The White House correspondents’ dinner is still on. Appetites vary. | “Why waste your time? Why be around powerful people if the only way they’re using their power is to lie to the public and to demean your profession and to undermine the amendment in the Constitution that your profession is built around?” — Ron Fournier, a former Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, who said reporters would be better off spending the night calling sources and filing Freedom of Information Act requests.

Chinese nationalists praise Trump’s cuts to Voice of America | “The Chinese government has argued that the dominance of American soft power, in the form of these news sources, has undermined China’s security at home and its economic and geopolitical interests abroad…’Against this backdrop, the actions of the Trump administration are cause for enthusiastic celebration,’ said David Bandurski, the director of the China Media Project, a research organization. ‘In a matter of weeks, Trump seems to have slit the throat of American influence.’”

Defying Trump, several U.S.-funded international broadcasters are still reporting the news | Leaders of the broadcasters – including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks – have instructed their organizations to continue broadcasting because they believe last weekend’s terminations were unlawful, CNN reported.

How Trump and Musk built their own reality | “The break with reality has been a long time coming — QAnon and Pizzagate preceded it — but in the pre-pandemic era, it was largely the fringes of the conservative movement. Now it is the main event…The spectacle works because pseudo-events are more exciting than reality; a normal budgetary meeting is a snooze, and normal diplomatic relations rely on closed doors, occurring out of sight of the average voter. Reality TV doesn’t work on this level — and keeping the viewers hooked is the main source of Trump’s and Musk’s respective power. The question is how long the spell will last.”

AI search is starting to kill Google’s “ten blue links” | “Users who are referred from AI search compared to traditional referrals (like a standard Google or Bing search) tend to stay on the site 8 percent longer, browse through different pages 12 percent more, and are 23 percent less likely to just visit the link and leave (or “bounce”). This could suggest that AI tools are directing people to more relevant pages than traditional search.”

ABC News is pivoting its podcast strategy to true crime | “‘True crime resonates, and the audience just seems to have an appetite that knows no ends,’ says Liz Alesse, VP of audio for ABC News, in an interview.”

The growing battle over how to define a “podcast” | “In the past, podcast deals essentially revolved around controlling who could sell ads on shows. Lately, that’s been rapidly changing. If a ‘podcast’ shows up on Netflix, or stages a live event or gives rise to a merch shop, who sells the sponsorships on those various products and events? And who shares in the resulting profits? Even just selling a show as a video versus an audio program could be complicated.”

In 1977, the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times was murdered in Cairo. The newspaper now says he was a spy. | “We are now confident that: [David] Holden was no mere foreign correspondent but a spy. He had been recruited by the KGB before he became a journalist. He later became involved with the CIA. There is a strong possibility Holden was a double agent. This is the likeliest reason he was murdered.”

AI slop is a brute force attack on the algorithms that control reality | “The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended ‘audience’ of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings…the very nature of AI slop means it evolves faster than human-created content can, so any time an algorithm is tweaked, the AI spammers can find the weakness in that algorithm and exploit it.”

Trump praises Jeff Bezos for his changes at The Washington Post: “He’s trying to do a real job” | “Trump said he doesn’t think the media’s overall treatment of him has changed so far in his second term, but he is seeing a shift among tech giants.”