NPR Suspends Uri Berliner Over Critical Substack Essay – The New York Times

By Benjamin Mullin

April 16, 2024

“NPR has suspended Uri Berliner, the senior business editor who broke ranks and published an essay arguing that the nonprofit radio network had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage.

Mr. Berliner was suspended by the network for five days, starting Friday, for violating the network’s policy against doing work outside the organization without first getting permission.

Mr. Berliner acknowledged his suspension in an interview with NPR on Monday, providing one of the network’s reporters with a copy of the written rebuke. In presenting the warning, NPR said Mr. Berliner had failed to clear his work for outside outlets, adding that he would be fired if he violated the policy again.

Mr. Berliner’s essay was published last week in The Free Press, a popular Substack publication.

He declined to comment about the suspension. NPR said it did not comment on personnel matters.” . . . . .

Tim Wu, Opinion | With TikTok and China, the World’s Democracies Have Played the Sucker for Far Too Long – The New York Times

By Tim Wu

Mr. Wu is a law professor at Columbia, a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.”

“China’s violations of human rights and the basic norms of internet freedom are blatant and obvious. This month, with little fanfare, the country ordered Apple to block downloads of WhatsApp, Threads and Signal within its borders. It already prevents citizens from connecting to dozens of other providers of information, including this newspaper and Wikipedia, and for years, it has aggressively surveilled journalists and dissidents.

That abysmal track record gives the United States every right to demand that TikTok find a different owner — one not subject to the control of the Chinese state.

Last week, President Biden signed a law that did just that. TikTok’s current owner, ByteDance, has long emphasized that global institutional investors — such as the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group — have a 60 percent stake in the company, but it is still, at its core, a Chinese company, with headquarters in Beijing and subject in multiple ways to the direction of Chinese officials. This new law, which gives TikTok roughly 270 days to find a new owner, is designed to change that. But more fundamentally, it sends a message to the world: You cannot disregard basic internet norms and expect to be treated just like any other country.”

‘Thunder Run’: Behind Lawmakers’ Secretive Push to Pass the TikTok Bill – The New York Times

By Sapna Maheshwari, David McCabe and Cecilia Kang

Sapna Maheshwari reports on TikTok. David McCabe and Cecilia Kang cover tech policy.

April 24, 2024Updated 11:16 a.m. ET

“Just over a year ago, lawmakers displayed a rare show of bipartisanship when they grilled Shou Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, about the video app’s ties to China. Their harsh questioning suggested that Washington was gearing up to force the company to sever ties with its Chinese owner — or even ban the app.

Then came mostly silence. Little emerged from the House committee that held the hearing, and a proposal to enable the administration to force a sale or ban TikTok fizzled in the Senate.

But behind the scenes, a tiny group of lawmakers began plotting a secretive effort that culminated on Wednesday, when President Biden signed a bill that forces TikTok to be sold by its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or risk getting banned. The measure, which the Senate passed late Tuesday, upends the future of an app that claims 170 million users in the United States and that touches virtually every aspect of American life.

For nearly a year, lawmakers and some of their aides worked to write a version of the bill, concealing their efforts to avoid setting off TikTok’s lobbying might. To bulletproof the bill from expected legal challenges and persuade uncertain lawmakers, the group worked with the Justice Department and White House.” . . . .

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT  NYT:

I’m not sure this is a good idea. Read what Tim Wu, law professor, wrote in his columns in the NYT. I’m afraid it was text buried in an article about a different main topic. One of his main ideas was, we shouldn’t single out Tik Tok, but make all the social media companies clean up their acts. I am in an awkward position. I agree with Tim Wu, or whoever it was, that this bill is wrong. Tik Tok is already more regulated than our other social media companies. My own thought is that we should be forcing the sale or barring Tik Tok, for a different reason. If the Chinese ban all or most of our social media companies in China, we should reciprocate, and ban theirs.        InconvenientNews.net

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust. | The Free Press

By Uri Berliner

April 9, 2024

“You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.” . . . .

