Trump Says Border Is “Single Greatest Threat”, so Keep It Open

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Highly conservative Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma stepped forward on “Fox News Sunday” to list the features of the bill a bipartisan group of senators has been working on for months with Lankford as lead negotiator:

“This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings today. There’s no amnesty. It increases the number of border patrol agents. It increases asylum officers. Increased detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals. It ends catch and release. It focuses on additional deportation flights out. It changes our asylum process so people get a fast asylum screening at a higher standard and then get returned back to their own country.”

Also conservative commentator Charlie Sykes, editor-in-chief at online publication The Bulwark, calls Lankford’s provisions “a conservative Republican’s dream.”

And yet, House Speaker Mike Johnson, showing himself ever more to be Trump’s bootlick, issued a statement criticizing Biden’s support of the bill, saying the President already has the power to act. This is the same political class that, to deflect the Democrats’ sounding alarm at Trump’s dictatorial tendencies, asserts it is Biden who is the autocrat for conducting government by executive order, now urging Biden to do just what they fault, to autocratically issue a border edict in obeisance to Trump who has commanded Republicans in Congress to do nothing.

Over the weekend, Trump told an audience:

“In the House, as you know, the Speaker…who, by the way, I think he’s going to prove to be a very good Speaker…he just said it’s dead on arrival. We want either a strong bill or no bill and whatever happens happens, but this is the single greatest threat to our country right now”.

The single greatest threat, but do nothing. Keep the border open for another full year until he is back in the White House, a nakedly cynical injury to the country with nothing in mind other than his own political benefit.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says now is the “ideal time” to get a deal on border security, what he calls “the most substantial border security policy in 30 years. This agreement would come not a moment too soon”. Sykes said further that the Senate bill gives conservatives “one of the biggest wins they’ve ever had, and they’re about to tank their own agenda”.

While at it, Trump and the rightwing cabal in the House will abandon Ukraine — a megaphone to our allies that America cannot be trusted and to our adversaries that the time is ripe for aggressive moves against the U.S. and its interests abroad.

Migrant caravan in Mexico in October makes its way to the U.S. border.

Joe Biden has said he’s ready to sign such a bill, much as he dislikes much of it, but provided that it be coupled with further aid to Ukraine.

Republicans have been clamoring for border security for years. What’s new is that they are finally lining up to do something about it. A number of Senate Republicans have spoken out. South Dakota’s John Thune, the second ranking leader under Mitch McConnell says, “There are a number of pieces in there that are good, conservative border policies that we’ve been trying to get done.”

Democrats are traditionally more lenient and even welcoming to immigrants, but know that action must be taken to stem the deluge. They realize that the border tsunami is a major negative for Biden going into the election, that strong legal reforms before then will give him a badly needed boost.

house deniers

But then we get to the House where there are a number of holdouts who will not vote for anything short of their extreme immigration policies which they will have in the Senate bill yet still reject. Freedom Caucus Republicans don’t seem to care how many Ukrainians die as a result of their political priorities. Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) says,

“Here’s the problem: In the House of Representatives there is probably no border and immigration deal short of building a high wall and never letting an immigrant into this country again that will satisfy, let’s call it, 20 or 30 Republican members”.

Dan Crenshaw, a Navy SEAL officer representing Texas, said in an impromptu answer to a reporter,

“If we get meaningful border policy and for whatever reason people come up with, they don’t want it anymore, that’s going to be a pretty tough position to stand by…We’ll never vote for it if it’s attached to Ukraine. Really?…You want Russia to win more than you want border policy?”

Republicans don’t want a fix. They want the chaos to continue, to keep the gates open for illegal immigrants to stream into this country for another nine months, so they can rail against Biden’s lack of immigration reform, border reform that they themselves obstruct. Here’s Congressman Troy Nehls (R-Tx) on CNN in early January:

“Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating… I’m not going to do it. Why would I?”

squeeze play

Nehls and his sort have an ally in Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. In a press conference days ago Johnson said about border policy reform,

“It’s a complex issue. I don’t think now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform, because we know how complicated that is.”

Not enough of a crisis? There’s a better time? When would that be?

