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Just 100 years ago this June, armed whites rampaged through East St. Louis, slaughtering more than 100 African-Americans. In Tulsa in 1921, white mobs attacked a wealthy black neighborhood, killing as many as 300 people and leaving 8,000 homeless in what was wrongly labeled a “race riot” and left out of history texts until recently.

after mass attacks perpetrated by brown Muslim assailants, such as the Orlando Pulse massacre or the San Bernardino, California, killings, the media, authorities and politicians were quick to label them “terrorism” even before we had full information

Just because someone’s angry or even mentally ill doesn’t mean their actions aren’t those of a domestic terrorist (see U.S. Code definition above). As Joshua Keating points out in Slate, being distraught and a terrorist are “not mutually exclusive.” A 2013 study of violence by far-right extremists in America in Criminology and Public Policy found 40 percent of “lone wolf” domestic terrorists had a history of mental illness

Fox News dubiously described the shooter’s father’s life as “colorful,” as if it were entertaining that the man’s father robbed a string of banks, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and busted out of a federal penitentiary. Can you imagine a black, Muslim or Latino’s long criminal record being described in the same way?

Underlying this bias is the implication that Muslims or brown immigrants are more dangerous to Americans’ safety than white attackers. That is provably false, based on government statistics – yet it was the central narrative of President Trump’s campaign

according to an analysis by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh of fatal terrorism on U.S. soil from 1975 through 2015 – including the staggeringly high toll of the 9/11 attacks – the chances of an American being killed in a terror attack on U.S. soil by a foreigner was a miniscule 1 in 3.6 million per year. The chances of being killed by an illegal immigrant in the same 41-year period was an infinitesimal 1 in 10.9 billion per year.

Syrian activists became adept at crafting a specific message

By focusing only on English-language social media posts, mainstream media have frequently distorted the focus of the Syrian story, the report’s authors claimed.

“We here in Washington, especially, we think that the United States is really important; we think that American policy is the single most important thing about Syria, and what Obama does is what everybody wants to know about,” Lynch said. “The Arabic-speaking community does not care about Obama, for the most part. They don’t think American policy is all that important; they’re focused on other things.”Mentions of President Barack Obama, for example, are sporadic in Arabic tweets. By March 2013, Arabic tweets about Syria only mentioned Obama 0.28 percent of the time, compared to 4.28 percent of English tweets.

when the military took hold of the building, it became forbidden to mention the military. If you did something like that you’d be called ‘an agenda with ulterior motives.’ ”

He insisted that Al Ahram was no longer “the newspaper with one reader” — that was President Mubarak — but now sent its reporters out to truly cover the news. On Wednesday, he promised that Thursday’s front page would feature the photograph of an 84-year-old man who had brought a complaint to President Morsi’s new grievance office — a demonstration of the paper’s new empathy for the common man and fairness to President Morsi. But the picture did not appear; the headline featured a misleading quotation from Mr. Morsi suggesting he had backed down before a new court order again dissolving Parliament. “The media looks to the center of power,” said Hala Mustafa, editor of the state-financed journal Democracy. “I think everybody knows that the military council represents the center of power, the real comprehensive authority in the country.”

Whereas entertainment channels that do not offer news content can attract a multisectarian and multiethnic viewing base, news channels generally draw upon a particular ethnic or sectarian segment of the population whose coverage it favors, further reinforcing the political divisions that already afflict the media environment. 

 “The Ninth Studio” does not rely for its success on an enormous budget or sophisticated technical capabilities. Rather, it tends to deal frankly and directly with issues that concern the ordinary audience, and to do so with a high degree of independence. “The Ninth Studio” tends to focus on issues pertaining to the corruption and inefficiency of governmental institutions, and generally offers scathing criticism of Iraqi officials, without indulging in the discourse of sectarian prejudice.

Despite the absence of sectarian language on “The Ninth Studio,” and the difficulty of discerning any sectarian bias in its rhetoric, Iraq's Media and Communications Commission temporarily shut down its office in September on the pretext of it being a threat to public peace. Most likely, this decision came in response to governmental pressures, and as a consequence of the show's earlier criticism of the commission.

The problem is that neutral media organizations usually lack sufficient financial support, and are exposed to pressures by officials who are unhappy with their content, without being able to rely on independent institutions capable of defending them.

