We're In the Middle of An Info War

American media in crisis. Plus, the end of Skype

Cartoon by Nick Anderson. Scroll down for the Digimentors Tech Tip from Robert S. Anthony. Want to get your message to our 15K subscribers on LinkedIn and Substack (with a 40% open rate)? Here’s our sponsorship kit. Email me: sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

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THERE WAS ONLY ONE WINNER of the visit by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the White House on Friday. It wasn’t President Donald Trump or Vice President JD Vance or even Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend who asked why Zelenskyy didn’t wear a suit to the Oval Office (everyone knows Zelenskyy’s public pledge to not wear a suit until the war is over). The winner was Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But this isn’t a newsletter about that debacle, which has been analyzed nonstop for five days now (to hear my thoughts, watch a panel discussion hosted by MojoStory’s Barkha Dutt, starting at 17:48).

Instead, this is a newsletter to take stock of the state of the media in the U.S. Sure, things have been bad since Trump first ran for office, treating the press as his nemesis and “the enemy of the people.” But things have never been so bleak for the American press and beyond in modern times.

The Trump Administration is ramping up its already formidable attack on credible information by taking control of the media outlets that can cover the White House on-location, building on the disinformation and misinformation forced on the world by Elon Musk’s X.

Trump and his MAGA loyalists are not alone in this information offensive.

Here’s a truncated list of extremely concerning recent events:

• The Associated Press cannot cover the White House because it refuses to change its style guide—used in multiple countries across multiple industries—to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. The White House now controls access to the White House press pool. [AP][HuffPo][NYT explainer]

• Jeff Bezos declared The Washington Post opinion section open for business, as long as you write about “individual liberty” and “free markets.” Bezos famously spiked The Post Editorial Board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in October. We just recently found out that Bezos spoke with Trump as early as July, encouraging him to pick a different running mate. All of this after giving Melania Trump $40 million for an Amazon Prime biography—to be produced by Melania.

• LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong also spiked his paper’s Harris endorsement, and the editorial board all resigned. He wants to introduce an AI-powered “bias meter” on the site, and so much more.

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has launched an investigation into PBS and NPR because he is “[C]oncerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials.” [NPR]

• Trump is demanding $20 billion from CBS because, he claims, a 60 Minutes interview with Harris was “manipulated” to be more favorable for her in the run up to election day 2024. [Brookings]

• ABC News and anchor George Stephanopolous reached a $15 million settlement with Trump, who sued the network for libel. [Politico]

None of this is even remotely normal or good. Regulatory bullying, overtly political lines of attack, and personal lawsuits are the formal side of the playbook. But Trump’s real power comes from having major news outlets owned by wealthy industrialists with billions of dollars under threat from a combination of Trump’s utter unpredictability and his underlings’ vendettas.

There is no shortage of terms of art for what’s happening—constitutional crisis, coup, etc.—but it looks more like looting to me. Trump is an empty vessel for all of this, just as he has been for the entirety of his active political career. He wants a cut, explicit adoration, or, at the very least, deference.

This second term is different.

He wants litigation against his companies to go away. He wants his once-and-future golf buddies to get richer. Governing is the personal tax Trump has to pay—he certainly sees his public duty as a burden, especially this time around—to let the people who want to be in, or in this case tear down, government do just that. And he has a willing partner in Musk who, I’m now convinced, wants to not only tear down the regulatory state, he wants to scrape as much data as he can about every American and every project the American government has ever done.

Because we have a free press, we know a great deal about the haphazard, often-illegal dismantling of the U.S. government and its core functions by an opaque group of Musk’s choosing.

Here is a truncated list of extremely concerning things that we know because enterprising journalists were able to do their jobs:

• A DOGE worker was “mistakenly” given read and write access to a sensitive federal payments database. [Politico]

• ICE Assistant Chief Counsel James Rodden was discovered to be behind a white supremacist Twitter account. [Texas Observer]

• DOGE posted classified information on its website [HuffPost]

• Over the last 20 years, Musk’s companies “have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits.” [The Washington Post]

• Musk and his team of unaccountable, anonymous helpers fanned out in search of access to the government’s most sensitive systems as Trump was being sworn in. [The Wall St. Journal][The New York Times]

Wired has been in a class of its own over these chaotic weeks. Decades of reporting on the tech sector has the outlet uniquely placed to cover the intersection of Silicon Valley’s malcontent techo-utopians and the levers of state power (and data). To say Wired has proven up to the challenge would be an understatement.

• DOGE staffers who run trailer parks and an AI real estate startup are rifling through stores of personal housing data at HUD.

