government's request to drop the case against Assange. But mollifying a U.S. ally is not the only reason to reconsider this prosecution, which poses a grave threat to freedom of the press by treating common journalistic practices as crimes.

All but one of the 17 charges against Assange relate to obtaining or disclosing "national defense information," which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Yet all the news organizations that published stories based on the confidential State Department cables and military files that Manning leaked are guilty of the same crimes.

More generally, obtaining and publishing classified information is the bread and butter of reporters who cover national security. John Demers, then head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, implicitly acknowledged that reality in 2019, when he assured reporters they needn't worry about the precedent set by this case because Assange is "no journalist."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit took a similarly dim view of Villarreal in January, when it dismissed her lawsuit against the Laredo prosecutors and police officers who engineered her 2017 arrest. They claimed she had violated Section 39.06(c) of the Texas Penal Code, an obscure law that makes it a felony to solicit or obtain nonpublic information from a government official with "intent to obtain a benefit."

The cops said Villarreal committed that crime by asking Laredo police officer Barbara Goodman to confirm information about a public suicide and a fatal car crash. As interpreted by the Laredo Police Department, Section 39.06(c) sweeps even more broadly than the Espionage Act, making a felon out of any reporter who seeks information that is deemed exempt from disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act.

Gliding over the alarming implications of making it a crime for reporters to ask questions, the 5th Circuit dismissed the idea that Villarreal is "a martyr for the sake of journalism." The majority opinion by Judge Edith Jones dripped with contempt for Villarreal, an independent, uncredentialed journalist who posts her unfiltered reports on Facebook instead of publishing vetted and edited stories in a "mainstream, legitimate" news outlet.

Seemingly oblivious to what quotidian news reporting across the country entails, Jones faulted Villarreal for relying on a "backchannel source" and for "capitaliz[ing] on others' tragedies to propel her reputation and career." But like the judgment that Assange is "no journalist," such criticism fundamentally misconstrues freedom of the press, which applies to anyone who engages in mass communication.

The 5th Circuit's decision provoked four dissents authored or joined by seven judges, and it is not hard to see why. "If the First Amendment means anything," Judge James C. Ho wrote, "surely it means that citizens have the right to question or criticize public officials without fear of imprisonment."

In a petition it filed on Villarreal's behalf last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression urges the U.S. Supreme Court to vindicate that right. "Villarreal went to jail for basic journalism," it notes. "Whatever one may make of Villarreal's journalistic ethics, they are of no constitutional significance."

© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

The post Journalism Is Not a Crime, Even When It Offends the Government appeared first on Reason.com.

Cops hate being watched, no matter where they’re located.

In the United States, we’ve seen several arrests and prosecutions of journalists and citizens for daring to record public officials performing their public duties. The case law isn’t completely settled in the United States, but in most parts of the country, it’s understood the First Amendment covers these activities.

That fact hasn’t stopped cops and prosecutors from pursuing everything from obstruction charges to alleged violations of state wiretapping laws against people who hold cops accountable simply by documenting the things they do.

There’s no First Amendment in the UK. But that doesn’t mean UK law enforcement officers are free to arrest people who do nothing more than document their actions. Given this lack of built-in protection, it’s extremely surprising to see UK prosecutors admit they’re in the wrong when it comes to shielding cops from accountability efforts that don’t involve government employees.

A journalist who did nothing more than try to document a criminal investigation taking place in full view of the public has received an apology of sorts from the UK government, as Steven Morris reports for The Guardian.

The Crown Prosecution Service has admitted it was wrong to press on with a case against a news photographer arrested as he tried to lawfully take pictures at a crime scene.

Judge Walters at Swansea crown court described the case against Dimitris Legakis, which was dropped on the eve of his trial, as “disturbing” and said it seemed “the high point” of the prosecution was that a police officer “took offence” against someone whose job was to take photographs.

The journalist did nothing more than show up at the scene of a car fire last year. He attempted to document the police response, only to get arrested by UK police officers, apparently because he was the only one in the crowd operating a camera. That this later turned out to be a murder investigation (allegedly a man beat his wife to death with a hammer before setting fire to the car with her in it) doesn’t really matter. At that point, it was just a normal police response to a potentially dangerous situation.

At some point during the police response, an “altercation” between some members of the crowd began. For whatever reason, officers decided to single out the journalist as the problem. He was arrested “with considerable force” and detained for 15 hours, supposedly for assaulting a first responder and “obstructing” a police officer, despite the fact no obstruction or assault was captured by any cameras operated by responding officers. The lack of evidence was admitted by the prosecution prior to its dropping of the charges.

The trial was due to start on Tuesday but at a hearing on Monday prosecution barrister Alycia Carpanini said no evidence would be offered in the case. The barrister said it had also been decided that it was not in the public interest to pursue the obstructing a constable matter, a summary-only offence.

Asked by Judge Geraint Walters why the decision to offer no evidence had been taken on the eve of the trial, the barrister said the original statement taken from the police officer “does not coincide” with what he later said in his victim personal statement, and she said the alleged assault itself was not captured on bodycam. The judge said having read the papers in the case it seemed to him “the high point of the prosecution case” was that somebody employed as a photographer was taking pictures and a police officer “took offence” to it.

