Media – Media Nation

Thugs assault U.S. senator for asking a question; plus, showdown for public media, and an odd omission

This morning I feel like anyone who comments on media and politics ought to say something about Thursday’s unprovoked assault on U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla. But I’m at a loss for words. I assume you’ve seen it; if you haven’t, here it is (gift link), along with a detailed New York Times account.

Federal agents are seen dragging the California Democrat from a room where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was holding a news conference, forcing him to the floor and handcuffing him. He was soon released and was not charged, but this is what an authoritarianism takeover looks like.

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I was interested that Noem at least had the presence of mind to lie, falsely claiming that Padilla had “lunged” toward the stage and didn’t identify himself. All you have to do is watch the video to see the truth. All he was trying to do was ask a question. And, of course, Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have picked up on her lies. Heather Cox Richardson writes:

While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Finally, I am never going to mention Noem without reminding you that she bragged about shooting her dog and her goat.

Public media’s last stand

I had hoped that President Trump’s plunge in the polls might stiffen the spines of House Republicans enough that they would not vote to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some of the revenues for PBS and NPR. No such luck.

As NPR reports, the House voted on Thursday to eliminate $1.1 billion in previously appropriated money that was supposed to fund CPB for the next two years. Another $8.3 billion was cut from international-aid programs. The measure passed, 214 to 212, with every Democrat and four Republicans voting against it.

So now it’s on to the Senate, where the Republican majority is slightly less right-wing than the House’s. At this point, though, all bets are off.

A curious omission

There is so much going on, nearly all of it bad, that I’m going to have to leave most of it aside. But I do want to mention that on Thursday I listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times interview (you can subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show for free at all the usual podcast haunts) with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has accused the Netanyahu government of committing war crimes in Gaza.

It was a long, fascinating conversation. Yet there was scarcely a mention of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and none at all of the possibility that Israel would soon act to destroy it — something that definitely had been in the news lately.

And now Israel has attacked Iran. In retrospect, it seems like a lost opportunity.

ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on

*Terry Moran, right, interviews Donald Trump in April 2025. Public domain photo by Joyce N. Boghosian via the White House.*

How to behave on social media has bedeviled journalists and confounded editors for years. Marty Baron clashed with reporters Wesley Lowery and Felicia Sonmez over their provocative Twitter comments back when he was executive editor of The Washington Post, and those are just two well-known examples.

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The latest journalist to run afoul of his news organization’s social-media standards is Terry Moran, who was, until Tuesday, employed by ABC News. Moran was suspended on Sunday after he tweeted that White House official Stephen Miller and President Trump is each a “world-class hater.” The tweet is now gone, but I’ve included an image. On Tuesday, Moran’s employer announced that they were parting company with him, as NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes.

I think ABC was right to suspend Moran but wrong to get rid of him, and that media critic Margaret Sullivan got the nuances perfectly when she wrote this for her newsletter, American Crisis:

I’m amazed that Moran posted what he did. It’s well outside the bounds of what straight-news reporters do. It’s more than just calling a lie a lie, or identifying a statement as racist — all of which I think is necessary. Moran is not a pundit or a columnist or any other kind of opinion journalist….

I would hate to see Moran — with his worthy career at ABC News, where he’s been for almost 30 years — lose his job over this. I hope that the honchos at ABC let a brief suspension serve its purpose, and put him back to work.

Unfortunately, this is ABC News, whose corporate owner, Disney, disgraced itself earlier this year by paying $15 million to settle a libel suit brought by Trump over a minor, non-substantive error: George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll when, in fact, he’d been found liable for sexual abuse. The federal judge in the Carroll case even said in a ruling that the jury had found Trump “raped” Carroll in the ordinary meaning of the term. But Disney couldn’t wait to prostrate itself before our authoritarian ruler.

So when Moran violated ABC News’ social-media policy, as the organization claimed, he no doubt knew he could expect no mercy.

Continue reading “ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on”

Journalists covering the unrest in LA are being obstructed, assaulted and injured

You may have seen the video. Lauren Tomasi of 9News in Australia is doing a standup in the middle of a Los Angeles street. Behind her, some distance away, are uniformed police officers. She tells viewers that “the situation has now rapidly deteriorated. The LAPD moving in on horseback, firing rubber bullets at protesters, moving them on through the heart of LA.”

