Joshua Benton

3 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

LINK: www.nytimes.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   June 4, 2025It’s hard being The Washington Post. And I don’t just mean lately. It was one thing to be the No. 2 general-interest newspaper in the country when your business model was still resolutely analog — local ads bought by local companies being delivered with local news to local front doors. But once everyone’s competing on the same platform online, you can start to feel like Bing to The New York Times’ Google.

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

There’s a wonderful turn of phrase in the lawsuit NPR and some of its member stations filed this morning against Donald Trump — one that would survive a round of edits with any All Things Considered producer. “It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment,” NPR’s lawyers write. “But this wolf comes as a wolf.”The brief is quoting Antonin Scalia, from his dissent in 1988’s Morrison v.

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

If you’ve been paying attention to the world of misinformation and disinformation for the past decade, you know the names of Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis. First at BuzzFeed News R.I.P. and then at ProPublica, Silverman has been one of the top reporters on the beat, uncovering Macedonian fake-news mills, Facebook malfeasance, Google ad shenanigans, and insider ad fraud.

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

LINK: knightcolumbia.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   May 19, 2025Stand and fight — that’s what a coalition of American free speech groups are asking the country’s elite institutions to do in response to the Trump administration’s “multi-front assault on First Amendment freedoms.”“There have been other times in our nation’s history that witnessed sustained and misguided efforts to suppress speech,” they write in an open letter released this morning.

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

LINK: www.wsj.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   May 6, 2025Can Google be trusted to act less like a monopolist in digital advertising? The U.S. Department of Justice says no — which is why it wants to force the company out of whole segments of the business instead. Just catching up? For more than two years, Google has faced antitrust charges over allegations that it holds too much power in the digital advertising market.