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…
By Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism – ProPublica – “My sisters have died,” the young boy sobbed, chest heaving, as he wailed into the sky. “Oh, my sisters.” As Israel began airstrikes on Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, posts by verified accounts on X, the social…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Do you like reading news online but hate paywalls and popup ads? There is a solution. But it will take a smart law firm to file the right kind of legal case against Google and Meta to bring it about. It has long been…
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…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Within days of moving to the nation’s capital in 2004, I was the last reporter hired by States News Service operating out of a cool newsroom on Pennsylvania Avenue, a couple of blocks from the White House. It was right near a Metro tunnel,…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — It was as hot as I believed hot could get when I landed at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans in the midst of the first August of the new millennium. Even in a summer Searsucker Suit the hot air hit you…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Do you ever feel like you are marking time, waiting for something to happen? Something that is supposed to happen, but the timing is not yet right? I was thinking that recently when watching the movie “Field of Dreams.” “The one constant through all…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — A person with character may pickup a few nicknames in a life. A famous Baptist preacher once called me “Cowboy,” and it stuck. That worked for a couple of decades, and I was locally famous as the only drummer to ever wear a cowboy…
“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 basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson,…
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…
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…
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…
By Glynn Wilson — 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…
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…
It looks like a miracle considering where Americans get their information – The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Uh, oh. It’s been one week since Election Day, and it appears Republicans are on the verge of winning the 218 seats they need in the House to take majority control in…
By Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies – ProPublica – Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s 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…
Staff Report – As the legal and financial heat continue to rain down on Mark Zuckerberg at Meta-Facebook, the tech giant has caved at the last minute and agreed to settle a massive lawsuit seeking billions in damages for allowing Cambridge Analytica to access the private data of tens of millions of users, data used…
Movie Review: ‘Don’t Look Up’ – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. – Some streaming movie fans are reeling away from the outrageous silliness of one of the top watched films on Netflix this year, “Don’t Look Up.” It’s an American satirical science fiction film written, directed and produced by Adam McKay, another in a…
By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — For millions of people around the world, Facebook is simply another toy on the internet. Many people simply log in now and then and scan what’s on the home page news feed on their smart phones, maybe hit like on a post or video, and don’t engage on…