When faced with taking this case to trial, the CPS finally admitted it had no evidence. But it took a court calling this out as a bullshit “contempt of cop” prosecution for that to happen.

And while there’s a very rare apology here, it comes couched in exculpatory language that suggests the CPS was completely in the right until it was forced to admit it was completely in the wrong.

A spokeswoman said: “We take assaults on emergency workers incredibly seriously. In all cases, including those resulting from police charge, we have a duty to continually review the evidence. In a review prior to the recent hearing, we decided that there was no longer sufficient evidence to continue with the prosecution and it should be stopped. We acknowledge this should have been done sooner.”

Maybe the CPS should divert some of its resources to investigating police officers who cook up bogus charges for the sole purpose of deterring public accountability. And, very definitely, the agency employing the officers who arrested the journalist and concocted a host of criminal charges should act quickly to punish the officers involved in this potential miscarriage of justice. It shouldn’t take 15 hours of detention and the run-up to a criminal case to finally have the truth come out. Because if that’s what it takes for the government to finally admit it’s in the wrong, the harm has already been done and the chilling effect on public accountability remains intact.

That being said, it’s still a step ahead of the status quo here in the United States. Even when governments pay out settlements to people whose rights have been violated, the payments are almost always attached to legal verbiage in which the government refuses to admit any wrongdoing. At least in the case above, the government acknowledged it was at fault. And that’s something, even if the lack of consequences means CPS and the cops that provide it with cases to prosecute are free to make the same “mistakes” over and over again.

Tech companies and First Amendment groups are calling attention to a provision in a domestic spying bill that they say would significantly expand the federal government's power to snoop on Americans' digital communications—potentially by forcing employees of private businesses to become informants.

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a global trade group that represents major tech companies including Google and Microsoft, is calling for last-minute changes to the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which could get a final vote in the Senate on Friday. The bill's primary purpose is to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows U.S. intelligence agencies to scoop up communications between Americans and individuals abroad.

But the bill also includes a provision that "vastly expands the U.S. government's warrantless surveillance capabilities, damaging the competitiveness of U.S. technology companies large and small, and arguably imperiling the continued global free flow of data between the U.S. and its allies," the ITI said in a statement this week.

As Reason reported in December, that provision means that nearly any business or entity with access to telecom or internet equipment could be forced to participate in the federal government's digital spying regime. The big target, as Wired noted this week, is likely to be the owners and operators of data centers.

Under the current FISA law, Section 702 only applies to telecommunications companies and internet service providers. But the amendment included in the RISAA would expand that definition to cover "any service provider" with "access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store" electronic communications.

"The practical impact of the revised definition is significant and means any company, vendor, or any of their employees who touch the physical infrastructure of the internet could now be swept under FISA's scope and compelled to assist with FISA surveillance," the ITI warns. "If this amendment were to become law, any electronic communications service equipment provider or others with access to that equipment, including their employees or the employees of their service providers, would be subject to compelled FISA disclosure or assistance."

In short, even someone like a custodian could be legally compelled to assist in the federal government's spying efforts.

Marc Zwillinger, an attorney who has experience arguing before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), wrote this week on his personal blog that the RISAA would "permit the government to compel the assistance of a wide range of additional entities and persons in conducting surveillance under FISA 702."

The newest version is less broad than what was initially proposed in December—for example, gathering places like hotels and coffee shops have been specifically excluded from the law. But, as Zwillinger writes, the revised definition would cover "the owners and operators of facilities that house equipment used to store or carry data, such as data centers and buildings owned by commercial landlords, who merely have access to communications equipment in their physical space," as well as "other persons with access to such facilities and equipment, including delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utility providers."

Because newsrooms and other places where journalists work are not specifically exempted, some First Amendment groups are also worried about how the expansion of digital spying authority could affect journalism.

"This bill would basically allow the government to institute a spy draft," Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), said in a statement on Thursday. "If this bill becomes law, sources will rightly suspect that American newsrooms are bugged by the government. And journalists won't be able to reassure them that they're not, because, for all they know, the building maintenance worker is an involuntary government spy."

The reactions from tech companies, legal experts, and free press advocates come on the heels of objections raised by various civil libertarian groups. As Reason's J.D. Tuccille covered earlier this week, some opponents of the FISA reauthorization bill have taken to calling it "the 'Everyone Is a Spy' provision, since potentially anybody with access to a laptop or WiFi router could be compelled to help the government conduct surveillance."

If the RISAA is approved by the Senate on Friday, as expected, and signed by President Joe Biden, Americans will have little recourse except to hope that the Justice Department is telling the truth when it says it won't use the broad authority contained in the bill. In a letter to senators on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote that his department "commits to applying" the new definition of electronic communications service providers in a narrow fashion. "The number of technology companies" covered by the new provision, he wrote, "is extremely small."

Of course, anyone with a working knowledge of the history of federal surveillance programs—or any government initiative, for that matter—is probably right to be skeptical of that assurance.

"Even if the bill is intended to target data centers, it doesn't say that," Stern said in a statement. "And, even if one trusts the Biden administration to honor its pinky swears, they're not binding on any future administrations."

The post How the FISA Reauthorization Bill Could Force Maintenance Workers and Custodians To Become Government Spies appeared first on Reason.com.

