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    When dead children are just the price of doing business, Zuckerberg’s apology is empty | Carole Cadwalladr

    I don’t generally approve of blood sports but I’m happy to make an exception for the hunting and baiting of Silicon Valley executives in a congressional committee room. But then I like expensive, pointless spectacles. And waterboarding tech CEOs in Congress is right up there with firework displays, a brief, thrillingly meaningless sensation on the retina and then darkness.Last week’s grilling of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley Übermenschen was a classic of the genre: front pages, headlines, and a genuinely stand-out moment of awkwardness in which he was forced to face victims for the first time ever and apologise: stricken parents holding the photographs of their dead children lost to cyberbullying and sexual exploitation on his platform.Less than six hours later, his company delivered its quarterly results, Meta’s stock price surged by 20.3% delivering a $200bn bump to the company’s market capitalisation and, if you’re counting, which as CEO he presumably does, a $700m sweetener for Zuckerberg himself. Those who listened to the earnings call tell me there was no mention of dead children.A day later, Biden announced, “If you harm an American, we will respond”, and dropped missiles on more than 80 targets across Syria and Iraq. Sure bro, just so long as the Americans aren’t teenagers with smart phones. US tech companies routinely harm Americans, and in particular, American children, though to be fair they routinely harm all other nationalities’ children too: the Wall Street Journal has shown Meta’s algorithms enable paedophiles to find each other. New Mexico’s attorney general is suing the company for being the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally”. A coroner in Britain found that 14-year-old Molly Jane Russell, “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content” – which included Instagram videos depicting suicide.And while dispatching a crack squad of Navy Seals to Menlo Park might be too much to hope for, there are other responses that the US Congress could have mandated, such as, here’s an idea, a law. Any law. One that, say, prohibits tech companies from treating dead children as just a cost of doing business.Because demanding that tech companies don’t enable paedophiles to find and groom children is the lowest of all low-hanging fruit in the tech regulation space. And yet even that hasn’t happened yet. What America urgently needs is to act on its anti-trust laws and break up these companies as a first basic step. It needs to take an axe to Section 230, the law that gives platforms immunity from lawsuits for hosting harmful or illegal content.It needs basic product safety legislation. Imagine GlaxoSmithKline launched an experimental new wonder drug last year. A drug that has shown incredible benefits, including curing some forms of cancer and slowing down ageing. It might also cause brain haemorrhages and abort foetuses, but the data on that is not yet in so we’ll just have to wait and see. There’s a reason that doesn’t happen. They’re called laws. Drug companies go through years of testing. Because they have to. Because at some point, a long time ago, Congress and other legislatures across the world did their job.Yet Silicon Valley’s latest extremely disruptive technology, generative AI, was released into the wild last year without even the most basic federally mandated product testing. Last week, deep fake porn images of the most famous female star on the planet, Taylor Swift, flooded social media platforms, which had no legal obligation to take them down – and hence many of them didn’t.But who cares? It’s only violence being perpetrated against a woman. It’s only non-consensual sexual assault, algorithmically distributed to millions of people across the planet. Punishing women is the first step in the rollout of any disruptive new technology, so get used to that, and if you think deep fakes are going to stop with pop stars, good luck with that too.You thought misinformation during the US election and Brexit vote in 2016 was bad? Well, let’s wait and see what 2024 has to offer. Could there be any possible downside to releasing this untested new technology – one that enables the creation of mass disinformation at scale for no cost – at the exact moment in which more people will go to the polls than at any time in history?You don’t actually have to imagine where that might lead because it’s already happened. A deep fake targeting a progressive candidate dropped days before the Slovakian general election in October. It’s impossible to know what impact it had or who created it, but the candidate lost, and the opposition pro-Putin candidate won. CNN reports that the messaging of the deepfake echoed that put out by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, just an hour before it dropped. And where was Facebook in all of this, you ask? Where it usually is, refusing to take many of the deep fake posts down.Back in Congress, grilling tech execs is something to do to fill the time in between the difficult job of not passing tech legislation. It’s now six years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal when Zuckerberg became the first major tech executive to be commanded to appear before Congress. That was a revelation because it felt like Facebook might finally be brought to heel.But Wednesday’s outing was Zuckerberg’s eighth. And neither Facebook, nor any other tech platform, has been brought to heel. The US has passed not a single federal law. Meanwhile, Facebook has done some exculpatory techwashing of its name to remove the stench of data scandals and Kremlin infiltration and occasionally offers up its CEO for a ritual slaughtering on the Senate floor.To understand America’s end-of-empire waning dominance in the world, its broken legislature and its capture by corporate interests, the symbolism of a senator forcing Zuckerberg to apologise to bereaved parents while Congress – that big white building stormed by insurrectionists who found each other on social media platforms – does absolutely nothing to curb his company’s singular power is as good as any place to start.We’ve had eight years to learn the lessons of 2016 and yet here we are. Britain has responded by weakening the body that protects our elections and degrading our data protection laws to “unlock post-Brexit opportunities”. American congressional committees are now a cargo cult that go through ritualised motions of accountability. Meanwhile, there’s a new tech wonder drug on the market that may create untold economic opportunities or lethal bioweapons and the destabilisation of what is left of liberal democracy. Probably both. Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer More

