‘The New York Times’ Wants Gary Webb to Stay Dead ‘The New York Times’ Wants Gary Webb to Stay Dead
Many journalists went after Webb, destroying his reputation and driving him out of the profession and into a suicidal depression. Now they’re at it again.
Oct 10, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Greg Grandin
Scariest Ad of the Week Scariest Ad of the Week
Agree with this ad, or else.
Oct 9, 2014 / Leslie Savan
The Government War Against Reporter James Risen The Government War Against Reporter James Risen
The vendetta against him and whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling reflects an antidemocratic goal: the uninformed consent of the governed.
Oct 8, 2014 / Feature / Norman Solomon and Marcy Wheeler
Right-Wing Fear-Mongering Is Far More Contagious Than Ebola Right-Wing Fear-Mongering Is Far More Contagious Than Ebola
When it comes to Ebola, ISIS and other perceived threats, the right basically wants us to build a higher dang fence and then Otherize the heck out of everything on the other side.
Oct 8, 2014 / Leslie Savan
No, ISIS Is Not a Threat to the US No, ISIS Is Not a Threat to the US
The terror-mongers are at it again, but dangers to the “homeland” are vanishingly small.
Oct 7, 2014 / Tom Engelhardt
Media Culpa: The Politics of Personal Deconstruction Media Culpa: The Politics of Personal Deconstruction
Eric on this week's concerts (plus some upcoming events) and Reed on Matt Bai's treatment of the Gary Hart-Donna Rice affair.
Oct 6, 2014 / Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson
The ‘Sentimentality Taboo’ and Fox News The ‘Sentimentality Taboo’ and Fox News
Do we dismiss sentimentality in media too easily—or not enough?
Oct 3, 2014 / Leslie Savan
Which Cable Network Nearly Skipped Out on Climate Week? Which Cable Network Nearly Skipped Out on Climate Week?
CNN’s climate change coverage almost disappeared like Malaysian Flight 370.
Oct 2, 2014 / Leslie Savan
Revenge Porn Is Malicious and Reprehensible. But Should It Be a Crime? Revenge Porn Is Malicious and Reprehensible. But Should It Be a Crime?
The line between respecting civil liberties and protecting victims is anything but clear.
Oct 1, 2014 / Michelle Goldberg
Minority Report Minority Report
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an era in which information has finally become “free”—unlimited media access, twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data. A new report shows that when Big Data creeps into our workplaces and our financial lives, it may simply create new ways of reinforcing old racial and economic injustices. The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future,” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, notes that technological advances, the declining cost of data storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America have spurred massive data collection. This accumulation of private information by corporations and government has created troubling new issues in the areas of labor rights, privacy and ethics. Consider the influence of Big Data on hiring practices. Hiring algorithms are often seen as an “objective,” meritocratic assessment, free of irrational prejudice or biases. But the report warns that because “[d]igital indicators of race, religion, or sexual preference can easily be observed or inferred online,” the mining of social media and Google-search data can reinforce systemic discrimination. The result may be a perpetuation of an unjust status quo: disproportionately white, upper-class, elite-educated and culturally homogeneous. Sloppy résumé scans end up excluding people based on superficial criteria—where they live, for example, a metric bound to reflect already-existing housing discrimination. Big Data manipulation allows these subtle individual slights to be expanded to new orders of magnitude with monstrous efficiency. Since the algorithm reflects social patterns, researcher David Robinson tells The Nation, “any time someone is the victim of old-fashioned human discrimination, that discrimination is likely to be reflected in some of the data points that these new algorithms measure. Culturally speaking, there is a real tendency to defer to decisions that come from computers—which means if we’re not careful, it is reasonable to expect that computers will sanitize biased inputs into neutral-seeming outputs.” Read Next: David Auerbach on data profiling and microtargeting
Oct 1, 2014 / Michelle Chen