Rep. Jim Banks (R–Ind.) announced yesterday that he will introduce a bill to defund National Public Radio (NPR). Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) has said she hopes to do the same in the Senate. We live in strange times, anything can happen in politics, and there may be no faster route to looking like a fool than to issue a prediction. With that throat-clearing out of the way: No, of course Congress isn't about to defund NPR.

This latest wave of Defund NPR! sentiment follows an article by Uri Berliner in The Free Press, in which the NPR editor and reporter—make that former NPR editor and reporter, since he has since resigned—argues that the network "lost America's trust" by shutting out opinions disfavored by the center-left hivemind. I think Berliner's piece wavers between claiming too much (it would have been more accurate, though probably less SEO-friendly, to replace "lost America's trust" with "saw its niche grow somewhat smaller") and claiming too little (it ends with a plea not to defund public radio, since Berliner believes there's "a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith"). But at this point the specifics of his essay are almost beside the point, since the debate it has unleashed goes far beyond what the article says. The proof is that people have been using it as a springboard to call for cutting off NPR's federal dollars even though Berliner goes out of his way to stress that that's not the result he wants.

And now the anger has spread, with NPR CEO Katherine Maher under fire for her history of left-wing tweeting. The troops are ready for battle. So why don't I expect Congress to stop the funds?

For three reasons. The first is the obvious one: The Democrats control the White House, and there aren't enough Republicans in Congress to override a veto, so at the very least this is unlikely to become law before 2025. A second reason is that it's difficult to devise a bill that cuts off NPR while leaving the rest of the public-broadcasting ecosystem alone. As the network's defenders never tire of pointing out, NPR doesn't get much direct support from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). It gets far more money from its member stations, which NPR does not own, and which receive their own cash from the CPB (and, frequently, from other government sources, since many of them are run by state universities).

This shell game isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's the sort of thing that has tripped up legislators before. Last year, for example, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R–Texas) introduced a bill to prevent federal funds from flowing "directly or indirectly" to NPR, its TV cousin PBS, or "any successor organization." Well, how do you define "successor organization"? There are already several public radio networks out there, some of them pretty old. If the Morning Edition team drops its NPR affiliation and starts distributing the show through Public Radio Exchange, are they in the clear?

The easiest way around such tangles, of course, would be to write legislation that doesn't try to single out NPR and instead just cuts off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting entirely. That would keep the money from moving. But it also leads us to the third and biggest reason I don't think a defunding bill will get anywhere anytime soon: No matter how much it huffs and puffs, most of the GOP has no serious interest in defunding public broadcasting.

Yes, there are a few Republican officeholders who would rather see an openly liberal NPR that supports itself than a "balanced" system that relies on tax dollars. I'd bet a libertarian-leaning legislator like Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) would vote for that. But Massie is an outlier. If history has taught us nothing else, it's that the most powerful Republican officials aren't usually bothered by the idea that Americans are being forced to subsidize views they dislike. They just want the subsidies to go in a different direction.

Why do I say that? Because we've seen this process play out again and again, and it always ends pretty much the same way. In 1971, President Richard Nixon proposed a "return to localism" that would have effectively overthrown the crew running PBS, and a year later he vetoed a CPB appropriations bill; then PBS canned most of the programs that the president didn't like, the CPB brought a bunch of White House–friendly figures onto its board, and the president signed a budget increase. In 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–Ga.) suggested that he might "zero out" the CPB's money; the chief long-term result was that several conservatives got public TV gigs. In 2005, a House subcommittee actually voted to cut the CPB budget by 25 percent and wipe out the rest over the following few years; that time things ended with a former chair of the Republican National Committee becoming chair of the CPB—which landed a higher appropriation, not a lower one. I could list more examples, but I've already written that article more than once and I don't want to write it again. Suffice to say that the CPB invariably survives these battles, that its federal support almost always increases, and that its rare budget cuts don't last long.

And—here's where we come back to Uri Berliner's article—one reason this keeps happening is because the attack so often comes down to the idea that NPR and PBS are unbalanced. That's true, of course: The big public-broadcasting operations have always tilted toward the dominant views of the social milieu that produces them, and Berliner is surely correct that this has intensified at NPR in the years since Donald Trump was elected president. But when bias is your chief complaint, you give the folks who run the networks an easy out. They would almost always prefer to gesture toward balance with some hires or fires than to see their money axed.

Is there a way around that? I think there is, but it would take a different approach to the fight. Instead of a narrowly partisan battle, bring together an alliance of people (mostly on the right) who are sick of subsidizing opinions they dislike and people (mostly on the left) who are sick of seeing those subsidies used as an excuse to insert the government into broadcasters' editorial choices. Adopt a plan to transform the CPB from a semi-governmental body into a fully independent nonprofit, bringing the federal role in noncommercial broadcasting to an end.

There was serious talk of doing this right after the Gingrich attacks shook up the broadcasters. In 1995, the New York Daily News even reported that a CPB spokesman had "confirmed that all the groups agreed on the need to establish an independent trust fund that eventually could replace federal funding." Then the CPB's subsidies started creeping upwards again and the idea moved back to the edges of the political spectrum. So a push like this has failed once before. But the partisan approach has failed to detach these operations from the government far more times than that. It can be hard to assemble a transpartisan alliance, but sometimes it's the only thing that can get the job done.

