…I know someone who for a long time held to the view that if something was funny once…it was always funny…& in fairness when they kept it up long enough it could swing back around that way…but…some shit doesn’t work like that

On Wednesday night, a remarkable scene unfolded on the Senate floor as several Republicans, including Sens. Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Joni Ernst (Iowa) Todd C. Young (Ind.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) confronted Tuberville, imploring him to lift his hold for the sake of national security and proposing votes on individual officers whose promotions have been delayed. Tuberville rebuffed them one by one, blocking each proposed nominee as his colleagues’ frustration continued to rise.

The confrontation stretched nearly five hours, with Ernst, a retired Army officer, and Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, rotating to bring forward the bulk of 61 officers presented by name. They called out Tuberville for saying previously that he would relent on nominations that were brought forward for votes individually.

“Xi Jinping is loving this. So is Putin,” Sullivan said at one point, referring to top leaders in China and Russia. “How dumb can we be, man?”
[…]
The surprising public confrontation made clear that some of Tuberville’s Republican colleagues have hit their limit, but it remains unclear if there is enough GOP support for a Democratic plan to temporarily change Senate rules to neutralize his blockade. That proposal is set to come to a vote in the next few weeks, and would need nine Republicans to support it.

Some Republicans have urged Tuberville, who imposed his hold in protest of the Pentagon’s policy of reimbursing personnel who must travel out of state for reproductive care, to adjust tactics and focus instead on Biden’s proposed political appointments.

…for some of us his shtick was always deranged…but as the context has shifted…& he hasn’t…well…you know what they say about folks whose mind doesn’t change when the facts in front of them do…& this might in many ways be more of a nuisance than an active hindrance for the military from what they call a readiness perspective…but as some have pointed out…it sure as hell doesn’t do the services any favors in terms of retention or recruitment…which are tomorrow problems…at a time when a lot can change while it’s still today

Tuberville initiated the legislative blockade in February, preventing the Senate from using its typical process for approving uncontroversial nominees in batches of dozens or hundreds at a time. The number of military officers ensnared by the logjam has risen to 375 and includes positions spanning commands worldwide. The Pentagon estimates that by the end of the year, about three-quarters of the generals and admirals in the Defense Department — 650 of 852 — will be affected.

The Senate can bypass Tuberville’s hold by voting on officers individually, which it has done in only three instances, but to do so now for every frozen nomination would take months and impede action on numerous other issues.

…&…it’s as serious as a heart attack

Smith, 58, is the Marine Corps commandant and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He remains hospitalized in stable condition, the service said in a statement Wednesday. Officials have offered little publicly about his condition and prognosis, saying the general’s family has asked for privacy as he “continues his recovery” and that updates would be shared “as appropriate.”

Before the Senate approved his nomination in September, Smith was the service’s assistant commandant, a post that has remained vacant amid the ongoing gridlock. That has left him to shoulder the responsibilities of both jobs since July, when his predecessor retired. He had been among the most candid military officials about the challenges Tuberville’s hold created, saying the workload was not “sustainable.”
[…]
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters Wednesday that he supports temporarily changing the Senate’s rules to bypass Tuberville’s blockade and allow senators to vote on a large block of military nominees. The resolution, backed by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), would need all Democrats and nine Republican votes to pass.

“Patience is wearing thin with Senator Tuberville on both sides of the aisle,” Schumer said. “What happened with the Marine commandant just showed many people how dangerous” Tuberville’s gambit has proved. The majority leader said he is “very optimistic” that the resolution will pass once put to a vote, but when asked when that could happen, he responded: “We’ll see.”

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he believes the hold on military nominations is a “bad idea.”
[…]
Republicans have offered Tuberville multiple off-ramps this year, but he has refused to go along, according to one Republican who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
[…]
On Tuesday, Schumer filed a motion to force individual votes to fill key vacancies in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Those nominees include Adm. Lisa Franchetti, Biden’s choice to lead the Navy; Gen. David W. Allvin, nominated to lead the Air Force; and Lt. Gen. Christopher J. Mahoney, who would be promoted to four-star general, become the Marine Corps’s No. 2 officer, and step in as the caretaker commandant in Smith’s absence.