Johnson, who rose in an instant from obscurity to second in line to the presidency, must want desperately to keep his job, so doing nothing is the safest course and the nation be damned. He dares not pull the pin of the grenade adopted by House Republicans that a single member can file a “motion to vacate”, triggering a vote to relieve the Speaker of his job, a weapon that the Freedom Caucus threatens to deploy if any bill is introduced that doesn’t contain their every wish. Himes says, “Three quarters of the House, in my mind, is totally ready to do a Ukraine deal and immigration deal”, but they will get neither because “each one of those 20 or 30 members” he spoke of above “has the right to go to the floor and offer to vacate”.

calling the shots

But all that is noise. The one who is deciding there will be no border deal is private citizen Trump.
Not even in government, technically still not even the nominee, he is controlling the House by telling Johnson what not to do. Johnson drew stunned criticism when he let out to Laura Ingraham on her Fox News show that he has been talking to Trump about border legislation “pretty frequently”. Ingraham told Johnson that Trump,

“just got off the phone with me right before the show…and he urged you to be against this deal. He was extremely — President Trump was extremely adamant about that.”

You need know no more than that to see that Fox is again Trump’s puppet and that he can dial in to direct what is to be said in their interviews.

Trump has been busy on “truthing” on Truth Social to make his preference known:

“I have no doubt that our wonderful Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, will only make a deal that is PERFECT ON THE BORDER.”

Trump — who wants his followers to believe that migrants are all “from prisons”, “mental institutions”, “insane asylums”, are “terrorists” (yet somehow “nobody has any idea where these people are coming from”) and are “poisoning the blood of our country” — in fact contradicts with:

“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!”

That all or nothing plan leaves the door open for his undesired millions to keep coming because he wants to make it Biden’s failure when in fact it will be his.

another American betrayal

Johnson, from Louisiana and with no apparent sense of America’s priorities in the world, doesn’t care a damn for Ukraine. He has voted against every tranche of aid. He nudges Ukraine into the background:

” We understand that there’s concern about the safety, security, sovereignty of Ukraine, but the American people have those same concerns about our own domestic sovereignty.”

That’s as good as saying, let’s for now set aside the crucially needed Ukraine package, which is in turn as good as saying let’s schedule it for never.

To fortify what he believes is actually a friendship with Vladimir Putin, Trump wants to bestow the gift of ending aid to Ukraine, clearing a path for the Russian dictator to roll up the entire country.

Thom Tillis, Republican senator from North Carolina, says about Trump’s subversion of immigration reform. that “to lose this opportunity to get it passed into law, I think is malpractice”. About Trump and the far-right Republicans who will vote again Ukraine aid, Tillis is particularly angered:

“We have to get money for Ukraine, or the same people [who oppose it] need to own this historically. I’m going to be somebody that does everything I can to get Ukraine funded. If we fail, I want every single [opponent] to go on record as owning what I think will be one of the worst strategic decisions members of Congress will make in their careers.”

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder, an authoritative scholar on the region, underscores the stupidity of Republicans who will vote to abandon Ukraine:

“Frankly, no one in the government will put it like this, but this has been a national security bonanza for us. The Ukrainians have fulfilled the entire NATO mission as a non-NATO country with 3% of our military budget. They have absorbed and repulsed a full-scale Russian attack on their own.”

A Close Look at Manic Disorder

In September, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News firebrand, interviewed Donald Trump. Here’s a dose of his manic carrying-on when the subject turned to the case of documents taken to Mar a Lago that Trump hid and fought against returning to the government:

By the way, the Presidential Records Act restricts the president, declaring that documents are owned by the government — the opposite of what he says. His disorder is in full display in twisting that around to create his own reality:

