Katie Zacharia faces mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam

Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary says it is “unknown” how much she will engage with the press, amid mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam.

In a brief interview with the Guardian, Katie Zacharia detailed the whirlwind sprint to replace her predecessor Karoline Leavitt as the US president’s chief spokesperson.

• Former QB says he is looking ‘for next landing spot’

• Aikman and Buck said to have argued over contracts

Longtime Monday Night Football announcer Troy Aikman said he is looking for his “next landing spot” with ⁠his ESPN contract set to expire after February’s Super Bowl.

“I’ll broadcast through this season, and I’ll be ⁠a free agent ⁠at ​the end of the year and kind of see what happens,” Aikman said in a radio interview ⁠with KTCK of Dallas on Thursday morning.

The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different script

For the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”

In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

District court judge Timothy Kelly was ruling after Trump administration blocked access to three outlets last month

A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to continue allowing journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to access the building as the media coalition’s lawsuit against the Trump administration plays out.

Timothy Kelly, a district court judge, had on 24 September granted a 14-day reprieve for the news organizations, which six days earlier had been banned by the president in an extraordinary move from entering the White House grounds “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”.

• Former QB fought with 69-year-old last October

• Fox Sports parted ways with Sanchez over incident

• Sanchez was charged over Indianapolis confrontation

Former NFL quarterback and Fox Sports analyst Mark Sanchez has reached an agreement in principle with the truck driver who stabbed him during an altercation last October, according to the Athletic.

Sanchez was stabbed and pepper sprayed by Perry Tole, who was 69 at the time, during the incident in Indianapolis, where the former New York Jets star was due to cover an NFL game between the Colts and Las Vegas Raiders. Prosecutors said Tole used pepper spray and a knife to defend himself ​after Sanchez attempted to enter ‌his truck during an argument over a parking spot.

Amid worries about children’s relationship to tech, the solution is often spending more time talking openly with each other

We have become obsessed with the idea that screens are destroying human connection.

The evidence seems to be everywhere. Each week headlines warn of teenagers addicted to phones, a loneliness epidemic and the dangers of AI. The release of The Social Reckoning leads us to ask, “How bad were those guys at Meta?” and then ultimately wonder, “How bad am I if I still use Instagram?” In our day-to-day, we observe workers eating lunch alone while scrolling and friends choosing online games over offline gatherings.

Quite a few parents aren’t convinced social media and AI are safe, and have been adapting accordingly

When it comes to their kids, many parents don’t trust tech companies any more.

Social media companies have spent the better part of the last decade arguing that their platforms are safe for teens, but quite a few parents aren’t convinced. They, along with a growing number of regulators, have increasingly accused companies like Meta of designing products that are addictive to younger users.

Investigation launched after five broadcasters last month ceased presidential coverage after CNN, MS Now and Politico were barred from White House

The US Department of Justice is investigating whether the decision of the White House television press pool to halt coverage of the US president, Donald Trump, last month violated antitrust law, an agency spokesperson said Saturday.

A spokesperson for the department said group boycotts among business competitors might violate US law. “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws,” they said.

Skits and parodies making fun of the trillion-dollar industry have taken over social media, racking up millions of views

Johnny Hilbrant Partridge kept getting stuck next to the same kind of finance guy at weddings – the one bragging about his family’s full-time nanny and lavish vacations while name-dropping elite club memberships and private schools.

To Partridge, a former fitness instructor, their shameless knack for self-promotion felt ripe for comedy. Using a filter that puts an exaggerated sneer on his face, Partridge donned a puffer vest and created “The PE Guy”, a caricature of the men who work in the private equity industry.

Lawyer for CNN, MS Now and Politico says Trump admitted he banned networks from White House over their coverage

Donald Trump continues to be the strongest witness for the media companies arguing that they were unfairly barred from the White House at his direction, a lawyer representing CNN, MS Now and Politico told a federal judge on Thursday afternoon.

