iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/09/2026

Sites that still prefer "Gulf of America" over "Gulf of Mexico" are mostly the MAGA media you'd expect: Fox News, Daily Caller, etc. (% of "America"-only stories in red, "Mexico"-only stories in blue, and stories using both in gray — mostly stories about Trump's renaming.)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/09/2026

In February 2025 — just after Trump's Gulf name change — national outlets used "Gulf of Mexico" 1.24 times for every 1 "Gulf of America." By August 2026, that ratio had climbed to 7.23 "Gulf of Mexico"s for every "Gulf of America."

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/09/2026

New by me—> Trump wants the media to call Lake Ontario "Lake America." But it hasn't worked with the "Gulf of America." U.S. news outlets — even the ones that Republicans prefer — have been steadily increasing their preference for "Gulf of Mexico." www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/trum...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 26/08/2026

White racists complaining about how woke Harvard is (from the New Orleans Times-Democrat, 1/17/1903)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 01/06/2026

Some future history textbook: "The American Civil War was primarily a conflict over the Confederate states' strong anti-diversity stance."

Hegseth Strikes Female and Black Navy Officers From Promotion List
The defense secretary's decision to block the officers' promotions appears driven by his anti-diversity stance rather than based on merit.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 25/11/2025

The strangest thing to me about this piece — on detecting cheating-via-AI — is its central conceit that writing about a 1800 slave rebellion "from a Marxist perspective" is some wild, nutty idea that could only originate in ChatGPT www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 10/10/2025

If any of you wanted to spend $200 to buy me Steve Albini’s screenprint of Jay Ryan’s “Let’s Eat Ice Cream and Dismantle White Supremacy” (2019), I promise I wouldn’t be mad www.stevealbiniscloset.com/stuff/p/jay-...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 09/10/2025

June 11: GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn introduces a bill to defund NPR and PBS because of their "left-wing propaganda" and "radical leftist gender ideology." October 7: The news industry's main trade group gives Blackburn its "Support Journalism Champion Award." Just shameless.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 25/09/2025

With this document just filed with the SEC, 140 years of control (and 99 years of ownership) of @dallasnews.com by the Dealey-Decherd-Moroney family has come to an end. Family patriarch Robert Decherd "no longer beneficially owns any shares." investor.dallasnewscorp.com/static-files...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 23/09/2025

This is that rare case of a headline that would benefit from a hashtag symbol to clarify #MeToo ≠ "me too"

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 09/09/2025

tired: "news avoiders" wired: “news minimalists"

Affective polarization and political (dis)trust: Investigating their interconnection and the moderating role of (social) media use

Annelien Van Remoortere iD' and Rens Vliegenthart iD
Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands

Abstract This article investigates the interplay between political trust and affective polarization during the 2023 Dutch parliamentary elections and how this interplay is moderated by (social) media use. We hypothesize a reciprocal relationship, where trust influences affective polarization and vice versa. This interaction may intensify in election campaigns. Using a cross-lagged panel model on a panel wave survey conducted during the 2023 Dutch parliamentary election campaign, we analyze trust and polarization dynamics across five distinct media user types, including quality media users, social media users, and news minimalists. Findings indicate that higher political trust leads to lower affective polarization; however, polarization does not significantly impact trust. Importantly, quality media users show no connection between trust and polarization. In contrast, social media users exhibit less stable levels of political trust, highlighting the potential volatility of trust among this group during campaigns. Our findings emphasize media's moderating role in shaping political attitudes.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 04/09/2025

I just want to get this on the record: The large half-circle windows in the "Toledo Truth-Teller" newsroom in Peacock's "The Paper" are 100% a reference to the identical windows in the @toledonews.bsky.social newsroom, on the 3rd floor of the Toledo Blade Building.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 29/08/2025

What a dumb framing of a federal court declaring Trump's obviously illegal tariffs illegal — positioning *Trump* as the source of stability and obeying the law as the agent of chaos that could screw things up! www.axios.com/2025/08/29/t...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 19/08/2025

Meanwhile, @dallasnews.com is sticking to the argument that if Decherd doesn't want to sell, a sale is impossible, so Alden will just need to find another corpse to scavenge. investor.dallasnewscorp.com/node/15141/h...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 19/08/2025

