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briancreech.bsky.social
Brian Creech
@briancreech.bsky.social
2.1K followers 1.1K following 73 posts
Professor and Chair, Lehigh University Department of Journalism and Communication
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · Feb 17
New pub: In this piece, Michael Buozis and I consider statements made by editors, publishers, and owners—what we call "elite metajournalistic discourse"—and how these voices responded to challenge and change.

Largely, these voices called for "independence."

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
“The View from the Top”: Elite Metajournalistic Responses to Normative Critiques of American Journalism
Recent debates about journalism’s abiding values have often centered the role journalistic objectivity has played in sustaining various inequities in American society. Amid these challenges, newsro...
www.tandfonline.com
briancreech.bsky.social
In hindsight, given the fetish for prediction that quant social science has always had, this seems like where the turn to data was inevitably going to go: specious and dubious prediction to feed the content mill; diluted social science to anticipate the narrative flow
status.news Status @status.news · 2d
In search of new revenue streams, newsrooms are embracing prediction market companies as partners—an ethically dubious move that launders speculation as serious data journalism.

More in @status.news: www.status.news/p/polymarket...
Legacy Media’s Risky Bet
In search of new revenue streams, newsrooms are embracing prediction market companies as partners—an ethically dubious move that launders speculation as serious data journalism.
www.status.news
January 24, 2026 at 4:24 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
status.news
In search of new revenue streams, newsrooms are embracing prediction market companies as partners—an ethically dubious move that launders speculation as serious data journalism.

More in @status.news: www.status.news/p/polymarket...
Legacy Media’s Risky Bet
In search of new revenue streams, newsrooms are embracing prediction market companies as partners—an ethically dubious move that launders speculation as serious data journalism.
www.status.news
January 24, 2026 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
joshshepperd.bsky.social
I was interviewed about what’s next for public media after the closure of the CPB. This is a digestible 10-minute segment on the political and ideological winds that are currently confronting democratic voice. kgnu.org/what-does-th...
What does the end of the CPB mean for local news?
kgnu.org
January 22, 2026 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
lorak.bsky.social
Minnesota Star Tribune has been doing incredible, and likely traumatizing, reporting on ICE in their home town. So have many local and independent outlets and even some MSM. But I really wish they didn't have to...
startribune.com Minnesota Star Tribune @startribune.com · 3d
Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026
January 23, 2026 at 12:30 AM
Reposted by Brian Creech
damon.kiesow.net
That journalism has let politics force it into an epistemological corner is an indictment of corporate-owned media.
January 20, 2026 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
jamellebouie.net
very good piece which confirms that weiss is both exceptionally arrogant and totally out of her depth. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News
The network’s new editor-in-chief has championed a press free from élite bias, while aligning herself with a billionaire class more willing than ever to indulge Donald Trump.
www.newyorker.com
January 19, 2026 at 3:26 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
techpolicypress.bsky.social
Grok stands as the clearest example of an AI that is both ideologically aligned and operationally embedded in a social media platform, says Matthew Kirschenbaum. Its mechanisms should be taken apart under bright lights, in much the same way people learn how to defuse a bomb, he argues.
Grok is an Epistemic Weapon
Elon Musk's Grok claims to be truth-seeking while shaping discourse and amplifying ideology, argues Matthew Kirschenbaum.
buff.ly
January 18, 2026 at 2:51 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
volts.wtf
The basic problem is that high-quality journalism is not a viable market product. If it is not protected from market forces, it will inevitably degenerate into the ragetainment that dominates these days.

Ragetainment is what, measured on a pure impulsive will-they-click-it basis, the public wants.
January 16, 2026 at 12:44 AM
Reposted by Brian Creech
joshshepperd.bsky.social
I curate the history series at public media's trade journal Current. We're looking for pieces on the history of NPR, PBS and its affiliates, with some space to imagine public media's future. We accept academic articles repurposed for wide readership. Plus, we pay. Please circulate!
Rewind: The Roots of Public Media
This series features scholars of media history looking back at both familiar and lesser-known chapters in public broadcasting’s evolution. “Rewind” is presented in partnership with the Radio Preservat...
current.org
January 11, 2026 at 9:42 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
emilybell.bsky.social
I’ve written for a long time (almost 2 decades) that platform aims are at odds with public interest journalism, and partnerships with them are inevitably compromised. In 2026 that relationship faces the ultimate test, which tech companies will likely fail

www.cjr.org/tow_center/b...
Are tech companies allies or threats to press freedom?
In 2026, this will be the question that matters most to journalists.
www.cjr.org
January 8, 2026 at 2:36 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
cwarzel.bsky.social
Not sure how to summarize this one. Wrote about the podcaster-occupied government invading for content, how the algorithmic internet is governed by the logic of reaction videos, and how it has contributed to a very nihilistic illiterate politics and culture of performance for imagined audiences
Everything Reacting to Everything, All at Once
Why the Trump administration is posting messages like “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE” after the attack on Venezuela
www.theatlantic.com
January 7, 2026 at 12:42 AM
Reposted by Brian Creech
micahloewinger.bsky.social
Props to the scholars and researchers who identified January 6 for what it was. @milleridriss.bsky.social said this to me in the July 2nd 2021 episode of @onthemedia.bsky.social
Cynthia Miller-Idriss: One of my biggest concerns is that we look at January 6 as the end of something. I think we should be more open to the possibility that it was a continuation or even a beginning of something.
January 6, 2026 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
jamellebouie.net
kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life
January 6, 2026 at 2:00 AM
Reposted by Brian Creech
joshshepperd.bsky.social
Sorry but yes we should still read Adorno. No one has to be an Adornian, or follow any specific author as a single authority. But we must continue reading the critical tradition during this time of conservative restoration.
January 5, 2026 at 12:48 AM
Reposted by Brian Creech
rebekahtromble.bsky.social
An excellent op-ed by @attorneynora.bsky.social laying out the Trump admin’s campaign of censorship.