The media coalition was in court asking the judge to extend the temporary restraining order (TRO) he issued on 24 September requiring the White House to lift the ban for 14 days. That temporary reprieve was scheduled to expire on Thursday, but district court judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said he would extend it until Tuesday and that he would probably rule on a motion for a preliminary injunction by that day. That means the White House will be forced to allow journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to continue accessing the building until at least Tuesday.

Ads promoting the president have cost more than $12m and his Super Pac has refused to reimburse taxpayers

• Sign up to The Stakes 2026: your weekly guide to the US midterms

The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration in federal court on Wednesday, asking a judge in Washington DC to stop the president from using taxpayer funds to air a series of ads promoting himself, arguing that the ads are illegal government-sponsored propaganda.

The ads promoting Donald Trump, including one recycled from his 2024 presidential campaign, have cost taxpayers more than $12m so far, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact.

Lawyers tell judge ABC being unfairly targeted as US regulator seeks review of network’s local TV station licenses

Lawyers for Disney accused the Trump administration of “blatant violations of the US constitution” and censorship on Tuesday in the first court hearing over the Federal Communications Commission’s early review of the media giant’s eight local television station licenses.

District judge Loren AliKhan seemed unswayed by government arguments that the order to force Disney’s ABC to apply years early to renew local television station licenses was tied to an investigation into parent company Disney’s hiring practices.

Youngest press secretary in White House history left earlier this year after the birth of her second child

Karoline Leavitt, who stepped down as White House press secretary in August, is joining her former boss’s favorite network, Fox News, as an on-air contributor, the channel announced on Monday.

Considering that two of her predecessors from Donald Trump’s first administration, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany, had also joined Fox after leaving office, Leavitt was seen as a logical fit for Fox, on which she will begin providing commentary on 1 November.

Beni Rae Harmony, 24, has been ‘a trusted voice for the Maga movement’ as a correspondent, White House says

The White House has defended a newly hired press aide who posed for a holiday photograph in 2021 wearing a “Fuck Joe Biden” T-shirt and holding a rifle.

Beni Rae Harmony, the new assistant White House press secretary, announced on Friday that she was going to work for Donald Trump just days after covering him as a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a partisan rightwing outlet originally created as a video podcast platform for the US president’s former adviser Steve Bannon.

A funny thing happened on the day OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its video generation app: Iran went all in on synthetic propaganda and very quickly started winning the global meme war. The timing is a coincidence, no doubt, but it is the kind of coincidence that illuminates. 

Watching the explosive virality of the clips offers a powerful lesson in asymmetric media operations. They deploy cultural sophistication, an understanding of online communities and the enormously powerful creation tools made available by American tech companies, tools that give everyone on the internet access to a personal reality distortion field — drones, but for your feed.

On Wednesday, as Donald Trump was trying desperately to talk down the oil markets with hints of a deal, a stream of videos, carefully calibrated for U.S., regional and third country audiences rolled out on X via embassy accounts, Russia Today, and disaffected Maga influencers. The clips, by broad social media consensus, are good. Some lean heavily on the extremely online grammar of the U.S. right. Some remix Hollywood characters and likenesses in exactly the way that OpenAI’s now nixed billion-dollar deal with Disney was supposed to sanction. Others lean more heavily into Islamic iconography, featuring Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as worshippers of Baal, the foreign demon god who figures in both the Quran and the Hebrew Bible. The Lego movie is an especially rich resource, but so are TikTok formats, and the kind of idealized AI figures beloved of Trump administration meme makers. You can watch a few of them here.

Notably, faked war footage is far from the dominant format. All of these clips foreground and celebrate their own artificiality: some are sentimental, some triumphal, many are full of the gleeful adolescent wit of gamers on discord forums. 