Trump: Number one, I did nothing wrong because I come under the Presidential Records Act. The fascists who are going after me and are not going after Biden even though he has ten times more documents — maybe more than that. He has documents going back 40 years, or 50 years. We did nothing wrong. I come under the Presidential Records Act. I’m allowed to have these documents. This was done in 1978 and this was done for exactly this reason. I’m allowed to have these documents. The other side doesn’t even mention that. They don’t even mention the words ‘Presidential Records Act’. The Presidential Records Act is very important. Bill Clinton took out in his socks — it’s called the socks case — [Biden’s] got thousands of documents as a senator and even I watched couple of Democrat senators say very strongly there’s no way he took that out from the SKIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where only those authorized may view classified or secret material]. He’s got documents and he’s fighting them like crazy. I come under the Presidential Records Act. It’s a very simple thing. Number one, it’s civil. It’s not criminal at all. These fascists and these Marxists, these people that are dealing and they leak and they’re disgusting people. They’re horrible for the country. We have a deranged guy named Jack Smith who’s been overturned at the Supreme Court a number of times and he gets overturned. You know why he gets overturned? Because he goes too far. They don’t even mention the Presidential Records Act. This is all about the Presidential Records Act. I’m allowed to have these documents. I’m allowed to take these documents, classified or not classified and frankly, when I have them, they become unclassified. People think you have to go through a ritual. You don’t. At least in my opinion, you don’t. But it’s even beyond that because the Presidential Records Act allows you to do as president, only as president. Now, the other people that we talk about, including Biden. He wasn’t president. So what he did, is a different standard, and he should have real problems. They really should be talking about that, not about me. I did absolutely nothing wrong.

Kelly: OK, but let’s get to my question. Why would you be holding up a newspaper saying this is still secret?

Trump: I’d have to look at it. I’d have to look at it. I could have declassified. No, I also told Bret Baier, as I remember — I don’t know, it was a long time interview. I also told Bret Baier that it wasn’t a classified document.

Kelly: What were you waving around in that meeting because it certainly…

Trump: I’m not going to talk to you about that because I think that’s already been, I think very substantiated and there’s no problem with it.

Kelly: It hasn’t been substantiated. Jack Smith says…

Trump: Megyn, lemme just tell ya. Let me tell you. Here we go again. I’m covered by the Presidential Records Act. I’m allowed to do what I want to do. I’m allowed to have documents. The Presidential Records Act is civil, not criminal in any way. It’s civil, and I’m covered by it one hundred percent…This should be a case for …

Kelly: I’m not going to come at you criminally.

Trump: Of course you are. This should be a case for Biden because he is not covered by the Presidential Records Act. [Recites other presidents who he says kept documents].

Kelly: The obstruction case isn’t about that. So even if you had the right to the documents, once you get the subpoena, you gotta fork ’em over.

Trump: You ready? Are you ready? This is just like the Mueller stuff. They create a fake crime and then they say you obstruct it. This is a fake thing that they’ve done…When you fight them, they call it obstruction. I have complied with everything. I have given more documents and they came in, they raided Mar a Lago, probably illegally, okay? And we’ll find that out. They took documents they were not even allowed to do, but they took documents, they took everything. I have, I have, and I would have given it to them. We had a meeting and I said, what do you want? Instead of doing that, because they’re doing this for political reasons. The reason they’re doing this is for election interference. [and the back and forth continues].

Jan 26 2024 | Posted in Election | Read More »

Increasing Incidents Expose Trump’s Cognitive Decline

That 81-year-old Joe Biden shows intermittent signs of cognitive decline is not in dispute. There’s no denying that he has worrying lapses. Leftwing media has touched on such incidents gingerly; rightwing cable channel hosts engage in the topic virtually every night.

For them it takes the form of gleeful mockery. Sean Hannity of Fox News tells us “about your president who doesn’t know today is Thursday” and “it’s not even clear that Biden knows he’s alive.” Laura Ingraham on that same channel ridicules Biden’s occasional malaprops. Both often fabricate. “Today he looked totally, completely, utterly confused, confounded, unsure of his surroundings”, says Hannity, the worst of the two, while the video on the split screen shows nothing of the sort.

But now, it has become increasingly apparent that 77-year-old Donald Trump is showing signs of wear. Incidents of confusion and rambling dissociation are occurring at increasing frequency. His confusing Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi got wide attention. He has several times spoken of Barack Obama in place of Biden and Hilary Clinton. Forbes magazine in a November article chronicled at least seven times he confused Biden and Obama.