In her full report (www.freepress.net/download/cho...), she chronicles ~200 instances of attempted censorship this year.

It’s incredibly important reading.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/o...
Opinion | I Counted Trump’s Censorship Attempts. Here’s What I Found.
www.nytimes.com
December 31, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
adamserwer.bsky.social
The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
Every society that has ever existed has had views that are mainstream and views that are fringe. The free-speech frauds who captured the discourse over the past decade understood this, but their true objection was that they did not unilaterally have the power to define which was which. For example, in a 2018 Times column, Weiss complained that “leftists” were engaged in a “concerted attempt to significantly redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” This was meant to sound sinister, menacing. In fact, this is politics. Every faction is always trying to “redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” In a free society, the government allows people to have those arguments. Such disputes are not a threat to free speech; they are free speech. When I say that CBS News’s Bari Weiss understood this, you needn’t take my word for it. In November, shortly after being given the reins to one of the oldest broadcast-news organizations in the country, Weiss used identical language to describe her own project: “I think it’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture,” Weiss said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a censorious, gatekeeping way.” What’s the difference between her “redrawing the lines” of acceptable speech and other people doing it? What makes one “censorious” and “gatekeeping” and the other not? Well, because she gets to decide. That’s what so much of the free-speech panic was ever about: making sure the right people were in charge of what you see, hear, and read. Notably, this has very little to do with reporting the news, which is supposed to be what CBS News does. But if the point of installing Weiss was to ensure that she would gatekeep on behalf of right-wing interests, that is precisely what she appears to be doing.
December 23, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
adamserwer.bsky.social
The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
The reason so many of yesterday’s free-speech champions transitioned so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors is that their definition of free speech never included the right of others to talk back. They were not defending a universal right to freedom of speech; they were defending a right to monologue. They could say what they want, and you could shut up and like it. The cynicism of the effort can be known by its fruits: an administration that issues executive orders “protecting” free speech while engaging in the most sweeping campaign of state censorship since the Red Scare.
December 23, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Now there is an effective metaphor.
nkalamb.bsky.social Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · Dec 9
"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular.

pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (permalink) Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June:
December 20, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
damon.kiesow.net
Thinking about some of the reassuring myths journalism tells itself, and how they shield us from confronting intractable problems.

"Things would be better if only readers would act correctly."

kiesow.net/lies-we-tell...
Lies we tell ourselves
A fairly common discussion in journalism/adjacent circles on social media is: Media critic: With all of the disinformation and misinformation online, the news industry needs to figure out how to bett...
kiesow.net
December 19, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
chrisgeidner.bsky.social
Everyone is understandably sharing the Miller quote, but I found this response from photographer Christopher Anderson to be notable, too.
O'Neill: Some people are reading this as being an attack or being petty. Anderson: If presenting what I saw, unfiltered, is an attack, then what would you call it had I chosen to edit it and hide things about it, and make them look better than they look?
December 18, 2025 at 12:46 AM
Reposted by Brian Creech
donmoyn.bsky.social
Specifically, lawyers who look at the plain meaning of laws and constitution as something to be gamed if they are clever enough, like looking for the loophole to help their rich client beat the murder charge.

Dershowitz would sell out the constitution for a dozen pierogis.
December 18, 2025 at 2:09 AM
Reposted by Brian Creech
mattjord.bsky.social
My take on the resurgence of media oligopolies bidding to be the belle of Trump's oligarch ballroom.

Whether Netflix or Paramount buys Warner Bros., entertainment oligopolies are back – bigger and more anticompetitive than ever theconversation.com/whether-netf...
Whether Netflix or Paramount buys Warner Bros., entertainment oligopolies are back – bigger and more anticompetitive than ever
Hollywood has seen this movie before.
theconversation.com
December 12, 2025 at 2:06 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
nehafge3403.bsky.social
Today marks six months since nearly 70% of staff at the National Endowment for the Humanities were fired without cause.

If you do nothing else today, please read and *share* this recent article outlining what this year, mostly without us, has looked like at #NEH.

archived: archive.is/LgVyh
Fired Scholars and Big Grants to Favored Projects: Inside Trump’s N.E.H.
www.nytimes.com
December 10, 2025 at 8:52 PM
Reposted by Brian Creech
adamserwer.bsky.social
America is a mafia state running a protection racket in the interest of the boss, not the people www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1... bsky.app/profile/john...
December 12, 2025 at 11:54 AM
Reposted by Brian Creech
bencollins.bsky.social
Hey all,

The Onion is accepting applicants for our writing, video and graphics fellowships.

Fellowships last six months, pay well, and provide full benefits.

You can apply at theonion.com/fellowship.
Fellowship
theonion.com
December 3, 2025 at 9:26 PM