And yes, it's possible to bring people around on these issues. Back when I spent a lot of time covering the radical Pacifica radio network, I often encountered leftists who saw the CPB as a back door for government influence and felt they'd be better off without it. On the other side of the spectrum, after I wrote a blog post on this subject in 2011 I got a couple of emails from Ken Tomlinson, who had chaired the CPB for two years under President George W. Bush. Tomlinson had gone after public broadcasting for being unbalanced, a crusade that led to a lot of reshuffling of the system but no reduction in its federal support. He didn't care for how I had characterized his efforts, but he was friendly, and he seemed to have come around to the idea that the underlying problem was the purse strings, not the bias. "Bottom line, get tax money out of CPB," he told me. "Not just NPR. CPB."

Maybe someday we'll get there. But if Banks and Blackburn manage to pull it off this year, I'll eat an NPR tote bag.

The post Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR appeared first on Reason.com.

Who is Katherine Maher, and what does she really believe? The embattled NPR CEO had the opportunity on Wednesday to set the record straight regarding her views on intellectual diversity, "white silence," and whether Hillary Clinton (of all people) committed nonbinary erasure when she used the phrase boys and girls.

Unfortunately, during a recent appearance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to discuss the journalism industry's war on disinformation, she repeatedly declined to give straight answers—instead offering up little more than platitudes about workplace best practices. I attended the event and submitted questions that the organizers effectively ignored.

That's a shame, because Maher's views certainly require clarity—especially now that longtime editor Uri Berliner has resigned from NPR and called out the publicly funded radio channel's CEO. In his parting statement, Berliner slammed Maher, saying that her "divisive views confirm the very problems" that he wrote about in his much-discussed article for Bari Weiss' Free Press.

Berliner's tell-all mostly took aim at specific examples of NPR being led astray by its deference to progressive shibboleths: the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19, etc. He implored his new boss—Maher's tenure as CEO had only begun about four weeks ago—to correct NPR's lack of viewpoint diversity. That's probably a tall order, since Maher had once tweeted that ideological diversity is "often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories."

That Silicon Valley v Russia thread was pretty funny — until it got onto ideological diversity. In case it's not evident, in these parts that's often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories about meritocracy. Maybe's not what the author meant. But idk, maybe it is?

— Katherine Maher (@krmaher) July 6, 2018

Indeed, Maher's past tweets would be hard to distinguish from satire if one randomly stumbled across them. Her earnest, uncompromising wokeness—land acknowledgments, condemnations of Western holidays, and so on—sounds like they were written by parody accounts such as The Babylon Bee or Titania McGrath. In her 2022 TED Talk, she faulted Wikipedia, where she worked at the time, for being a Eurocentric written reference that fails to take into account the oral histories of other peoples. More seriously, she seems to view the First Amendment as an inconvenient barrier for tackling "bad information" and "influence peddlers" online.

But interestingly, she did not reiterate any of these views during her appearance at the Carnegie Endowment on Wednesday. On the contrary, she gave entirely nonspecific answers about diversity in the newsroom. In fact, she barely said anything concrete about the subject of the discussion: disinformation.

When asked by event organizer Jon Bateman, a Carnegie senior fellow, to address the Berliner controversy, she said that she had never met him and was not responsible for the editorial policies of the newsroom.

"The newsroom is entirely independent," she said. "My responsibility is to ensure that we have the resources to do this work. We have a mandate to serve all Americans."

She repeated these lines over and over again. When asked more specifically about whether she thinks NPR is succeeding or failing at making different viewpoints welcome, she pointed to the audience and said that her mission was to expand the outlet's reach.

"Are we growing our audiences?" she asked. "That is so much more representative of how we are doing our job, because I am not in the newsroom."

Many of the people who are in the newsroom clearly had it out for Berliner. In a letter to Maher, signed by 50 NPR staffers, they called on her to make use of NPR's "DEI accountability committee" to silence internal criticism. Does Maher believe that a diversity, equity, and inclusion task force should vigorously root out heresy?

At the event, Maher did not directly take audience questions. Instead, audience members were asked to write out their questions and submit them via QR code. I asked her whether she stood by her previous tweet that maligned the concept of ideological diversity, as well as the other tweets that had recently made the news. Frustratingly, she offered no further clarity on these subjects.

This Week on Free Media

In the latest episode of our new media criticism show for Reason, Amber Duke and I discussed the Berliner situation in detail. We also reacted to a Bill Maher monologue on problems with liberal governance, tackled MSNBC's contempt for laundry-related liberty, and chided Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) for encouraging drivers to throw in-the-way protesters off bridges.

This Week on Rising

Briahna Joy Gray and I argued about the Berliner situation—and much else—on Rising this week. Watch below.

Worth Watching (Follow-Up)

I have finally finished Netflix's 3 Body Problem, which went off the rails a bit in its last few episodes. I still highly recommend the fifth episode, "Judgment Day," for including one of the most haunting television sequences of the year thus far.

But I have questions about the aliens. (Spoilers to follow.)

