Newsrooms are shrinking, hedge funds are buying up local papers and clickbait is shaping more and more what you know about the world. What the heck is happening to the news business — and what does this spell for the future of democracy? Journalism professors Jay Rosen and Nikki Usher say the internet isn’t all to blame: Journalists, they argue, need to get more creative about who they reach, what they cover and how they fund their work.
US President Donald Trump reacts next to Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk, after speaking at the public memorial service for right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21, 2025.
In the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s— apparently temporary— suspension from late-night TV, a (tragically small) number of prominent conservatives and Republicans have taken exception to the Trump administration’s comfort with “jawboning” critics into submission.
Sen. Ted Cruz condemned the administration’s “mafioso behavior.” He warned that “going down this road, there will come a time when a Democrat wins again — wins the White House … they will silence us.” Cruz added during his Friday podcast. “They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly. And that is dangerous.”
Ben Shapiro, the MAGA-adjacent media mogul, concurred. While he offered little sympathy for Kimmel, he too warned against the moral hazard problem. “I do not want the FCC in the business of telling local affiliates that their licenses will be removed if they broadcast material that the FCC deems to be informationally false,” Shapiro said. “Why? Because one day the shoe will be on the other foot.”
There were others, including Sen. Rand Paul. But not many. They should be congratulated for offering any pushback against the new right’s strange mix of bullying and moral panic in the wake of the heinous murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Indeed, it’s remarkable that the dual response to Kirk’s killing has been for his admirers to simultaneously praise Kirk’s commitment to free speech while showing very little such commitment themselves.
The cognitive dissonance has been remarkable. Kirk — rightly— ridiculed the concept of “hate speech” as a legal category. “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free,” Kirk posted last year.
Yet, in response to the at times ugly, gross and evil speech that followed Kirk’s murder, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi promised that “especially after what happened to Charlie,” Trump’s Justice Department “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
The president, as is so often the case, made the issue about himself, saying that if news coverage about him is too lopsidedly negative “that’s no longer free speech.” When network news casts a good story in a bad light, Trump said, “See, I think that’s really illegal.”
But there’s a problem with the primary argument offered by Cruz, Shapiro and others on the right in response to the administration’s heel turn on the 1st Amendment. And the problem is not that they’re wrong. Cruz and Shapiro are obviously correct to worry that a future Democratic administration could exploit the precedents Trump is laying down to target right-wing media. Indeed, many argue — correctly — that Trump is exploiting precedents laid down by the last Democratic administration. This is oft-repeated argument for retribution: “They did it to us first.”
Again, the problem with the “they did it to us first” and the “they could do this to us later” arguments — about censorship but also “lawfare,” congressional redistricting, etc. — is not that they’re wrong. It’s that they sidestep the wrongness of the deeds themselves.
Just for purposes of illustration, consider that Kirk’s murder was wrong, regardless of anything he said or anything you might believe he said. Murder is wrong independent of any other considerations (if there are mitigating factors for taking a life, we stop calling it murder). If a right-winger kills some prominent left-wing influencer as “payback,” that would be wrong too. As a matter of moral logic, bad acts cannot be justified by other bad acts. We are all taught this from childhood: Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Unfortunately, because of the tribal logic of our time, this ancient moral precept has been supplanted by the “Chicago way” — any transgression that they visit upon us must be repaid with interest.
I don’t condemn the argument that conservatives should be wary of reaping later what they are sowing now. Warning that they might be on the receiving end of the Chicago way the next time Democrats are in power just may be the only argument that many on the right are willing to buy right now. But I do lament how tribalism causes each tribe to forgo arguments based on objective standards. Using the government to punish critical speech is wrong, regardless of who is in power and regardless of whether the criticism is right or fair.
When you argue that you have to fight fire with fire, not only does everything get burned, you let your opponents’ indefensible behavior become your new standard for defensible behavior.