She flinches briefly as another rubber bullet is fired. Then another — and she’s hit in the leg, crying out in pain and bending over. The camera moves away from her and we hear a male voice asking, “You OK?”

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Tomasi went live after the incident and doesn’t appear to be much worse for the wear. She was lucky. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, law enforcment officers have assaulted, obstructed and injured a number of reporters who are covering the unrest in Los Angeles touched off by an ICE raid at a Home Depot on Friday. The CPJ writes:

Law enforcement in Los Angeles, California, shot non-lethal rounds that struck multiple reporters while they covered protests that began on Friday, June 6, and escalated over the weekend following immigration raids. More than 20 others were reported to have been assaulted or obstructed.

And though Tomasi didn’t appear to be seriously hurt, rubber bullets can cause severe injuries. CPJ reports that Nick Stern, a British freelance photojournalist, underwent emergency surgery for injuries caused by a plastic bullet that struck him in the leg. The CPJ notes: “Stern told the BBC that he was wearing a press card around his neck and carrying his camera when he was shot.”

Is law enforcement targeting journalists? “Tomasi, holding a microphone and talking into a camera, was clearly a journalist,” writes Poynter media columnist Tom Jones. But as you can see from the video of Tomasi, she had embedded herself with a large swath of protesters. It’s possible that the police were firing at the protesters and she just happened to be in harm’s way.

The more important question is this: Why were officers firing at a crowd of what appeared to be peaceful demonstrators?

By the way, the “more than 20” number cited by CPJ is up to 37 as I write this, according to a database being maintained by journalist Adam Rose. There are some harrowing reports of journalists’ being taken to the hospital and being struck in the head and in the eye. CNN’s Erin Burnett is quoted as saying, “The officers are also pushing us … They knew we’re media. They were just as happy to push me as to push anybody else.”

“We are greatly concerned by the reports of law enforcement officers’ shooting non-lethal rounds at reporters covering protests in Los Angeles. Any attempt to discourage or silence media coverage by intimidating or injuring journalists should not be tolerated,” said CPJ executive Katherine Jacobsen. “It is incumbent upon authorities to respect the media’s role of documenting issues of public interest.”

AI roundup: The WashPost eyes robot-edited op-ed pieces, while Chicago and Philly execs speak out

*Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann*

The Washington Post’s plan to bring in a plethora of outside opinion writers, edited by artificial intelligence, is being widely mocked, as it should be. But the idea is not new — at least the non-AI part.

A decade ago, the Post started publishing something called PostEverything, which the paper called “a digital daily magazine for voices from around the world.” Here’s how the 2014 rollout described it:

In PostEverything, outsiders will entertain and inform readers with fresh takes, personal essays, news analyses, and other innovative ways to tell the stories everyone is talking about — and the ones they haven’t yet heard.

PostEverything went PostNothing sometime in 2022, but now it’s back. According to Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times (gift link), the revived feature, known internally as Ripple, will comprise opinion writing from other newspapers, independent writers on Substack and, eventually, nonprofessional writers. Ripple will be digital-only and will be offered outside the Post’s paywall.

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What’s hilarious is that Mullin contacted several of the partners the Post is considering, such as The Salt Lake Tribune and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was told they’re not interested. Another potential partner was identified as Jennifer Rubin, who quit the Post over owner Jeff Bezos’ meddling and started her own publication called The Contrarian. Mullin writes: “When told that she had been under consideration at all, Ms. Rubin burst out in laughter. ‘Did they read my public resignation letter?’ she said.”

Continue reading “AI roundup: The WashPost eyes robot-edited op-ed pieces, while Chicago and Philly execs speak out”

AI embarrassment aside, Business Insider faces huge challenges in the post-SEO environment

*Former masters of the universe Henry Blodget, founder of Business Insider, and Nick Denton, founder of Gawker. Photo (cc) 2012 by the Financial Times.*

There was a time when Business Insider’s digital strategy was among the most widely admired and emulated in publishing. But that was then.

