The surge in use and chatter around artificial intelligence after ChatGPT’s release six months ago has increased awareness and concern of the technology’s rapid progress. Now, the United States government faces the question of how to regulate this potentially uncontrollable technology—something it has fallen behind on before. AI innovators and experts Sam Altman, the chief executive…
Perfectly objective journalism seems like the perfectly moral life—unattainable by ordinary humans. But recent experience has reaffirmed the importance of the classic journalistic virtues of open-minded fact-finding, and fair, accurate, and complete reporting. Today we have the most technically sophisticated data-rich information system ever. But it hasn’t satisfied our need for what Walter Lippmann called…
Two major defamation cases against Jim Hoft, the St. Louisan who publishes The Gateway Pundit, an influential far-right website, appear poised to gain momentum in the weeks ahead after months of delays. The cases, in Denver and St. Louis, are taking place against a backdrop of huge victories recently by the plaintiffs in two other…
When Josh Hawley debated Sen. Claire McCaskill in the 2018 U.S. Senate contest, he unleashed the usual invective against the incumbent Democrat. He told a Missouri Press Association audience that she was a “radical leftist,” a hopeless “elitist” and a “Hollywood liberal.” Such a pity that he hadn’t yet coined his most recent pejorative, “Epicurean…
When Maudlyne Ihejirika, an award-winning journalist, asked me to meet her at her office recently for our interview, I was surprised. Hadn’t she retired from the Chicago Sun-Times? What was she doing at a high-rise office in downtown Chicago? Ihejirika was in the lobby, waiting for me so she could escort me to the third…