Activity tagged "journalism"

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

No, Trump didn’t make $50 billion from his memecoin

Photo of Trump dancing with his fists in the air, overlaid over the $TRUMP token price edited to appear as though it skyrocketed

Journalists’ flawed math and ignorance of crypto markets turn tokens into fake fortunes.

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apparently preventing fraud is “anti-crypto”.

according to this Fortune headline, the SEC going after fraud and deceptive business practices after a company publicly announced they were going to breach a previous agreement with the agency is an “anti-crypto campaign”

According to the Wells Notice, viewed by Fortune, the SEC plans to formally accuse Unicoin of violations related to fraud, deceptive practices, and the offering and sale of unregistered securities, although the letter did not specify the exact violations.

Still, because of its novel approach, Konanykhin toldFortunethat the company has been subject to several SEC investigations, though the latest is the first to result in a Wells Notice. He said that the company had entered into a so-called standstill agreement with the SEC earlier this year not to conduct an ICO or go public, but Konanykhin said he decided to breach the agreement after Trump won the recent election. Unicoin had previously filed paperwork with the agency announcing its intent to go public through a reverse merger.

This is particularly hilarious given that Fortune has skewered Gary Gensler for failing to go after the FTX, Celsius, and Terra frauds.

Gary Gensler blew it again. After his agency failed to warn investors about Terra and Celsius—whose collapses this spring sparked a trillion-dollar investor wipeout—the Securities and Exchange Commission chair allowed an even bigger debacle to unfold right under his nose. I’m talking, of course, about the revelation this week that the $30 billion FTX empire was a house of cards and that its golden boy founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is the crypto equivalent of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes.

Schrödinger’s regulator can’t go after fraud before the company collapses, but if it collapses and the SEC didn’t warn us, they failed.

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Remember when mainstream news outlets published a bunch of incredibly irresponsible articles about how rich people were getting off crypto, and then people bought in and got wrecked over the two years of "crypto winter" that followed?

Anyway here's a WSJ headline I just saw: "Young Men Are Making Risky Bets on Crypto and Politics—and Raking It In Right Now" (gift link)

And an excerpt:

A hypothetical portfolio holding equal amounts of bitcoin, gold, the meme stock GameStop and the sports-betting stock DraftKings returned 62% in the first 11 months of this year. That is more than triple the returns of a traditional portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds, according to an analysis by the financial firm Leuthold Group.

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I’ve been banging the drum about the need for a federal anti-SLAPP law for a long time now, and one has just been proposed. Call your Congresspeople!

More on the bill from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

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people talk about “the media” and “journalists” and they picture the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or cable news.

and sure, “the media” is the Big Five. but it’s also non-profit newsrooms, independent journalists, international and/or non-US publications, worker-owned media collectives, bloggers, local newsrooms, citizen journalists, podcasters, critics, community radio stations, documentary filmmakers, trade publications, freelancers, fact checkers...

if you applaud attacks and legal intimidation against “the media” and “journalists” because you are picturing the former, remember that it is ultimately the smaller fish who will suffer the most from it.

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don’t let the failures of some (major) news outlets disillusion you with media as a whole. and especially don’t let those failures desensitize you to attacks on free expression.

we can criticize media failures while also fiercely defending media freedom.

it is scary to see people responding to trump’s baseless lawsuits against the NYT and others with a shrug because of their complaints about those outlets’ coverage of him.

we can oppose lawfare against media institutions and also hold those institutions properly to account for poor coverage.

allowing authoritarians to target media institutions you don’t like only works until they decide to start targeting the ones you do — often ones with far fewer resources than the NYT and its ilk.

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test print. 9x12”

A black and white linocut print of a printing press in the process of printing a newspaper with the words “Defend press freedom”, and a fist holding a pen aloft. The arm of a pressman is visible, and they are holding up a print to inspect.

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The drumbeat of legal threats signals a potentially ominous trend for journalists during Trump’s second term in office. Litigation is costly and time-consuming. Most news organizations will look to settle rather than face months—more likely years—of discovery and depositions, plus significant legal fees.

“It is both conscious and unconscious. Journalists at smaller outlets know very well that the costs for their organization to defend themselves could mean bankruptcy. Even journalists at larger outlets don’t want to burden themselves or their employees with lawsuits. It puts another layer of influence into the journalistic process,” [Anne Champion] said.

Perhaps the CJR editors decided it went without saying, but it feels worth mentioning that — if Trump’s appointments go as planned — he will have the entire judicial branch to bring to bear on journalists, not just his wacky lawyer neighbor.

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For anyone looking to adjust their media diet, now’s a great time to consider escaping The Algorithms with RSS. My blogroll lists some of the blogs, newsletters, and independent news sites I follow.

For feed readers, I use Inoreader, but there are many other good options.

Read:

"Why Are Liberals Infuriated with the Media?"

Jeff Jarvis in Columbia Journalism Review. Published October 29, 2024.

From sanewashing to false equivalence, many readers have had it with their favorite news publications. Editors would do well to listen.

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