Those could be held as soon as Thursday.
[…]
Any vote to go around Tuberville’s hold on the hundreds of other frozen nominations is probably weeks away, as it still needs to go through the committee process. Many Republican senators have rejected the idea, however, saying they believe it could weaken lawmakers’ power to stall nominations in the future.

“I’m not for a rule change,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), “because I think we see around here that once precedent is set for a rule change then it’s a slippery slope to other changes, which I think threatens the institution.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), a moderate Republican who Democrats often seek out for bipartisan efforts, said Wednesday that she, too, is “cautious” about any vote that overturns the Senate’s rules, even as she remains concerned about the impact of Tuberville’s hold.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/01/tuberville-military-promotion-hold/

…FFFS (the extra one’s a participle)…I know these people don’t feel beholden to any calculus beyond what gets them over the threshold in their own local elections…& some of those are skewed to a joe manchin degree or as batshit as texas in terms of the calculus

Republicans welcome local benefits of climate law despite voting against it [Guardian]

…but…the staggering levels of dumber-than-shit they put on display does a pretty fine job of looking like they’re doing the other guy’s job for him…&…let’s face it…he’s more than likely feeling like cultivating that ground is one of the investments that’s keeping him afloat these days

Russia has restricted western companies that sell their Russian assets from withdrawing the proceeds in dollars and euros, imposing additional de facto currency controls in an effort to shore up the weakening rouble.

Western companies exiting Russia must agree on a sale price in roubles or, if sellers insist on receiving foreign currency, face delays and even losses on the amounts that can be transferred abroad, according to people familiar with the matter.

The fresh restrictions underscore Moscow’s concerns about the rouble continuing to depreciate as its economy grapples with western sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.

The rouble has depreciated more than 20 per cent against the dollar this year, passing Rbs100 to the dollar in August. That marked a “psychological threshold” for President Vladimir Putin, forcing authorities to take “palliative measures”, said one of the bankers involved in recent exits by western companies. “It’s like applying a Band-Aid to gangrene.”

When the rouble began to weaken in July, Russian authorities first imposed limits on the ways companies exiting the country could take the sale proceeds with them, according to a document published by the government subcommittee on foreign investments whose approval is required for transactions involving western-owned assets.

Western companies were presented with two options when selling their assets in foreign currencies: having the money transferred to a highly restricted type “C” account at a Russian bank, or having the proceeds wired to an account abroad — in which case the sum was to be paid in several instalments. Alternatively, the seller could cash out in roubles and receive the entire sum immediately into a regular Russian bank account.

But the first two options were in practice further restricted in terms of volume and frequency of payments abroad, as authorities sought to strong-arm companies into doing business in roubles.

…never mind your inside dealing…this is straight palming off the bottom of a stacked deck

The restrictions on currency repatriation have added to the growing list of criteria deals must meet before they can be approved. These include a “voluntary” contribution to the Russian budget, recently raised from 10 to 15 per cent of the transaction amount, and sale at a discount of at least 50 per cent to the fair value of the assets.

An investment banker who recently helped close a deal worth about $300mn said the commission had set a seven-day deadline on the completion of the sale into a foreign account, but that the buyer was unable to transfer more than $20mn per day. “Simple math shows that it was impossible for the seller to receive all the proceeds from the deal,” he added.

Another person working on a number of exits said the commission told them there was an informal cap of $500mn that could be transferred overseas.

“The state has imposed capital controls without saying so. The state says, ‘It’s not forbidden to be paid in euros or dollars, it’s just complicated’. It’s up to you whether you cash out in foreign currency or in roubles, or whether you do not cash out at all,” the person said.
[…]
A western seller experienced Russia’s successive rule changes within one deal.

First, they applied and obtained a sale permit nominated in euros, but the buyer backed off at the last minute. When they applied with the same deal and a new buyer in July, they were told only 50 per cent of the euro proceeds could be received immediately and the rest would be deferred. However, if the seller agreed to a rouble-denominated deal, they were told they could receive the entire sum right away.

After being paid in roubles, the seller can either exchange the amount in Russia or try to buy foreign currency abroad.

