The Boston Globe published a story Friday about a New Hampshire state representative named Jonathan Stone, an ex-police officer who — according to recently released records that he tried to keep secret — “spoke of killing police and raping the chief’s wife and children.”
As the Globe notes, the story was broken on April 5 by Damien Fisher of InDepthNH, a nonprofit news organization that covers politics and public policy in the Granite State. Fisher’s story begins:
Republican Rep. Jon Stone’s New Hampshire law enforcement career ended when he threatened to kill fellow police officers in a shooting spree, and murder his chief after raping the chief’s wife and children, all while he was already under scrutiny for his inappropriate relationship with a teen girl, according to the internal investigation reports finally released this week.
Yikes. Fisher writes that he first filed a right-to-know request in 2020, and that the records were ordered released last month by New Hampshire’s Supreme Court. InDepthNH executive editor and founder Nancy West was a guest on our “What Works” podcast in November 2022.
In Ohio, DIY pink slime
Jack Brewster of NewsGuard, a project that tracks the rise of pink slime news sites, has written an essay for The Wall Street Journal (free link) that is at turns harrowing and hilarious. Spending just $105, he put together a website powered by artificial intelligence that’s designed to look like a local news outlet. Per his specifications, the site, which he called the Buckeye State Press, was designed with a right-wing bias, favoring Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno over the Democratic incumbent, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Brewster used an Israeli-based service called Fiverr.com to build the site, which in turn was programmed by a Pakistani freelancer named Huzafa Nawaz. Brewster writes:
From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total. The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it.
I’ve been following developments in pink slime off and on for the past decade, and what I’ve found is that they are pretty inept. That proved to be the case with Brewster’s experiment as well — at one point his site hallucinated Brown’s attendance at a local fig festival. At some point, though, these projects are going to evolve into effective sources of political propaganda, which we all need to be concerned about.
Google plays hardball in California
As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m skeptical of legislative attempts to force Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for the journalism that they repurpose. If anything, the notion has become more nonsensical over time, as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has made it clear that it would just as soon eliminate news content on platforms like Facebook and Threads.
Google is a different matter, but no less complicated. News publishers want money from Google, but at the same time exactly none of them add the necessary code to their sites which would make them invisible to Google, because they’re dependent on traffic from the giant search engine, too.
Still, it’s hard not to be outraged by Google’s latest tactic. According to Jeremy B. White of Politico, Google is blocking access to some local news content in parts of California as it fights against state legislation that would force them to pay news organizations. White writes:
“We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism,” Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, Jaffer Zaidi, said in a Friday blog post. Zaidi warned the bill could “result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”
Well, I guess so. These are the tactics of a thug, and yet another sign that the tech giants have amassed way too much power.