Media
China’s efforts to subdue the turkic-speaking Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region will be familiar to Techdirt readers. International awareness is increasing, too, not least thanks to the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics that the US and other countries have announced. That presents an interesting challenge to the Chinese authorities: how to counter the growing evidence of pervasive
Media
Robert Reich – From favoring the status quo to indulging in false equivalence, the mainstream media engages in subtle, persistent biases. That’s why I read the Guardian. I’m often asked how I keep up with the news. Obviously, I avoid the unhinged rightwing outlets pushing misinformation, disinformation and poisonous lies. But I’ve also grown wary
Corporate Greed
The current conversation about inflation serves corporate interests. nflation is punching far above its weight in the minds of Americans immersed in louder and louder media alarms about rising prices — often stripped of any context or policy prescriptions that might complicate the narrative, embarrass the rich, or spotlight the predatory business practices of wildly
Capitalism
Tucker Carlson likes to style himself a populist. But every time there’s a fight over something that might actually make life easier for working-class people, he never misses the opportunity to take the side of big business and the rich. Watching Carlson’s show means wading through an ocean of passionate, angry screeds taking aim at
Media
The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world. In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which
Media
Local sites in Virginia published tens of thousands of conservative-skewed articles, many of them misleading or wrong, in the past 11 months Rightwing operatives in the US are using a huge network of fake local news sites to target crucial state elections, with the sites publishing tens of thousands of conservative-skewed articles on politically charged