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    Dismay as Mehdi Hasan’s MSNBC and Peacock news show cancelled

    The cable TV channel MSNBC and its sister network NBC’s Peacock streaming service is cancelling the weekend news show The Mehdi Hasan Show, with its eponymous outspoken host, people familiar with the decision have told the news website Semafor.The host and journalist Mehdi Hasan will instead become an on-camera analyst and guest host, the outlet reported on Thursday. The Peacock original show will be replaced by an additional hour of Ayman, the news program hosted by Ayman Mohyeldin.Staff were made aware of the news on Thursday morning, according to Semafor.The show, which was broadcast live on Sundays at 8pm US eastern time, covered national politics, current affairs and global news.The show’s reported cancellation sent shockwaves through his fanbase.The prominent human rights attorney Noura Erakat called the show “an oasis on air and more needed than ever”.Hasan was known for inviting guests on to his show and engaging with them in a fierce debate, often fact-checking and correcting them in real time. His line of questioning was often direct and unrelenting, refusing to let his guest avoid giving an answer.Some of his past guests included the former national security adviser John Bolton, whom he questioned about his vehement support for the Iraq war, launched by then president George W Bush in 2003, despite it resulting in an overwhelming number of civilian deaths.In September, Hasan interviewed the 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, whom he questioned about his position against affirmative action in US higher education, despite being a recipient of a scholarship for immigrants and their children.More recently, Hasan has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s bombardment and military assault of Gaza after the state declared war on the Palestinian territory’s controlling militant group, following Hamas’s mass murder attack on southern Israel on 7 October. Earlier in November, he interviewed Mark Regev, senior adviser to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s former ambassador to the UK, questioning Regev firmly on the high Palestinian civilian death toll, the Palestinian children that were killed by the Israeli military and and related matters.Hasan asked: “They’re people your government has killed. You’ve killed children. You accept that, right? Or do you deny that?”To which Regev replied: “No, I do not.”Along with Mohyeldin and NBC’s Ali Velshi, Hasan was among the few Muslim anchors in American television.Before what is reportedly the official cancellation of the Mehdi Hasan show, NBC faced criticism for temporarily taking these Muslim anchors off of the air in the midst of the war in Gaza. Although one of Hasan’s scheduled Thursday night episodes did not air, plans were scrapped for Ayman Mohyeldin to fill in for the host Joy Reid on her show, and Alicia Menendez filled in for Ali Velshi, NBC denied reports it was sidelining Muslim voices and that the move was purely coincidence.Hasan, a Briton of Indian-descent, moved to the US in 2015. He became a US citizen in 2020. Previously, Hasan was a senior columnist at the Intercept, a regular contributor to the Guardian and a presenter for Al Jazeera English.Hasan is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics. There, he memorably debated the subject of Islam and defended that it was a peaceful religion. The video, posted on the Oxford Union YouTube channel has over 10m views.Neither Hasan nor NBC immediately responded to a request for comment. More

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    Media gave much less play to Trump’s ‘vermin’ comment than Clinton remark