Speaking at the D.C. Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington in mid-September, his accusation of…

“crooked Joe Biden and the radical left thugs who have weaponized law enforcement to arrest their leading political opponent, and leading by a lot, including Obama”

…said that he thinks he is running against Barack Obama for the Republican nomination. He continued with the belief that it was Obama he had beaten in 2016:

“The country was very divided and we did with Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn’t be won.”

He went on to call Biden…

“totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war. Just think of it. We would be in World War Two, very quickly.”

Yes, “Two”. At a campaign rally in South Carolina, he again showed confusion about the 2016 presidential race, thinking he had run in the primaries against George W. Bush and not his brother Jeb:

“You know the beauty was when I came here everyone thought Bush was going to win…They thought Bush because Bush was supposedly a military person. You know he was a, he got us into the Middle East. How did that work out?”

Campaigning in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump told of watching an interview of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in which Trump says Orbán was asked “what would you advise President Obama?”. He pronounces it ‘hungry’. Minor? Yes. But it’s the sort of quirk that would have them guffawing at Fox if Biden had said ‘hungry’.

Trump has said that “Hungary fronts on both Ukraine and Russia”. It doesn’t, yet he has said it more than once, and that’s not the first time he has doubled down on an error as if repetition would make it true. How many times has he claimed, for example, that “China has paid us billions of dollars, many, many billions of dollars in tariffs” when it is America’s importers who pay the tariffs.

Besotted with Orbán, whom he brings up whenever he is before an audience, Trump always asks:

“Viktor Orban, did anyone ever hear of him? He’s probably like one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of, right? He’s the leader of Turkey.”

No, not Turkey. He also admires North Korean leader Kim Jong Un who “leads 1.4 billion people and there’s no doubt about who the boss is”, he told his followers, except it is China that has 1.4 billion. North Korea has 26 million people.

Geography befuddled Trump again when he greeted the crowd at a rally in Iowa in late October with,

“Well thank you very much and a very big hello to a place where we’ve done very well, Sioux Falls. Thank you very much Sioux Falls”.

He didn’t know what state he was in. Sioux Falls is in South Dakota. When an aide corrected him he unaccountably asked the folks of Sioux City, “How many people come from Sioux City?”.

Joe Biden uttered a worse gaffe when abroad a year ago he forgot what country he was in and thanked the “prime minister of Columbia,” rather than Cambodia, for chairing a major summit meeting. Our point, remember, is not to paint over Biden’s stumbles – conservative media has done a bang up job hyperbolizing that — but to show, to our nation’s anguish, that the other presumptive candidate for the presidency is showing decline, too.

The Haley incident before a crowd of supporters in Concord, N.H., was more pronounced owing to Trump’s saying her name several times in the course of a jumble of falsehoods about offering Nancy Pelosi troops to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6:

You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley … you know they … do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it? All of it! Because of lots of things. Like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people. Soldiers, National Guard—whatever they want. They turned it down.” For the record, then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, testifying under oath to the House Select Committee, directly refuted Trump’s claim of ordering up any troops. There were none to offer.

He tries lamely to paper over the Haley-Pelosi, Obama-Biden mix-ups as sarcasm. At a rally he said,

“A lot of times I’ll say that President Obama is doing a lousy job, meaning that Obama is running the show. They’ll say, Donald Trump doesn’t know who our president is.”

On Truth Social he wrote,

“No, I know both names very well, never mix them up, and know that they are destroying our Country. Also, and as reported, I just took a cognitive test as part of my Physical Exam, and ACED it. Also ACED (a perfect score!) one taken while in the White House.”

We submit that if he had truly taken (and aced) a cognitive test recently, we would have heard all about it instantly.

Other odd bits of his preoccupation pop up and deserve mention:

  “All I know about magnets IS THIS. Gimme a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnet. That’s the end of the magnet.”

  He would prevent California’s wildfires by “dampening” forest floors. The forest floors span millions of acres.

  Earlier he had suggested that forests be raked to remove flammable brush.

  In childlike awe of Israel’s U.S.-supplied “iron dome” anti-missile system, he went to sound-effect mode (“Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! …pssshng, poom!”) a few days ago to make clear that “we don’t have it here!”, and pledged to build “the greatest dome ever” to protect the entire United States.