In 3 Body Problem, a group of scientists must prepare Earth for war against the San Ti, an advanced alien race that will arrive in 400 years. The San Ti have sent advanced technology to Earth that allows them to closely monitor humans and co-opt technology—screens, phones, presumably weapons systems—for their own use. We are led to believe that the San Ti want to kill humans because unlike them, we are liars. Eccentric oil CEO Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce), a human fifth columnist who communicates with the San Ti, appears to doom our species when he tells the aliens the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The San Ti are so offended by the Big Bad Wolf's deceptions that they decide earthlings can't ever be trusted, and should instead be destroyed. "We cannot coexist with liars," says the San Ti's emissary. "We are afraid of you."

The scene in which Evans realizes what he has done makes for gripping television but… I'm sorry, it's nonsensical. Clearly the San Ti already understand deception, misdirection, and the difference between a made-up story and what's really happening. After all, they were the ones who equipped Evans and his collaborators with the virtual reality video game technology they use to recruit more members. The game does not literally depict the fate of the San Ti's home world; it uses metaphor, exaggeration, and human imagery to convey San Ti history. It doesn't make any sense that they would be utterly flummoxed by the Big Bad Wolf.

Then, in the season finale, the San Ti use trickery to taunt the human leader of the resistance. They are the liars, but no one ever calls them out on this.

The post NPR's Katherine Maher Is Not Taking Questions About Her Tweets appeared first on Reason.com.

Going way, way back, we’ve talked about the need for protection of journalistic sources, in particular the need for a federal journalism shield law. I can find stories going back about 15 years of us talking about it here on Techdirt. The issue might not come up that often, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

On Thursday, a judge held former CBS journalist Catherine Herridge in contempt for refusing to reveal her sources regarding stories she wrote about scientist Yanping Chen.

The ruling, from U.S. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper, will be stayed for 30 days or until Herridge can appeal the ruling.

Cooper ruled that Herridge violated his Aug. 1 order demanding that Herridge reveal how she learned about a federal probe into Chen, who operated a graduate program in Virginia. Herridge, who was recently laid off from CBS News, wrote the stories in question when she worked for Fox News in 2017.

In his ruling, Judge Cooper claims that he’s at least somewhat reluctant about this result, but he still goes forward with it arguing (I believe incorrectly) that he needs to balance the rights of Chen with Herridge’s First Amendment rights.

The Court does not reach this result lightly. It recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge. Yet the Court also has its own role to play in upholding the law and safeguarding judicial authority. Applying binding precedent in this Circuit, the Court resolved that Chen’s need for the requested information to vindicate her rights under the Privacy Act overcame Herridge’s qualified First Amendment reporter’s privilege in this case. Herridge and many of her colleagues in the journalism community may disagree with that decision and prefer that a different balance be struck, but she is not permitted to flout a federal court’s order with impunity. Civil contempt is the proper and time-tested remedy to ensure that the Court’s order, and the law underpinning it, are not rendered meaningless.

But the First Amendment is not a balancing test. And if subpoenas or other attempts to reveal sources can be used in this manner, the harm to journalism will be vast. Journalism only works properly when journalists can legitimately promise confidentiality to sources. And that’s even more true for whistleblowers.

Admittedly, this case is a bit of a mess. It appears that the FBI falsely believed that Chen was a Chinese spy and investigated her, but let it go when they couldn’t support that claim. However, someone (likely in the FBI) leaked the info to Herridge, who reported on it. Chen sued the FBI, who won’t reveal who leaked the info. She’s now using lawful discovery to find out who leaked the info as part of the lawsuit. You can understand that Chen has been wronged in this situation, and it’s likely someone in the FBI who did so. And, in theory, there should be a remedy for that.

But, the problem is that this goes beyond just that situation and gets to the heart of what journalism is and why journalists need to be able to protect sources.

If a ruling like this stands, it means that no journalist can promise confidentiality, when a rush to court can force the journalist to cough up the details. And the end result is that fewer whistleblowers will be willing to speak to media, allowing more cover-ups and more corruption. The impact of a ruling like this is immensely problematic.

There’s a reason that, for years, we’ve argued for a federal shield law to make it clear that journalists should never be forced to give up sources. In the past, attempts to pass such laws have often broken down over debates concerning who they should apply to and how to identify “legitimate” journalists vs. those pretending to be journalists to avoid coughing up info.

But there is a simple solution to that: don’t have it protect “journalists,” have the law protect such information if it is obtained in the course of engaging in journalism. That is, if someone wants to make use of the shield law, they need to show that the contact and information obtained from the source was part of a legitimate effort to report a story to the public in some form, and they can present the steps they were taking to do so.

At the very least, the court recognizes that the contempt fees should be immediately stayed so that Herridge can appeal the decision:

The Court will stay that contempt sanction, however, to afford Herridge an opportunity to appeal this decision. Courts in this district and beyond have routinely stayed contempt sanctions to provide journalists ample room to litigate their assertions of privilege fully in the court of appeals before being coerced into compliance….

Hopefully, the appeals court recognizes how problematic this is. But, still, Congress can and should act to get a real shield law in place.

As the Vice collapse and Messenger collapse just got done illustrating in glorious technicolor, the problem with online U.S. journalism isn’t that it’s not inherently profitable. The problem is usually that the worst, least competent, shallowest people imaginable routinely fail upward into positions of management, then treat the media companies they acquire and operate like a disposable napkin.

That’s certainly been the case over at Sports Illustrated, which isn’t so much even a media organization anymore as much as it is a bloated brand corpse being exploited by extraction-centric, visionless failsons, who have minimal coherent interest in the company’s original function: sports journalism.

