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Javier E

Which 'Succession' Character is James Murdoch? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ames-murdoch-maureen-dowd.html

murdoch fox news fox succession role model right-wing media disinformation culture history

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
  • in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.
  • “I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas
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  • A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.
  • In 2017, President Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., as “very fine people” spurred James Murdoch to give $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Murdoch rebuked Mr. Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”
  • In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “frustration” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox nighttime anchors picked up a false story line about arson from The Australian, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.
  • So it wasn’t possible to change News Corp from the inside?“I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”
  • Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realizing his better angels and his better instincts.”
  • But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?
  • Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.
  • When Rupert, 89, finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one
  • Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News — labeled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren — and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox and its kin — downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line — be the huge moneymakers they are if they went straight?
  • He is particularly excited about investing in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning as far as I can tell.”
  • He’s funding a research program to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.
  • “So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said.
  • I wonder if this is some sort of expiation, given all the disinformation that News Corp has spewed.
  • when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three teenagers, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.
  • “I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”
  • Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Ms. Murdoch said.
  • Mr. Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given $1.23 million to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell yes,” he said with a smile.
  • I noted to Ms. Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward.
  • After so much time in the executive suite, Mr. Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school.
  • “The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says, ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”
  • I wondered what he made of Fox and Mr. Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalized.“Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”
  • He added that Mr. Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu has been “his message from Day 1,” and is “craziness.” He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”
  • “I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”
  • With Mr. Trump and Fox, who is the dog and who is the tail?“It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,’’ he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.”
  • Confirm or Deny
  • Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck.Isn’t that what they say — the harder you work, the luckier you get?
criscimagnael

Dubai restaurant using tech to stop seafood fraud - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • If you order snapper at a restaurant, you probably expect to be served snapper. But multiple reports over the last decade say there's a strong chance you'll be getting a lower-value fish.
  • Consumers could be paying double the price for wild-caught salmon, but being served the farmed equivalent. Or they may think they're eating fresh-off-the-boat lobster, which has in reality been frozen for months.
  • Tackling fish fraudRead MoreDiners ordering fish at Rockfish, a beachfront Italian restaurant, receive a QR code with their order.
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  • "Seafood is an industry that is wrought with not necessarily fraud but opacity or darkness within the supply chain," says the company's CEO and co-founder Sean Dennis."It is very difficult for buyers to know where they're getting their seafood from," he adds.
  • The code links to a web page that tells them when and where their fish was caught, how it was transported, and provides necessary certifications to verify it was sustainably sourced.
  • he kitchen's executive sous chef Marco Acquaroli says there is a lot of "fake product or fake naming" on menus around the world. "Here we are looking for freshness, quality, sustainability and traceability."
  • Because Seafood Souq tracks every point on the supply chain, Dennis says it can provide accurate data. "Traceability ... really addresses the inefficiencies within the supply chain," he says.
  • "We're very happy now," says Acquaroli. "Our guests (are) 100% sure where the fish was in the last 24 hours."
Javier E

Historians privately warn Biden: America's democracy is on the brink - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...us-historians-democracy-threat

democracy warning historians US biden history politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • President Biden paused last week, during one of the busiest stretches of his presidency, for a nearly two-hour private history lesson from a group of academics who raised alarms about the dire condition of democracy at home and abroad.
  • Comparisons were made to the years before the 1860 election when Abraham Lincoln warned that a “house divided against itself cannot stand” and the lead-up to the 1940 election, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled rising domestic sympathy for European fascism and resistance to the United States joining World War II.
  • Biden, at these tabletop sessions, often spends hours asking questions and testing assumptions, participants say.
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  • The diversion was, for Biden, part of a regular effort to use outside experts, in private White House meetings, to help him work through his approach to multiple crises facing his presidency
  • McFaul was among a socially distanced group that met to discuss Ukraine in the East Room earlier this year, along with former diplomat Richard Haass, journalist Fareed Zakaria, analyst Ian Bremmer, former National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill and retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.
  • “They really wanted outside-the-box thinking of, is there any way that this war, which will be horrible for everyone involved, can be stopped? Can we stop it? How can we stop it?” Bremmer said. “All of my interactions [with the White House] in the last few years have been uniformly open, constructive and really wanting to get my best sense of where they’re getting it right and where they’re not.”
  • The historians Biden has invited to the White House generally take a longer view, placing his presidency in the context of America’s path since its founding.
  • the Aug. 4 gathering was distinguished by its relatively small size and the focus of the participants on the rise of totalitarianism around the world and the threat to democracy at home. They included Biden’s occasional speechwriter Jon Meacham, journalist Anne Applebaum, Princeton professor Sean Wilentz, University of Virginia historian Allida Black and presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
  • Beschloss, a presidential historian who regularly appears on NBC and MSNBC, has recently become more outspoken about what he sees as the need for Biden to battle anti-democratic forces in the country.“I think he has got to talk tonight about the fact that we are all in existential danger of having our democracy and democracies around the world destroyed,”
  • Wilentz, prizewinning author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln,” has also voiced alarm in recent months about the state of the country. “We’re on the verge of what Hamilton in ‘The Federalist’ called government by brute force,” Wilentz told the Hill last month.
  • Biden has continued to bring up such themes in his public speeches, most recently in a July address to a law enforcement group, where he criticized Trump for taking no immediate action as the rioters he had inspired attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021
  • “You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy,” Biden told the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. “You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-American.”
Javier E