  And all that we cite here is in addition to the fundamental lunacy of his perhaps actually believing that he won the 2020 election.

the echo chamber

Not wanting previously to draw attention to age, the Biden campaign has only just begun to point out Trump’s mental failings. It may not make a smidgeon of difference in the election, but it matters to even the record against a claim someday that Trump won because only Biden was cognitively impaired, especially after the likes of Ingraham and Hannity having spent months poisoning viewers’ minds. Hannity builds up nothings, such as recently exulting, “It gets even worse, you’re gonna love this”: The screen spelled out what Biden had said: “over a billion three hundred million trillion three hundred million dollars”. Biden had so instantly corrected “billion” with “trillion” that the two numbers ran together in his rapid speaking, but that was the president’s “trouble with numbers”, said Hannity. “Let’s just say it got the best of Joe”.

On Fox it’s a loop. As Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic confirms,

“There just is no liberal or progressive echo chamber that’s nearly as insistent and relentless as the conservative, rightwing echo chamber. They stay on talking points more faithfully and they just pound messages home in a way Democrats don’t.”

You can drop in on Hannity most any night to hear his elder abuse, this excerpted from 200 words one night a week ago:

“Joe got dazed and confused, as usual…Joe is often mixed up…Let’s just be dead honest, here. This man is not well…The president of the United States of America clearly does not have the cognitive bandwidth to do any job. I don’t think he could be a Walmart greeter”.

His audience doesn’t go any further to find out for themselves and buys into gross distortions.

Fox News must have wanted to cut the mic when irrepressible New Hampshire Republican Governor Chris Sununu let loose on Harris Faulkner’s show with an overly frank Trump brain scan:

“This is not the Donald Trump of 2016, guys. If he’s off the teleprompter, he can barely keep a cogent thought… I’ve worked with him very closely. He’s not the same guy. This is not 2016 anymore. He’s not on his fastball.”

Compared to the venomous Hannity, we have several times heard voices at rival MSNBC make allowances for Trump’s slipups. Here’s co-host Mika Brzezinski, far from a Trump fan, of the “Morning Joe” program, about Trump’s diminished mental acuity:

“Yeah, and you have to think, at this age? It could be. But it also could just be the mountain of legal actions against this man, just crushing him and making him so stressed that he’s literally confused.”

She went on from there and has said the same since about “every single day he’s dealing with lawyers. Every single day he’s dealing with challenges and threats to his freedom.”

rambling man

Joe Biden will wander off script to tell favorite stories repeatedly. Evidence of Trump’s instability is of a different order. Trump’s disorderly mind has an inability to focus attention, as was heavily chronicled during his four years in office, and it is our failing that we have became inured to his ramblings, now accepting them as normal. They are not. His tweets, with their all caps outbursts, have the look of insanity. Three nights ago he posted 37 tweets against E. Jean Carroll, in her second suit against Trump for defamation.

He has rambled to audiences about “liquid gold”, former GOP speaker Paul Ryan “driving grannies off cliffs”, his mother-in-law dying. He drifts off unintelligibly:

” We have become a drug-infested, crime-ridden nation which is incapable of solvin’ even the straws, smallest problem. The simplest of problems we can no longer solve. We can’t do anything. We are an institute and a powerful death penalty we will put this on.”

Difficulty making sense of that? That’s our point.

Apart from the other horrors he would bring, we should worry about the scattered mind of the man who could well become president again. The long meanders of his rallies have no structure; he can be endlessly repetitive, and leave the listener wondering what has gone mentally wrong. If an example were inserted here, this article would drown in words, but examples are needed to prove the point, so to close out we’ll offer a transcript of one — an excerpt of Megyn Kelly’s September interview of Trump when the subject turned to the documents at Mar a Lago. If interested, you can read that here. We’ll leave you with that.

Jan 26 2024 | Posted in Politics | Read More »

First Social Media, Now AI. Will News Reporting Survive This Latest Parasite?

