Columbia Journalism Review

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. On Monday, when the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece from Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor, hoped it would make news. Druckenmiller, a billionaire investor, had been a mentor to Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, early in his hedge fund career. Now, in the piece, Druckenmiller was essentially rebuking Bessent’s bond buyback plan. But the message was soon overshadowed by the means of its production.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Polymarket, a betting website where users can place wagers on current events, publishes AI-generated news timelines on its website that are saturated with hallucinations ranging from misrepresentations and misattribution of news to outright fabricated references to nonexistent news stories, a Tow Center for Digital Journalism analysis finds.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Since it was first published, in 2001, The Elements of Journalism, by Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, has schooled fledgling reporters in their craft by advocating that journalists adhere to a series of core principles—including that journalism’s first obligation is to the truth; that it is, in essence, a discipline of verification; and that journalists must serve as a monitor of power.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Sal Mercogliano appears on my video call screen looking precisely how you’d hope one of the internet’s foremost shipping experts would: surrounded by nautical paraphernalia, wearing a shirt so riddled with parrots and margaritas that it would have made the late Jimmy Buffett weep with pride.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Last fall, Karen Attiah was fired from her job as a columnist at the Washington Post over social media posts about Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, who had just been killed. “I knew immediately that I was going to fight back,” she told me, “because it was so absurd.” Attiah, a member of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, embarked on an arbitration process with the Post—which has now ended in her favor.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. It began with a leak. On May 12, the government of India announced that, before a national medical-school exam was administered, some of the questions had found their way onto WhatsApp and Telegram—meaning that roughly two million students would have to retake it. The students, understandably, were livid.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. It should be clear by now to anyone paying attention that the media coverage of Jason Arday—a forty-one-year-old Black British former professorial chair at the University of Cambridge, who died this month—was racist (fueled by an academic who espouses pseudoscientific anti-Black views), disproportionate (more than two hundred articles were published in the span of a few weeks), and utterly tragic.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. When Max D. Lederer Jr., the longtime publisher of Stars and Stripes, announced his retirement on Tuesday, amid rumors that the Pentagon might fire him, it was the culmination of months of uncertainty.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. One of my favorite dive-bar conversations with fellow journalists is “What would you do if you couldn’t do this anymore?” We’ve all thought about it; the tough economics of our industry haven’t left us any choice. It’s such an interesting window into people’s psyches: friends have told me about secret dreams of going to medical or law school, opening a restaurant, running a bed-and-breakfast, teaching kindergartners, and more.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—Philip K. Dick’s dystopian 1968 novel, later adapted into the movie Blade Runner—a bounty hunter is tasked with killing cyborgs who look deceptively similar to humans. A polygraph-like device can distinguish between the two. Max Spero, the thirty-year-old cofounder and CEO of Pangram, an AI detection tool, likens his company to that machine.