Month: July 2020

This was originally written for the daily newsletter published by the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Like the old tale of the blind men describing an elephant, where each one was convinced they had found a different animal based on whatever part they were touching, Wednesday’s congressional antitrust hearing with the heads of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook looked dramatically different depending on your perspective. The Wall Street Journal said the six-hour hearing showed that there was room for compromise between the way Republicans perceive the technology giants and the way that Democrats do. But Slate and a number of other outlets pointed out how most of the Republican members of Congress spent their time talking about alleged bias by Facebook and YouTube aimed at conservatives (something for which there is absolutely no evidence) rather than antitrust. The Verge‘s Casey Newton said the “lunatic whipsawing between companies, issues, and conspiracy theories” made the hearing feel like a social-media feed, and not in a good way: “Every question shouted, every answer interrupted, nothing truly ventured, and very little learned. Polarized and polarizing” (although Newton also said that in the end he came away “mostly heartened” at the idea that Congress might finally be prepared to do its job as an antitrust regulator.

Part of the problem — as with with the elephant — was that the hearing was just too massive and sprawling and unfocused, and tried to cover too much ground. As Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times pointed out, each of the tech companies should probably have had its own hearing, since the antitrust issues that apply to each one are very different (Will Oremus of One Zero said sources told him the technology companies themselves pressed for a hearing with all four, as a way of muddying the waters, and if true then their attempt was successful). Even at six hours, once you subtract the grandstanding and irrelevant questioning by people like Republican Matt Gaetz — who seemed most interested in whether the companies shared what he called “American values” — or the sad spectacle of Rep. Sensenbrenner asking Zuckerberg why Facebook took down a comment from Donald Trump Jr. (something Twitter did), there wasn’t much time for more than one or two hard-hitting questions about actual anti-competitive behavior.

The fact that there were even a few of these was held up by some as a triumph — Prospect.org called it “The Triumphant Return of Congress” — something that says a lot about just how low expectations are when it comes to these kinds of hearings. And yes, it was better than the one where Facebook was asked how it made money and Zuckerberg responded, as if speaking to a toddler, “Senator, we sell ads” (and Facebook definitely makes a lot of money doing so — on Thursday, the day after the hearing, the company reported that its revenues rose to $18 billion in the most recent quarter). One of the stars of the day was Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who came equipped with voluminous notes, including some of the 1.3 million documents that Congress has accumulated over the year or so this antitrust investigation has been underway. She pinned Zuckerberg with questions about his acquisition of Instagram, including emails that showed he was planning to build a competitor if the company didn’t sell, and the CEO could only stammer “I’m not sure what you mean by threaten.” She also asked some tough questions of Amazon, including pressing chief executive Jeff Bezos on whether the company used internal sales data to launch competing products (he said this is against the rules, and he’s looking into it).

Continue reading “A bevy of billionaires: The tech titans go (virtually) to Washington”

This was originally written for the daily newsletter published by the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

For the past several weeks, Facebook has been the subject of a boycott campaign, one that has called on advertisers to pull their business from the social network, due to what the groups involved say is a failure to act quickly enough to curb hate speech and other offensive content. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and other senior staff from the company have met with some of the groups who are leading the boycott—a list that includes Free Press, Color of Change, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Anti-Defamation League—but those groups say the response from Zuckerberg was completely unsatisfactory. Meanwhile, the social network has also been hit by an independent audit report that looked at Facebook’s handling of civil-rights related issues (including the way it has handled offensive posts from Donald Trump) and said the company’s policies and enforcement have been a “tremendous setback” for civil rights.

Using CJR’s Galley discussion platform, we arranged for a series of interviews on both of these topics with human rights and freedom of expression experts, some of whom—like Jessica González, co-chief executive of Free Press—have been directly involved in organizing the boycott campaign. In addition to her role at the advocacy group, González is an attorney and long-time racial justice advocate who co-founded Change the Terms, a coalition of more than 50 civil and digital-rights groups that works to disrupt online hate. Prior to joining Free Press, she was executive vice president and general counsel at the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and she has also worked as a staff attorney and teaching fellow at Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Public Representation. Still to come in our Galley discussion series are interviews with Jillian York, the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Jenny Domino, a legal adviser with the International Commission of Jurists who specializes in Myanmar, where Facebook was accused by the United Nations of aiding in the genocide of the Rohingya people.

