It is high season for election interference, with multiple foreign actors trying to influence American voters with all kinds of misleading content. While this kind of disinformation is not a new phenomenon, intelligence experts say it is an “unprecedented threat in 2024 and that the US is less ready than ever,” according to NBC News.
Category Archive: News and Analysis
If you ask Tucker Carlson, we know what he would say. In fact, he already said it.
Did you witness the earth-shattering news live? NFL football star Travis Kelce, fresh off a Super Bowl victory with the Kansas City Chiefs, had just taken a private jet to Sydney, Australia to see his girlfriend Taylor Swift. She was on a concert tour stop there. And OMG, you’d never guess what happened next.
Sora is the latest AI-powered tool from OpenAI, so new that it’s only available to a few select researchers, academics and visual artists. This software generates highly realistic videos from short snippets of text, like “historical footage of California in the gold rush.” After typing in that description, presto! Sora generates a high-resolution video in a fraction of the time it would take a digital artist to create it and way faster than actually filming that scene on-site with actors, props, lighting and cameras.
Anything that persuades news consumers to pause before sharing is a good start and helps keep misinformation from polluting our information ecosystem.
The jury is still out on this question in the long term, but for now, most experts say chatbots will contribute to the spread of misinformation. Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT what it knew about me—and its response was startling.
Reporting often involves the presentation of conflicting information from different sources. When this happens, reporters must be diligent in verifying the facts and seeking multiple perspectives. Ultimately, the goal is to provide the context, evidence, and analysis needed for the audience to make an informed judgment. And in moments when information is hard to assess accurately, it is critical for reporters to explain to their readers why they couldn’t obtain that information.
Protect your sources. It’s the cardinal rule of journalism, and reporters hold this promise of confidentiality in the highest regard. Journalists will protect a source’s identity or withhold details of their conversations when revealing these truths would be morally objectionable or life-threatening to the source. Yet, some journalists have broken this sacred covenant when their own security or safety is on the line.
Ethical journalists act with integrity, seek the truth, and report on it. Telling a story of public interest requires transparency on who provided the information and how the reporter acquired it. Sometimes sources or experts will only speak with a journalist if the conversation is considered on background or deep background. The terms are part of a journalist’s reporting arsenal and should only be used when necessary. But some subjects, particularly those in positions of power, have used this type of attribution to their advantage.
Journalists have a long history of putting citizens first and holding power to account–and that shouldn’t change just because there’s a new owner on the masthead. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel go even further and say in a Neiman Reports post that this responsibility is “social obligation that can actually override their employers’ immediate interests at times.”