Alden Global Capital has raised its bid for @dallasnews.com by another buck — now $18.50/share vs. Hearst's $15. But again, as long as Robert Decherd says no — and I don't see him changing his mind — the DMN should be saved from the Alden guillotine. www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 18/08/2025

By “jumping” he meant “riding across the roofs of,” by “jet-powered” he meant “could be made to emit sparks,” and by “riding” he meant “falling off of.” (Story here by future Pulitzer winner Madeleine Blais.)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 18/08/2025

First media coverage of Penn & Teller (then performing as 2/3 of the “Asparagus Valley Cultural Society”), November 1975. The stunt: Penn jumping over five 1976 Volkswagen Rabbits on a jet-powered unicycle named the Asparajet.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 07/08/2025

GPT-5 is so amazing it can make 52.8 higher than 69.1 on a bar chart It can even make 69.1 and 30.8 THE SAME SIZE

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 31/07/2025

I kept waiting for the *wink* of an "of course, we all know this is bullshit" graf — the absolute minimum required in a story like this — but nope, it's just 800 words of gullibility. They led their morning newsletter with this! www.dallasnews.com/business/202...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 23/07/2025

If you call me to talk about Alden Global Capital, I will not hold back. www.dallasobserver.com/news/vulture...

Just two weeks ago, things were looking somewhat, maybe, more positive for the News as word broke that Hearst, the media company with a giant footprint in Texas as owner of the Austin American-Statesman, Houston Chronicle, San Antonio ExpressNews and Beaumont Enterprise, among others, was offering $14 per share for Dallas News Corp. (Full disclosure: I worked for the San Antonio paper many, many years ago, and my wife is a former copy editor for the Morning News.)
The Morning News wrote that Hearst's offer "was 319% more than the July 9 closing price of $4.39. That puts the value of the company, Texas' oldest continually operating company, at $74.9 million."
Then word broke Thursday that Alden, owner of The Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and San Jose Mercury News, among many others, was offering $16.50 per share, or "roughly $88 million," according to The New York Times.
We spoke with Joshua Benton, founder and former director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard and a former News reporter, about the competition and who we should root for. It wasn't even close.
Alden Global Capital's "entire business model is wrecking newspapers and just sucking the blood out of them till they die," he said.
Whoa, don't hold back, Josh.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 16/07/2025

It’s extra hurtful when your own damned website doesn’t think you’re a human.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 07/07/2025

Any “senior” journalist who — in 2025! — still thinks about newsroom decisionmaking in terms of “Hey, if people are criticizing a story, it must have been the right to publish it!” either has learned nothing from the past decade, has brain worms, or both. www.semafor.com/article/07/0...

Despite some public criticism and internal grumbling, the paper's leadership has continued to back the piece.
One person familiar with the editorial process noted that the Times' senior editors were aligned on whether to publish the piece, which was read and greenlit by multiple top editors before its publication. Others on staff that spoke with Semafor on the condition of anonymity said the reaction to the piece showed why it was important to tackle it.
"The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting," one senior reporter told Semafor.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 02/07/2025

Anyone worried about AI achieving sentience and self-awareness should be relieved it won’t happen in The Browser Company's Dia anytime soon

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 26/06/2025

How the zone of active conflicts across Africa grew between Q1 2021 to Q4 2024 www.maplecroft.com/products-and...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 24/06/2025

It’s nice that geese decided to announce their plans to humans this year — no surprise gaggles pitchfork.com/news/geese-a...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 18/06/2025

There are now only 3 OpenAI models in the 20 most used at @openrouter.bsky.social — and they’re only at Nos. 11, 13, and 19. Google has 8 (including Nos. 1, 3, 7, 8, 9) Anthropic has 2 (at Nos. 2 and 5) DeepSeek has 4 (incl. Nos. 4, 6, and 10) Mistral 1 (No. 12) Meta 1 (No. 17) xAI 1 (No. 18)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 09/06/2025

We all know that @newyorker.com only did a big story on the lives on Hollywood intimacy coordinators so they could blow past their annual dieresis quota early in the year (62 ö’s in there!) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

How I Learned to Become an Intimacy Coördinator

At a sex-choreography workshop, a writer learned about Instant Chemistry exercises, penis pouches, and nudity riders to train for Hollywood’s most controversial job.