That’s all well exemplified by this Washington Post article that explores how as the company was falling apart and its journalists and editors were being fired right and left, the folks in charge of the company were throwing lavish Super Bowl parties. It’s well worth a read, and features a lot of doublespeak by managers who talk out of both sides of their mouth about “values” and “mission.”

Over the past six years Sports Illustrated has been tossed around between a rotating crop of dodgy middlemen for whom journalism was an afterthought. SI was acquired in 2018 by what was left of Meredith Publishing as part of the purchase of Time (which founded the magazine in 1954), then had its intellectual property sold to Authentic Brands Group (ABG) for $110 million a year later.

ABG has basically just been renting the Sports Illustrated brand to a company by the name of The Arena Group, which has been mismanaging it for most of that time. The company, like Vice, was run by a lot of non-journalism, affluent, hedge fund brats, simply interested in blindly chasing engagement at impossible scale via seventy-five consecutive but nonsensical attempts to “pivot to video.”

Arena just got bogged down in a massive scandal after it began using fake AI generated authors to create shitty, fake AI-generated journalism — without bothering to even tell staff or readers. Then the company balked on paying its $12 million yearly fee to ABG, resulting in more chaos.

Now Authentic Brands Group is left pondering what to do with the brand. And it will probably involve renting it yet again to some other set of visionless brunchlords keen on chasing engagement at impossible scale in the most superficial way possible. The people who pay the actual price for this incompetence are, as usual, the journalists and editors who have little to do with mismanagement.

When you read the Washington Post article, there seems to be some realization by the executives at ABG, like CEO Jamie Salter, that you can’t just hollow a journalism company out like a pumpkin and parade the corpse around to sell shitty supplements without repercussions:

“Salter insisted SI’s journalism remains central to his mission. “That’s the mouthpiece to the brand,” he explained. “It’s not as critically important from the financial side, but what we put out there from journalism [is the] core. If you took the shoes out of Reebok, I’m not sure Reebok would be Reebok anymore.”

But then these hustlebros will proceed to do exactly that. Repeatedly. Their entire function is to collect brands, exploit and extract any last bit of value, and then when they’ve drained all meaning from the husk, toss it in the trash and start over somewhere else. Salter seems to throw most of the blame for this dysfunction in the lap of The Arena Group, but the dysfunction is commonplace and everywhere in media.

And then the question the Post correctly asks is, why are the actual employees doing the work always left holding the bag, while never getting a cut of the proceeds? Why does this extraction class view labor as such an irrelevant, exploitable resource in the pursuit of their fourth home?

“If Authentic is forging a new way to monetize a media brand — and, to be sure, there are not a lot of happy stories anywhere in media today — why, SI staffers asked, can’t they get a real cut?”

…”As the fates of some 80 staffers hang in the balance and Authentic contemplates its next move, whatever comes next for SI — a new publisher, a zombie website, a cultural renaissance or anything else — Salter probably will be just fine.”

The Sports Illustrated implosion is just such a perfect example of the utterly hollow vision of a lot of the modern media extraction class. There’s really no genuine interest in craft, or journalism, building consistent audience, or longevity. It’s just mindless consolidation, acquisition, quirky tax tricks, and exploitation dressed up as savvy deal-making, all slathered in as much tacky neon paint as possible.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

Wikipedia has downgraded tech website CNET's reliability rating following extensive discussions among its editors regarding the impact of AI-generated content on the site's trustworthiness, as noted in a detailed report from Futurism. The decision reflects concerns over the reliability of articles found on the tech news outlet after it began publishing AI-generated stories in 2022.

Around November 2022, CNET began publishing articles written by an AI model under the byline "CNET Money Staff." In January 2023, Futurism brought widespread attention to the issue and discovered that the articles were full of plagiarism and mistakes. (Around that time, we covered plans to do similar automated publishing at BuzzFeed.) After the revelation, CNET management paused the experiment, but the reputational damage had already been done.

Wikipedia maintains a page called "Reliable sources/Perennial sources" that includes a chart featuring news publications and their reliability ratings as viewed from Wikipedia's perspective. Shortly after the CNET news broke in January 2023, Wikipedia editors began a discussion thread on the Reliable Sources project page about the publication.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

• Category: Games

How Times & Galaxy Turns Journalism into a Game Mechanic

Summary

• Times & Galaxy’s unique Build-A-Story feature lets players tell the story how they see it.
• Copychaser Games’ Creative Director shares how his past as a crime reporter shaped the game’s approach to journalism.
• Times & Galaxy is coming to Xbox in mid-2024.

Ever wanted to experience the rush of breaking news? In Times & Galaxy, you’ll chase down scoops as the newest robo-intern of a trusted holopaper. Your assignments might initially seem less than glamorous, like intersolar cat shows and underground dirt fairs—you are an intern, after all. But what, and how, you report is up to you: by picking your way through branching conversations and exploring each level, you’ll discover hidden information, new sources and surprising quotes, allowing you to craft your story your way through the game’s unique Build-A-Story feature.

“Branching conversations are the bread and butter of a lot of larger Western RPGs, and they are, in many ways, what you do as a reporter doing an interview,” Copychaser Games Creative Director Ben Gelinas explains. “You have to decide what to ask, and how to ask it to get the information you need.”