“Both options are bad,” the person said. “In the first case, the exchange rate is terrible and it is difficult to exchange large quantities. In the second case, it is difficult to find a bank that will accept the money.”

Russia tightens capital controls on western companies [FT]

…in the context

Some Ukrainians Helped the Russians. Their Neighbors Sought Revenge.
For people in Bilozerka, the invasion began a cat-and-mouse game of collaboration and resistance. [NYT]

…fomenting the likes of bannon to prime the pump for the likes of his IRA & their chums to chum the online waters of american online discourse continues to be the gift that keeps on giving

AI chatbots have exploded in popularity over the past four months, stunning the public with their awesome abilities, from writing sophisticated term papers to holding unnervingly lucid conversations.

Chatbots cannot think like humans: They do not actually understand what they say. They can mimic human speech because the artificial intelligence that powers them has ingested a gargantuan amount of text, mostly scraped from the internet.
[…]
Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.

To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)

The Post worked with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI on this investigation and categorized the websites using data from Similarweb, a web analytics company. About a third of the websites could not be categorized, mostly because they no longer appear on the internet. Those are not shown.

Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart [WaPo]

…even as he relentlessly drives his electorate into an all too literal meat-grinder of historical proportions…&…well…you know how it is…if you start out as a fucking idiot you can go through the motions of trying to reason your way around a new fact pattern…but…you don’t get an automatic upgrade to being someone whose head isn’t buried up their own ass…so…stupid prizes abound & in a lot of cases are handed out for participation in stupid games…exhibit A

The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape Western Politics [NYT]

…I mean…poor little ross thinks the existence of what he refers to as an “arab street” that’s “inside the west”…is an “emergence” rather than a “fuck me, I just now noticed”…but then ross is a confirmed fuckwit of several hundred columns’ standing at this point…but…in fairness to the hypothetical exercise he purports to engage in…there’s no shortage of your bona fide emergent properties to consider…at a variety of scales

Drought Saps the Panama Canal, Disrupting Global Trade
The number of ships that can travel through the vital route has fallen sharply this year because of a lack of water for the locks, raising costs and slowing deliveries.[NYT]

…meanwhile…several layers of abstraction away but dealing in very much indigestible realities

Graphic pro-Israel ads make their way into children’s video games [Reuters]

Hamas hostage videos are cruel, manipulative, revealing. Experts expect more. [WaPo]

…it’s like…they just can’t parse the problems…even if they reduce them to numbers & try to do math

House Republicans’ plan to pay for emergency aid to Israel by cutting the Internal Revenue Service’s budget would increase the deficit by $90 billion over 10 years, the chief of the tax agency said Tuesday.

…& yes…they’re also all about trying to separate giving money to israel…which they’d like to make insanely costly in altogether more senses than I’m comfortable with…from giving money to ukraine…because they still don’t get what an amazing bargain the ukrainians have been bestowing on “the west” this whole time the way tuberville doesn’t get that some shit isn’t about trying to murder abortion rights…because…as the saying goes…a little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Seeking to pay for $14 billion of proposed aid to Israel sought by both parties, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Monday unveiled legislation that would cut roughly $14 billion from funds recently approved by Democrats to expand the IRS. But Daniel Werfel, who was nominated by President Biden as the IRS commissioner last year, said the cuts would lead to greater expense by reducing audits of the wealthy and large corporations and hampering the agency’s ability to collect revenue that funds the government.
[…]
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last year that the $80 billion IRS expansion would cut the deficit by more than $100 billion by improving collections and enforcement. The IRS expansion was approved to pay for Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature economic legislation, in 2022.

Although it specifies that taxpayer services would be spared from cuts, the House GOP bill does not identify precisely how it would cut $14 billion from that $80 billion expansion that has improved a broad range of agency functions. The GOP bill also would prohibit the CBO from counting the legislation against existing domestic spending caps.
[…]
Werfel’s assertion, which is based on IRS modeling that shows a 6-1 ratio of money spent on tax enforcement to revenue collected, complicates the GOP’s attempts to characterize President Biden as fiscally irresponsible. In the days since becoming speaker, Johnson has argued that the $14 billion of aid for Israel must be paid for by cutting other parts of the federal budget, citing the nearly $2 trillion annual deficit facing the country this year.
[…]
“I think it was intellectually lazy,” Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), the vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, told The Post. “Rhetorically, it’s sort of what we’ve always done. It’s a little hard to have, ‘I care about debt,’ and then at the same time move something as your pay-for that actually will have a multiplier of raising the debt.”
[…]
Johnson also told Fox News on Tuesday: “If you put this to the American people, and they weigh the two needs, I think they are going to say standing with Israel and protecting the innocent is in our national interest, and a more immediate need than IRS agents.”