    Major US news outlets devoted significantly less time and space to covering Donald Trump’s description of his enemies as “vermin” this month than they did in a similar period in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s reference to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”, a new study has found.Findings by the progressive watchdog Media Matters included 18 times more coverage of Clinton’s remark than Trump’s by the “Big Three” broadcast networks (NBC, ABC and CBS) in the first week after the remark was made; and print reports among the top five circulating newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today) in which mention of Clinton’s remark outnumbered Trump’s 29-1 in the same period.“Coverage decisions like these … shape the political landscape during presidential election cycles,” wrote Matt Gertz, a Media Matters senior fellow.Media Matters describes itself as “a web-based, not-for-profit … progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media”.It has recently made headlines by highlighting far-right content on X, prompting advertisers to withdraw, an effort now the subject of a lawsuit from Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the platform formerly known as Twitter.Clinton’s “deplorables” remark was a famous feature of the 2016 presidential election, which she lost to Trump.In September that year, the Democrat told a New York audience: “To be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” Trump lost to Joe Biden four years later but is the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee again in 2024, dominating polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.Earlier this month, in New Hampshire, he told supporters he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.Biden joined pundits and historians in pointing out how authoritarian leaders have called opponents “vermin”, Adolf Hitler prominently among them.Acknowledging such comparisons and warnings, Gertz wrote: “The former president … added that those forces want ‘to destroy America and to destroy the American dream’ and that ‘the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within’.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“By contrast, the right weaponised Clinton’s relatively mundane ‘basket of deplorables’ comment … [though] she went on to stress that attendees shouldn’t write off all of his backers because they also include ‘people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change’, adding: ‘Those are people we have to understand and empathise with as well.’”The new Media Matters research, Gertz said, illustrated how major news outlets responded to “weaponisation” of Clinton’s remark, “rewarding the right for its disingenuous act, showering Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ remark with coverage.“By contrast, the same outlets largely ignored Trump’s description of his political enemies as ‘vermin’, continuing a pattern of relatively muted coverage of Trump’s abhorrent and incoherent commentary.”According to the research, ABC, CBS and NBC spent 54 minutes on the “deplorables” remark in the first week after it was uttered (making 1,662 mentions of it) but only three minutes (through 191 mentions) on the “vermin” remark in the same period.The only print article in the five main papers to consider the “vermin” remark was published by the Washington Post. In 2016, it ran nine print articles on the “deplorables” comment in the first week after it was made, Media Matters said.Gertz said: “When experts are sounding the alarm about the similarities between a likely US presidential nominee’s rhetoric and that of genocidaires, it warrants much more significant attention from journalists at leading news outlets.” More

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    Trump interview an ‘insult to Hispanic community’, ex-Univision head says

    A former president of Univision condemned the Spanish-language US television network’s recent interview with Donald Trump as “propaganda” and an “insult to the Hispanic community”.“To call the Trump [interview] an interview is mistaken,” Joaquin Blaya told MSNBC. “It was not an interview as we understand [it] in the United States. It was basically a one-hour propaganda open space for former president Trump to say whatever he wanted to say.”The friendly interview was filmed at the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago home. Lingering controversy ensued, including a call from John Leguizamo, the actor and sometime Daily Show host, for a Univision boycott.Amid revelations that Univision canceled both ads bought by President Joe Biden (after announcing a surprise policy change) as well as an interview in which a White House official was scheduled to respond, a top network anchor resigned.Speaking to the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday, Blaya lamented “a drastic change for what have been the standards of Univision”.“When I created the Univision network news [in the 1980s], [it was] built on the principles of American broadcasting journalism, the ABC, CBS, NBC … we were trying to basically create a Spanish but American network,” Blaya said.“And I say that because there’s a big difference from our association in those days with the news that we’re seeing coming from Mexico.”Univision recently came under the control of Grupo Televisa, a Mexican company. In his interview, Trump, who famously clashed with the Univision anchor Jorge Ramos during the 2016 election, said of the new owners: “They like me.”Last week, Blaya told the Washington Post that the Univision interview failed to preserve a standard “separation of business and news”.“What I saw there was batting practice, someone dropping balls for him to hit out of the park,” Blaya said. “I think it was an embarrassment.”Trump faces 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats but dominates Republican primary polling, amid mounting warnings of the fascistic tone of his rhetoric.Speaking to MSNBC, Blaya said favourable Univision coverage of Trump’s anti-immigration views was “a real insult to the Hispanic community of this country”.He added: “And for those who understand the business, there is no doubt that in doing what they did, [it] had to be a corporate decision. That is not a decision that the local news director or the local general manager would have taken on [their] own.”According to the Post, the interview was “arranged with the help of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner”, who was also a senior White House adviser for the ex-president.The Post said the interview was also “attended by a trio of senior executives at Univision’s parent company”.Latino voters have long leaned Democratic. This week, however, the polling firm Morning Consult noted that “Trump is gaining ground among key voter segments including Black, Hispanic and young Americans.” More