Climate crisis deniers target scientists for vicious abuse on Musk's Twitter | Climate ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-scientists-abuse-musk-twitter

twitter climate change scientists abuse threats politics culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 14 May 23 - No Cached
  • “There’s been a massive change,” said Mark Maslin, professor of earth system science at University College London and the author of popular books including How to Save Our Planet. “I get so much abuse and rude comments now. It’s happening to all of us, but I challenge the climate deniers so I’ve been really targeted.”
  • Maslin says he used to have regular meetings with Sean Boyle, Twitter’s former head of sustainability, who was laid off in Musk’s mass cull of staff shortly after he took over in Aprll 2022. Maslin said Boyle discussed the platform’s work to develop ways of ensuring that trusted information was pushed to the top.“They were using climate change as a good test bed, because it was fairly clear who the good and bad actors were,” Maslin said. “But he was sacked and Twitter became the wild west.”
  • Maslin said he will stay on the platform and push back against conspiracy theories with scientific evidence. “I want people to understand there are solutions. There is a real need for us to be on social media defending the truth, however nasty the responses get.”
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  • “I spent years debating quite strongly with climate sceptics, including people I assume were paid,” he added. “But there can be a real personal cost interacting over a long time with people who are abusing you.”McNeall said it was hard for scientists to work out how to cut through the false information on Twitter. “I just can’t tell if people are seeing disinformation or getting good scientific information about what is happening,” he said. “That’s really worrying.”
  • Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, who has 94,000 Twitter followers, said he had seen a “huge increase” in tweets from climate-denier accounts, often involving conspiracy theories or long-debunked topics. “A larger fraction of the comments are personal and abusive,” he said. “Any mildly popular tweet from a climate scientist is now targeted for a barrage of replies.”
  • Hawkins has noticed that many denier accounts have paid subscriptions to Twitter and therefore appear higher up in the replies. “It appears to be a coordinated effort [by climate change deniers] to make it appear as though climate denial is more prevalent than it really is,” he said.
  • Professor Richard Betts, chair of climate impacts at Exeter University and head of climate impacts at the Hadley Centre, said: “Outright hostility has increased in recent weeks. It’s mostly just people saying you’re talking rubbish. They don’t want a conversation.”
  • A survey of 468 international climate scientists published by campaign group Global Witness last month found that prominent scientists were the most likely to face abuse, with half of those who had published at least 10 papers reporting they had suffered online harassment as a result of their climate work. One in eight female scientists who reported abuse had been threatened with sexual violence.
Javier E

Weeks Before Election as Speaker, Johnson Lamented 'Dark and Depraved' Culture - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mike-johnson-prayer-call.html

speaker HR culture politics end-of-the-world

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Mr. Johnson’s comments on the prayer call were reported earlier by Rolling Stone. The call took place on Oct. 3, hours before the House voted to oust Speaker McCarthy,
  • “What we need is a supernatural intervention from the God of the universe,” he said of the chaos gripping the House Republican conference.
  • Mr. Johnson added that the country had reached an inflection point. “The only question is: Is God going to allow our nation to enter a time of judgment for our collective sins?” he asked. “Or is he going to give us one more chance to restore the foundations and return to him?” He added: “We need to turn to him. We need a revival.”
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  • For decades, he has been writing and speaking publicly about his religious views, including his stances on same-sex marriage and homosexuality, which he has written is “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle.”
  • “Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic,” he wrote in a local newspaper in 2004.
  • He has been described by some of his fellow House Republicans as someone whose views on social issues are frozen where the Republican Party was in the 1990s, and where the country was in the 1950s.
  • “I don’t even remember some of them,” he said in an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity when asked about his previous statements on homosexuality. “I genuinely love all people, regardless of their lifestyle choices. This is not about the people themselves.”
  • At the end of his appearance, Mr. Johnson choked up as he led the call in prayer. “We repent for our sins individually and collectively,” he said. “And we ask that you not give us the judgment that we clearly deserve.”
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