Just after Christmas, The New York Times opened a new front in the yearslong war between news publishing companies and Internet platforms that have appropriated their reporting without compensation. The Times sued Microsoft and the AI development
company, OpenAI, in which Microsoft is heavily invested, for helping themselves without authorization to millions of Times articles to build the large language models that feed the companies’ generative-AI engine, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

At a time when hundreds of news outlets have been shuttered during this new century, driven out by Americans getting their news from social media, and now even unlikely sources such as Instagram and TikTok, AI is seen as a new parasite even more deadly.

“Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism”, the complaint says.

“Times journalism is the work of thousands of journalists, whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year…Defendants have effectively avoided spending the billions of dollars that The Times invested in creating that work by taking it without permission or compensation.”

cordoned off

In the years of struggle with free-riding social media, readers of their news feeds could at least click through to publisher websites which could earn revenue through advertising adjacent to articles and by selling direct subscriptions. The AI threat is that instead of sending the reader to a publisher website to read an article, it sucks in the publisher’s copyrighted work from its vast datasets to write summaries that may suffice for readers. The publisher is shut out.

Since May, Google has segregated 10 million users to test an AI product called “Search Generative Experience”, which it openly says it intends to merge into its search engine. Publishers see the legal dilemma of Google responding to inquiries with summary answers that are a mix of content from any number of publications ingested into the huge “language models”, which will make it difficult to prove just what was derived from which publication. Google would sell ads against those search results; publishers that supplied the content would get nothing.

Along with data analysis firm SimilarWeb, The Wall Street Journal found that Google generates an average of 40% of the traffic into publisher sites, and further, that test runs at The Atlantic found that AI coupled with Google search would satisfy reader queries enough to shut down 75% of that traffic.

The Google vice president involved with AI search says driving traffic to web publishers is of uppermost intent, but there is no indication from the process just described of how that would come about. If that doesn’t happen, news and information publishing will atrophy. Newsroom staffs will be still further reduced — 200 more buyouts at The Washington Post as this is written — and the breadth and quality of journalism will suffer. It is a snake eating its tail, with ever less material generated for the language models to scrape up with Google and others coming up with ever less of merit in their search results.

Seemingly as an answer, Google and other AI developers promote their products as being a boon to newspapers and magazines. Their reporters and writers can use their AI-search engines to efficiently generate story abstracts from material in their leviathan datasets, cutting time and cost. Small local newspapers, no longer able to pay for reporters, are already learning how to let AI write their articles. That might at least free up whoever is left on staff to keep an eye out for local corruption.

fair use?

A spokeswoman at OpenAI said they were “surprised and disappointed” by the Times suit, saying that “Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively”. Those conversations began last spring and nine months later still no deal sounds more like big tech not budging from its larcenous practices.

The AI companies based their commandeering of publication work-product on a legal concept called “fair use”, which allows anyone to incorporate modest excerpts of another creator’s output in their own work. The courts have accordingly thwarted attempts by writers such as book authors to successfully sue over modest excerpts. But the Times complaint shows several examples where OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s tool sweep up large tracts of Times editorial material verbatim. AI generated news will be plagiarism on a grand scale.

Microsoft is a $13 billion investor in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Bing is Microsoft’s counterpart to Google. The tech behemoth has incorporated ChatGPT into Bing in a feature called Browse With Bing. Wirecutter is the New York Times’ product review site which makes money when users click through to buy a product that the site recommends.

When the Times ran tests it discovered that Browse With Bing lifted product reviews it had scraped from the Times almost verbatim. The Bing results had no links to Times articles, and even stripped the click-through links, which will deprive the Times from making any money from its work. The reader sees information completely divorced from the Times with no compensation. “Decreased traffic to Wirecutter articles and, in turn, decreased traffic to affiliate links subsequently lead to a loss of revenue for Wirecutter,” the Times complaint states.

To the extent that a news feed identifies The Times as a source of articles, the newspaper is alarmed that chatbots will conjure errors, misinformation, and imaginary falsehoods called “hallucinations” that will tarnish its brand — which chatGPT did produce in Times’ testing.

The lawsuit does not state a dollar amount sought by the Times but cites “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” Conceivably, the company wants to force an ongoing, profitable contractual relationship for the use of its output.