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    Network of Lies review: Brian Stelter on Fox News, Trump and Dominion

    This week, Rupert Murdoch formally stepped down as the chairman of News Corp. At the annual shareholder’s meeting, the 92-year-old media mogul inveighed against the “suppression of debate by an intolerant elite who regard differing opinions as anathema”. He also passed the baton to Lachlan Murdoch, his 52-year-old son, “a believer in the social purpose of journalism”.Murdoch also told those assembled that “humanity has a high destiny”. Unmentioned: how Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 election led to its shelling out of hundreds of millions to settle a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, or how other suits continue.Five days after the election, insisting Donald Trump could not have lost to Joe Biden – as he clearly did – Maria Bartiromo defied management to become “the first Fox host to utter the name ‘Dominion’”, writes Brian Stelter, a veteran Fox-watcher and former CNN host. “All gassed up on rage and righteousness, [Bartiromo] heaped shame onto the network and spurred a $787.5m settlement payment.”Bartiromo popularized the Trump aide Sidney Powell and her special brand of insanity. Their enthusiasm became fatally contagious. January 6 and the insurrection followed. Two and a half years later, Bartiromo is still on the air. Powell is a professional defendant. Last month, she pleaded guilty in Fulton county, Georgia, to six counts of misdemeanor election interference and agreed to six years of probation. She still faces potential civil liability and legal sanction.“What Bartiromo began on a Sunday morning in November … destroyed America’s sense of a shared reality about the 2020 election,” Stelter laments. “The consequences will be felt for years to come.”In the political sphere, Trump shrugs off 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats to dominate the Republican primary, focusing on retribution and weaponizing the justice department and FBI should he return to power.With less than a year before the 2024 election, Stelter once again focuses on the Murdochs’ flagship operation. Like his previous book from 2020, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Network of Lies offers a readable and engrossing deep dive into the rightwing juggernaut paid for by the Murdochs and built by the late, disgraced Roger Ailes.Now a podcast host and consulting producer to The Morning Show, an Apple TV drama, Stelter also has journalistic chops earned at the New York Times. He wades through court filings and paperwork from the Dominion litigation, talks to sources close to Fox and the Murdochs, and offers insight into the firing of Tucker Carlson, the dominant, far-right prime-time host who was suddenly ditched in April. Stelter’s book is subtitled The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy. He overstates, but not by much.Unlike Bartiromo, Carlson didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He was sly and calculated, not crazy.“Carlson privately thought Powell’s ‘software shit’ was ‘absurd’,” Stelter writes about the idea that voting machines were outlandishly rigged. “He worriedly speculated that ‘half our viewers have seen the Maria clip’, and he wanted to push back on it.” But Carlson didn’t push back hard enough. He went with the flow.He now peddles his wares on what used to be Twitter, broadcasts from a basement, and hangs out with Trump at UFC. For a guy once known for wearing bow ties, it’s a transformation. Then again, Carlson also prided himself on his knowledge of how white guys ought to fight, an admission in a text message, revealed by the Dominion suit, that earned the ire of the Fox board and the Murdochs.In Stelter’s telling, Fox “A-listers” received a heads-up on what discovery in the Dominion case would reveal.“‘They’re going to call us hypocrites,’ an exec warned.” Plaintiffs would juxtapose Fox’s public message against its internal doubts about voter fraud claims. “It was likened to ‘a seven-layer cake of shit’,” Stelter writes.The miscalculation by Fox’s legal team is now legend. It led Murdoch to believe Dominion would cost him $50m. But even Murdoch came close to concluding it was “unarguable that high-profile Fox voices” fed the “big lie”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStelter captures the Murdochs’ struggle to make money, keep their audience happy and avoid liability. It is a near-impossible task. The beast must be fed. There is always someone or something out there waiting to cater to Trump’s base if Fox won’t. After the 2020 election, Trump forced Fox to compete with One America News and Newsmax for his attention and his followers’ devotion.The Murdochs’ pivot toward Ron DeSantis as their Republican candidate of choice won’t be forgotten soon, at least not by voters during the GOP primary. Despite being assiduously courted by Fox to appear at the first debate, which it sponsored, Trump smirkingly and wisely declined to show. Fox still covers Trump’s events – until he plugs Carlson, the defenestrated star.Judging by the polls, none of this has hurt Trump’s hopes. He laps the pack while DeSantis stagnates, Nikki Haley threatening to take second place. At the same time, some polling shows Trump ahead of Joe Biden or competitive in battleground states and leading in the electoral college. For now, Fox needs him more than he needs Fox.In that spirit of “social purpose” reporting lauded by his dad, Lachlan Murdoch will be left to navigate a defamation action brought by Smartmatic, another voting machine company, and, among other cases, a suit filed by Ray Epps, an ex-marine who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for his role in the January 6 insurrection but became the focus of conspiracy theorists. Sating the appetites of the 45th president and his rightwing base never comes cheap.In the Smartmatic litigation, Fox tried to subpoena George Soros, the bete noire of the right. It lost, but conspiracy theories die hard. US democracy remains fragile, the national divide seemingly unbridgeable. Expect little to change at Fox. The show must go on.
    Network of Lies is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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    Former Fox News reporter sues after he was allegedly fired for protesting January 6 coverage