Gelinas knows that from experience: before he began writing for games—with credits on Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect 3, and Control, among other titles—Gelinas was working as a crime reporter for a daily newspaper in Canada. Drawing on his past career offered new opportunities for well-established conversation systems.

“In Times & Galaxy, we’ve turned information into a collectible,” he adds, “which excited me from a narrative standpoint. It’s always so tricky to combine narrative elements with gameplay.”

The Build-A-Story feature breaks each story down into five parts: headline, lede, nut graf (a summarizing, ‘in a nutshell’ paragraph), key quote, and color context. Your options for each will expand as you pull quotes from conversations and scour levels for context and clues. Depending on how you frame what you’ve discovered, your story can turn out sensational, informational, or “alien” interest—each with lasting consequences for your paper’s reputation and readership.

Gelinas notes that it’s not so much about finding the “right” answer as it is deciding how best to present what you find.

“I didn’t want to do a binary,” he says. “I didn’t want to do ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Having three extremes makes things more complicated. And these are all pulled from types of journalism that people do in the real world.”

In his reporter days, Gelinas noticed how different newspapers, covering the same story, would produce very different takes on the same thing.

“We were all reporters doing our jobs,” Gelinas notes. “But the result was different depending on who was reporting and the overarching goals of the newspaper.”

So when it came time to gamify journalism in Times & Galaxy, Gelinas built his narrative team mostly out of former and current journalists, with histories in alt-weeklies and student journalism, to lend their lived experience with the craft—and to help shape the 100-plus memorable characters that populate the game, both on and off the news ship.

“For whatever reason, journalism attracted, and still continues to attract, some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet,” Gelinas says. “I wanted Times & Galaxy to reflect that: I wanted to fill it with very memorable weirdos… ​​And then you get to join them and decide what kind of weirdo you are.”

Times & Galaxy will come to Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in 2024.

The post How Times & Galaxy Turns Journalism into a Game Mechanic appeared first on Xbox Wire.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been imprisoned in London for nearly five years, pending extradition to the United States so he can be prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified information. Since that amount of time behind bars is about the same as the four-to-six-year prison term that Justice Department lawyers have said Assange would be likely to serve if convicted, you might think the Biden administration would be ready to reconsider this case, especially since it poses an alarming threat to freedom of the press. Instead, the U.S. government's lawyers are back in London for yet another hearing, which Assange's attorneys describe as a last-ditch attempt to block his extradition.

Recognizing the First Amendment implications, the Obama administration declined to prosecute Assange for obtaining and disclosing confidential State Department cables and military files leaked by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010. After all, leading news organizations in the United States and around the world had published stories based on the same documents, and those acts of journalism likewise could be construed as felonies once this precedent was established. So could the routine practices of reporters who cover national security, which commonly involves divulging information that the government prefers to keep secret.

Despite those concerns, the Trump administration decided that Assange should be locked up for doing things that The New York Times et al. do on a regular basis. All but one of the 17 counts in Assange's latest federal indictment relate to obtaining or disclosing "national defense information," which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Theoretically, Assange could face 160 years in prison for those counts alone, although the government's lawyers say it probably would be more like the amount of time he already has served in the United Kingdom. Manning herself—who, unlike Assange, violated the terms of her government employment—received a 35-year sentence but was released after seven years thanks to Barack Obama's commutation.

"Some say that Assange is a journalist and that he should be immune from prosecution for these actions," John Demers, then the head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, told reporters after the Assange indictment was announced in May 2019. "The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy and we thank you for it. It is not and has never been the department's policy to target them for reporting." There is no need to worry, Demers suggested, because Assange is "no journalist."

This line of argument misconstrues the "freedom…of the press" guaranteed by the First Amendment, which applies to mass communication generally, not just the speech of people whom the government deigns to recognize as journalists. Demers' assurance is similar to the reasoning that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit recently applied in counterintuitively concluding that treating journalism as a crime is not "obviously unconstitutional."

That case involved Priscilla Villarreal, a Laredo, Texas, gadfly and citizen journalist who was arrested in 2017 for violating Section 39.06(c) of the Texas Penal Code. Under that previously obscure law, a person who "solicits or receives" information that "has not been made public" from a government official "with intent to obtain a benefit" commits a third-degree felony, punishable by two to 10 years in prison.

Texas defines "benefit" as "anything reasonably regarded as economic gain or advantage." According to the arrest affidavits, the "benefit" that Villarreal sought was a boost in Facebook traffic. Section 39.06(c) defines "information that has not been made public" as "any information to which the public does not generally have access" that is also "prohibited from disclosure" under the Texas Public Information Act. The arrest affidavits did not address the latter requirement at all.

Like the Espionage Act, Section 39.06(c) purportedly criminalizes common reporting practices—in this case, obtaining information about a public suicide and a fatal car accident from a "backchannel source" at the local police department. Writing for the 5th Circuit majority in Villarreal v. Laredo, Judge Edith Jones did not try to hide her disdain for Villarreal, an independent, uncredentialed journalist who files her unfiltered reports on Facebook instead of publishing vetted and edited stories in a "mainstream, legitimate" news outlet.

