“Carr told Katherine Maher, NPR’s chief executive, and Paula Kerger, PBS’s chief executive, about the investigation in a letter on Wednesday. Carr, who was appointed by President Trump, said the investigation would focus on the stations’ practice of airing sponsorships.” Nieman Lab previously wrote about Brendan Carr and the sections of Project 2025 he authored.

“Meta’s legal team had said Trump was suspended for violating policies against inciting violence [in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol] … The Meta payout is the second to Trump in recent months. In December, ABC news agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump to settle a lawsuit over coverage of E. Jean Carroll.”

“She has two conversational modes, she says, fixing me with her gaze before we start. One includes a certain amount of umming and ahhing. The other, reserved for when the cameras are rolling, allows for no hint of hesitation or doubt. I suggest maybe chatty Christiane will be good. She smiles and does her level best, though in an hour in which she umms maybe twice, I can only imagine what it is like to sit opposite her when she is in full combat mode.”

Nice — but not quite Threads’ 320 million monthly actives and 1 million daily signups.

“Facebook is used by more than 3 billion monthly actives and we’re focused on growing its cultural influence.”

“Just 8% of those who believe the human-induced climate crisis was a conspiracy used public radio and television as their main source of news.”

“NewsGuard found that with news-related prompts, DeepSeek repeated false claims 30 percent of the time and provided non-answers 53 percent of the time…NewsGuard’s December 2024 audit on the 10 leading chatbots (OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok-2, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini 2.0, and Perplexity’s answer engine) found that they had an average fail rate of 62 percent. DeepSeek’s fail rate places the chatbot as tied for 10th of the 11 models tested.”

“That interview didn’t go well, and Lemon pushed Musk on several topics including questions about his personal drug use. Musk, who grew visibly irritated during the conversation, ended the partnership within a day of the interview, Lemon claimed. Musk later suggested that his issue was with the show’s format, which ‘was basically just “CNN, but on social media,”‘ he wrote.”

“This is all to say that, if OpenAl argues that it is legal for the company to train on whatever it wants for whatever reason it wants, then it stands to reason that it doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when competitors use common strategies used in the world of machine learning to make their own models. But of course, it is going with the argument that it must ‘protect [its] IP.'”

“After working for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries, she said, ‘we’ve arrived at a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free internet except for the infringers.'”

“The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, includes The Salem News, Phelps County Focus, Pulaski County Weekly along with their websites and social media, Action Graphics Sign Company, magazines and special publications and the company’s commercial printing operation.”

“The program, called Access Pass for Legends, will permit former players such as Brandon Marshall and Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton to use game highlights and video footage from the Super Bowl, NFL Draft and other events on their YouTube Channels. It allows them to keep a share of the advertising revenue that’s generated from the posts.”

“For the better part of a decade, the dialogue between Meta and Madison Avenue has moved in one direction: The company pledged to do more and more to combat hate speech and misinformation on Facebook and Instagram, responding to grievances from brands as well as broader social and political pressures. Now, a new cultural moment has arrived, punctuated by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and Meta’s executives are carrying an unmistakably different message: Some things we used to remove will now be allowed.”

“For years, foreign government grants have been the lifeblood of Ukraine’s independent media.”

“Amid the hype, researchers from the cloud security firm Wiz published findings on Wednesday that show that DeepSeek left one of its critical databases exposed on the internet, leaking system logs, user prompt submissions, and even users’ API authentication tokens—totaling more than 1 million records—to anyone who came across the database.”