In her Galley interview, González said that she first started paying attention to how white supremacists in particular were using the media as an organizing tool back in the late 2000s, when she was working with the National Hispanic Media Coalition. A number of groups including the Southern Poverty Law Center were tracking anti-immigrant sentiment and saw how talk radio and cable TV were being used to spread false and dehumanizing information about immigrants, and how they started using social media like Facebook in the same way. “We started organizing against this, and started talking to members of other demographic groups that are often targeted by hate: Blacks, LGBTQ people, Muslims, etc. And we followed how white supremacists were organizing online, and started drawing attention to it in the early 2010s,” said González. Those efforts led to the creation of the Change the Terms coalition. “We have a set of model corporate policies to disrupt online hate, and we’ve been asking for big tech firms to adopt them since 2018,” she said.

Continue reading “Campaign organizers say boycott of Facebook will continue”

Did you know that the modern idea of paramedics — a special team of personnel with broad medical training who pick up the injured and bring them to hospital — began as a charitable effort in poor Black neighbourhoods in Philadelphia? I didn’t, until I read this 99 Percent Invisible story about Phil Hallen, a a former ambulance driver who worked with a community-driven program providing food to poor Black neighborhoods and got the idea to combine that with medical assistance to create mobile intensive-care units.

“One day, Hallen came across an article in the local paper, about a Black-operated jobs training program based in the Hill District called Freedom House. The article described how Freedom House had rolled out a kind of mobile grocery store for Black neighborhoods, using trucks to bring fresh vegetables to people’s doors.  Hallen initially thought something similar could be done to provide medical transportation to the underserved Black communities of Pittsburgh.”

The excavation of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, which was buried under an ocean of lava after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, has revealed beautiful murals, frescoes, temples and other examples of classical architecture. But it has also revealed some X-rated examples of ancient Roman graffiti as well, although this isn’t usually a part of most Pompeii tours. The blog Kashgar collected some of the best ones, and they read like the best (or worst) of the kind you find in modern washrooms, but with Roman names inserted where the modern North American names would otherwise be:

In the gladiator barracks: “Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion”

In a tavern: “Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates”

In a bar/brothel: “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”

In a bar: “I screwed the barmaid”

On a street wall: “Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog”

Elizebeth Smith Friedman was one of the first cryptographers and one of the few women in the early years of crypto-analysis, and helped lead a team that cracked dozens of Enigma codes during World War II. Smith had been a public-school teacher but was looking for work in 1916 when she mentioned to a librarian in Chicago that she had studied Shakespeare, and the librarian mentioned this to Colonel George Fabyan, a wealthy and eccentric textile merchant who also had a fascination with the playwright.

Smith was soon hired to work at Fabyan’s private Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois, one of the first facilities in the U.S. founded to study cryptography. She and another cryptographer she eventually married, William Friedman, were employed to decipher hidden messages that were allegedly contained in Shakespeare’s plays and poems, which Fabyan hoped would reveal the fact that Sir Francis Bacon actually wrote all of Shakespeare’s work. They were eventually hired away by the US government (over the protests of Fabyan, who intercepted their mail and removed multiple offers of employment), and their work formed the basis of what would become the National Security Agency.

Note: I originally wrote this for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

The fallout from recent protests over the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor have reignited long-standing concerns on the part of many Black journalists about their roles in the newsrooms they work in, and the value they are given (or not given) by the media companies they work for, how their voices are marginalized and/or silenced, etc. In one particularly egregious case, Alexis Johnson, a Black journalist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was prevented from covering the protests because of a single innocuous, joking tweet. Others have also been silenced in a variety of ways, or had their work tokenized by largely white newsrooms. Journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many other leading publications have taken to Twitter and elsewhere to talk about their experiences of systemic racism in those companies.

We brought together a group of Black journalists this week using CJR’s Galley discussion platform to talk about their experiences with systemic racism in the industry, a group that included CBS News reporter and former Washington Post correspondent Wesley Lowery, author of a recent essay in the New York Times entitled “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists” (which sparked a related discussion series on Galley about whether objectivity has outlived its usefulness). Others who have taken part include Errin Haines, editor-at-large for The 19th, a nonprofit focusing on gender-related issues, and a former national correspondent on race for Associated Press; Karen Attiah, global opinion editor for the Washington Post; Danielle Belton, editor-in-chief of The Root; Alissa Richardson, an assistant professor of journalism at USC Annenberg and author of the recent book Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalismand Adriana Lacy and Erin Logan, who both work at the Los Angeles Times.

One theme that ran through many of the discussions was the additional work that Black journalists often have to do in newsrooms. On top of often covering stories that involve violence against other Black people, with the associated emotional trauma that can produce, many Black journalists are also called on to give advice about stories written by non-Black reporters, and to educate their colleagues about racism and its effects. “In one of my group texts, this one with two other black male reporters, we recently were all talking about how there’s been a noticeable uptick in ‘Hey – could you give this a glance?’ notes that we’ve gotten from colleagues in recent weeks,” said Lowery. “And, to be clear, almost every black reporter I’ve ever encountered is eager and happy to help, but… there is very little appreciation of the real labor involved in being every person in the newsroom’s ‘black friend.'”