Oh, just for the record, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight it with water. And a lot of people could use a splash of cold water right about now.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Rep. Angie Craig’s No Social Media at School Act would ban TikTok, Instagram & Snapchat during K-12 school hours. See what’s in the bill.
Gen Z’s worst nightmare: TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat couldn’t be used during school hours.
Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN2) introduced the No Social Media at School Act, which would require social media companies to use “geofencing” to block access to their products on K-12 school grounds during school hours.
The bill carves out exceptions for push notification of weather alerts, Amber alerts for missing children, and emergency responders.
The specification of “school hours” means social media couldn’t even be used in the cafeteria at lunch or in the hallways between classes. However, it could still be used on school campuses after hours. For example, posting photos and videos at night from football games on the gridiron, or from school talent shows in the auditorium.
The bill also carves out multiple examples of websites or apps that don’t qualify as social media and wouldn’t be subject to a ban. These include: email, Wikipedia, e-commerce like Amazon and eBay, videoconferencing like Zoom, and (perhaps controversially) gaming.
In 2023, Florida became the first state to restrict cell phones in schools statewide. Just in the two years since then, a groundswell of 34 states across the political spectrum have passed policies either restricting or banning cell phones in schools.
In summer 2025 alone, similar policies were enacted by blue state Oregon, swing state North Carolina, and red state Ohio.
As education policies are generally set at the municipal and state level, no member of Congress appears to have introduced legislation banning or restricting cell phones in schools nationwide.
The closest might be the Focus on Learning Act, bipartisan legislation encouraging school districts to adopt phone-free classrooms by establishing a federal grant program to pay for lockable pouches and magnetized containers. The legislation has not yet received a vote.
But even if enacted, it wouldn’t directly change public policy, just nudge it through incentives. This bill, though, would directly change public policy. While it still wouldn’t ban cell phones themselves in schools, banning social media would certainly curb the main thing teens do on their cell phones.
Supporters argue that social media is distracting tens of millions of children from both education and face-to-face interactions with peers.
“We all know how negatively social media is impacting our students’ mental health, attention span, and ability to focus—especially at school,” Rep. Craig said in a press release. “Schools should be places for learning and socializing, not scrolling.”
“While Minnesota's teachers and administrators work hard to create a safe and engaging environment for our students, we have to hold Big Tech accountable for how their platforms are impacting our kids,” Rep. Craig continued. “My bill requiring tech companies to block access to social media during school hours is a start.”
Opponents counter that the answer is to use social media in schools in a curtailed and responsible way, rather than banning it entirely. They say that when done right, social media could actually help education.
For example, Matt Evans at the University of San Diego wrote an article titled “Social Media in Education: 13 Ideas for the Classroom.”
The bill awaits a potential vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
It has not yet attracted any cosponsors, from either party—despite the increasingly bipartisan consensus on banning or restricting cell phones in classrooms at the state and municipal levels.
Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with The Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on The Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
Congress Bill Spotlight: Banning Trump Administration From Renaming Naval Ship Harvey Milk
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New Orleans fights a facial recognition ordinance as residents warn of privacy risks, mass surveillance, and threats to immigrant communities.
Every day, I ride my bike down my block in Milan, a tight-knit residential neighborhood in central New Orleans. And every day, a surveillance camera follows me down the block.
Despite the rosy rhetoric of pro-surveillance politicians and facial recognition vendors, that camera doesn’t make me safer. In fact, it puts everyone in New Orleans at risk.
On Aug. 21, a live facial recognition ordinance was withdrawn by the New Orleans City Council, after months of community organizations fighting back and loudly opposing this dangerous ordinance. A council member's office confirmed that it was removed, pending edits, suggesting that a new one will be introduced. If this or a similar surveillance ordinance is approved, Louisiana would become the first state in the nation with a city-wide biometric surveillance network capable of tracking hundreds of thousands of residents in real time.