…guess that’s what passes for strategic dumbassery

“As I understand it, it was designed to unify Republican support for the bill. As a stand-alone, you think they’d go for something easier because this is just not going to fly in the Senate,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the CBO who is now the president of the American Action Forum, a conservative group. “This is a new speaker trying to get the bill off his floor — and then they’ll figure it out in negotiations with the Senate.”

That’s how Johnson’s closest congressional allies expect him to run the chamber, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who has known Johnson for nearly a decade when they both served in Louisiana state government, told The Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/01/israel-aid-irs-gop/

…speaking of which

The first international AI Safety Summit, held at a former codebreaking spy base near London, focused on cutting-edge “frontier” AI that some scientists warn could pose a risk to humanity’s very existence. [NBC]

…that’ll be the one where rishi gave it the ol’ “let’s not rush to regulate”…but then

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-generated-images-bias-racism-sexism-stereotypes/

…what did you expect?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/26/its-great-except-when-its-not-rishgpt-reveals-his-insights-on-ai

…or to pick one a little more recent

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/31/genius-among-morons-dominic-cummings-gives-halloween-display-of-his-ego

…not sure how well known the saying is elsewhere…but there was a famous line in blighty about those who fought the great war being lions led by donkeys…but…figured I’d mention it before…you know…mentioning it?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/01/so-no-10-run-by-donkeys-went-to-oxbridge-my-dog-could-have-done-better

…which rounds out a hat-trick of john crace columns…so don’t say I never did nothing for ya…but…none of us have time to get into the details

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/02/hamas-funding-ismail-haniyeh-us-sanctions/

…but…there’s no shortage of devils making themselves at home in those things

Some cybersecurity companies have been tightening budgets, and there’s no lack of available vendors, raising the question of what purpose venture capital serves in the cybersecurity industry.

It’s one that Ted Schlein, executive chairman and general partner at Ballistic Ventures, said he’s answered for decades. The sector “is truly one of the only technology areas where adversaries dictate the change,” he told me.

• “Because it’s so asymmetrical and how this works, meaning good guys have to be right 100 percent of the time and bad guys only have to be right once, it forces innovation to change based upon how attack vectors change,” he said. “And it forces you to reinvent stuff that we felt we had already done.”

There’s been plenty of study about the “revolving door” between government and industry, and the potential downsides of that. Schlein, Inglis and Todt all see benefits.

…all over the shop

Apple warned at least prominent 20 Indian nationals, including opposition politicians and journalists, that they were the target of a state-sponsored cyberattack, a development reviving allegations that the government is using hacking and surveillance to suppress political rivals, our colleague Gerry Shih reports.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/01/two-former-cyber-officials-have-advice-national-cyber-director-nominee/

…& not all the fronts are where you think they make sense being

Americans spend a lot of time on social media, and this term the Supreme Court will do the same. Over the next few months — beginning Tuesday — the court will hear a series of cases requiring it to resolve First Amendment questions arising out of the role that major social media platforms play in hosting, shaping and setting the limits of public discourse online.

One striking feature of these cases is that they involve conflicts internal to free speech — not conflicts between free speech and other values, like equality or national security, but conflicts between the competing free speech claims of government, platforms and ordinary citizens. In resolving these conflicts, the court should remember that the First Amendment’s highest purpose — its “central meaning,” as Justice William Brennan put it nearly 60 years ago — is to protect the speech that’s necessary to democracy.

