The committee’s report recommends that Yale change its mission statement to say, in line with the current Faculty Handbook, that the University’s “mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” That would remove the current mission statement’s commitment to “improving the world today,” its call to educate “aspiring leaders” and its mention of “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.”

Just when American society most needs universities--especially the privileged among them--to take moral leadership, Yale's faculty turns inward and shirks its greater responsibility.
Yale needs major reforms to rebuild public trust, faculty committee says
yaledailynews.com/articles/yal...

Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems

The right has been rallying against higher education for far longer than most of the conditions mentioned in this report have existed. Indeed, right-wing policies of austerity and disinvestment bear responsibility for many of them.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/u...

There's no greater sign of the iron grip that "both sides" framing has on American journalists than the repeated descriptions of the unhinged tantrum Trump is throwing over the pope's anodyne statements on Catholic doctrine as a "feud" or a "fight" or anything else that implies they're both to blame

AP says it will offer buyouts as part of pivot away from newspaper-focused history The Associated Press says it will offer buyouts to an unspecified number of its U.S.-based journalists as part of an acceleration away from the focus on newspapers and their print journalism that sust...

People should actually be very alarmed that while AP's business model is shot to bits, Americans are still very much reliant on the news it delivers. The alternatives in some cases are inferior or non-existent.
apnews.com/article/news...

OpenAI's out-of-the-blue acquisition of TBPN, the buzzy online talk show, stunned the worlds of media and technology. But it's a continuation of a pattern that dates back a hundred years, to 1926, when RCA created NBC in part to sell radios. https://cnn.it/4vaRWiO

The fact that Trump is going to oral arguments to pressure the justices to acquiesce to his attempted nullification of a constitutional amendment and create a stateless class for the first time since the civil war, illustrates what is really at the core of the Trump project and it isn’t tariffs.

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Silicon Valley Elite How the self-styled know-it-alls atop the knowledge economy want to dismantle the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake

I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and now every time a Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation: www.thenation.com/article/soci...

When twitter was perceived as liberal it was a bubble and people should not take it seriously. But now that it's a cesspool of right-wing propaganda it's the Soul of America and the libs ignore it at their peril

CBS News will end radio service as Weiss struggles to right ship The troubled network is eliminating its century-old CBS News Radio division and laying off more staff.

NEW: CBS will eliminate its century-old CBS News Radio service and cut more newsroom jobs as new top editor Bari Weiss's rocky tenure gets rockier. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202... (by @liamjscott.bsky.social, me & @scottnover.bsky.social)

This is probably a media thing, because that’s also when large and medium city metro papers and local TV news were also making a play for the suburbs, where the wealthier advertising demo was.

I’ve been walking around with this folk theory that still being on twitter, covering COVID era politics, listening to right-coded podcasts had turned into some kind of epistemic contagion for elite journalists. And well…

Read this thread & the underlying one by @eliasisquith.blog. They get at something really important about the sociology of today's economically-collapsing journalism industry. My tl;dr takeaway is that to save democracy from MAGA authoritarianism, we need LOTS more local journalism written by locals

Trump is using immigration policy to suppress speech, lawsuit claims A new lawsuit accuses the administration of violating the First Amendment by threatening the visas of researchers for work on disinformation and content moderation of social media.

Researchers in the US live in "pervasive fear" of immigration enforcement.

It has “chilling effects" on independent research and advocacy.

Now the researchers are suing 💪🏽

www.npr.org/2026/03/09/n...

Gullible, Cynical America The trouble with believing anything and nothing at the same time

The data economy has made us dumber in ways that also make us vulnerable to authoritarian takover. We are have become both cynical and gullible in the sense we think we are too jaded be fooled and as a result are tricked more easily www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Thrilled to share this piece by my colleague Madhavi Reddi, which looks at how comedians Aziz Ansari and Hassan Minaj have created a uniquely second-generation Desi male identity. Very sharp stuff here.

csalateral.org/issue/14-2/g...

When the media covers war, every other topic fades Trump will do anything to distract from the political damage of the Epstein files

'Subjects that were dominating the news last week are brushed aside. Instead, it’s all war, all the time.'

@sulliview.bsky.social reminds readers not to lose sight of the (many, many) topics that Trump doesn't want you to pay attention to

margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/when-the-m...

Check out the latest #bookreview at @jmcquarterly.bsky.social — a good review of a good book! @briancreech.bsky.social @ajbauer.bsky.social

the whole 'monitoring the situation' meme is poking fun at this & also partly people just giving into the fact that our information systems push us to consume and converse in totalizing ways. of course the effect is that everything just becomes entertainment or raw data in a pretty dehumanizing way

GOP “Antitrust Concerns” Magically Disappear Now That Larry Ellison Is Buying Warner Brothers You might have noticed that when Netflix was attempting to acquire Warner Brothers, Republicans were suddenly and uncharacteristically interested in media consolidation and antitrust reform. Republ…

funny how that works, huh?

Personal news update: I'm delighted to announce that as of today, I am an actual Bluesky employee! I'll be working to welcome indie media and local govt to Bsky—and supporting those already here.

I'll always want to hear your thoughts on how we can make Bsky the sort of social media we all want!

Oligarchs Are Building The World's Biggest Propaganda Machine. Their Success Isn't Guaranteed. America's wealthiest, shittiest people are trying to hoover up the entirety of new and old media companies in a bid to pummel the plebs with propaganda. But what they want, and what they actually get,...

Over at the newsletter I wrote about the Paramount/Warner deal, how it's best viewed as a well-funded attack on informed consensus, and how we still have collective agency to determine whether or not it actually succeeds.

I get why/that people say this, but dont' underestimate this:

all other social networks are invested in making sure that posts that link to journalism remain buried, or at least never go viral.

BlueSky doesn't do that. That makes it very valuable to a ton of newsrooms righ tnow.

This is a bombshell: "the Pentagon wanted the company to allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data"

This kind of agenda echoes the defunded Total Information Awareness effort, post-9/11

A list of news outlets and social media sites whose billionaire owners, investors or parent companies also have U.S. government defense contracts:

Axios
CBS
NBC
The Washington Post
TikTok
YouTube
X
Soon: CNN

A lot of masks are about to come off in U.S. news media. “When the Press Fails” is going to need a sequel. #journalism

The Tampa Bay Times starts a monthly “book club” for news stories The idea is not just to discuss a story's substance, but to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting process and decision-making that shape the published article.

“The business is packed, and people across all demographics are sitting there in conversation,” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘wow, wouldn’t it be great if we could apply this model to news?'” www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-...

imo the threat posed by CBS News and CNN getting absorbed by pro-regime billionaires isn't that they're going to produce right-wing slop that convinces people to be right-wing, it's the dismantling of newsrooms capable of doing investigative reporting on the administration. Fewer eyes on the street.

Netflix Backs Out of Warner Bros. Bidding, Paramount Set to Win In a stunning twist, the streaming giant's co-CEOs say the major studio was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.

Wow. Say goodbye to independent journalism at CNN. The two Davids, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Paramount CEO David Ellison will together likely drive a stake through the heart of one of the best global news operations on TV. https://loom.ly/cbDtaPA