By Jennifer Wilson
June 9, 2025

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 07/06/2025

As I confirmed when I ran the data through Numbers.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 07/06/2025

I regret to say only Grok 3 got the data right.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 07/06/2025

Next was ChatGPT 4o. Given the same data, it determined that every American public radio station is at 88.1, 88.3, or 88.7 — except for one lone 88.9 and one weirdo over at 107.7. Asked twice to try again, it presented the same made-up date each time. The bars were thicker the third time, though.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 07/06/2025

It kept telling me what a lovely chart it had made — "The color gradient, from a cool blue on the left to a warmer magenta on the right, also helps to visually emphasize this divide” — while presenting a blank space where the viz was supposed to be. (I had to download its code and run it myself.)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 07/06/2025

Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro made a lovely chart full of completely invented data. For one thing, it revealed that there were secretly 6,904 public radio stations in America! (I gave it a list of 1,040 FM frequencies. There are also a few public radio stations on the AM dial.)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 07/06/2025

Today in AI: I got a dataset of every U.S. public radio station’s FM frequency. It was, as you’d expect, heavily weighted toward the “left of the dial." I gave the data set to 3 AIs — ChatGPT 4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3 — asked them each to make a data visualization. 🧵

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 04/06/2025

Well, that’s sort of an artifact of America’s white flight to the suburbs, which choked off our central cities’ land and made them smaller parts of their metro areas. Greater Adelaide, at 1.46 mil, would be 43rd in the US. (But No. 1 in Somerton Men!)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 04/06/2025

How in the world, @axios.com, can you call renaming ships named for gay, Black, and female Americans as purging “references to DEI”? Rebranding open bigotry as “purging DEI” is a hell of a trick.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 02/06/2025

Maybe my expectations are too high because of their line of work — but I wish the union representing many New York digital media workers could be more internally consistent over whether its name is Writers Guild of America East or Writers Guild of America, East

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 27/05/2025

Can't believe I missed the two-year anniversary of Elon saving the media through micropayments www.niemanlab.org/2023/05/micr...

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 19/05/2025

Not to be cruel, but the content mix on the homepage makes me think: “What if The Messenger survived but went anti-Trump?" www.thedailybeast.com

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 19/05/2025

The @thedailybeast.bsky.social may do better numbers now than it did under previous mgmt, but it's also much less interesting and more predictable. Very MAGA-scandal-of-the-day — much less original reporting. It’s a shame — they really punched above their weight journalistically for a long time.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 06/05/2025

Call it Janet Cooke’s Law: If you write a story about how good your journalism is, you *will* have an ugly typo within the first 15 words.

The Post wins Pulitzers for Trump rally shooting stories, editorial cartoons

The *****newpaper***** was recognized in the breaking news category for coverage of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July and for the illustrated work of Ann Telnaes. The New York Times won four prizes.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/05/2025

This is the time each year when I unveil my foolproof Kentucky Derby: Bet on any horse ridden by a Cajun jockey. This year, alas, there’s only one of those in the race: Brian Hernandez Jr., riding 12-1 Burnham Square. But of course you should really just bet on Journalism to win.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/05/2025

One last note: In this set of 25 biographies, about 10 would be of Confederates and their intellectual kin. Editor Oberholtzer committed to only letting Southern historians write those bios — "as a guaranty of greater impartiality.” 🙄

We have arrived at a period in our history when we can look calmly and dispassionately at the issue and see both sides without the prejudices of the War Time. Having the perspective of a half a century, and having authors who are not survivors of the struggle, but who instead have come forward since the War, we hope that all these requirements shall be fulfilled.