That’s not a step we want to take. Once invasive surveillance technology like that ends up in the hands of the government, there are no guardrails or oversight mechanisms powerful enough to protect our freedom and our privacy from bad actors, corrupt politicians, hackers, and anyone who doesn’t have our best interest at heart.
Expanding real-time facial recognition to all city cameras would set an unprecedented shift in mass surveillance for the whole country. It would build the infrastructure for a database that would record our facial features, personal characteristics, and our whereabouts, every time we stepped outside our front doors. All of that data, even if eventually deleted, can be used to train artificial intelligence to get better at recognizing and tracking us over time.
Disturbingly, a collection of cameras positioned across New Orleans is already capable of tracking residents’ every move, recording our data, and trying to match our faces to databases of millions of images of people. These cameras were never approved by the people of New Orleans. They were set up by Project NOLA, a crime prevention nonprofit group, which we now know because of bombshell revelations in the Washington Post. Project NOLA has been secretly spying on New Orleans residents with live facial recognition cameras for years. These cameras are at undisclosed locations around the city, and most importantly, police use of this technology has been outlawed since the local community rallied behind a surveillance ban in 2021.
Enough is enough. Time and again, New Orleans has been used as a testing ground for disempowering programs against our Black and brown communities––not only for secretive racist mass surveillance tech but also for a racist charter school system that has deteriorated our youth’s education. We have been treated as a sacrifice zone for oil, gas, and plastic plants to destroy our ecosystem and poison our health, causing us to have the highest rates of cancer in the country. We are not guinea pigs, and we are not disposable.
As an immigrant, I am desperately sounding the alarm about how devastating this surveillance ordinance would be for all New Orleaneans, including our migrant communities. All over the country, our people are being snatched off the street, our families are being separated, and in New Orleans, even our U.S. citizen babies with cancer are being deported. If we roll out real-time facial recognition in New Orleans, we have to expect that our facial recognition data will be demanded by ICE, requested by Louisiana police, or even hacked by anti-immigrant groups—empowering Trump’s agenda of terrorizing and violating our immigrant communities' fundamental human rights.
Instead of doubling down and investing in costly, racist technology, we should refocus on the root causes of crime and harm. 26% of all adults in New Orleans have low literacy levels. At 22.6%, our poverty rate dwarfs the national average of 10%. Dystopian face surveillance doesn’t solve those problems, but it does put us all at risk. The good news is we already know how to do better. Just last week, The Advocate editorialized about the many community programs and nonprofit efforts that are successfully reducing crime in Louisiana year by year.
Our elected officials have a duty to their constituents: to protect our freedoms, defend our dignity, and keep us safe. Our problems can’t be solved with more cameras and surveillance; they have deep systemic roots that have to be addressed.
Edith Romero is a Honduran community organizer with Eye On Surveillance, a researcher, writer, and a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project, The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and the Every Page Foundation.
15-year-old Owen Cooper made history to become the youngest male to win an Emmy Award. In the Netflix series Adolescence, Owen plays the role of a 13-year-old schoolboy who is arrested after the murder of a girl in his school. As we follow the events leading up to the crime, the award-winning series forces us to confront legitimate insecurities that many teenage boys face, from lack of physical prowess to emotional disconnection from their fathers. It also exposes how easily young men, seeking comfort in their computers, can be pulled into online spaces that normalize misogyny and rage; a pipeline enabled by a failure of tech policy.
At the center of this danger lies the manosphere: a global network of influencers whose words can radicalize young men and channel their frustrations into violence. But this is more than a social crisis affecting some young men. It is a growing threat to the democratic values of equality and tolerance that keep us all safe.
Like the crime series, we have already seen where this can lead in real life. Recently, French authorities charged a teenager connected to the incel subculture with terrorism, marking the country’s first such case of gender-based violence, a case built on the young man’s conspiracy to harm women. This should not be seen as an isolated incident, but as a symptom of a broader ideological problem.
