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…
Search Engines
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
Editorâs Note: We publish this here today in honor of Presidentâs Day, and especially to honor George Washingtonâs 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…
Blue Monday: The Day Facebook Went Down
Part III: Government Regulations and Objective Journalism Redefined
FTC and Bipartisan Coalition of 48 Attorneys General Sue Facebook for Violating Consumer Privacy and Crushing Competition
By Glynn Wilson – The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in 48 of 50 states launched a major legal broadside across the bow of social media giant Facebook on Wednesday, escalating the battles in Washington and across the country against the largest technology companies in a way that “could remake the social media industry,”…
President Barack Obama, Idiocracy and Our Epistemological Crisis
By Glynn Wilson – This is something I’ve been thinking about and writing about for a long time, but now former President Barack Obama and The Atlantic are talking about it. In an exclusive interview by Jeffrey Goldberg, the former president identifies the greatest threats to the American experiment in democracy, explains why he’s still…
Part III: How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet
Editor’s Note: This is the third in a three part series on how to create a functioning communications system to save democracy and the planet. We face an existential crisis in this world and no one seems to know what to do about it. We are just beginning to explore solutions while others seem willing…