The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Have you ever thought you lost something and then discovered it wasn’t lost after all? That’s how I felt Wednesday night winding down for sleep after watching a show on Netflix. Checking the calendar on the iPhone, it occurred to me it’s coming up on 10 years…
Search Engines
Artificial Intelligence, the Power Grid and News Work: Who Will Pay for Covering the Information Falling Through the Cracks?
Welcome to Botville: An Uncertain Computerized Future
Connecting the Dots – By Glynn Wilson – Computer hacker-programmers have been creating bots to do various things since the 1990s. Bot is short for robot, although these bots don’t look like the robots from science fiction going back to the 1950s. If you use any search engine to ask “what is a bot?” you…
A Story Told is A Life Lived
Letters: Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus
Editor’s Note: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” is a line from an editorial by Francis Pharcellus Church. Written in response to a letter by eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asking whether Santa Claus was real, the editorial was first published in the New York newspaper The Sun on September 21, 1897. “Is There a Santa…
Study: Google and Meta Owe News Publishers at Least $12 Billion
Public Attention to Political News Drops: Implications for the Future of News and Democracy
By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — As wars continue to rage in Israel-Gaza and Russia-Ukraine, and the Republicans still can’t seem to find a Speaker of the House they can get behind, what is the American public paying attention to and concerned about these days? Judging by what people seem to be interested in…
Part 5: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams and Covering News in Washington, D.C.
Part 4: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams and the Big Easy
Part 3: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams and Journalism
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — One of the themes that emerges from this life analysis is that kids need heroes to inspire and emulate. That’s why it’s so important for young women to have role models, along with African Americans and other minorities in America. All I can do…
Part 1: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams
The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance: How Authoritarian Leaders Mutilate Reality, History and Culture
“The first thing every totalitarian regime does along with confiscation and mutilation of reality is confiscation of history and confiscation of culture.” – Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Introduction WASHINGTON, D.C. — When I first walked into the administration building of an Alabama community…
The American Crisis: By Thomas Paine – 1776
Editor’s Note: We publish this here today in honor of President’s Day, and especially to honor George Washington’s brilliant plan to cross the Delaware River and attack the British Red Coats at Trenton, New Jersey on the night of December 25, 1776, which turned the tide and gave the American Revolution the public opinion boost…
Common Sense: By Thomas Paine – 1776
Justice Department Sues Google for Monopolizing Digital Advertising Technologies
Staff Report – WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States Department of Justice and eight states filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday for monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology products in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on…
Big Tech’s Advertising Monopoly is Destroying the American Press and Damaging Democracy
By Ken Buck – Special to the New American Journal – The first brilliant idea Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had was to “crawl” — and trawl — the World Wide Web. Using spiders, it would copy what it found, create vast databases of web content, and then “index” that content, evaluating it…
Bipartisan Support for Regulation of Big Tech Means It’s Coming in 2023
By Glynn Wilson â WASHINGTON, D.C. — Elon Musk of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the methhead hacker/programmers at Google and YouTube and their lobbyists in Washington, as well as their Republican friends in the House, do not want to hear this. But there is little doubt that more government regulation of social media is…
Beyond Section 230: Three Suggested Ways to Make Big Tech More Accountable and Transparent
Editor’s Note: As we have been reporting for some time, there is academic research taking place to offer potential solutions to the problems of social media. Here’s one example. The difficulty of making any progress on these issues over the next few months is going to be the problem of partisan divisiveness in Congress, distorted…
Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World
By Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies – ProPublica – Google is funneling revenue to some of the webâs most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found. The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the…