While toxic for the young men it ensnares, the manosphere's deeper danger lies in its corrosion of the foundational values of democracy. These male-dominated online spaces reinforce rigid, traditional masculine norms. On the surface, we may see young men searching for identity and belonging, but beneath churns a murky undercurrent of pseudoscience and a contempt for gender equality.
Misogynistic messages poison the minds of young men, weaponizing their frustrations. They offer a seductively simple answer to complex feelings of loneliness: blame women. In 2014, Elliot Rodger fatally stabbed three people before going on a shooting spree to kill three more and injure 14 others. In his manifesto, he wrote, “All of my suffering in this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women,” blaming even his childhood crush for his violent hatred of women.
This blame can then be refined into a hatred for the very institutions, such as education, government, and the media, that are pillars of a functioning civil society, breeding a generation that rejects the pluralistic ideals necessary for democracy to thrive. Take, for example, the rise of far-right and neo-Nazi groups in Sweden that are attracting a new generation of young men who have lost faith in democracy. They share racist memes and violent videos to attract potential recruits, including boys as young as 10, on mainstream platforms like TikTok, before moving to more private, less regulated spaces.
The manosphere is a pathway to violence where online hate is turned into real-world violence. The French case is a direct example, but the trail of blood stretches back to attacks in Toronto, Isla Vista, and beyond. These digital communities don’t just vent; they strategize. They provide twisted justification and promote a culture of martyrdom that glorifies retribution. The leap from dehumanizing rhetoric on a forum to physical acts of terror is shorter than we imagine.
The manosphere is not neutral and can serve as a pipeline to extremist ideologies. While its entry point is often resentment of women, its logic inevitably expands. The same frameworks of hatred used against women are easily applied to minorities, migrants, and LGBTQ+ individuals. The Center on Extremism (COE) explains that the fear that women’s equality undermines men’s status is just a step away from seeing all demands for equality as threats to white male dominance. This exposes the symbiosis between misogyny and white supremacy, both connected by a deep-seated loathing of women.
And this matters because the status of women has long been a litmus test for the health of democracy. A recent study by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security found that women’s equality is strongly correlated with election integrity, freedom of association and assembly, and checks on executive power. In other words, when women’s rights erode, so too do the foundations of democratic governance.
Some argue that we might be overestimating the influence of the manosphere, as many of its users selectively choose what resonates with them and disregard what doesn’t. Indeed, not every frustrated young man online is a criminal. Not all criticism of society is extremist. Yet history shows that even small, seemingly fringe groups can eventually reshape society in harmful, authoritarian, or destructive ways. When Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, which later became the Nazi Party, he was the 55th member. We do not have to wait for a movement to gain a large following to see the potential trajectory it may take.
Ignoring the manosphere is a luxury we cannot afford. Combating it requires a proactive, multi-sectoral effort that must include a robust tech policy framework. Tech companies must move beyond reactive content moderation and proactively redesign their algorithms to de-amplify hateful content, rather than recommending it. They must consistently enforce their own terms of service against organized hate and misogyny, subjecting their enforcement to independent audits for transparency. Furthermore, they should invest in redirect initiatives that algorithmically offer resources for mental health and positive mentorship to users searching for harmful keywords. Governments must move beyond a hands-off approach. They should legislate mandatory safety-by-design standards for platforms, compelling them to conduct and publish risk assessments on how platforms might facilitate radicalization. Legislators must also strengthen laws that hold platforms accountable for knowingly profiting from the algorithmic amplification of extremist content.
This must be coupled with integrating digital literacy into education to build resilience against manipulation and, most importantly, offering young men positive models of manhood built on respect rather than hatred and blame. Our collective safety and the future of our democratic values may just depend on it.
Kevin Liverpool is a Public Voices Fellow on Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse with The OpEd Project. He works as a partnerships specialist with No Means No Worldwide, an international nonprofit on a mission to end sexual violence against women and children globally.
S4 E13. Broken News
