Joshua Benton

The toxicity that @ericlipton.nytimes.com and his colleagues have uncovered is everywhere but if you live in Texas, Louisiana, or Alabama pay special attention

To those implying that Kremlin-controlled social media bot/troll farms became silent after Ukraine hit a Yandex data center, posting this CloudFare chart ( radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238 ): Hate to disappoint you all ⤵️

Glad that @charliesavage.bsky.social has demonstrated what a hack John Solomon is. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/11/u... I did my own version of that story here: emptywheel.net/2026/10/06/j...

Beyond being a MAGA apparatchik he is also abominably stupid

None of this is surprising but it is a good dissection of how the White House and its allies generate victim-narrative bullshit.

Hey, I redesigned @niemanlab.org, I think it looks nice www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/niem...

This kind of talk has always seemed to impress certain segments of the political class, but now that he’s imploding, they look like gullible suckers. He’s just a lout, nothing more. He insults people because he isn’t smart enough for anything else. He’ll become more loutish as he circles the drain.

A CNN @kfile.bsky.social investigation unearthed since-removed posts from Texas GOP candidate Bo French that repeatedly advocated public executions for political opponents, including former President Barack Obama www.cnn.com/2026/09/28/p...

Huge bummer when you’re just innocently trying to join and promote a movement that hates Black people, immigrants, and Jews — but then you discover that they have a dark side. apple.news/A9g-feRPSTme...

Louisiana sheriff's deputies "accidentally" arrested a local Black mayor this weekend. Sheriff: "Long story short, we made a booboo." www.klfy.com/local/st-lan...

I think I'm going to adopt the LLM concept of "knowledge cutoffs" for whole segments of my life Like, my contemporary popular music knowledge cutoff is June 2014 My ACC basketball knowledge cutoff is April 2017

Me being cranky about David Ellison, Rupert Murdoch, and Margaret Thatcher in @theatlantic.com: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"No matter how well-intentioned the members of these committees may be, if David Ellison wants to get around them, he will. It’s an artificial set of rules that a billionaire owner will inevitably circumvent. These 'independent' boards are PR gestures, not vehicles for editorial protection."

"This particular move … [has] been a part of past news company acquisitions where concerns about antitrust or editorial control end up being downshifted into similar (and mostly toothless) 'boards.' Their effectiveness has been, to be generous, extremely limited." Quite.

Renee DiResta (@noupside.bsky.social) and Dean Jackson published a new paper explaining how the "censorship industrial complex" propaganda campaign took shape & was eventually used to dismantle election information resilience infrastructure in the U.S. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Great backgrounder on how "likely" an "independent editorial board" will preserve CNN's independence under David Ellison's Paramount acquisition deal. (As Rupert Murdoch demonstrated: Don't bet on it!) www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/davi...

Harvard’s @niemanlab.org with a very spooky headline www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/davi...

New by me —> David Ellison is gonna have control of CNN, and don't pretend any "independent editorial board" will mean otherwise. (With an extended tour of the Rupert Murdoch Cinematic Universe) www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/davi...

Bari Weiss and David Ellison thought their changes to CBS would be popular. Elon Musk thought his changes to Twitter would be popular. For years, they claimed they spoke for The People, forced into wokeness by the leftist elites who control everything. They said that because they believe it.

More honest would be, "we finally succeeded in destroying public trust in your institution, now give it to us."

This almost always consists of conservatives saying "people no longer trust your institution" after spending decades doing everything they can to destroy trust in the institution. True of the press, true of academia, true of public health.

the way to understand a piece like this from schmitz is that he lives in an urban, cosmopolitan millieu and the popularity of country music is a novelty to him. and so to explain it, he has to fit it into his volkish conception of america, whether or not that makes any actual sense.

The NYT opinion section is very committed to the mission of finding the deep core of legitimate grievance that supposedly underlies right wing populism and/or Trumpism.

Great use of @mediacloud.bsky.social data: @joshuabenton.com found few outlets have taken up "Gulf of America" renaming www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/trum...

Ironically, the only reason this viscerally stupid column got published at all is the Times' affirmative action for conservatives.

Ironically a good argument for DEI is “it would help the NYT find someone other than a Princeton grad, suit wearing right wing magazine editor dweeb to write about rural America” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/o...

MASSIVE SCOOP! Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin @justinelliott.bsky.social Brett Murphy @josh-kaplan.bsky.social @amierjeski.bsky.social

Good times for scholars of the long 19th century, now returning to join us again

This "Republicanism packaged as a gen Z hostage video" show has the real potential to become the Thought Catalog of the late 2020s. thank you jeff bezos.

Twenty years into the Facebook News Feed era, Australia wants to turn back the clock www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/twen...

One of the most enraging pieces I've read in a while: Idiot YouTubers are trying to reach uncontacted tribes and teach them the wonders of bacterial pneumonia www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...

So here's a quote from @pablo.show that applies to not only his Clippers investigation but the best of what journalism can be: www.nytimes.com/athletic/756...

Interested to see which parts of the UK media will lead the charge to remove this Cambridge professor? Which types of misconduct are worthy of punishment? channel4news.substack.com/p/exclusive-...

I’m so angry that I have to admit that both the Trump DOJ and fucking OpenAI are right in this case. The NYT and every other major news outlet depends on fair use. If the NYT wins this case it will eviscerate fair use. Copyright maximalism won’t save us from AI harms. It will bake them in

Both Bellingcat and I were targeted specifically in this witch hunt, and they've come up with absolutely nothing, but I'm sure Matt Taibbi, Mike Benz and pals will still keep publishing their fantasies about the censorship-industrial complex rather than admitting they were wrong.

Probably the best breakdown of the "censorship industrial complex" conspiracy theory that I've seen. Here's a gift link: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"The fraud allegations come months after we reported that the professor had a longstanding relationship w/ Epstein. Ariely was named 636 times in files released by the DOJ pertaining to Epstein. All of Ariely’s interactions with Epstein came after the financier was convicted of soliciting a minor."