    Fox News is being sued by a former Capitol Hill reporter who accuses the network of discriminating and retaliating against him because he refused to appease Donald Trump and the former president’s supporters by propagating lies about the “stolen” 2020 election.Jason Donner, who worked for Fox News for 12 years as a Capitol Hill reporter and producer, accuses the network of firing him because he spoke out against the coverage of Trump’s stolen election lie and the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. He was the victim of a wider purge of the newsroom, the lawsuit claims, designed to hold up the network’s ratings by playing along with election denial.The suit, which is being heard by a federal court in Washington DC, gives a vivid account of Donner’s experiences during the January 6 insurrection. Once rioters had entered the Capitol building, he sheltered along with other reporters in the news booths connected to the Senate.As they were hiding, and while reports were coming in of shots fired outside the House chamber, Fox news was broadcasting that the event was “peaceful”. Donner called the newsroom, the suit says, and exclaimed: “I don’t want to hear any of this fucking shit on our air ever again because you’re gonna get us all killed.”The suit claims that after Fox News became the first media outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden shortly before midnight on election night in 2020, the network faced a furious backlash from Trump and his supporters. Ratings suffered.“To win back viewership and pledge its loyalty to President Trump, Fox’s corporate leadership purged the news division and those reporters who spoke out against claims of election fraud,” it states.Donner also objected to the conspiracy theories being touted by Fox’s star host at the time, Tucker Carlson, who has since been fired. Donner particularly objected to Carlson’s Fox Nation program, Patriot Purge, but was told by a manager, the suit says, that there was “nothing they could do because Tucker has gotten bigger than the network”.The former Fox News reporter claims that retaliation against him began in the spring of 2022. “It became evident to Donner he was now being targeted for speaking out against the false reporting on the election and the January 6 insurrection,” the lawsuit contends.Donner was fired on 28 September 2022 on what he claims were pretextual grounds related to the sick day he had taken two days previously having fallen ill after a Covid-19 vaccination.The new suit is one of a spate of litigation that Fox is fielding relating to its handling of the stolen election lie. In April, the company settled with the voting equipment company Dominion for $787.5m in a defamation suit over false allegations about the firm’s involvement in “rigging” the 2020 election.A similar $2.7bn suit from another voting machine company, Smartmatic, is ongoing. More

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    Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lays off staff