Source: I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust. | The Free Press

David Lindsay	10:39 AM (3 minutes ago)
to letters@nytimes.com, me

I got interested in the story today 4/18 which I can no longer find, that Uri Bertliner wrote an essay published in the Free Press, criticizing NPR for group think, tilting left into identity politics, and telling viewers how to think.  It was covered in a story today, that didn’t appear to have a link to the original document. I did find from 4/16

NPR Suspends Editor Whose Essay Criticized the Broadcaster, which also does not link to the original essay.

In searching inside the Times, I couldn’t find even a link to the original essay, but Google found the first article:

NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias

  April 11^th with a link to the essay at The Free Press. What a great essay.

I am disappointed that the NYT didn’t make it easy to find this link in todays articles. It has a weak search engine internally.  Or is the NYT interested in burying this story? Probably not.  I often need to use google to find an old story in the NYT.com.

Uri Bertliner makes many good points. It is too bad he felt compelled to resign from NPR. It might even be tragic for NPR.

David Lindsay,  blogging at InconvenientNews.net

Zeynep Tufekci, Opinion | TikTok’s Influence on Young Voters Is No Simple Matter – The New York Times

By Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist

“We’re in a season of hand-wringing and scapegoating over social media, especially TikTok, with many Americans and politicians missing that two things can be true at once: Social media can have an outsized and sometimes pernicious influence on society, and lawmakers can unfairly use it as an excuse to deflect legitimate criticisms.

Young people are overwhelmingly unhappy about U.S. policy on the war in Gaza? Must be because they get their “perspective on the world on TikTok” — at least according to Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who holds a strong pro-Israel stance. This attitude is shared across the aisle. “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said. Another Republican senator, Josh Hawley, called TikTok a “purveyor of virulent antisemitic lies.”

Consumers are unhappy with the economy? Surely, that’s TikTok again, with some experts arguing that dismal consumer sentiment is a mere “vibecession” — feelings fueled by negativity on social media rather than by the actual effects of inflation, housing costs and more. Some blame online phenomena such as the viral TikTok “Silent Depression” videos that compare the economy today to that of the 1930s — falsely asserting things were easier then.” . . . . .

“Do we need proper oversight and regulation of social media? You bet. Do we need to find more effective ways of countering harmful lies and hate speech? Of course. But I can only conclude that despite the heated bipartisan rhetoric of blame, scapegoating social media is more convenient to politicians than turning their shared anger into sensible legislation.” . . . .

David Austin Walsh | Elon Musk Takes Aim at the ADL – The New York Times

By David Austin Walsh

Dr. Walsh is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and author of the forthcoming book “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right.”

“Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men who is now most famous for running the website X, formerly known as Twitter, has a new excuse for the company’s shaky performance since he bought it last year. The problem, according to Mr. Musk, is the Jews.

In an outburst on his platform on Monday, Mr. Musk claimed — without presenting any evidence — that ad revenues on Twitter are down 60 percent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL”— the Anti-Defamation League — which he said “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”

While the website has long had a reputation as a cesspool for lies, hate speech and a significant neo-Nazi user base, under a former chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, Twitter had begun to take steps to ban the most provocative and openly racist and antisemitic users. A 2018 report by the ADL noted that 4.2 million antisemitic tweets had been shared or re-shared on the platform in the previous year, before Twitter’s ban on extremist accounts took effect. Mr. Musk largely reversed those policies under the aegis of free speech. Thanks to the reinstatement of extremist accounts — and a new algorithm which prioritizes posts from “verified” users who have forked over $8 a month to the company — X/Twitter now functions as a bullhorn for the most toxic elements of the white nationalist right.”

Chris Murphy | Social Media Makes Teens Unhappy. It’s Time to Stop the Algorithm. – The New York Times

By Chris Murphy

Mr. Murphy is the junior senator from Connecticut.

“Kids are even more in the bag of social media companies than we think. So many of them have ceded their online autonomy so fully to their phones that they even balk at the idea of searching the internet — for them, the only acceptable online environment is one customized by big tech algorithms, which feed them customized content.