The two cases the court will hear on Tuesday pose the question of when a public official’s social media account is subject to First Amendment constraints. One case was brought by parents in Southern California who were blocked from school board members’ Facebook pages after they posted hundreds of comments about racism at local schools. The other case was filed by a Michigan resident who was blocked from the Port Huron city manager’s Facebook page after he criticized the city’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The plaintiffs in both cases argue their First Amendment rights were violated when public officials blocked them based on their viewpoints, but the public officials invoke the First Amendment, too. They argue that they have a constitutional right to use social media — and to block other users from their accounts — just like everyone else.

These cases may seem trivial, but they’re not. Some officials’ social media accounts have become vital forums for speech relating to those officials’ exercise of government power, and for speech about public policy more broadly. We need the First Amendment to protect ordinary citizens from government censorship in these forums to ensure that public officials don’t suppress dissent, insulate themselves from criticism and transform these democratically important spaces into echo chambers.

A few years ago, the Knight First Amendment Institute, which I direct, filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump on behalf of users he had blocked from his Twitter account after they had criticized him. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with us, but after Mr. Trump lost the election, the Supreme Court declared the case to be moot and vacated the appeals court’s ruling. The two cases the court is hearing Tuesday morning provide it with an opportunity to recognize, as the appeals court did, that public officials who use their social media accounts as extensions of their offices are not protected by the First Amendment but constrained by it.

Those two lawsuits are about government officials’ use of social media. Other cases the court will hear this term are about government efforts to regulate the platforms. Two of the cases concern the constitutionality of social media laws enacted by Florida and Texas. Both require the platforms to carry speech they might prefer not to carry. Florida’s law restricts platforms’ right to remove or suppress the posts of political candidates and media organizations, and Texas’ bars platforms from taking down content because of its viewpoint. Both states’ laws also require the platforms to provide explanations to users whose posts the platforms take down.

A threshold question the court will have to answer is whether platforms’ content moderation policies reflect the exercise of editorial judgment, since editorial judgment is protected by the First Amendment. Texas and Florida say no, and if the court agrees, then the states win. But the platforms have the better of this argument. In fact, it was the states’ disagreement with the platforms’ editorial judgment, particularly with the decision of some of them to eject Mr. Trump after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, that led the states to pass these laws.

The harder question is what follows from this. Nearly half a century ago, the court held that the First Amendment foreclosed the government from requiring newspapers to provide space in their pages for political candidates to respond to editorials that had criticized them. Whether the First Amendment should be similarly hostile to so-called must-carry rules imposed on the platforms is a question whose answer might turn on whether we think the platforms are meaningfully distinguishable from newspapers — perhaps because of the way these platforms exercise editorial judgment, the significance of their users’ free speech interests or the reasons the government is seeking to regulate them.

What Matters Most in the Supreme Court’s Upcoming Social Media Cases [NYT]

…&…somewhat implied…is the part where…that’s the stuff people not only consider relevant…but look to for relevance

[…]News consumption hit a tipping point around the globe during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, with more people turning to social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram than to websites maintained by traditional news outlets, according to the latest Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. One in 5 adults under 24 use TikTok as a source for news, the report said, up five percentage points from last year. According to Britain’s Office of Communications, young adults in the United Kingdom now spend more time watching TikTok than broadcast television.

This shift has been driven in part by a desire for “more accessible, informal, and entertaining news formats, often delivered by influencers rather than journalists,” the Reuters Institute report says, adding that consumers are looking for news that “feels more relevant.”

While a few national publications such as the New York Times and The Washington Post have seen their digital audiences grow, allowing them to reach hundreds of thousands more readers than they did a decade ago, the economics of journalism have shifted.

Well-known news outlets have seen a decline in the amount of traffic flowing to them from social media sites, and some of the money that advertisers previously might have spent with them is now flowing to creators. Even some outlets that began life on the internet have struggled, with BuzzFeed News shuttering in April, Vice entering into bankruptcy and Gawker shutting down for a second time in February.

The trend is likely to continue. “There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older,” Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said in the report, which is based on an online survey of roughly 94,000 adults in 46 national markets, including the United States.

As a profusion of independent online producers of news programming has risen to prominence, the ramifications for society are still coming into focus. One positive impact is a more diverse media ecosystem, where a wider array of voices can challenge narratives fashioned by the gatekeepers of traditional journalism. But that also serves to undercut the authority of legacy news organizations, draining support from newsrooms that are a primary source of original reporting.