    Jezebel, a feminist US news site, was shut down by its owners on Thursday, with 23 people laid off and no plans for the outlet to resume publication.G/O Media, which owns Jezebel and other sites including Gizmodo and the Onion, announced the closure in a memo to staff, which was obtained by the Guardian.“Unfortunately, our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s,” Jim Spanfeller, the chief executive of G/O Media, wrote in the memo, which was sent to staff on Thursday morning.“And when that became clear, we undertook an expansive search for a new, perhaps better home that might ensure Jezebel a path forward. It became a personal mission of Lea Goldman, who worked tirelessly on the project, talking with over two dozen potential buyers.“It is a testament to Jezebel’s heritage and bona fides that so many players engaged us. Still, despite every effort, we could not find Jez a new home.”In response to the shuttering, the Writers Guild of America-East, which represents G/O Media staffers, issued a statement condemning Spanfeller.“Jezebel has been a pillar of fearless journalism and important cultural commentary since 2007 and made an indelible mark on the media landscape,” the statement read, before adding: “A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude. Jezebel was a good website.”Susan Rinkunas, a senior reporter at Jezebel, told the Guardian that it was “unconscionable that the company is shutting down its only politics site, which did hard-hitting reporting on abortion, ahead of the 2024 elections.“Readers everywhere will be worse off without Jezebel,” she added.Audra Heinrichs, a staff writer at Jezebel, told the Guardian she was “certainly not surprised” at the site’s closure, but was “heartbroken” that both G/O Media and Spanfeller “unceremoniously gutted Jezebel, a pillar of fearless feminist journalism in digital media and the website I’ve been fortunate to call home for nearly two years”.“Its demise in the wake of Dobbs and in the run-up to the 2024 election in which abortion will no doubt be a significant part of the conversation is not only undue, but despicable,” she said. “As Jim Spanfeller wrote, the Jezebel staff – both past and present – ‘changed the game’. I feel at once honored to be one small part of its singular legacy and devastated for all those who were comforted by its presence.”The closure and layoffs come at a difficult time for US journalism.On Thursday, Vice Media Group said it would lay off a number of employees, six months after more than 100 people were laid off in April. Deadline reported that a number of Vice News shows would not be renewed, meaning some employees would lose their jobs.Vice, once a titan of the media industry, filed for bankruptcy in May, and was acquired by a consortium of organizations following an auction.In October, the Washington Post announced plans to cut 240 jobs through a voluntary redundancy scheme, while earlier this year the Los Angeles Times said it would lay off 10% of its newsroom staff.The Jezebel closure brings an end to 16 years of publishing for the organization. It was launched in 2007 by Anna Holmes and Gawker Media – the online media company and blog whose flagship Gawker.com website shut down in 2016 after being financially crippled by a lawsuit filed by Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the memo to Jezebel staff, the Daily Beast reported, Spanfeller praised journalists’ coverage of reproductive rights in the wake of the supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade.Spanfeller added that he had not “given up” on Jezebel, the Daily Beast said, despite G/O Media’s decision to shut it down.“Media is nothing if not resilient. So are its practitioners,” Spanfeller wrote to staff. “I will keep you apprised if circumstances change.”News of the site’s closure sent shockwaves through social media, with many former staffers and readers offering eulogies and notes about the site’s legacy.“I am not exaggerating when I say [Jezebel] is the reason why I became a journalist. Reading it completely changed my perspective on so many things: on abortion, on sex, on how I navigated the world as a woman in general. I owe it a huge debt. Lots of us do,” wrote the Rolling Stone reporter EJ Dickson on X.Gita Jackson, a former staffer at the G/O Media site Kotaku, wrote: “All my love to the staff laid off today at G/O Media, especially the staff of Jezebel. That site helped me understand how to be not just a feminist, but craft a coherent ideology, and being able to work alongside all the many wonderful people who worked there was a dream.”Laura Bassett, Jezebel’s most recent editor-in-chief, who departed the site earlier this fall, implored people on X to hire the Jezebel staffers who were let go on Thursday: “My heart is with the entire Jez staff who just got laid off, including incredible abortion reporters at a time when the beat couldn’t be more relevant to national politics. Please hire them.”Bassett told the Guardian that it was “ironic that the forces that necessitated the founding of Jezebel in the first place are the same ones that put the nail in its coffin – especially at a time when the site’s urgent coverage of abortion rights is more relevant than ever.“I mourn the loss of the outlet that inspired me to become a journalist in the first place and that I proudly led for two years,” she continued. “The work Jezebel writers have always done and continue to do, and the unflinching voice they bring to feminist media, are vital and irreplaceable.”
    Jenna Amatulli contributed reporting; she is a former deputy editor at Jezebel More