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Some observers have felt dissatisfied with the media coverage. “Are we in a hype cycle? Absolutely. But is that entirely surprising? No,” said Paris Martineau, a tech reporter at The Information. The structural headwinds buffeting journalism—the collapse of advertising revenue, shrinking editorial budgets, smaller newsrooms, demand for SEO traffic—help explain the “breathless” coverage—and a broader sense of chasing content for web traffic. “The more you look at it, especially from a bird’s eye view, the more it [high levels of low-quality coverage] is a symptom of the state of the modern publishing and news system that we currently live in,” Martineau said, referring to the sense newsrooms need to be covering every angle, including sensationalist ones, to gain audience attention. In a perfect world all reporters would have the time and resources to write ethically-framed, non-science fiction-like stories on AI. But they do not. “It is systemic,” she added.

One story that seems to have gotten lost is the “incredible consolidation of power and money in the very small set of people who invested in this tool, are building this too, are set to make a ton of money off of it.” We need to move away from focusing on red herrings like AI’s potential “sentience” to covering how AI is further concentrating wealth and power.

Sensationalized coverage of generative AI “leads us away from more pressing questions,” Simon of the Oxford Internet Institute said. For instance, the potential future dependence of newsrooms on big tech companies for news production, the governance decisions of these companies, the ethics and bias questions relating to models and training, the climate impact of these tools, and so on. “Ideally, we would want a broader public to be thinking about these things as well,” Simon said, not just the engineers building these tools or the “policy wonks” interested in this space.

My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.

We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.

Trump got roughly twice as much coverage in 2020 as Biden has received in 2021. And the coverage of Biden is noticeably more negative than the tone of news coverage overall. Predictably, Breitbart and the New York Post are among the most negative outlets, but even liberal ones such as HuffPost and Salon have been negative. (The Post was the closest to neutral, at 0.0006.)

Most coverage of Muslims in British news outlets has a negative slant, according to a major analysis by the Muslim Council of Britain, which concludes that news stories in the mainstream media are contributing to Islamophobia.

The findings come amid growing scrutiny of Islamophobia in the Conservative party and whether its roots lie in rightwing media coverage. A YouGov poll of Tory members by the campaign group Hope Not Hate found that 60% believe “Islam is generally a threat to western civilisation” and more than half believe “Islam is generally a threat to the British way of life”

British television stations, which are regulated for balance by the broadcasting code, were substantially less likely than newspapers to portray Muslims in a negative light, with local television broadcasts particularly likely to feature more positive stories about Islam.

The institution of local broadcast news is a young one, but among the most ubiquitous in the United States. It’s a pair of routines that unfold each night: As Americans gather to wind down their days, the medium has worked to deepen racial tensions and reinforce racial stereotypes about communities of color.

This format launched in Philadelphia, first with the birth of Eyewitness News in 1965, and then with Action News in 1970. Over the next few generations, the pervasive and seductive twin broadcasts would spread to stations across the country — and with them, negative narratives about neighborhoods that would effectively “other” certain groups based largely on race, class, and zip code.

The new breed of local news would transform how Americans received the day’s headlines. It would even change the substance of the news itself. Before Eyewitness appeared on America’s small screens, local television news hardly existed, with national stories dominating the day’s headlines as anchors vied for spots at big-city network markets. And it was delivered largely behind a desk, by a suited white man in a series of passive sentences.

One of supposed golden rules of journalism goes like this: “If everybody’s mad at your coverage, you must be doing a good job.” That’s ridiculous, of course, though it seems comforting. If everybody’s mad, it may just mean you’re getting everything wrong.

the middle-lane approach to journalism — the smarmy centrism that often benefits nobody, but promises that you won’t offend anyone.

the supposedly daring, supposedly against-the-grain hires made by magazines and by newspaper op-ed pages. In their quest to run the full gamut from center-left to center-right, they are already well-equipped with anti-Trump conservatives.

Almost half (46%) of British people actively avoid reading the news as a result of fatigue at excessive Covid and political coverage and a drop in trust in journalism

trust in the UK media had undergone a dive recently despite rising slightly during Covid, with just 34% of those polled in 2022 saying they trusted UK news, compared to 51% in 2015

far above the last-placed USA where just 26% of people trusted most news reporting

we compared British journalists’ professional attitudes to those of journalists in another country with a similar media landscape but a more muted press: Germany. German media tend to be noticeably more restrained in their coverage of controversial issues than British papers.

We used two representative surveys of British and German journalists to analyse the professional attitudes of both groups. Both surveys were part of the Worlds of Journalism Study, which brings together researchers from 67 countries, including the UK and Germany. Between 2012 and 2016 over 27,500 journalists across the world were interviewed, using a common methodological framework.