Last week, the outlet announced it was laying off 21% of its staff and doubling down on artificial intelligence, a sign of how drastically the business model for digital news has changed over the past few years. I’ll get back to that. But first, an AI-related embarrassment.

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On Sunday, Semafor media reporter Max Tani revealed that, last May, Business Insider management distributed to staff members a list of books it recommended so that its employees could learn about the vision and best practices of leading figures in business and technology. The list included such classics as “Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia,” “Simply Target: A CEO’s Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand” and “The Costco Experience: An Unofficial Survivor’s Guide.”

As it turned out, those books and several others either don’t exist or have slightly different titles and were written by authors other than the ones cited in what managers called “Beacon Books.” In all likelihood, Tani reports, the book titles were generated by AI. At least Business Insider didn’t recommend them to readers, as two daily newspapers did recently with a list of summer books generated by a third-party publisher.

Business Insider is owned by Axel Springer, a German-based conglomerate that also owns Politico and Morning Brew, neither of which faces layoffs, according to Corbin Bolies of The Daily Beast.

Henry Blodget founded Business Insider in 2007, and the publication quickly established itself as a success in the world of SEO, or search engine optimization. In 2016, I interviewed The Washington Post’s then-chief technologist, Shailesh Prakash, for my book “The Return of the Moguls.” He told me that BI was one of several outlets the Post studied to see how it used a variety of factors to get its journalism in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Here’s part of what he said:

We have built our own crawlers, so we have crawlers go and crawl a bunch of other sites — USA Today, New York Times, Business Insider — and we go and grab their content and bring it in-house, strip out all the branding, only have the headline, image and a blurb, and put it in front of 500-plus users every month as a test. And the question that’s asked is, “Would you read this story?” And you don’t know whether it’s a Business Insider story or a Washington Post story or a Huffington Post story or a USA Today story. All you see is an image, a headline and blurb. And based on the results of that, we compare our content to these different sites. Are we better than The Huffington Post in politics content for women? Are we better than Business Insider in business content for men?

Back then, Business Insider and HuffPost were offering their journalism for free and paying for it by building huge audiences and selling them advertisers. The Times and The Washington Post were in the early stages of building their paywall strategy.

Eventually, the free model collapsed as Google drove the value of digital advertising through the floor. Today, HuffPost is a greatly diminished outlet owned by BuzzFeed, which itself is a shadow of what it used to be. And Business Insider has a paywall.

Now, I have nothing against for-profit news organizations charging for their journalism. But who would take out a paid subscription to Business Insider? That’s not a comment about the quality. But readers are dealing with subscription fatigue, and even the most hardcore news junkies might pay for one national paper (perhaps The Wall Street Journal in the case of BI’s target audience), one regional paper and a few newsletters.

BI isn’t going to make the cut for more than a handful of readers.

There’s an additional factor. BI still relies on Google to attract readers who might be enticed into buying a subscription — and now a Google search gives you an AI-generated result. There’s no need to click through, even though the AI summary might prove to be wildly inaccurate.

In an interview with Andy Meek of Forbes, Blodget said he was “very sad” to learn about the layoffs at BI, and he offered his thoughts on how digital publishers can survive in the current environment. “Direct distribution and subscriptions,” he said. “That model will support thousands of excellent publications, big and small. And audio and video are still growing as we move from TV/radio to digital.”

But Business Insider already has a paywall and newsletters. At best, the publication faces a smaller, less ambitious future. And turning over some of what it produces to AI is not going to help it maintain a relationship of trust with its readers.

Feds indict alleged ringleader in NHPR harassment case; plus, public media lawsuits, and trouble for Musk

Photo from the Middlesex County district attorney’s office via NHPR

It’s been a major loose end in a frightening story about harassment and threats directed at journalists.

Four men have been sentenced to federal prison for carrying out a campaign of terror against New Hampshire Public Radio journalist Lauren Chooljian, her parents and her editor, Dan Barrick. All four appeared to be motivated by Chooljian’s reporting on Eric Spofford, the founder of several addiction treatment centers, who, according to Chooljian’s reporting, had engaged in sexual abuse and harassment.

