Sunday [18 till close of play]

Evening all.

19.  The down side of both controlled and free news

Very little news at 1934:

This started this morning at OoL. When the controlled MSM is done with the non news news, the filler pieces fill up the space.  Social media pundits though tend to write nothing and go out for drives or walks, as do readers, leaving a blogger bereft of anything worth posting, lean pickings indeed.

They come back late Sunday evening, expecting to catch up with "the latest" but their trusty colleagues have been either outside or watching Rumpole, feasting or bonking.  

Thus soc-med posts are quite uneven and when they observe that there's nowt worth writing of a late Sunday afternoon, they tend to contrive posts on why there's nowt worth writing of a late Sunday afternoon.

Let's sing "something else instead":

18.  Jo Nova and controlled news

https://joannenova.com.au/2023/02/what-looks-acts-and-smells-like-a-global-news-cartel-and-just-got-hit-by-an-antitrust-lawsuit/

The Trusted News Initiative is everything journalists should hate. It’s basically there to “protect” voters from hearing about things like the Hunter-Biden Laptop, good climate news and bad vaccine reactions. TNI practically told us that in 2020:

The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was set up last year [2019, just in time, eh?] to protect audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy, such as elections.

Nearly everyone’s on board:

Core partners in the TNI are: AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta [Facebook], Microsoft, Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompass – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express – India, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.

Which is a handy list of “where not to get your news”.