• Musk is trying to build software that will make firing federal employees even more robotic than it is now.

• DOGE technologists Edward Coristine—the 19-year-old known online as “Big Balls”—and Kyle Schutt are now listed as staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

• SpaceX engineers are already working at the FAA.

Because so many journalists have been laid off, we are seeing many new news outlets. Here’s a starter list of new projects to check out: 404 Media has been indispensable; Defector is perhaps the best mix of sports, absurdity, and astute political commentary on the internet; Popular Information is turning into the site of record for reporting on corporate malfeasance and political corruption. Marisa Kabas has been breaking news about DOGE’s offenses almost daily on her Bluesky feed and Handbasket website. [What are your suggestions? Tell me in the comments or email me.]

Outlets like these will never have the reach of The New York Times, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that all news is local. Maybe not geographically local, but proximity matters. It needs to be real, whatever it is. A neighbor losing their job with the Forest Service, a niece unable to get Medicaid-sponsored medication, a local farmer losing thousands of dollars because of canceled federal contracts, a friend’s grandmother scammed out of thousands on Facebook—immediacy changes minds. Information is no different. The information diet of at least half the country paints a picture that simply isn’t reality. At some point, this will all become very immediate.

You know what you have to do to help in this awful moment: Subscribe to small, trustworthy, independent media outlets. Put these facts in front of people who ordinarily won’t see them. Fact-check your uncles in family WhatsApp groups.

The government is the one place where we have a say, it’s the last bastion of public power, and it’s all being carved up to the best-connected bidder. Government need not be the enemy here, it can’t be. Together with our wallets, it’s the last place where we can demand accountability and actually receive it.

We need a press that will do the digging and show was what is happening in our name. We certainly are not going to get it from Musk and his fellow American oligarchs.

In December, I had made the case for funding new media outlets. Am working on some ideas and looking for collaborators and partners. Ping me: sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com.

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TECH TIP | Goodbye Skype: Videoconferencing OG Set to Log Off May 5

By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Bob Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob.

Long before we “zoomed,” “facetimed” or “huddled,” we “skyped,” the verb evolving from Skype, the most popular videotelephony platform of the early 2000s. Unfortunately for its millions of users, the days of skyping are coming to an end as Microsoft plans to pull the plug on the iconic platform.

Last week Microsoft said it would shut down Skype, which it acquired in 2011 for $8.5 billion, on May 5, citing that it wanted to press forward with newer technologies. Jeff Teper, Microsoft president for collaborative apps and platforms, wrote in a blog post that “…we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.”

From its humble beginnings in 2003, Skype was an easy-to-use calling and messaging solution which circumvented the phone network and its high fees by using VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) technology via the fledgling Internet. While those of a certain age can attest to the crackling, unreliable audio of early version Skype calls, audio quality improved as Skype’s software evolved and broadband data speeds increased.

At launch, Skype had a no-frills, clean interface that was easy to navigate. If you knew the Skype ID of a fellow user, it was easy enough to initiate a free phone call, trade text messages or make a low-cost call to a landline phone. Skype quicky became popular for no- or low-cost international calls and the addition of video calling in 2006 only widened its appeal.

After its acquisition by Microsoft in 2011, however, Skype began to lose its simplicity and, some may argue, its direction and focus, as it tried to evolve into an interactive and entertaining social networking platform with support for animated GIFs and emojis.

Skype was famously the videoconferencing platform of choice in TV’s “Big Bang Theory” sitcom. Its familiar boop-beep ringtone often presaged amorous—or combative—video calls between Sheldon and Amy or tense, international videochats between Raj and his wealthy parents in India.

A dark moment for Skype came during the televised trial of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator who shot and killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012—a case which sparked nationwide protests. An attempt to receive video testimony via Skype was repeatedly interrupted by pranksters when an attorney’s Skype ID was exposed on the TV screen. The attorney had neglected to use Skype’s “do not disturb” feature to fend off incoming calls.

By the time the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic arrived, igniting a sudden demand for videoconferencing, Skype still had millions of avid users but had already drifted into also-ran status as platforms such as Zoom, Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s Meet proved more popular.

Until May 5 Skype users can switch to the free version of Microsoft Teams by signing into Teams with their Skype credentials—all chats and contact data will automatically be imported. Users can also download their call history, contacts and chats from Skype if they don’t want to transition to Teams.

Like CompuServe, which yielded its online service crown to AOL, which then yielded to the Internet and the Web, Skype is yielding to newer platforms that can do its job and then some. Still, for the millions of users who keep the app in their smartphones and installed in their PCs, Skype will certainly be missed when it goes offline for good.

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