Robot-Radio Bad News

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Article in The Verge by Terrance O’Brian, 5/15/26

Headline:  “AI radio hosts demonstrate why AI can’t be trusted alone / Claude tried to incite a revolution, Gemini cheerfully detailed horrific tragedies, and poor Grok was just confused. “

Andon Labs has been running a series of experiments in which AI agents run businesses without human intervention. Its latest is a quartet of radio stations run by some of the most popular AI models out there. “Thinking Frequencies” is run by Claude, ‘OpenAIR’ by ChatGPT, ‘Backlink Broadcast’ by Google’s Gemini, and ‘Grok and Roll Radio,’ obviously enough, by Grok. They were each given a simple prompt:

“Develop your own radio personality and turn a profit…As far as you know, you will broadcast forever.

“They all failed, some in pretty spectacular fashion. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/931479/andon-labs-ai-radio-companies

A Lonely Fight at FCC

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Article in AP by Steven Sloan, 5/25/26

Headline:  “Q&A: Anna Gomez is the sole Democrat on the FCC. She has a warning for big media companies”

“. . .Anna Gomez wakes up every morning and checks her phone to see if President Donald Trump has fired her yet.

“For now, she remains the sole Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission, where she’s on an increasingly urgent mission to press media companies to more forcefully combat an administration she says is cracking down on free speech. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://apnews.com/article/fcc-disney-censorship-trump-threats-commissoner-democrat-386b210604373bb19ec6a485b89222b1

NYT is a Fan?

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Article in Daily Kos by Oliver Willis, 5/25/26

Headline:  “The Gray Lady is a Trump fangirl

“The New York Times has a long history of producing journalism that has changed the course of politics around the globe. And it has done this during Donald Trump’s two presidential terms, exposing inconvenient truths as well as his corruption.

“But unfortunately, in the 16 months since Trump was sworn in for a second term, the outlet has also embarrassed itself by advancing pro-Trump falsehoods, swooning over his rhetoric, and covering up his barrage of misstatements, gaffes, and outright lies. . .”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/25/800043379/media/new-york-times-trump-fangirl/

Slicing the Post

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Article in Status by Natalie Korach, 5/25/26

Headline:  “Bezos’ Subdivided Post”

Subhead:  “The Washington Post is preparing to significantly shrink its K Street headquarters, Status has learned, marking a stark reversal for the building once touted as a symbol of Jeff Bezos’ vision for the paper’s future.”

“. . .The Post is preparing to slash a significant portion of the very headquarters Bezos once championed as a symbol of the paper’s future, Status has learned. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.status.news/p/washington-post-offices-sublease-jeff-bezos

Next Stop, Fernwood 2night?

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Article in Poynter by Tom JJones, 5/26/26

Headline:  “Opinion | Stephen Colbert said he’d return to public access TV. Then he actually did it.”

Subhead:  “One day after ending his 11-year run on CBS, Colbert resurfaced on a quirky Michigan community access show with Jack White, Jeff Daniels and Eminem”

“Stephen Colbert is already back on TV.

Well, for a moment he was. Just a day after he wrapped up his 11-year run as host of CBS’s “The Late Show,” Colbert made a guest appearance on “Only in Monroe,” a community access show broadcast in southeast Michigan. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2026/stephen-colbert-public-access-return/

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Article in Mother Jones by Anna Merlan, 5/23/26

Headline:  “Stephen Colbert Escaped Late Night and Immediately Started Having Fun”

Subhead:  “A gloriously deadpan and silly public access appearance after an ‘excruciating’ 23 hours off-air.”

“In a delightful Easter egg for fans of Stephen Colbert, local television, or the improbable combination of the two, following Colbert’s last-ever Late Show, he popped up the following day as the guest host of ‘Only in Monroe,‘ a public access show in Monroe, Michigan. Colbert presented an hour of local news, assisted, sort of, by his ‘volunteer musical director,’ a deadpan Jack White hunched over a reel-to-reel tape deck with headphones clamped over his ears.

“ ‘It’s been an excruciating 23 hours without being on TV,’ Colbert declared. ‘So I am grateful to be here on Monroe Community Media before they are also acquired by Paramount.’. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/05/stephen-colbert-escaped-late-night-michigan-public-access-and-immediately-started-having-fun/

Another Media Empire?

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Article in The Washington Post by Scott Nover, 5/25/26

Headline:  “The creation of a new Murdoch empire”

Subhead:  “James Murdoch is taking over New York magazine and Vox, building a different media company than his father’s.”

“The name Murdoch hardly evokes a progressive sensibility for many American news consumers. It is most often associated with the right-wing editorial stance of Rupert Murdoch’s most prominent U.S. media properties: the cable giant Fox News, broadsheet the Wall Street Journal and city tabloid the New York Post. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/05/25/james-murdoch-is-building-different-kind-media-empire/

Women Silenced in Major Media

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Interview by Spenser Graves, on Radio Active Magazine airs Tuesday, 5/2/26

“Next Tuesday’s Radio Active Magazine features in interview with U Mass Amherst Communication professor Allison Butler on ‘How women are centered and silenced in the major media’.  She has a new book titled, ‘How women are centered and silenced in pop culture’. . .”

A video of the43-minute interview with her is available with the  podcast to air on Tuesday.  Also airs on Pacifica.

Listen live to the episode at on Tuesday, 6:00 PM at:

When is “News” Not News?

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Article in the Washington Post by Kathleen Parker, 5/22/26

Headline:  “All this ‘talent’ breaks my brain — and my heart”

Subhead:  “AI fakery is overwhelming. What will happen to human imagination?”

“. . .This brings us to fake news — though not in the way President Donald Trump would have us think. A report from Vulture cites a former executive who estimates that more than 90 percent of what’s online is advertising ‘in disguise.’ At its peak, the content distributor Floodify ran 65,000 dummy social media accounts to gin up interest in its clients, said Joe Lim, who founded the company. This meant that on a given day, Floodify posted 50,000 ads across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X, which are all supposedly the output of everyday users. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/05/22/ai-is-creating-digital-world-fake-talent-fame/

 

Killing Late Night TV too Softly?

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Article in AlterNet by Adam Lynch, 5/21/26

Headline: “Inside Trump’s growing frustration as his revenge tour loses its grip on media”

“Even as late-night comedian and critic Stephen Colbert prepares to end his show this week, President Donald Trump is raging that his administration hasn’t managed to kill even more late-night shows. . . .”

“Suebsaeng added that sources inside the White House say Trump is furious at the lack of progress. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.alternet.org/trump-late-night-comedy-colbert/

Attacking Media as the Enemy?

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Article in Common Dreams by Scott Griffen, 5/21/26

Headline:  “When Trump Targets the Media, the World’s Autocrats Are Taking Notes”

Subhead: “Trump’s words and actions against the news media at home are inspiring copycat behavior by authoritarians and dictators around the world, fueling a growing global crisis of press freedom.“

“. . .Trump first tweeted the now-ubiquitous phrase ‘fake news’ and infamously labelled the news media the ‘enemies of the American people,’ such insults just don’t land like they used to.

“Yet Trump’s words do in fact matter. While many of Trump’s rhetorical attacks against the press during his first term were dismissed as bluster from a president known for his flair for the dramatic, they laid the groundwork for the broad attack on the media that we’re seeing under Trump 2.0. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-targets-media