Researchers have long been warning that generative tools will undercut the authority of visual evidence, compounding and accelerating the damage created by slower, cruder forms of fakery: photoshop, selective editing, even gaming clips passed off as combat footage. Of course, we are already there, and have been for a while. Russia has been the paramount master of this game, in Ukraine and in its ongoing influence operations around the world. But others have learned quickly. Last year, when India and Pakistan were engaged in a brief aerial battle, social media bullshit overwhelmed and compromised traditional coverage. More recently, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza was accompanied by a sustained and comprehensive blizzard of visually compelling misinformation, propaganda, and official lies. 

That continues. On March 28, Israel killed three journalists in a targeted strike in Southern Lebanon, claiming without evidence that one of them, Ali Shoaib, was a member of Hezbollah’s Radwan forces. They later distributed a photograph of him in military fatigues to reinforce the point, but explained to Fox news that in fact, they’d had to photoshop the uniform in because no such picture existed.

Meanwhile, in the Trump administration’s domestic war on immigrants and political opponents, we’ve seen a complete resetting of norms around the tone of official communication and any expectation that it is rooted in fact. Nowhere was that more evident than in the altered footage posted by the White House of the arrest of the prominent Minneapolis activist Nekima Levy Armstrong in January. In the video, shared by the official White House handle, a handcuffed Levy Armstrong is sobbing, her skin visibly darkened. In fact, she had faced arrest calmly. 

Questioned by reporters about this blatant falsification, deputy White House communications director Kaelan Dorr responded: "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” Collapsing the distinction between a meme and the factual record with the aid of AI is the final step in this administration's insistence that its preferred narrative simply is reality.

The problem for the White House and its allies is that their choices in tech policy, official communication, and press freedom level the playing field for information war in ways that Tehran’s media strategists understand and they, for all their immersion in online worlds, do not.

Iranian propagandists know that the currency of visual information online has already been completely debased. They’ve dealt with it plenty, and no doubt practiced it themselves in regional battles for narrative dominance. Their insight is that as cheap and easy as it is to create and distribute fakes, returns on the effort of mobilizing what disinformation researchers call “coordinated inauthentic action” are diminishing. They still do it, but it isn’t where the action is.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have, in a very practical sense, wrought this moment in concert with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, JD Vance and Donald Trump. At their urging, the U.S. has surrendered unrivaled dominance in scarce, expensive information and cultural assets in exchange for a political economy of media that widely distributes cheap, abundant ones.

Tech leaders and conservative politicians have worked consistently for a decade to deprecate the trustworthiness of American journalism and constrain its liberties. They have smeared its practitioners as “enemies of the people”; they have captured the commanding heights of the broadcast and culture industries through crony deals, and they have launched an assault on both press freedom and standards, two assets that once made American news outlets the envy of the world. Needless to say, the economic collapse of traditional media companies fostered by Google’s  and Meta’s advertising duopoly only served to deepen the damage. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post shuttered its Middle East bureaus just days before the war began.

Meanwhile, lying from agency podiums and the Oval Office, makes Karoline Leavitt barely distinguishable from Baghdad Bob, Iraq’s minister of information in 2003 whose surreal, truth-dodging press conferences during the U.S.-led invasion made him a global laughingstock. And the DOGEing of both the nominally independent Voice of America, as well as the state department’s Global Engagement Center leaves the administration with neither broadcast nor digital counter-propaganda assets. 

When no one can be trusted with the actual truth, we are left with the AI equivalent of 19th-century editorial cartoons, produced at industrial scale and distributed globally. America has little advantage in that war, particularly when it is at a moral, political and legal nadir.

If anything, Iran, which combines repression with an enormously rich literary culture, film scene and advertising market brings serious capabilities to the fight.

Of course, the ebbing of information power was already under way during the first Trump administration, and during Joe Biden’s term in ways that are indissociable from broader democratic decline. The “trust and safety” architecture adopted by big platform companies was designed — implicitly if not always visibly — to conserve information authority, and ensure that it functioned in broadly pro-democratic ways. 