As our children’s free time and imaginations become more and more tightly fused to the social media they consume, we need to understand that unregulated access to the internet comes at a cost. Something similar is happening for adults, too. With the advent of A.I., a spiritual loss awaits us as we outsource countless human rituals — exploration and trial and error — to machines. But it isn’t too late to change this story.

This spring, I visited with a group of high school students in suburban Connecticut to have a conversation about the role that social media plays in their daily lives and in their mental health. More children today report feeling depressed, lonely and disconnected than ever before. More teens, especially teen girls and L.G.B.T.Q. teens, are seriously considering suicide. I wanted to speak candidly about how social media helps and hurts mental health. By the end of the 90-minute dialogue, I was more worried than ever about the well-being of our kids — and of the society they will inherit.”

“. . . . . .   A week before meeting the students, I introduced the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act with three of my colleagues in the Senate, Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, and the Republicans Katie Britt of Alabama and Tom Cotton of Arkansas. The bill is a comprehensive attempt to protect young people on social media, prioritizing stronger age verification practices and placing a ban on children under 13 using social media altogether. But there was one provision of the bill that was particularly alarming to this group of students: a prohibition on social media companies using the data (what they watch and swipe on) they collect on kids to build and fuel algorithms that spoon-feed individualized content back to users. These high school students had become reliant, maybe even dependent, on social media companies’ algorithms.” . . . . .

Julia Angwin | Give Journalists What They Need To Hold Big Tech Accountable – The New York Times

By Julia Angwin

Ms. Angwin is a contributing Opinion writer and an investigative journalist.

“We are living through an information revolution. The traditional gatekeepers of knowledge — librarians, journalists and government officials — have largely been replaced by technological gatekeepers — search engines, artificial intelligence chatbots and social media feeds.

Whatever their flaws, the old gatekeepers were, at least on paper, beholden to the public. The new gatekeepers are fundamentally beholden only to profit and to their shareholders.

That is about to change, thanks to a bold experiment by the European Union.

With key provisions going into effect on Aug. 25, an ambitious package of E.U. rules, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, is the most extensive effort toward checking the power of Big Tech (beyond the outright bans in places like China and India). For the first time, tech platforms will have to be responsive to the public in myriad ways, including giving users the right to appeal when their content is removed, providing a choice of algorithms and banning the microtargeting of children and of adults based upon sensitive data such as religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The reforms also require large tech platforms to audit their algorithms to determine how they affect democracy, human rights and the physical and mental health of minors and other users.

This will be the first time that companies will be required to identify and address the harms that their platforms enable. To hold them accountable, the law also requires large tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter to provide researchers with access to real-time data from their platforms. But there is a crucial element that has yet to be decided by the European Union: whether journalists will get access to any of that data.” . . . .

David Lindsay: Bravo Julia Angwin.  Also, many excellent comments, such as:

Enjoy the kitchen

ChesapeakeJuly 14

Hello. Software developer here. I think these companies are currently exploiting the lack of transparency on their ad platforms for big profit. There is one very simple fix for social media companies to force them to be more accountable. Tax all their ad revenue but more importantly make them track and report that data daily, publicly, and openly. And require it to be 100% accurate and nuanced. Why this tactic? Why ads? Because companies can’t lie about their income to the IRS. By reporting this information in detail (that’s the key) it would force all this transparency around advertising. It would require congress to pass a law. That’s all.

2 Replies79 Recommended

Why No Comments? It’s a Matter of Resources – The New York Times

By Bassey Etim

• Sept. 27, 2017

The Reader Center is a newsroom initiative that is helping The Times build deeper ties with our audience.