Our statistical analysis revealed several significant differences between journalists in Britain and Germany. Most importantly, we found that British journalists believe it more important than their German colleagues to confront those in power and hold them to account. But – contrary to expectations – we found no difference between British and German journalists’ eagerness to set the political agenda or influence public opinion. The second significant difference we found concerned how they thought they should report reality. Whereas British journalists tend towards objective, factual reporting as detached observers, German journalists see their role as more analytical.

Historians warn about “the teleological view of history” – assuming a fixed endpoint and then telling the story as if it was always heading for that end point. Something similar has happened, over and over again, in political journalism.

a version of the Hawthorne effect in science, where study participants alter their behaviour because they know they are being observed. By focusing so strongly on the possibility of a deal with the SNP, journalists made it look extremely likely. That, in turn, drove voter behaviour.

once again political journalism struggled because it assumed the result – Remain – and worked backwards from there. In the course of the campaign, I can remember hardly any consideration being given to what form Brexit would take: there was no appetite for discussions of the merits of “Norway plus” against a Canada-style trade deal. Leaving the EU was deemed unlikely to happen, and therefore not sufficiently interrogated. That has had enormous repercussions ever since.

Alexey Gromov, formerly the president’s press secretary and now first deputy head of the presidential administration.

Described as an unassuming man whose passions include collecting antique coins, Gromov is nonetheless a key manager of the Putin government’s control over what gets said — or not — in Russia’s major print and broadcast media. He is also a co-creator of RT, the international propaganda network formerly known as Russia Today.

Elena Tregubova, a journalist whose 2003 tell-all book “Tales of the Kremlin Digger” warned that Putin was reinstituting Soviet-style control of the media, describes Gromov as a modest man who treated people well and, most critically, never expressed his own opinion on political issues during his tenure. In 2000, he was appointed as the press secretary for Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin. This promotion radically changed Gromov, Tregubova wrote. He began to behave less like a press secretary and more like a security guard, driving away journalists from the president and forbidding reporters from asking questions.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is launching Tracker-19 to monitor and evaluate the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on journalism and to offer recommendations on how to defend the right to information.

Called “Tracker 19” in reference not only to Covid-19 but also article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this project aims to evaluate the pandemic’s impacts on journalism. It will document state censorship and deliberate disinformation, and their impact on the right to reliable news and information. It will also make recommendations on how to defend journalism.

without journalism, humankind could not address any of the major global challenges, including the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, discrimination against women and corruption.

The re-election of the conservative-nationalist group, founded and led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has heightened fears among the journalists and academics that freedom of the press will be further restricted in the party's pursuit of a proposed "new media order".  PiS announced in its 232-page election manifesto that it wanted to regulate the status of journalists

The deputy culture minister, Pawel Lewandowski, has said: "[The media] is a type of state power. "We must have 100 percent certainty that everything that happens in Poland is overseen by the Polish authorities."

Since 2015, PiS has taken control of public companies, the courts and state-run broadcasting in its remoulding of society.  Press freedom in Poland has fallen from 18th to 58th place out of 180 countries in an annual index conducted by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Levels of trust in news on social media, search engines, and messaging apps is consistently lower than audience trust in information in the news media more generally.

Many of the same people who lack trust in news encountered via digital media companies – who tend to be older, less educated, and less politically interested – also express less trust in the news regardless of whether found on platforms or through more traditional offline modes.

Many of the most common reasons people say they use platforms have little to do with news.

Aesthetic choices have long shaped how American audiences see the world. Historically speaking, the West’s visual vocabulary tends to champion a fascination “with abjection and violence” in foreign subjects, whether that be the sinister depictions of Japanese people in World War II propaganda, Native American mascots in sports, or distressed communities in Africa and the Middle East.

Using repetitive, stereotyped tropes to signify that China is exotic, authorientalism visually links these tropes to abuses of government power, thereby promoting the view that authoritarianism is part of the essential character of Chinese-ness. It conflates the culture and the government, and reinforces the state’s own frequent claims that authoritarianism is innate to Chinese history or society.

Pap Ndiaye, a 56-year-old history professor specializing in American politics, looks the very model of a soft-spoken academic in tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses.  Ndiaye is the first Black education minister of France. A similar historical milestone in the United States would have been prominently noted in articles about his sudden rise in politics. But in a country that prides itself on being officially colorblind—to the extent that the government keeps no statistics on the racial or ethnic makeup of its population—this fact was omitted even in press coverage of his critics, who fretted that he would fling wide the doors of French classrooms to American-style “wokisme.” (That word resonates with some French parents and politicians the same way “critical race theory” does with some Americans.)

Blanquer focused on the teaching of basic skills and introduced free breakfasts for children in poor neighborhoods; he may be best known today for a group he co-founded dedicated to French republican principles like secularism and humanism and critical of what they perceive as the contagion of “woke” ideas from American campuses

Critics view an emphasis on racial matters as a nefarious U.S. import —like Coca-Cola, only with the risk not to the consumer’s waistline but to the national psyche, which they say will be debilitated by American-style culture wars.