After the disastrous failures of the Rohingya genocide — which rights groups and UN investigators blamed Facebook for facilitating — and the fears surrounding the manipulation of the U.S. electoral environment in 2016, there was a clear threat to the commercial and political health of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Tech companies, governments, researchers and human rights experts devised rules and norms for content moderation grounded in existing standards, tools for detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior, and a framework for crisis response.

The community of practitioners and institutions that sprung up to combat the flesh-eating virus attacking the body politic were working with bandaids in the battlefield hospital even before Covid, a coordinated attack from the right, and the second Trump victory hit them, but they succeeded in imposing some limits. That project now lies in ruins. 

The Stanford Information Laboratory has been shut down. Trust and Safety teams at Meta and X have been disbanded. The national security arm of the project, centered around the State Department is gone, and private funding for countering misinformation has largely dried up.

Where are the hyperscalers, the AI titans, whose tools are being so effectively deployed, in all of this?

The trust and safety people who do work at OpenAI are dutifully putting out reports every few months. They are detailing how they foiled efforts to use ChatGPT for a Chinese influence campaign aimed at Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, and exposing a Russian content mill feeding African newspapers. “Pro-tip for governments,” wrote Head of National Security policy Sasha Baker on LinkedIn of the February report. “Please don’t use our products to spread lies online.”

Governments, in the world of Sam Altman’s “democratic AI” do not include that of the United States. OpenAI has not mentioned a single U.S. ally — let alone the administration itself — in these reports. 

OpenAI has hired multiple ex-Clinton, Obama and Biden officials, and in their work a weird, attenuated piece of the old national security approach to information integrity lives on, alongside the project of selling products to the Pentagon. The company’s leaders clearly treat these issues  as a complement to messaging around Western AI, or a picayune adjunct to the bigger questions of AI risk, which are handled way up in the organizational stratosphere, as they are at Anthropic.

Perhaps the larger lesson is that you can’t really shut down Sora, or put AI-generated video back in its box. If you choose to prosecute an illegal war of choice after surrendering the hard-won high ground of a robust, democratic information environment, high tech weaponry will not offset the deficit. On the contrary, you will have compounded the risk of both tactical failure and strategic geopolitical defeat. When that happens, and in some ways it already has, those who made this war, and their enablers in Silicon Valley, will have only themselves to blame.

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The post Memeification and digital slop: AI and the fog of war appeared first on Coda Story.

Armenian authorities should "seriously" consider banning the broadcast of Russian television channels in Armenia, Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan said on July 1, citing concerns over interference and deteriorating ties.

"We must very seriously discuss the suspension of the Russian television channel broadcast in the territory of Armenia," Simonyan told reporters, according to Armenpress. He criticized recent content aired by Russian state broadcasters, which the Armenian government has denounced as harmful to bilateral ties.

The remarks come as Armenia continues to pivot away from Moscow's sphere of influence and seeks to bolster ties with the West.

Simonyan suggested that individuals connected to Armenian-Russian oligarch Samvel Karapetyan may be financing efforts to meddle in Armenia's internal matters.

"If there are channels that allow themselves to interfere in Armenia’s domestic affairs, perhaps we ought to respond likewise, by at least banning their entry into the homes of our society," he said.

Tensions between Armenia and Russia have mounted since Moscow's failure to intervene during Azerbaijan's military operation in Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, which resulted in the mass displacement of ethnic Armenians.

In April, Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturyan signed a law initiating the country's formal accession process to the European Union.

Though symbolic, the legislation marks a significant political shift, embedding European integration into Armenian law. The bill, passed by parliament in March, was backed by 64 lawmakers and opposed by seven.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said that EU membership would require a referendum, while the Kremlin warned that joining both the EU and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is "simply impossible." The EAEU, established in 2015, includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan.

Why Norway is investing billions in Ukraine’s victory

The Kyiv Independent’s Oleksiy Sorokin sat down with Eivind Vad Petersson, state secretary to the Norwegian foreign minister and co-chair of the joint Norwegian-Ukrainian Working Group on Nuclear Safety and Security.

The Kyiv IndependentOleksiy Sorokin