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Yet Spofford denied any involvment and was not charged. He even turned around and sued Chooljian and NHPR for libel, a suit that was dismissed by a New Hampshire state judge.

Now, according to a story by WBUR and posted at NHPR, federal authorities are charging Spofford with orchestrating a conspiracy to vandalize the homes of Chooljian, her parents and Barrick — vandalism that included threatening and offensive graffiti. The story says in part:

Prosecutors say Spofford paid his close friend, Eric Labarge, $20,000 in two installments to vandalize the homes in 2022. Spofford allegedly provided the addresses and specific instructions on what to do. Labarge then found three others to carry out the attacks.

Spofford reportedly lives in Salem, New Hampshire, and in Miami. He was arrested Friday and will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in Boston on Monday. According to a press release from the U.S. attorney’s office, Spofford, 40, was indicted by a grand jury on four counts of conspiracy and stalking. If he’s found guilty, he could face a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the four counts.

Continue reading “Feds indict alleged ringleader in NHPR harassment case; plus, public media lawsuits, and trouble for Musk”

What’s the Colorado angle in the NPR lawsuit?; plus, a Muzzle for Quincy’s mayor, and an AI LOL

Kevin Dale, executive editor of Colorado Public Radio. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

I haven’t seen any explanation for why three public radio outlets in Colorado joined NPR in suing the Trump administration over its threat to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I’m glad they did, but it seems to me that all 246 member stations ought to sign on, including GBH and WBUR in Boston.

The Colorado entities, according to Ben Markus of Colorado Public Radio, are CPR (which reaches 80% of the state through a network of transmitters and translators), Aspen Public Radio and KSUT Public Radio of Ignacio, a Native American station that serves the Southern Ute Tribe.

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When I was in Colorado several years ago to interview people for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” CPR was perhaps the largest news organization in the state, with a staff of 65 journalists. (I say “perhaps” because executive editor Kevin Dale thought one or two television stations might be bigger.) Some cuts were made last year as business challenges hit a number of public broadcasting outlets as well as NPR itself.

The basis of the lawsuit, writes NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, is that CPB is an independent, private nonprofit that is funded by Congress. The suit claims that the president has no right to rescind any money through an executive order; only Congress can do that. Moreover, the suit contends that this is pure viewpoint discrimination, as demonstrated by Trump’s own words — that NPR and PBS, which also relies on CPB funding, present “biased and partisan news coverage.”

Continue reading “What’s the Colorado angle in the NPR lawsuit?; plus, a Muzzle for Quincy’s mayor, and an AI LOL”

Northeastern’s Rahul Bhargava talks about his innovative approach to making sense of data

Professor Rahul Bhargava’s approach to data storytelling includes forks and Brazilian drumming.

It’s an all-Northeastern podcast this week as Ellen Clegg and I talk with Rahul Bhargava, a colleague at Northeastern University. Rahul is a professor who crosses boundaries: the boundaries of storytelling and data, the boundaries of deep dives into collaborative research and interactive museum exhibits and plays.

He holds a master’s degree in media arts and science from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. But he also minored in multimedia production. He brings the power of big data research to the masses, through newsroom workshops, interactive museum exhibits and more.

Bhargava has collaborated with groups in Brazil, in Minnesota and at the World Food Program. He helps local communities use data to understand their world, and as a tool for change. There’s more to data than just bar charts. Sometimes it involves forks! His recently published book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information,” unlocks all sorts of secrets.

Keeping with our all-Huskies theme, Ellen and I also talk with Lisa Thalhamer, a longtime TV journalist who is now a graduate student at Northeastern. Lisa realized that like many fields, journalism suffers from a gap between academic research and its implementation in workplaces. She is finding ways to bridge that gap, and urges an Avenger’s-style team to lift up the work of a free press.

Ellen has a Quick Take on a recent visit to Santa Barbara, California, and the efforts to revive a legacy paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press.

My Quick Take is about the latest developments from the National Trust for Local News. It involves a chain of weekly papers in Colorado — their very first acquisition dating back to 2021. And it’s not good news at all for the journalists who work at those papers and the communities they serve.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

CJR was said to be working on a story about Wesley Lowery. It finally drops — and it is horrifying.