"Villarreal and others portray her as a martyr for the sake of journalism," Jones wrote. "That is inappropriate. She could have followed Texas law, or challenged that law in court, before reporting nonpublic information from the backchannel source. By skirting Texas law, Villarreal revealed information that could have severely emotionally harmed the families of decedents and interfered with ongoing investigations. Mainstream, legitimate media outlets routinely withhold the identity of accident victims or those who committed suicide until public officials or family members release that information publicly. Villarreal sought to capitalize on others' tragedies to propel her reputation and career."

Although Jones implies that Villarreal's arrest was prompted by concern for "the families of decedents," Villarreal plausibly argued that it was actually punishment for her outspoken criticism of local law enforcement agencies. In any case, there is no First Amendment exception for reporting that might offend or disturb people. And Jones' characterization of Villarreal's work as "capitaliz[ing] on others' tragedies to propel her reputation and career" is an apt, if cynical, description of what many journalists do, even when they work for "mainstream, legitimate media outlets." Jones apparently is unfamiliar with the bread and butter of local news organizations and has never heard the expression, "If it bleeds, it leads."

The seven dissenting judges saw the situation differently. "If the First Amendment means anything," Judge James C. Ho wrote in a dissent joined by five of his colleagues, "surely it means that citizens have the right to question or criticize public officials without fear of imprisonment." Judge James E. Graves Jr. likewise complained that "the majority opinion will permit government officials to retaliate against speech while hiding behind cherry-picked state statutes."

Judge Stephen A. Higginson noted that Thomas Paine, who wrote "the pro-independence pamphlet that historian Gordon Wood describes as 'the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era,'" was, like Villarreal, a "citizen-journalist." Upholding "the text of the Constitution, as well as the values and history that it reflects," he said, "the Supreme Court guarantees the First Amendment right of engaged citizen-journalists, like Paine, to interrogate the government." Jones, by contrast, presumably would view Paine as disreputable, since he did not work for a "mainstream, legitimate media outlet."

Assange's critics, including some professional journalists, have proposed a similar distinction, arguing that he does not deserve the First Amendment's protection because he is not a "real" journalist. But whatever you might think of Assange's opinions, his tactics, or the care he exercised in publishing classified material, that distinction is not grounded in the Constitution and will not hold in practice.

The editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País recognized as much in 2022, when they urged the Justice Department to drop the case against Assange. In ignoring that advice, the Biden administration seems bent on establishing a dangerous precedent that replaces the First Amendment's guarantee with the whims of prosecutors.

The post The Biden Administration Is Bent on Setting an Alarming Precedent by Prosecuting Julian Assange appeared first on Reason.com.

Last month we noted how deteriorating quality over at Google search and Google news was resulting in both platforms being flooded by AI-generated gibberish and nonsense, with money that should be going to real journalists instead being funneled to a rotating crop of lazy automated engagement farmers.

This collapse of online informational integrity is happening at precisely the same time that U.S. journalism is effectively being lobotomized by a handful of hedge fund brunchlords for whom accurately informing the public has long been a distant afterthought.

It’s a moment in time where the financial incentives all point toward lazy automated ad engagement, and away from pesky things like the truth or public welfare. It costs companies money to implement systems at scale that can help clean up online information pollution, and it’s far more profitable to spend that time and those resources lazily maximizing engagement at any cost. The end result is everywhere you look.

The latest case in point: as hustlebros look to profit from automated engagement bait, The Verge notes that there has been a rise in automated obituary spam.

Like we’ve seen elsewhere in the field of journalism, engagement is all that matters, resulting in a flood of bizarre, automated zero-calorie gibberish where facts, truth, and public welfare simply don’t matter. The result, automated obituaries at unprecedented scale for people who aren’t dead. Like this poor widower, whose death was widely (and incorrectly) reported by dozens of trash automation sites:

“[The obituaries] had this real world impact where at least four people that I know of called [our] mutual friends, and thought that I had died with her, like we had a suicide pact or something,” says Vastag, who for a time was married to Mazur and remained close with her. “It caused extra distress to some of my friends, and that made me really angry.”

Much like the recent complaints over the deteriorating quality of Google News, and the deteriorating quality of Google search, Google sits nestled at the heart of the problem thanks to a refusal to meaningfully invest in combating “obituary scraping”:

“Google has long struggled to contain obituary spam — for years, low-effort SEO-bait websites have simmered in the background and popped to the top of search results after an individual dies. The sites then aggressively monetize the content by loading up pages with intrusive ads and profit when searchers click on results. Now, the widespread availability of generative AI tools appears to be accelerating the deluge of low-quality fake obituaries.”

Yes, managing this kind of flood of automated gibberish is, like content moderation, impossible to tackle perfectly (or anywhere close) at scale. At the same time, all of the financial incentives in the modern engagement infotainment economy point toward prioritizing the embrace of automated engagement bait, as opposed to spending time and resources policing information quality (even using AI).

As journalism collapses and a parade of engagement baiting automation (and rank political propaganda) fills the void, the American public’s head gets increasingly filled with pebbles, pudding, and hate. We’re in desperate need of a paradigm shift away from viewing absolutely everything (even human death) through the MBA lens of maximizing profitability and engagement at boundless scale at any cost.

At some point morals, ethics, and competent leadership in the online information space needs to make an appearance somewhere in the frame in a bid to protect public welfare and even the accurate documentation of history. It’s just decidedly unclear how we bridge the gap.