Bassey Etim, our community editor, has responded to readers who questioned our policies governing which New York Times articles are opened for comments:

@nytimes cowardly disables their comments section on controversial articles. They alone choose when it’s OK for article to go unchallenged.
— James Guillochon, Cambridge, Mass., via Twitter

Who is the coward who chose not to run comments on the Silicon Valley ‘discrimination’ story? As a former journalist who began life on the Women’s Pages in the 1960s, that piece sounded so very familiar. Astonishing, in fact. The boys are spoiled brats. In 60 years, we haven’t come a long way after all.
— Sallie Fuerth, Charleston, S.C., via a Reader Center submission

“Why didn’t The Times’s community desk allow comments on a Sept. 23 article about men who believe the push for gender equality in technology has gone too far?

The answer, I’m afraid, is rather dull: Our moderation resources are limited on weekends, which means fewer stories are opened for comment.”

I got the above message in response to my following email, to the managing editor:

“Where now is the office of complaints, or of the ombudsman for subscribers?

Two articles I enjoyed recently didn’t allow comments, and I would like to know why.

The first, was Peter Coy on China this Saturday, about a book by a Chinese scholar describing common Chinese views.

Today, there were no comments allowed for

“Israelis March Through Jerusalem, Raising Tensions in a Divided City

The annual parade marks the unification of the city after Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. Israelis see it as a celebration, but Palestinians consider it an insult, and it was marred by incitement against Arabs.”  May 18, 2023

I can guess why you shut off discussion in this later piece. Is it really your job to protect the right wing of Israel from hearing how many of your active readers disagree with them, — and many of us despise them.

But why not allow comments for Peter Coy’s challenging opinion essay.  Is this just penny wise and pound foolish?

It would be an improvement if you publicised your policy on when to remove comments or add them, and put at the end an explanation for their removal.  It appears you do not realize how valuable good comments are to an already good piece, and sometimes invaluable to a really bad one.

yours,

David Lindsay

Bret Stephens | Tucker Carlson and the Tragedy of Fox News – The New York Times

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

“In the summer of 2011, Rupert Murdoch stopped by my small office at The Wall Street Journal, where I was a columnist and editor. He was just back from London, where he had given testimony to a parliamentary committee investigating the phone-hacking scandal by his British tabloids (and where he was attacked with a shaving-foam pie). The scandal ultimately resulted in the closure of News of the World, at one point one of the world’s biggest-selling English-language newspapers.

I don’t remember many specifics about the conversation — Murdoch loved to talk politics and policy with his journalists, sometimes by taking us to lunch at the Lamb’s Club in Midtown Manhattan — but I do remember the gist of what he said about the fiasco: Never put anything in an email. His private takeaway, it seemed, wasn’t to require his companies to adhere to high ethical standards. It was to leave no trace that investigators might use for evidence against him, his family or his favorite lieutenants.

Fast-forward a dozen years. Not much has changed. What is being euphemistically described as a parting of ways on Monday between Fox News and its Chief Disinformation Officer, Tucker Carlson, is happening after the now-former prime-time host put things in emails and text messages that proved he knew he was peddling lies — and then went ahead and amplified them.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT  NYT Comment:

This is arguably one of the best pieces Bret Stephens has ever written at the NYT. His critics excoriate him for praising Reagan and GHW Bush, while ignoring what an extraordinary human and leader George HW Bush was. He probably lost his chance at re-election, when he wisely decided not to bomb the Iraqui Army retreating in defeat from Kuwait, and choosing not to invade Iraq at that time. Critics who dispose of GHW Bush with the same breath they dismiss Reagan, don’t know their history, or their presidents. Bret writes near the end of this assay, “Such a channel would still have been plenty conservative, in a way that most liberals would find infuriating. But it would also have defended the classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism: the idea that immigrants are an asset, not a liability; that the freedoms of speech and conscience must extend to those whose ideas we loathe; that American power ought to be harnessed to protect the world’s democracies from aggressive dictators; that we are richer at home by freely trading goods abroad; that nothing is more sacred than democracy and the rule of law; that patriotism is about preserving the capacity to criticize a country we love while loving the country we criticize.” I always mark Bret down for flaming anthropocentricism, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t say a lot of important things extremely well. I rest my case.

David Lindsay Jr. is a historian who blogs at InconvenientNews.net