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On the latest edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we examine criticism from the left and the right of how the war in Iran is being covered by the media.
Plus: Why the mainstream media have shied away from showing fetish photos of Bryon Noem, husband of Kristi Noem; how CNN is trying to reach a younger audience with a show featuring online influencers; and our panel’s Rants and Raves.
With Emily, Contrarian Boston publisher Scott Van Voorhis, Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe, and me, with production by Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Production.
Angela Fu of Poynter Online published a story on Thursday that’s been rocketing around media circles. Her lead: “Artificial intelligence company Nota — whose clients include organizations like The Boston Globe and the Institute for Nonprofit News — is scrapping its network of local news sites after learning that they contained dozens of instances of plagiarism.”
You should read Fu’s story in full. The gist of it is that the AI tool was supposed to scrape press releases and official information but has been grabbing news content in addition to that. “Poynter found more than 70 stories dating back to October that included reporting, writing and photography from local journalists without attribution,” she writes. “Some of the copied material came from outlets owned by Nota’s own clients.”
Earlier today, several trusted sources sent along a memo sent to the Globe’s newsroom assuring the staff that the paper was not part of the specific experiment at issue and that everyone should stop using Nota.
Here is text of the email, which is from editor Brian McGrory; Shira Center, vice president for innovation and strategic initiatives; Cynthia Needham, deputy managing editor for innovation and strategy; Matt Karolian, vice president of platforms and AI; and Heather Ciras, deputy managing editor for audience.
Poynter published a report yesterday about Nota, an AI tool used by the Globe and many other newsrooms across the country. The story said that a Nota experiment involving AI-driven hyperlocal news resulted in stories that were clearly plagiarized from other local news organizations.
The Globe was not part of this experiment, which was aimed at small counties in other states. We’ve worked with Nota on SEO, headline recommendations, related metadata, and social platform suggestions for Globe stories. The Globe’s contract with Nota prohibits it from using our journalism to train its AI model.
That said, what happened here does not fit with our values, and we are asking everyone to stop using this product while we wait for Nota to turn off the service and end our contract. We have other strong options for this work that we’re exploring.
My colleagues and I are engaged in the convoluted, ever-shifting process of figuring out how to use artificial intelligence in journalism in ways that are both productive and ethical. Somewhere between “Let students use AI to write their stories” and “We should forbid all uses of AI,” there is a reasonable approach, and we’re all trying to figure out what that is.
Our students learn from us. We learn from our students. Keep in mind, though, that we have not yet seen what you might call “AI natives” in our classrooms. Young people in their late teens and early 20s were part of the before times. In the not-too-distant future, though, we’ll start seeing students who can’t remember a world without ChatGPT, Claude and the rest.
Recently I devoted a class to AI in my graduate ethics seminar. It’s a small group of five students, one of whom is an advanced undergrad. I was surprised to learn that they are as skeptical of AI as I am.
New York Times assistant managing editor Michael Slackman, left, with Northeastern School of Journalism director Jonathan Kaufman. Photo (cc) 2026 by Dan Kennedy.
Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House has been fraught with peril for independent journalism. I couldn’t possibly list the threats emanating from the regime without omitting many others, but you know what’s been happening:
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Outrageous legal settlements agreed to by the parent companies of ABC News and CBS News. The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. The arrests of reporters Don Lemon and Georgia Fort while they were covering a protest. Threats against broadcast licenses by FCC chair Brendan Carr. The pending Trump-greased acquisition of CNN by billionaires David Ellison and his father, Larry, for whom wrecking CBS wasn’t enough. The Trump-friendly direction taken by The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times opinion sections at the behest of their billionaire owners. An illegal raid on a Washington Post reporter’s home.
On the brand-new “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we take a look at the Trump regime’s thuggish attempts to control coverage of the war in Iran.
Our other topics: the possibility of a merger between Boston’s two public radio stations, GBH, which is gung-ho, and WBUR, which isn’t; and why The Washington Post is refusing the Pentagon’s demands that it take down its confidential tip line. Plus our Rants & Raves.
Our panel is helmed by Emily and hosted by Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston, joined by Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.
