This is The Morning Press, a Brain Iron dot com production. Here’s eleven minutes or so of news for today, Friday, February 23, 2024.
Attorneys for former president Donald Trump on Thursday evening filed a series of motions in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida to dismiss the indictments brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith for the unlawful keeping of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. In keeping with the claims of total presidential immunity that he has made in the election obstruction case, Trump is once again claiming that his actions taken while and as president are beyond the reach of criminal prosecution. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on that question in March, so Judge Aileen Cannon’s opinion on the matter is fairly inconsequential. Trump’s lawyers are also trying to get the case thrown out by claiming that Jack Smith was illegally appointed by US Attorney General Merrick Garland, and insisting that the Presidential Records Act gave him “virtually unreviewable Article II executive authority to designate the records as personal.” There is a provision in the law that excludes “personal records” from the Archivist’s reach, but what is “personal” is clearly defined in the text, not a matter of presidential, Michael Scott-esque, declaration. The filing, naturally, also elides the fact that the very same Presidential Records Act says that “Upon the conclusion of a President's term of office…the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.” And of course, the claim that a president can simply declare whatever he wants to be personal and unclassified and therefore out of reach of the archivist and also perfectly legal for him to possess and keep secret is in direct opposition to the reason the Presidential Records Act exists in the first place—as a response to former president Richard Nixon’s destruction of records upon his resignation. The whole point of the law is to say that presidential records are not personal property, but owned by the public.
A brief editorial aside: The stories about Trump’s motions for dismissal at the major news outlets all mention the expansive or sweeping or long-shot nature of his claims, which is fair, but they don’t go quite far enough in pointing out just how dramatically the presidency would be remade if Judge Cannon, and eventually the Supreme Court, were to put the force of a judicial ruling behind them. Two of the claims are at least interesting legal questions—the Espionage Act, which Trump’s lawyers are asserting is unconstitutionally vague, is certainly worthy of legislative revisitation and clarification, but not for the reasons Trump is claiming; and the question of whether or not a special counsel can be appointed without Senate approval is presumably going to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court eventually. But the “total presidential immunity” claim would make all presidential action and behavior definitionally legal, and the nerfing of the Presidential Records Act would hermetically seal the presidency off from scrutiny by journalists and historians, not to mention the other branches of government. It is widely assumed that these claims are so ridiculous that not even this Supreme Court will seriously entertain them, but the fairly neutral presentation of them in the press belies how radical they really are. Trump is asserting that the president is not subject to the law, even after he leaves office. Pointing out that the repercussions of the Supreme Court agreeing with him on this point would be an affirmation of president-as-unaccountable-authoritarian-dictator, and in direct contradiction of approaching 235 years of American presidential history, would not be a display of media bias, but the simple truth. They should say so clearly.
Vice Media, the internet and television digital media brand that sought to capture the voice and attention of Gen X and millennials and was once valued at nearly $6 billion, plans to lay off hundreds of employees and will no longer publish material to its website. The company, which filed for bankruptcy last year, now hopes to sell off its women-focused publishing arm Refinery29 and pivot to creating content for its social channels, rather than continue to run its own platforms.
Also in digital media news, BuzzFeed this week sold Complex, the pop-culture site it acquired in 2021, for around $110 million—a nearly $200 million loss. Complex generated over $50 million in revenue last year, but Buzzfeed needed to unload it in order to cover debts over the next couple of years. The once powerful force in driving online engagement announced the layoffs of 16 percent of its workforce this week, less than a year after it shuttered its BuzzFeed News division, and with it 15 percent of its employees.
Even as giant digital media properties like Vice and Buzzfeed flounder, Slate, the online news magazine that also publishes a small number of very popular podcasts, reported its most profitable year in its nearly 30-year history. And China isn’t shying away from using the internet to publish things—researchers at the University of Toronto report that, according to Semafor, a “Beijing-based public relations firm has created more than 100 websites that are posing as local news outlets across 30 countries to spread pro-China talking points.” The sites are apparently designed not so much to generate organic traffic, or be viewed directly by lots of people, but instead to have their fake news content collated by search engines and read by large-language model AIs, so that the propaganda is sort of laundered through the AI chatbots and presented to end users seeking out reliable information.