Of the twenty-five volumes about ten will be of Southern men, including Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, Robert Toombs, General Lee, "Stonewall" Jackson, and perhaps one or two others yet to be chosen. It is intended that the lives of the Southern men shall be written by Southern writers as a guaranty of greater impartiality.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/05/2025

Today, Du Bois’ John Brown bio is considered a classic. History has been less kind to Washington’s Douglass bio. (from Kelly Miller’s "Radicals and Conservatives, and Other Essays on the Negro in America,” 1908)

The radical and conservative tendencies of the Negro race cannot be better described than by comparing, or rather contrasting, the two superlative colored men in whom we find their highest embodiment-Frederick Douglass and Booker Washington, who were both picked out and exploited by white men as the mouthpiece and intermediaries of the black race. The two men are in part products of their times, but are also natural antipodes. Douglass lived in the day of moral giants; Washington lives in the era of merchant princes. The contemporaries of Douglass emphasized the rights of man; those of Washington, his productive capacity. The age of Douglass acknowledged the sanction of the Golden Rule; that of Washington worships the Rule of Gold. The equality of men was constantly dinned into Douglass's ears; Washington hears nothing but the inferiority of the Negro and the dominance of the Saxon. Douglass could hardly receive a hearing today; Washington would have been hooted off the stage a generation ago. Thus all truly useful men must be, in a measure, time-servers; for unless they

serve their time, they can scarcely serve at all. But great as was the diversity of formative influences that shaped these two great lives, there is no less opposability in their innate bias of character. Douglass was like a lion, bold and fearless; Washington is lamblike, meek and submissive. Douglass escaped from personal bondage, which his soul abhorred; but for Lincoln's proclamation, Washington would probably have arisen to esteem and favor in the eyes of his master as a good and faithful servant. Douglass insisted upon rights; Washington insists upon duty. Douglass held up to public scorn the sins of the white man; Washington portrays the faults of his own race. Douglass spoke what he thought the world should hear; Washington speaks only what he feels it is disposed to listen to. Douglass's conduct was actuated by principle; Washington's by prudence. Douglass had no limited, copyrighted programme for his race, but appealed to the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States; Washington, holding these great principles in the shadowy background, presents a practical expedient applicable to present needs. Douglass was a moralist, insisting upon the application of righteousness to public affairs; Washington is a practical opportunist, accepting the best terms which he thinks it possible to secure.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/05/2025

But Oberholtzer asked Du Bois to switch his subject from Nat Turner to the white John Brown. ("I fear you will think me very hard to suit, but I should much prefer, if you can see your way clear to do it, that you should make John Brown the centre for your volume.”) Du Bois’ advance? $100.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/05/2025

Du Bois then pitched the editor, Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, on a Nat Turner biography instead. After all, Oberholtzer said he had “from the first" wanted to have 2 of the 25 biographies in the series be “on colored men."

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/05/2025

Fun fact: W. E. B. Du Bois originally committed to write this biography of Frederick Douglass — but the publisher decided to give it to Booker T. Washington instead. (I’m sure there were NO HARD FEELINGS over this, because those two guys were BEST PALS.)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 03/05/2025

Booker T. Washington asking his editor for the word “Negro” to be capitalized in his 1906 biography of Frederick Douglass. (Which was apparently ghost-written by the Chicago attorney and staunch Bookerite Samuel Laing Williams, anyway.)

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 17/04/2025

This is a *very* generous read of non-Elon (“normal”) natalism (“It’s not about white supremacy, see — just 'strengthening Western culture’!”) www.axios.com/2025/04/17/e...

Elon Musk has fathered at least 14 children with at least four women, intent on fighting civilizational collapse with a "legion" of genetically gifted offspring, according to an explosive new feature in the Wall Street Journal.

Why it matters: The investigation reveals new details on how the world's richest man has used his vast wealth and influence to recruit, manage - and at times silence - the mothers of his many children.

The big picture: Musk has been outspoken in his support for natalism, but his motivations — and certainly his methods - diverge from the family-first conservatism driving the broader movement.

Policies aimed at reversing America's declining birth rate have gained support within the Republican Party in recent years.

Musk and many Silicon Valley elites see promoting procreation as a civilization-saving project - one rooted in elite reproduction, human capital, and long-term survival through space colonization or Al.

Social conservatives like Vice President Vance champion natalism as a means of strengthening the nuclear family and Western culture, while some white nationalists frame it as a tool of demographic preservation.

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Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com · 05/04/2025

That’s a hell of a chart. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-a-con-...

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