While many online news creators are, like Al-Khatahtbeh, trained journalists collecting new information, others are aggregators and partisan commentators sometimes masquerading as journalists. The transformation has made the public sphere much more “chaotic and contradictory,” said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the PressThink blog, adding that it has never been easier to be both informed and misinformed about world events.

“The internet makes possible much more content, and reaching all kinds of people,” Rosen said. “But it also makes disinformation spread.”
[…]
Several social media platforms have emerged to serve conservative audiences. Rumble, BitChute and Telegram give right-wing creators a place to monetize, becoming magnets for accounts banned elsewhere, such as Alex Jones of Infowars who was banned from YouTube and other mainstream platforms for violating hate speech policies.

According to a recent Pew Research Center report, a majority of people who regularly get news from these alternative platforms (66 percent) “identify as Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party, in contrast with the news consumers on more established social media sites, who largely identify as Democrats or lean Democratic.”

Many news content creators on these platforms claim to be independent journalists but are backed by powerful special interest groups and conservative political activists. Rumble is financed by tech venture capitalists Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican now serving in the U.S. Senate. These creators tend to focus on polarizing topics guaranteed to generate outrage among their conservative followers and attract coverage by national news outlets, feeding political divisions.

…apologies for a pun that seems in spectacularly poor taste…but…it’s something of a minefield

At 17, Marcus became enamored with breaking news when a bomb exploded during the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring nearly 300. An avid Reddit user, Marcus skipped an entire day of classes to follow live updates about the bombing. He watched as the Reddit community pieced together information in real time, faster than any broadcast news organization. Instead of refreshing CNN.com, Marcus listened to a live stream of the Boston police scanner.

After several hours, the crowd on Reddit claimed to have identified the perpetrator, a missing Brown University undergrad whose family was immediately inundated online with attacks and death threats. Marcus later was horrified to learn the internet had named the wrong man.

“When it came out that it wasn’t the guy, and seeing what the internet had done to him and his family, that really stuck with me,” Marcus said. “That the internet can be a very dangerous place for news if it’s not used responsibly.”

Today, Marcus is best known as Quentin Quarantino, his alter ego on an Instagram news page started in the early days of the pandemic. All day every day, he shares breaking news updates on world events with his 1.1 million followers, “becoming an actual outlet for people to check news,” he said.
[…]
News industry experts are watching the shifting media landscape with a mix of skepticism and curiosity. Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School, called the rise of news influencers “the logical conclusion of the atomization of news media and an extension of trends that have been happening for quite a while.”

“I hate to say it,” Grueskin added, but it also marks “the diminishing importance of a lot of traditional media in the eyes of the under 35 demographic.”

Grueskin said he worries about the loss of original reporting as most news content creators simply aggregate or comment on news from traditional sources. “I’m not trying to say that giving opinions about something isn’t important, but ultimately it relies on the quality of the underlying information, which is done through actual journalism,” he said.

However, the primary source of much of that journalism — legacy media institutions — is viewed with growing distrust, especially among young people, said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. National news publications that rely on access to people in power or serve primarily wealthy audiences deliver coverage that often feels out of touch with average working people, he said.

“There is a sense of a self-serving, self-indulgent elite that’s running things to benefit themselves,” Wasserman said. “For all its claims about independence and bringing a critical gaze to policy, there are vast areas where the press is in lockstep with the people who own and run the country.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/31/creator-economy-news-outlets-influencers/

…&…sure…some folks file taylor lorenz in the same columnist column as bedbug brett or the loss that’s ross…but…you shake that tree & what drops might be fruit…or poisoned fruit…or just plain bullshit…& that’s before we drag the metaphor into the sort of frozen mental wasteland where whole boughs or even trunks can explosively shatter as the quirky ways of water getting bigger when it gets colder makes chainsaws look like butter knives…so…take one of these & call me in the morning?

Our world is in chaos. Here are six ways to take care of yourself (and others) [Guardian]

…& I’ll see if I can find some sort of tuneful penance for inflicting the above on y’all?