Now imagine how intense that will become with even more realism. It could be actually seriously traumatic.

In this case, it reads like their way of stroking their benefactors egos a bit, but without promising them anything real in return.

FTA: "AP often needs to educate funders upon first approach, explaining the company’s worldwide reach and mission to report independently. AP accepts money to cover certain areas but without strings attached; the funders have no influence on the stories that are done, Carovillano said."

WSJ and Fox News have the same owners but WSJ still has one of the best and most credible newsrooms in the business (their opinion section is another matter).

Meanwhile Fox News is a lie factory that only tells it's large (but niche) audience what it wants to hear. And now they have rival networks eating away at the pie by being more sensational and even more shamelessly obsequies. They're stuck in a radicalization doom loop.

> The problem with the "philanthropic" funding is not only is there no firewall, but it's explicitly pay-to-play agenda pushing

> if you go to the AP website today and look at some random article paid for by these grants

Why do you say there is no firewall? Is that really true? The AP has their guidelines here and I don't see it as substantially different than what a publication might do for advertisers and other stakeholders who may be tempted to exert editorial control:

- https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/how...

If you have specific instances where these arrangements have clearly compromised their journalism, that would be good to see.

In the meantime, I think we can do two things at the same time here: resist overdosing on maximal cynicism, but also be clear eyed about the ways money can tempt institutions to throw integrity out the window.

> The right wing are saying things like, journalism is fake because they're just pushing a left wing agenda for money.

> But it turns out that the rightists are correct and that's exactly what journalists are doing, so it's hardly their fault that mistrust was created and cultivated.

Generally speaking, no they are not correct, and most of them are just outright cynically lying, while engaging in the very behaviors of which they accuse others.

I'm sure non-profit sponsorship has it's own issues, but I don't think those issues are particularly new or unique or transformative.

The demand side is arguably the more intractable issue with journalism, since loads of people don't select for truth or importance in their news - or at least not very carefully. The institutions that seem to hold up the best are the ones with the broadest audiences.

On the issue of public trust in journalism, I don't think it's actually a function of the quality or trustworthiness of journalism. I think it has more to do with the rise of radical right-wing propaganda infotainment, a core pillar of which was (and is) delegitimizing mainstream media (and academic) institutions. The mistrust was created and cultivated. Consequently, there's not much they can do to regain trust, except to work harder at discrediting the radical right-wing propaganda that has been flooding all the zones for the past several decades.

All these big tech capitulations are their bets that the rule of law will not protect them, but kissing the ring will

It's a bad bet, ultimately - b/c the benefits and protections of kissing the ring are a mirage - their weakness is an invitation

No - the less real exposure a person has to immigrants and their communities, the more dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric has a chance to substitute for real experience.

> Southern border states are a lot more concerned with illegal crossings than anywhere else

Southern border states are also generally filled with a lot of people who actually know, from experience, that illegal border crossings and immigration are not the same thing.

> the southern border states having dual spanish language signs everywhere

The humanity! There will always be cultural diffusion along borders, no immigration policy is ever going to change that reality. The lives of people on either side are integrated in real tangible ways despite the lines on maps.

And the reverse is also true, of course. Mexico is filled with English speakers and it's quite easy to get around there without speaking a lick of Spanish. It's a great place to visit.

> Pretending that importing millions of foreigners will not affect the culture whatsoever is just a dumb or disingenuous argument

The argument is more that any predictions about the future of culture or efforts to steer it one way or another are mostly futile, and likely more inspired by ones prejudices and irrational fears.

Whatever it is that you are afraid of losing - you probably won't - or if you do, the immigrants probably weren't the ones who took it from you.

(It's actually way more likely that some piece of technology, maybe built by some people on this very site, will be the thing that kills your culture)

That's because adding people to the economy creates more demand

In times of recession, things might be different - but immigration tends to take care of itself in that regard. When a country has unfilled labor demand, immigration goes up. When it has no labor demand, immigration goes down.

Presuming to have any real agency over the evolution of human culture also seems misguided. Culture is like a river, in that "no man ever steps into the same one twice". It's constantly changing in unpredictable ways, from generation to generation or even within generations, with or without immigration. That goes for the cultures of immigrants also.

I'm not going to say this has never happened, but in general I don't think it's common or widespread. Generally, businesses going to the trouble of bringing in foreign labor through the various programs are trying to fulfill labor shortages.

You should be able to see evidence of it happening in jobs and unemployment numbers. You'd see it higher unemployment among American citizens than the workforce as a whole

Towards the end of the Biden admin, there was a great jobs report, but right-wing media and MAGA pundits spun it by saying the vast majority of all the new jobs were taken by immigrants.

That wasn't a lie, but it wasn't because immigrants were taking jobs that would have otherwise been filled with Americans as they tried to portray. If you looked at the employment numbers by citizenship status, citizens were sitting about as close to full employment as we could ever be. The only way to fill those jobs was to expand the labor pool.

This idea that we have lost manufacturing and we need some push to onshore it all again is... well... another manufactured problem that isn't.

Buying and selling don't need to be equal between buyers and sellers, and it's really just an incoherent idea.

Trump is taxing Americans when he imposes tariffs. Canada is taxing Canadians when they impose retaliatory tariffs.

And FWIW, most economists think retaliatory tariffs are stupid - on net they cause more harm to the retaliating country than if there were no retaliation. But the politics around tariffs are stupid too. It's all stupid.

Bluesky at least has really robust blocking features. Using them really reduces the toxicity that bubbles into your feed.

I think guys like Singal don't really like Bluesky because their engagement model just doesn't work as well there as it does on twitter. That faintly snarky, passive-aggressive, often concern-trollish, kind of rage-baiting for attention, both negative and positive, kind of tone.

I'm not sure why it doesn't seem to work as well, exactly. Maybe it's the block features. Maybe it's the feeds. Maybe its the user demographics that resulted from the self-selected twitter exodus.

I think it's a combination of all those factors - but keep in mind, one reason you see some of these people write polemics against Bluesky is because they just don't know how to get attention there.

Most users would probably rather block than respond to the bait - that practice got baked into the early bluesky culture. So the only ones left to take the bait are the unhinged, death-threatening, types.