Google News Plan to Create AI News Stories Stirs Alarm

Far less ambitious plan by conservatives brought far more msm outrage

Hypocrisy by the media will not surprise regular readers of this site. But sometimes you get an example so clear and incontrovertible that you operate under the delusion that pointing it out will trigger a flood of apologies from those who perpetrated the double standard. Don’t hold your breath.

A New York Times article this week was titled “Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles.” According to the Times, google pitched its great innovation to all of the important authorities in the noble skill of news gathering — Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the Times itself.

This is a controversial topic, riddled with potential problems about the ethics of presenting important information that hasn’t been vetted by humans. It should be considered and debated.

But it kind of already has. And the elites of the profession have already ruled that it’s inappropriate.

Brian Timpone is the founder of Journatic and LocalLabs.com and more than a thousand local news outlets. His goal is to produce local news sites that would fill the gap as hundreds of local papers shrank and closed their operations. There’s no doubt that Timpone brought to his mission a conservative point of view; he had been a tv reporter and the spokesman for Lee Daniels, the Republican minority leader in Illinois, Timpone’s home state. He’s highly associated with Dan Proft, a funny and effective conservative troublemaker who has adopted a sort of “Steve Bannon of Illinois” persona and dabbles in both politics and media. (Some would describe my own dalliances the same way, it’s worth noting.)

Timpone hasn’t hidden that his papers had a point of view. In my opinion, all papers have a point of view, and it’s only when that point of view is conservative that the hall monitors of the profession like NewsGuard raise a stink about it. But that’s a topic for another day.

As Timpone’s operations began to gather steam and pageviews much faster than expected, he rattled the establishment of the profession, who act as thought police and routinely question more forcefully any innovation that are made by conservatives, then by liberals.

In 2012, This American Life devoted a major segment, cleverly titled “Forgive us our Press Passes,” to exposing Timpone’s treachery. A pre-Serial Sarah Koenig questions the innovator’s methods and motives. Timpone explains that the death of local journalism has caused concern about the future of democracy and he sees his papers as filling a necessary void, both as a business opportunity and a chance to do some good. Oddly, Koenig’s main beef seems to be with Journatic covering the minutiae of town meetings from afar rather than via a reporter on the ground in nowheresville towns. She and Timpone have an intense debate about whether someone in Floosmoor, Illinois, has a better handle on the town’s budget than someone writing about it from the Philippines.

Examples Timpone gave in that interview and to me personally — he’s not really a friend, but he is someone who has provided helpful advice from time to time — make perfect sense. And they happen to be exactly what Google News is now touting as its big journalism savior 11 years later.

Timpone explained that during the salad days of local news, a paper like my hometown Northbrook Star in Illinois would have a guy who covers high school sports and a local real estate reporter who do nothing but spit out the house listings and recent sales. They may even have paid a human being to enter by hand the cafeteria menu for the schools each week.

This is all data. There was no real insight, expected or offered, just the data of the Glenbrook North Spartans beating New Trier in football 46-20 (I wish!) and Sloppy Joe being offered for lunch at Wood Oaks Junior High on Tuesday, and 4055 Micheline Ln. selling for $150,000 in summer 1977.

Timpone’s innovation was that all of this was data and did not require Mike Royko’s devastating typewriter or Roger Ebert’s peerless insight.

Rather than have a budget busting three journalists on staff with 2-1/2 of them committed to entering raw data each week, they offshore a lot of the data parts of it, freeing up the journalists to pursue only those stories that required actual human contact and insight. it makes perfect sense.

Sarah Koenig implied that something was fishy about it, and Timpone seemed to acknowledge that it wasn’t a great idea to be less than clear about who was actually writing the stories, including overseas writers who were using invented names. That’s never a good look, and the company that owns The Media Globe, Sea of Reeds Media, does not allow pseudonymous articles because of the high value it places on reader trust. Indeed, a follow-up story to the This American Life episode seems to gloat about one of Journatic’s investor’s conducting an investigation and newspapers ending their use of the company’s stories.

But here comes Google News, a source that AllSides rates as “leans left,” strongly to the left, pitching the same idea, mainly to progressive publications. We don’t yet know the interest level.

According to the Times, “Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.”

But we do know. The recipients of these pitches have even better reasons to fear questionable ethics than a paper like the Northbrook Star.

For one thing, Timpone mostly deployed these non-local creations to convey really boring and unimportant information. High school football scores, school lunch menus, home prices, stuff like that.

But for another thing, and this is where the hypocrisy is even more glaring, is that the big tearjerker here is supposed to be the tragedy of the death of journalism as a serious profession. How awful that news such as the score of the Glenbrook North football game is now being reported not by Carl Bernstein but in broken English by a Filipina who invented the name “Diane” for herself.

But here you’ve got the Washington Post and New York Times, which really do employ great journalists, entertaining a pitch that will inevitably replace unionized workers.

Where is This American Life’s expose on this tragedy? Well, the New York Times has already played this movie. Last week, the paper ended its vaunted sports section. Sports stories will now be provided by The Athletic, the standalone publication the times bought year last year for a reported $550 million.

The Times alleges that none of its great sports journalists will be fired, instead its 40 staffers will simply be moved to other desks. Maybe that’s true, But it ignores an important distinction. The Times staff is unionized, represented by the NewsGuild. The athletic is nonunion.

The Guild called it what it is: union busting.

“The company is claiming it has the right to subcontract to itself and have nonunion workers do union work without the same job protections, wages and other benefits we have fought so hard to secure. These claims are preposterous on their face and a brazen attempt at union-busting.”

So maybe that’s why we haven’t seen This American Life pursue the AI-ification efforts of establishment peers as aggressively as it went after Timpone. In 2020, The Times bought Serial Productions.