Continue reading “Black journalists face challenges that stem from systemic racism”

Lots of people have probably taken on projects or learned new things while quarantined with COVID0-19 — how to play the piano, how to paint, finished a novel, etc. But we had a pretty special experience, and it was special in part because we didn’t plan it at all, it just happened. It started in mid-March, when my wife Becky and I headed to the Farm (where we live now, near Buckhorn, about two hours north of Toronto) after coming back from vacation in Florida. Along with our youngest daughter Zoe, who joined us there during quarantine, we helped raise a little lamb who lost the ability to walk for some reason. Over the next couple of months, we helped teach him how to use his legs again and he wound up returning to his flock and becoming just a regular sheep. It was a lot of work at times, but it was definitely worth it. It was like living one of those Netflix specials or a Hallmark movie of the week!

It all started because a neighbour who lives across the road near Buckhorn asked if he could use one of the fields at the Farm to raise some sheep. So he put up a little pen and put some sheep in there, and then — as they do — the ewes had lambs (this tends to happen when you put a ram in with the ewes). First it was the twins we called Pebbles and Bam Bam, whose mother we naturally named Wilma. And then one morning when we went up to the pen, there was a little voice bleating: a new little lamb, wandering around the pen looking for his mom. But his mom — Bella — was still in labour with what would eventually be two other lambs, and so she didn’t have time to pay attention to the one we called Primo. So the poor little guy wandered around trying to nurse off just about everything, including the ram — who didn’t like that much, and head-butted poor Primo a bunch of times. And then finally, Bella gave birth to Big Red, and the one we called Dopey.

Continue reading “How we spent our quarantine: Teaching a lamb how to walk again”

In 2011, two photographers entered the so-called “No go zone” that extends for about 20 kilometres around the site of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which flooded during the tsunami in March of 2011, shutting down the power and cooling systems for three of the plant’s reactors, which leaked radioactive fuel. About 150,000 people had to be evacuated, and they left everything behind, including farm animals, personal belongings and cars — all of which was quickly overgrown with vines and other vegetation.

The photographers also too pictures of some former townspeople in their shops and places of work, all of which have been more or less destroyed by shoplifters and vandals.

Note: I originally wrote this for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

The killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor and the protests that followed helped spark a debate in many newsrooms and journalism schools around the country about the time-honored principle of objectivity in journalism, and whether it serves any useful purpose or is just a dusty artifact of an earlier time. Former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery wrote in the New York Times that what we call objective journalism “is constructed atop a pyramid of subjective decision-making,” and has been defined “almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses.” Since then, journalists at the Los Angeles Times and other newsrooms have spoken out about their longstanding experiences of racism and a lack of diversity, and the impact that has had on the journalism they and their employers do. So is objectivity a relic? And if so, what should we replace it with? We got a group of journalists and other experts together on CJR”s Galley platform this week for a virtual panel discussion on those and other related questions.

Lewis Raven Wallace is a transgender writer, journalist, and author of the recent book “A View From Somewhere,” as well as the host of a podcast of the same name. He is also a co-founder of Press On, a Southern collective of journalists, storytellers, and organizers that uses journalism in the service of liberation. Wallace’s book is based in part on his personal experience as a former reporter for Marketplace who was fired in 2017 after he wrote a blog post questioning the idea of objective journalism. “As a transgender journalist, it was a scary time,” he said during our interview. “I didn’t feel I could or should have to be silent about the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people, people of color, and freedom of the press.” Wallace said in his view, it’s not an either/or debate between personal journalism versus objective journalism. “I believe objectivity itself is a myth that’s been perpetuated based on a normative white male cisgender perspective in journalism,” he said. “The journalism we call objective is generally just biased towards acceptable social and political norms.”

Wallace said in his view, the media need to think about “the relationship between journalism, identity, community, and truth” and that focusing on that can offer a path forward for journalism that rebuilds trust with audiences, trust that has been lost after decades of supposed objectivity. Morgan Givens also argued that a complete reframing of what journalism is and how it operates is necessary to move forward. Givens is a writer, performer, and audio producer based in Washington, DC who works with NPR and WAMU and is also a former police officer who worked in prisons to eliminate sexual violence. “Black Americans have always lived in a United States where police killed us and still do with impunity, but this was an America that white journalistic institutions and those who allow them to function ignored,” he said. “Is ignoring these communities an example of being objective or ignoring the truth because the reality makes white journalists uncomfortable?”

Continue reading “What comes after we get rid of objectivity in journalism?”