How Journalism Could Survive AI (w Mic Wright)

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Mic Wright is the madman media survivor behind one of this show’s second-favourite newsletter, Conquest of the Useless . So when we heard he has a new book out in a couple of weeks we were delighted he could give us a few minutes to talk meeja matters in the age of AI and climate consequences.

Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why that Matters - despite my inability to stop obsessing about whether it is missing an Oxford comma in the title - is the magnum opus of Britain’s best observer of all things media since Christopher Hitchens went from Trot to Neocon.

Two years before the Brexit referendum, a year long inquiry by a UK parliamentary select committee concluded that BBC news teams consistently engaged in false balance when reporting on climate change stories. So for a senior news journalist to suggest that they weren't familiar with the concept felt like a very stark confession.

Head back even further to the misty, almost unimaginable, past of 2006, and you find Rob Corddry on the Daily Show, parodying journalists who bent over backwards to establish balance where there is none:

“How does one report the facts? When the facts themselves are biased from the names of our fallen soldiers to the gradual withdrawal of our allies to the growing insurgency, it's become all too clear that the facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda.”

Meatless speech was rightly praised for highlighting the influence of Conservative Party appointees on the BBC, but it also contained a series of confessions about missing the elephant in the room. Even as the stench of dung must have been stifling.

In Conversation

00:35 Introducing Mic Wright

01:31 Technical Challenges and Interview Preview

03:13 Mic Wright's Dramatic Reading

04:16 Discussion on False Balance in Journalism

13:07 The Rise of Churnalism

15:14 Media Ownership and Influence

19:39 Tech Enthusiasm and AI in Journalism

32:14 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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