DataDownload: A skeptical democracy
DataDownload: A skeptical democracy A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser
This week I think the articles we’ve curated speak for themselves.
This Pew Research survey is important. Very. Ev Williams update on how Medium is changing is important and rare (ok, pun intended). Stanford’s Cable TV News Analyzer is critically valuable. CNN’s fact-checker is barely keeping up.
Plus, On The Media podcast — with our pal Bob Garfield and Brook Gladstone is our must-listen for this week.
Plus… we’re starting to announce speakers for the SUMMIT — with more surprises on the way.
That’s it — chewing and complicated. Please reach out with ideas, suggestions, or feedback always welcome. Steve@nycmedialab.org.
Steve
Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read In Views of U.S. Democracy, Widening Partisan Divides Over Freedom to Peacefully Protest
Pew Research conducted an online survey of 11k Americans between July 27 and August 2 to assess the state of US Democracy. Besides the overall poor ratings across categories, opinions on the state of equal opportunity, the right to peacefully protest, and basic rights and freedoms are seeing noticeable partisan divide (see the image above). Here are some other major findings:
- Majority says significant changes are needed in structure of government. “A 62% majority of the public says that significant changes are needed in the fundamental design and structure of American government to make it work for current times”
- Fewer than half of Americans say the rights and freedoms of all are respected. “An overwhelming share of Americans (85%) say it is very important that the rights and freedoms of all people are respected. Yet only 41% say this describes the country very well (10%) or somewhat well (30%).”
- Declining share of Americans view respectful political debates as very important. “Slightly more than half of adults (54%) say it is very important that the tone of political debate is respectful, down from 61% two years ago. The shift has come about equally among Republicans and Democrats.”
13 min read
Read More Toward a More Relational Medium
If you use the Medium app, you might have noticed the opt-in for a redesign. Founder Ev Williams says while the original app was “fine”, the new one is “unlike any other mobile reading experience I know of.” The redesign takes a new approach to serving content, and Williams lays out the concept in his blog.
Today’s exposure to content is transactional — unlike choosing a specific source (say, a print magazine) and then selecting content from that source and building a natural affinity to the publication, you see headlines and images before you know where they’re coming from or who wrote the content. It’s efficient and you get variety, but it can get a little… cold.
Relational media is more akin to the magazine example above, or a particular blogger you follow, or a newsletter (“the feeling that you’re publishing to a relatively consistent group of people who care what you have to say”). With the new app, Williams aims to combine the best of both:
“An open and simple platform where anyone can publish — once or occasionally — that also allows for deeper connections between readers and regular writers. These notions are complementary because the overall vision is to build an even more robust network of thinkers and perspectives, where ideas get better because they’re connected to others, and where links between people and posts lead to more discovery.”
9 min read
Read More Tech+Media Announcing the Launch of the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford recently launched the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, an interactive tool that lets users measure the representation of people and events across over 270k hours of TV news since 2010. Using AI, the Analyzer is able to label who is on the news and what they’re talking about. You can try out the tool for yourself here. And you can find insights gathered from the tool here.
“The tool leverages computer vision to detect faces, identify public figures, and estimate characteristics such as gender to examine news coverage patterns. To facilitate topic analysis the transcripts are time-aligned with video content and compared across dates, times of day, and programs.”
4 min read Read More How the Coronavirus Pandemic Changes Weather Reporting According to Axios, news execs are saying the weather coverage has permanently changed due to the pandemic, and in virtually every aspect, from meteorologists needing to evaluate how weather factors impact COVID-19 to the effect of weather on new consumer habits like daily walks and homeschooling.
A range of new topics have surfaced, such as done-based storytelling (socially distant reporting), air quality forecasting (ex. dry or humid air affect transmission), indoor humidity, educational resources, and business weather warnings, “to make sure hospitals and testing centers, especially outdoor testing centers, have access to real-time warnings about the weather in case they need to shift testing indoors for a day.”
3 min read Read More BBC Lost a Battle Over British Songs, and the War Is Far From Over
“It’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions, and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness.” — Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reporters
The BBC recently suffered a backlash from the conservative government and pro-government publications after it removed a few lyrics — “Rule, Britannia!” and “Land of Hope and Glory” — from two patriotic songs in a telecast, likely because these evoked a colonial past at odds with the BLM movement. The public broadcaster reversed its decision later without much explanation.
The bout was one in a long line of hostility against the BBC: “There is a convergence of interests between the government and media owners in damaging the BBC.” Part of that convergence involves “two billionaire media moguls are hatching plans for 24-hour news channels that would be politically opinionated, bringing the model of Fox News to a market dominated by the BBC’s studied impartiality.”
6 min read
Read More What We’re Watching MUST-SEE: CNN Reporter Issues EPIC Fact-Check of Trump After Convention Speech
CNN reporter Daniel Dale went on a Trump fact-checking spree, and the result… speaks for itself. Here’s WaPo’s account (as well as a dive into the diminishing role fact-checkers are playing), but we recommend just hitting play.
6 min watch
Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Bizarro World
Why did RNC speakers refer to the pandemic in the past tense? A recent WNYC Studios On The Media podcast explores “why some politicians and educators are using the past tense to describe an active threat.”
50 min listen
Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: The NYC Media Lab SUMMIT 2020. Building the Future Together
Date: October 7–9
We’ll bring together 1,000+ virtual attendees from NYC Media Lab’s core community — including media and tech executives, university faculty, students, investors, and entrepreneurs — to explore the future of media and tech in New York City and beyond. Register Here.
Virtual Event: The New Journalism
Date: September 15, 2PM — September 16, 4PM
Journalism was in crisis well before COVID, the recent uprisings against racism, and the deep recession. Now, we are facing a blank-slate moment. What should we keep and what should we ditch? Who should tell our stories and what should those stories be? Join the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for a series of conversations to tackle these questions. Register Here.
Virtual Event: Quantum Media to Offer Complimentary Business Strategy Consulting Sessions
Deadline: September 9
Considering the business and social challenges in 2020, Quantum Media is offering complimentary business consulting sessions to three select young businesses or startups, for-profit or nonprofit, with preference given to minority- and/or women-owned and led enterprises. Apply Here. A Deeper Look The Coming Revolution in Intelligence Affairs
“In the future, machines will spy on machines in order to know what other machines are doing or are planning to do.”
AI’s impact on quotidian business and civilian life has been well covered — but what about AI’s role in national secrets? Foreign Affairs explores the tech’s involvement in clandestine matters in the coming revolution in intelligence affairs (RIA).
Military futurists envision the emergence of machines that don’t just collect and analyze classified data, but consume it, make decisions based on it, and even target other Intelligence Affairs machines — all at a speed, scale, and complexity that humans won’t be able to keep up with directly.
Driving this change is the rising deluge of data that nations must make sense of — and those that can do it faster will have an edge. One obvious analog: quant trading systems, which have forced even traditional firms to adopt more powerful machines and more complex algorithms as competition intensifies. Where might the RIA lead us?
“A plausible future scenario might involve an AI system that is charged with analyzing a particular question, such as whether an adversary is preparing for war. A second system, operated by the adversary, might purposefully inject data into the first system in order to impair its analysis. The first system might even become aware of the ruse and account for the fraudulent data, while acting as if it did not — thereby deceiving the deceiver. This sort of spy-versus-spy deception has always been part of intelligence, but it will soon take place among fully autonomous systems. In such a closed informational loop, intelligence and counterintelligence can happen without human intervention.”
8 min read
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