Journalists can be infuriating. They simplify. They exaggerate. They sometimes get things wrong. They are disproportionally university-educated, middle-class and a bit left-wing, so their attitudes often jar with the rest of the population. When they act unethically—for example, when the bbc’s Panorama programme aired clips of President Donald Trump that had been spliced together in a misleading manner—people are rightly outraged. Trust in the news media has declined across the rich world, especially since the advent of social media allowed errors in reporting to be more widely reviled. So some people may not care much when they hear that journalism is in trouble. Yet it is in their interest to care.
Less scrutiny, more booty
As global press freedom dwindles, corrupt politicians rejoice
Trump Team to Hold Daily Meetings on Getting Revenge New Republic
‘Just doesn’t look good for him’: Why Trump and those in his orbit are untouchable
The Epstein files unveiled a litany of wealthy, smart, powerful men apparently unbothered by the exploitation of women and girls. But as far as the Trump administration is concerned, the saga is now effectively over.
The Crypto-Hoarding Strategy Is Unraveling Wall Street Journal. We warned about this when Saylor first got wobbly…
Reverse Palantir: Inside The Online War to Identify ICE Agents (Exclusive) Migrant Insider. Important
How to Film ICE Wired
Clintons agree to testify on Epstein as vote looms to hold them in contempt of Congress BBC
Epstein and Ukraine: a match made in hell RT
Epstein Occupied A Structural Position, So Who Has Replaced Him? Ian Welsh
Follow the Changes: 9 Ways Web Archives are Used in Digital Investigations
Internet Archive Blogs: “Digital journalists increasingly turn to web archives like the Wayback Machine to follow how things on the Internet break, change or disappear – from deleted posts to quietly edited pages.
The web has become not only a source of informationbut also the subject of media investigations, prompting journalists, researchers and activists to use digital archives to reconstruct timelines, verify claims, uncover hidden connections and hold powerful actors to account. As online materials grow more fragile and prone to disappearance, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been critical in making “lost” web pages available – recently celebrating archiving over a trillion pages.
As we’ve previously written about on this blog, the Wayback Machine is an important resource for our work as media researchers, helping us to trace histories of digital media objects (for example, changes in ad tracker signatures of viral “fake news” sites over time). We are also interested in how others use web archives across fields, and what we can learn from each other.
In this piece we draw on the Internet Archive’s News Stories collection to surface practices and use cultures of the Wayback Machine amongst journalists and media organisations. We analysed a dataset of about 8,600 news articles, assembled by the IA via daily Google News keyword searches since 2018. Drawing on a combination of digital methods, machine learning and lots of reading – we surfaced nine ways that journalists use the Wayback Machine in their reporting…”