Four and a half months after being laid off, the state’s most prominent political journalist is returning to the airwaves. Jon Keller, whose job was claimed in a nationwide purge at CBS News after its parent network was acquired by Paramount, will be back on the 5 p.m. news later today on WBZ-TV (Channel 4), where he had worked for many years. The news comes in the form of an Editor’s Note at the bottom of today’s column for MASSter List:
Some good news for those who appreciate Jon Keller’s commentaries: after a hiatus of several months, he will be returning to WBZ-TV as a Special contributor starting tonight (Monday, March 16) on the early-evening WBZ news. Keller will be providing analysis of important political developments on WBZ’s newscasts and moderating major political debates on the station. His Sunday morning “Keller At Large” interview program, a staple of the city’s public affairs TV scene since 1991, resumes this Sunday at 8:30 a.m. with guest Gov. Maura Healey. Keller will continue his weekly column and event hosting for MASSterList as well as occasional articles for Boston Magazine.
In a funny coincidence, Channel 4 ran an old “Keller at Large” Sunday morning on which I appeared as a guest. I heard from a number of people, and I was puzzled. I later learned that the station has been broadcasting reruns of “Keller at Large” since his layoff.
For the rest of this item, I’m going to recycle part of what I wrote last October:
Jon and I go way back. He was the political columnist at The Boston Phoenix when I arrived there in 1991. He also worked as the producer for the late David Brudnoy’s outstanding talk show on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) and as a reporter for WLVI-TV (Channel 56) before moving to WBZ-TV. He did a stint as an op-ed-page columnist for the Globe. Both of us were also panelists on the now-defunct “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” on GBH-TV (Channel 2). (Note: Emily has revived “Beat the Press” on Scott Van Voorhis’ political newsletter, Contrarian Boston.)
Jon is known for dogged reporting and incisive, often caustic political commentary. He’s also a skilled debate moderator and has presided over some of the state’s highest-profile encounters, including Senate debates between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha Coakley in 2010 as well as Democratic primary foes Ed Markey and Joe Kennedy in 2020.
This isn’t the first time Keller has been caught up in corporate machinations. He lost his gig doing commentary for WBZ Radio some years ago when the station was sold to iHeartMedia; the TV operation remained part of CBS.
Back to the present: Jon’s return to the airwaves is good news for those of us who value his analysis, and a sign that someone at CBS recognizes that they made a mistake last fall.
Perhaps the most fraught topic during the first week of the war in Iran was the bombing of an elementary girls’ school, a horrendous event that killed about 165 people.
Some of the first reports, including one in Al Jazeera, claimed that Israel was responsible. That was followed by a social media campaign claiming that the Iranian government itself had admitted that the bombing was caused by one of its missiles that had gone astray. That was debunked by PolitiFact. Finally, investigations by media outlets like The New York Times and Bellingcat found that it was almost certain that the United States was responsible. The most likely explanation is that U.S. forces had targeted a Revolutionary Guard facility that was adjacent to the school.
I’m going to discuss with my graduate ethics students this evening how the story unfolded, and I’ve put together the slideshow you see here to go with it. You can also click here for a larger view.
Public domain Illustration of Jeffrey Epstein, left, and Donald Trump by Michael Gode.
The Jeffrey Epstein story is getting weirder, more disturbing and is moving ever closer to Donald Trump. The latest details come from Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has done more to expose Epstein’s depravity than any other journalist.
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Brown’s latest comes in the form of two articles. The first, published on Friday, advances earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR that the Justice Department had withheld some of the Epstein files regarding a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her around 1983, when she was about 13 years old. Those files have now been produced. Brown writes that in one of the interviews:
She said he unzipped his pants and forced her head to his penis. She said she immediately bit him and Trump struck her, the report said. She told the FBI agents that she bit him because he “disgusted” her.
In a follow-up interview, she said that after she rebuffed him, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of the head.”
On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.
In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.
Fox News anchor Will Caine, left, with retired Lt. Col. Allen West.
With Donald Trump plunging us into a new war in the Middle East, I was curious about how it was being covered on MAGA-TV, also known as Fox News. I decided to watch the 8 p.m. hour on Sunday.
Overall, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The real problems weren’t what was said so much as what wasn’t. But since I spent the weekend keeping up on developments primarily with The New York Times, I’m not sure whether other television news outlets were doing a better job.
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If I’d tuned in Fox at 8 p.m. on a weekday, I’d have encountered the loathsome Jesse Watters, a racist misogynist who once “joked” about killing Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, the hour was hosted by Dallas-based Will Caine, about whom I know nothing, but who came across as a fairly conventional anchor. Apparently that was a last-minute switch; the hour is normally given over to “Life, Liberty & Levin,” helmed by right-wing zealot Mark Levin.