Nearly thirty-five years since Said’s seminal work, the numbers revealed in the study unambiguously support his view with a quantitative edge, showing a consistent and systematic bias against Palestinians. It is consistent because it spans five decades, and systematic because the coverage has repeatedly responded to the need of Israel to justify its occupation as it metastasized over the years. For instance, assessing the frequency of certain words per decade, the study found correlations with the stated policy goals of both Israel and the U.S. There was a similar decline of mentions of the occupation, Palestinian refugees, and East Jerusalem, in addition to the portrayal of Palestinians in a negative light, in line with US-Israeli policy goals.

during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, examining only a sliver of the 51-days assault (June 29 and July 10), CNN broadcasted 28 appearances of Israeli public officials and laymen, while granting nearly 40% less appearances to Palestinians officials and laymen, a total of 16 appearances

existing efforts "focus on the interpretive responsibilities of the individual,"

"if bad actors intentionally dump disinformation online with an aim to distract and overwhelm, is it possible to safeguard against media manipulation?"

A 2012 meta-analysis by academic researchers found that media literacy efforts could help boost students' critical awareness of messaging, bias, and representation in the media they consumed. There have been small studies suggesting that media-literacy efforts can change students' behaviors—for example, by making them less likely to seek out violent media for their own consumption. And more recently, a pair of researchers found that media-literacy training was more important than prior political knowledge when it comes to adopting a critical stance to partisan media content.

the roles of institutions, technology companies, and governments

Because the term “AI” is ambiguous, it makes having clear discussions more difficult. In one sense, it is the name of a subfield of computer science. In another, it can refer to the computing techniques developed in that subfield, most of which are now focused on pattern matching based on large data sets and the generation of new media based on those patterns. Finally, in marketing copy and start-up pitch decks, the term “AI” serves as magic fairy dust that will supercharge your business.

output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem

the people selling this technology propose that text synthesis machines could fix various holes in our social fabric: the lack of teachers in K–12 education, the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people and the dearth of legal aid for people who cannot afford lawyers, just to name a few

Not only do we risk mistaking synthetic text for reliable information, but also that noninformation reflects and amplifies the biases encoded in its training data—in this case, every kind of bigotry exhibited on the Internet. Moreover the synthetic text sounds authoritative despite its lack of citations back to real sources. The longer this synthetic text spill continues, the worse off we are, because it gets harder to find trustworthy sources and harder to trust them when we do.

the systems rely on enormous amounts of training data that are stolen without compensation from the artists and authors who created it in the first place

the task of labeling data to create “guardrails” that are intended to prevent an AI system’s most toxic output from seeping out is repetitive and often traumatic labor carried out by gig workers and contractors, people locked in a global race to the bottom for pay and working conditions.

employers are looking to cut costs by leveraging automation, laying off people from previously stable jobs and then hiring them back as lower-paid workers to correct the output of the automated systems. This can be seen most clearly in the current actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood, where grotesquely overpaid moguls scheme to buy eternal rights to use AI replacements of actors for the price of a day’s work and, on a gig basis, hire writers piecemeal to revise the incoherent scripts churned out by AI.

too many AI publications come from corporate labs or from academic groups that receive disproportionate industry funding. Much is junk science—it is nonreproducible, hides behind trade secrecy, is full of hype and uses evaluation methods that lack construct validity

We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.

Culture is in the air like cigarette smoke in pubs before the ban, but it’s also pinned down in editorial rules and style guides. It’s there in tropes and cliches, precedent and the dread line “just how we’ve always done it”.

if Laura Kuenssberg had needed to be “told what to say — or what not to say” she would never have been appointed Political Editor

NOTMWTS is a shield intended to bat away further questions, to avoid closer scrutiny of how stories are chosen, framed, and reported. “All you’re doing is trying to find the truth,” is a line that comes from the same place as claims of journalistic impartiality and objectivity

purporting to offer true objectivity is like saying you can draw a perfect circle freehand

the notion that there are no clues to Kuenssberg’s politics or worldview in the thousands of hours of broadcasting she undertook in that role is downright insulting to viewers and listeners

Kuenssberg is far from alone in having provided a megaphone for anonymous sources, “not told what to say” but happily parroting lines to a huge audience; it’s an epidemic in British political journalism, where WhatsApp messages whip onto Twitter with undue weight and ceremony.

Their beloved Orwell — writer of two of the handful of books that every columnist leans on at some point (1984 and Animal Farm) — wrote in an unused preface5 to the latter that: Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

The unfashionable opinions have changed and shifted over time but the silence around them prevails