A brief editorial aside: I don’t know if this small collection of media stories points to anything definitive about the future, but it certainly speaks to the current moment. Vice and Buzzfeed and other growth-obsessed, media-of-everything for the masses companies have failed spectacularly in recent years. Slate, on the other hand, with a more modest self-conception and none of the attendant venture capital hype nor voracious appetite for acquisitions, is doing just fine. And then there’s the proliferation of nonsense and propaganda by a Chinese-friendly PR firm seeking to flood the internet with reliable-appearing information that it hopes gets picked up by the algorithm and fed back to people chatting with Gemini or ChatGPT. As Google search returns have devolved from once seemingly miraculously accurate and helpful to now unreliable and even dangerously scammy, where we can go to get good information is increasingly thrown into question. Google is still good for finding what’s happening in the moment, but try searching for breaking news from a week ago, and see how reliable the returns are. It is getting increasingly difficult to figure out what the world was like as events were unfolding because of a fear that returning now disproven or since-developed narratives will be taken as misinformation. Twitter is somewhere between useless and actively antithetical to the task of figuring out what’s actually happening in the world. As the information pile gets infinitely bigger every day, we are finding that our current crop of tools are not up to the interpretive task of discerning truth. And everyday, another media company lays off another fifteen percent of its workforce, and pivots to figuring out how to put its old content library in front of as many eyeballs as possible, even if it turns out half those eyeballs aren’t real. Hopefully Slate and the New York Times, both of which are popular and profitable, show a good path forward—but both rely heavily on subscription revenue. Are we willing to pay for our news coverage, not just with our attention, but with our money? And if enough of us are, should we be forced to subsidize the AI chatbots and aggregators who rely on the work of others to offer their free, and essentially plagiarized, product?
In briefer news, computer chip-maker Nvidia saw its shares reach $800 apiece and achieved a market cap of over $2 trillion on Friday, a doubling in value since last fall, and nearly eight times what it was worth in late 2022. The run-up can be attributed to the hype and demand for AI-related technology—ChatGPT debuted in November of 2022, and Nvidia’s chips provide the processing power for lots of generative artificial intelligence.
The United States and the European Union issued a new round of sanctions against Russia on Friday, announcing the targeting of more than 500 people and organizations who are affiliated with the country. This is a response to the death of political dissident Alexei Navalny and comes at the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And finally, the South Carolina Republican primary takes place on Saturday, the first opportunity in a month for voters to choose between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump in a head-to-head contest. Trump is expected to win with at least 60% of the vote, but Haley has vowed to stay in the nomination contest until she is mathematically eliminated. Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states will vote in primaries, is March 5.
Now, here’s a look at the weather.
The United States landed a spacecraft on the moon for the first time in nearly 52 years yesterday, when the privately-built lander, Odysseus, touched down near the satellite’s south pole Thursday evening. It’s not clear what the total cost of the project was, but NASA sent Intuitive Machines, the company behind the lander, less than $130 million, and the total cost is thought to be not more than $200 million or so. That sounds like a lot, but it represents, for example, about one-four-thousandth of the US defense budget, and .003 percent of the annual US budget. For a tiny, tiny fraction of our annual spending, we landed on the moon again. I sincerely don’t know why we don’t do way more of this. NASA’s annual budget is about $25 billion, less than half of one percent of the annual budget. The Morning Press is calling for a return to early 1990s-level spending on NASA—approximately one percent of total annual expenditures. Spending on space exploration, the discoveries and wonders it produces, reminds people of our common and rare humanity better than all of the sociology and anthropology and social science ever done. We humans will likely never survive anywhere else in the universe besides our cozy little habitable earth, but I think we can make it a much more tolerable place to share if we focus a little bit more of our attention on finding out what’s out there, together.
That’s the weather from here—how’s it look out your window?
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The Morning Press is eleven minutes or so of the news of the day, and is a production of the BrainIron dot com multinational media empire. Please direct comments and complaints to brainironpodcast@gmail.com, or visit the website at www.brainiron.com. For a transcript of today’s episode and links to the stories referenced, find The Morning Press at brainiron.substack.com. To support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the good website Brain Iron dot com, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at brainiron.substack.com. Have a wonderful day.
The Morning Press for Friday, February 23, 2024