Wesley Lowery, left, speaking at a panel discussion. Photo (cc) 2016 by New America.

When Sewell Chan was fired by the Columbia Journalism Review last month for reasons that have not been adequately explained, he wrote on social media about a sensitive story that was in the works. He said he had what he described as “pointed conversations” with three staff members. Here’s how he described one of those conversations:

[It] was with an editor who has been working for weeks on a sensitive MeToo investigation I launched about sexual harassment by a prominent investigative reporter. Following a legal review of that story, I urged her to share her draft to the dean so that we could move expeditiously toward publication. She asked for more time, to which I reluctantly acceded. The story remains unpublished.

Those of us who are media obsessives assumed he was referring to former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize winner. In March, Lowery was the subject of a tough article in his former paper (gift link), written by Will Sommer, alleging that he had left his job at American University over allegations that he’d made “inappropriate sexual comments in private meetings with students and unwanted sexual advances and actions toward journalists.”

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On Wednesday, the story that Chan had alluded to finally dropped. And it is truly the stuff that nightmares are made of. Betsy Morais, named interim editor of the Columbia Journalism Review after Chan’s firing, reports that Lowery engaged in a pattern of serious sexual misconduct while he was at American University, with several women saying that Lowery had pressured them into sex or sexually assaulted them after he plied them with alcohol. It is a deeply disturbing story. Lowery would not speak with CJR, but he did give Morais a statement that I can only describe as unparseable. It says in part:

CJR’s portrayal of these periods in my personal life is incomplete and includes false insinuations about complicated dynamics. Still, I respect the women who have shared their experiences and take their perspectives seriously. As a young professional, I did not always recognize the power imbalances that surfaced as personal relationships evolved into professional ones, and vice versa.

He adds that he has since “committed to sobriety.”

This would be a tragedy in any case, especially for the women he allegedly victimized. But it’s also a tragedy because of what Lowery represents. He is a prominent Black journalist who has been outspoken about the ways that traditional notions of objectivity have served to reinforce the status quo with regard to race and gender — both within media organizations and in how the news is covered.

I know Lowery slightly and, until recently, counted myself among his admirers. I interviewed him briefly for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.” I’ve emailed back and forth with him about which of his books I should assign my ethics students. I’ve assigned his essays on objectivity as well as the video of a panel discussion he took part in on that topic hosted by the Columbia Journalism School, which is the home of CJR.

It is a real loss that his voice will no longer be heard. And no, I won’t be assigning his work anymore. There are times when it’s just too difficult to separate the writer from what they have written.

Lowery worked for The Boston Globe about a dozen years ago, and when editor Marty Baron left to become executive editor of The Washington Post, Lowery followed not long after. He wrote an important book about the first wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” and he helped the Post build a widely praised database of people who had been killed by police officers.

But it is Lowery’s critique of objectivity that was uniquely valuable. I don’t agree with him entirely — as Walter Lippmann originally conceived of objectivity, it is the fair-minded, evidence-based pursuit of the truth, not mindless balance, which is the way it is often caricatured. And I don’t really think Lowery disagrees with Lippmann.

At the beginning of each semester, I’ve asked my ethics students to read an op-ed piece (gift link) that Lowery wrote for The New York Times in 2020 headlined “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” and to watch an address that Baron delivered at Brandeis in 2023 called “In Defense of Objectivity.”

What’s striking is that Lowery’s and Baron’s views aren’t really that far apart, even though their clashes over Lowery’s outspokenness on social media led to Lowery’s departure from the Post.

Now Lowery has been silenced — has silenced himself. The debate over journalistic ethics, objectivity and race will be poorer without his contributions. I am not saying he deserves any special treatment for the terrible behavior of which he’s been accused. I am saying that his critique of how journalists do their work will be missed.

I realize that, in lamenting the loss of Lowery’s voice, I haven’t given voice to any of the women quoted in the CJR story. So I’m going to close with a thread on Bluesky written by Olivia Messer, the editor-in-chief of Barbed Wire, who told CJR a harrowing tale of being sexually assaulted by Lowery.