Others have already done so; the Associated Press and and Axel Springer, the German publisher that owns Politico and Business Insider have struck licensing deals with OpenAI. In the meanwhile, The Times asks the court to enjoin the tech companies from using Times’ content and to erase datasets that contain million of pieces of that content on which they were trained.

social nemesis

The mortality of newspapers in this country poses the serious question of where will Americans get in depth news in the years to come. The Associated Press reports that since 2005 the nation has lost one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its journalists. Every week in 2023 another 2.5 newspaper closed up shop, an increase from two a week the year before.

Social media and other online platforms have been the primary cause of the decline of major newspapers over the last couple of decades. Able to pinpoint those most likely to buy products by their ability to track people’s interests as they prowl the Internet, social media is a more effective medium for advertisers than newspapers. To add injury, several online platforms developed news feeds, not by doing any reporting, but by taking for themselves the work of print media and television.

Pew Research says 56% of Americans prefer getting their news on digital devices, and 39% of them go to Facebook. That has left publications to rely on social media for traffic via click-through links. And it means that hundreds of publications need to compete with one another around the clock in that single news feed channel to get the attention of the algorithms that choose the news to get that traffic. Pressing giants such as Facebook and Google for licensing fees has always been problematic. It runs the risk of those outlets downgrading or dropping them.

For years, news executives have criticized major tech companies like Google and Facebook for aggregating and distributing articles in their platforms without shouldering any of the financial burden of gathering the news. There have been payment arrangements, but insufficient. In 2019, Apple launched Apple News+ for $10 a month for unlimited access to hundreds of publications, but would distribute 50% of the revenue among them and turned over none of the customer data it acquired. That same year Facebook unveiled Facebook News, dedicated only to news unlike their regular news feed with news from family and friends intermixed, but would pay only the major publishers their service couldn’t do without.

The heat rose when in 2020 the Australian government instructed its Competition and Consumer Commission to force Google and Facebook to negotiate payments to newspaper publishers. France’s competition commission ordered Google to do the same. Both Facebook and Google made one-time contributions — $1 billion over three years in Google’s case — in the hopes of heading off more costly permanent legislation. When that did work, Facebook retaliated in Australia by blacking out news on its platform, sinking traffic to news sites.

In the process, it also took down Internet access to hospitals, emergency services, and charities.

The company says that was inadvertent, but a year later whistleblowers said disruption of Australian services was deliberate and was viewed internally at Facebook as a strateglic “masterstroke”.

Australia passed the payment requirement into law. Canada in 2022 copied Australia. In August of this year, as in Australia, Canadians woke to find that Facebook had shut down news. It is clear that Facebook’s, now Meta’s, CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks all the money should be his and publishers should be grateful for Facebook’s accceptance of their material.

In 2022, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was introduced in the U.S. Senate. It is meant to help smaller publishers to band together for negotiating with the tech titans for the content they expropriate. Facebook threatened to ban news in the U.S. if the bill is passed rather than “submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard the value we provide to news outlets.”

The upshot? Zuckerberg has decided to get out of news. Campbell Brown, head of global media partnerships and a former television news reporter and anchor, made the announcement that the company will switch to what it calls the “creator economy”, which seems to be more like what TikTok offers. She left the company.

The U.S. bill? Bipartisan at the start, but Ted Cruz got an amendment passed (a Democratic senator was quarantined from Covid giving Republicans a one vote majority) that explicitly prohibits discussion of content moderation in payment negotiations, a move thought to protect conservative news outlets. So there the bill sits.

wholesale piracy

It is not just newspapers that need action from our glacial Congress, whose inaction leaves legislation to the courts. Novelists have discovered that AI large language models have ingested tens of thousands of books. Authors such as John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen have sued, as has Getty Images, targeting a company that uses its content to generate images in response to written requests.

In Silicon Valley, AI is the latest mania; there is no discernible concern for the intellectual property of others. The Times quoted venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, an early investor in OpenAI, writing to the U.S. Copyright Office that exposing AI companies to copyright liability would “either kill or significantly hamper their development.”