Messer also says that she was interviewed, on the record, for the article that Sommer wrote for The Washington Post and that her comments did not make it into print. Sommer has since left the Post for The Bulwark. So it sounds like there are still some loose ends to be tied up.

Here is what she posted last night:

Some of y’all noticed I’ve been uncharacteristically offline. This is why, and I remain on leave for a few weeks to handle a PTSD relapse. CJR was dogged in its pursuit of my story. Because of what I do and who I am, I felt that I had to answer their questions honestly.www.cjr.org/feature-2/we…

— Olivia Messer (@oliviamesser.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T17:17:28.955Z

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but I also believe it was a chance to prove that I mean what I say to the women who have trusted me with theirs. I have to believe that there’s power in telling the truth — and in journalism.

— Olivia Messer (@oliviamesser.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T17:17:53.850Z

I’m really really overwhelmed by the messages of support — and the multiple journalists who’ve DMed me about their similar experiences with him. It’s going to take time to get back to everyone, but I deeply appreciate it and am filled with just immense gratitude and relief.

— Olivia Messer (@oliviamesser.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T19:43:02.150Z

That AI-generated list of fake books was published by a Hearst subsidiary, 404 Media reports

We now know more about the AI-generated slop that was published in the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

According to Jason Koebler of 404 Media, the 64-page summer guide called “Heat Index” was produced by King Features, part of the Hearst chain. As Koebler reported earlier, a freelancer named Marco Buscaglia used AI to write a guide to summer books. He admitted that he did not check his work, and it turned out that most of the books don’t exist.

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Marina Dunbar reports in The Guardian that other articles in “Heat Index” may also contain AI hallucinations, including one on food and another on gardening. The Sun-Times addressed the fiasco on Tuesday but put its statement behind the paper’s paywall. That’s unacceptable, so here’s a link where you can find it. The paper says in part:

Our partner confirmed that a freelancer used an AI agent to write the article. This should be a learning moment for all of journalism that our work is valued because of the relationship our very real, human reporters and editors have with our audiences.

The Sun-Times statement also says that subscribers won’t be charged, that “Heat Index” is being removed from its e-paper version, and that various steps are being taken to improve transparency.

The Chicago Sun-Times News Guild issued a statement as well:

The Sun-Times Guild is aware of the third-party “summer guide” content in the Sunday, May 18 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. This was a syndicated section produced externally without the knowledge of the members of our newsroom.

We take great pride in the union-produced journalism that goes into the respected pages of our newspaper and on our website. We’re deeply disturbed that AI-generated content was printed alongside our work. The fact that it was sixty-plus pages of this “content” is very concerning — primarily for our relationship with our audience but also for our union’s jurisdiction.

Our members go to great lengths to build trust with our sources and communities and are horrified by this slop syndication. Our readers signed up for work that has been vigorously reported and fact-checked, and we hate the idea that our own paper could spread computer- or third-party-generated misinformation. We call on Chicago Public Media management to do everything it can to prevent repeating this disaster in the future.

It’s interesting that most of the focus has been on the Sun-Times rather than the Inquirer, even though “Heat Index” appeared in the Inquirer last Thursday, three days before the Sun-Times, according to Herb Scribner of The Washington Post (gift link). Axios reported that the Inquirer’s publisher and CEO, Lisa Hughes, called the screw-up “a violation of our own internal policies and a serious breach.” Mostly, though, the focus has been on Chicago, where the mistake was first caught.

It’s worth noting, too, that the Sun-Times and the Inquirer are both owned by mission-oriented nonprofits — the Sun-Times by Chicago Public Media and the Inquirer by the Lenfest Institute. It shows that anyone can get caught up in this. And I don’t really blame editors at either paper for not checking, since “Heat Index” is outside content produced by a respected media organization.

Speaking of Hearst, we have not yet heard from them as to how this was allowed to happen. Because even if it was acceptable for the Sun-Times and the Inquirer not to edit the supplement, it certainly should have been thoroughly edited by King Features before it was sent out to client newspapers.

This is a story about the hazards of AI, but, even more, it’s a story about human failure.