SHORT TAKES #15: IMPORTANT JOURNALISM FROM READER-SUPPORTED, NON-PROFIT OUTLETS

Here are summaries of three important stories that have gotten little attention in the mainstream media. These are all stories from or about reader-supported, non-profit journalism outlets. I encourage you to support their critically important work. It’s work the mainstream, for-profit, corporate media will never do, and often won’t even report on. This post summarizes stories from Mother Jones, Lighthouse Reports with The Guardian, and Common Dreams that range from 1) suing AI entities for using articles from Mother Jones and other sources without permission, compensation, or acknowledgement, 2) projecting the impact of Trump’s campaign promise to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and 3) investigating the pesticide industry’s attacks on its critics including the use of some U.S. government funding to do so.

STORY #1: Mother Jones, the progressive, investigative, policy-oriented magazine, is suing OpenAI and its biggest shareholder, Microsoft. OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools. It has used nearly 17,500 Mother Jones’s articles, and continues to use new ones, to inform and train ChatGPT. The articles are part of ChatGPT’s database of knowledge that it will spew out in response to queries. However, OpenAI has done so without permission or compensation, despite having used the articles to create an extremely valuable product and business. [1]

Furthermore, early versions of ChatGPT listed the sources of its data. It now provides no information on the sources or authors of the information it disgorges. On top of the copyright violation and plagiarism issues, users of ChatGPT have no idea where the information produced is coming from and, therefore, whether the source is trustworthy. They don’t even have the information they would need to research the source to determine its trustworthiness.

Mother Jones’s suit is a David versus Goliath battle, as its annual budget is less than 1% of OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder Sam Altman’s net worth. However, the New York Times and eight other newspapers are also suing OpenAI and Microsoft due to use of millions of their articles without permission or compensation.

This is an existential threat to Mother Jones and other journalism because soon AI tools like ChatGPT will digest the news and other information for much of the public. Many people won’t read articles in newspapers or magazines either in-print or on websites. However, AI tools and companies don’t investigate, dig up or verify stories, or even fact check, they just regurgitate what they have processed from unacknowledged sources. The companies that do all the hard work of investigating and reporting will become invisible and their primary sources of revenue will disappear. This will be a repeat of the Internet’s threat to newspapers on steroids.

STORY #2: The most recent issue of Mother Jones magazine (Sept.-Oct. 2024) took a deep dive into what would happen if Trump were elected president and carried through on his promise to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Economists estimate that this would lead to a dire shortage of low-wage workers, triggering a recession while also igniting inflation. [2]

It’s estimated that state and local governments would lose roughly $37 billion in tax revenue, including California losing $8.5 billion and Texas about $5 billion. The federal government would lose approximately $59 billion in taxes, including almost $26 billion in Social Security taxes paid by undocumented immigrants even though they aren’t eligible to receive Social Security benefits.

Half of farm workers would disappear and the prices of hand-picked crops would increase by an estimated 21%. Milk might well double in price. One-quarter of the workers in meat processing facilities are undocumented so meat prices would likely skyrocket. The construction industry relies on about 1.4 million undocumented workers, about 1/5th of its workforce. If they were all deported, the construction of homes (among other things) would slow dramatically and their prices would increase by 10 – 15%. Roughly 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, 160,000 as housekeepers and cleaners, and about 142,000 as child care providers, personal care aides, or home health care aides. The impact of the loss of all those workers would be catastrophic.

STORY #3: Investigative reporting by non-profit Lighthouse Reports and its partners [3] has revealed a concerted campaign by the agrochemical industry (and Syngenta corporation in particular), with some funding from the U.S. government, to discredit evidence and advocates opposing the use of the pesticide paraquat (as well as other industry products). Paraquat is a very toxic pesticide and has been banned in the European Union, the United Kingdom, China, and dozens of other countries, but is still used in the U.S. and Africa. Paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease which is the basis of thousands of lawsuits against Syngenta (a subsidiary of Sinochem, a Chinese state-owned enterprise). The New Lede and The Guardian have previously reported that decades ago Syngenta’s internal research found that paraquat had adverse effects on brain tissue but it withheld the information and instead worked to discredit such findings.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have for decades promoted U.S. agrochemical products, including pesticides and genetically-modified organism (GMO) crops, worldwide. USAID contracted with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to manage a U.S. government initiative to promote GMO crops in Asia and Africa. IFPRI, in turn, paid v-Fluence, a U.S.-based public relations firm, more than $400,000 from 2013 to 2019 for assistance in countering critics of the use of GMO crops and pesticides like paraquat. [4]

[1]      Bauerlein, M., Sept.-Oct. 2024, “Why we’re suing OpenAI,” Mother Jones (Press release: https://www.motherjones.com/press-releases/cir-sues-openai/)

[2]      Dias, I., Sept.-Oct. 2024, “How Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ plan would ruin America,” Mother Jones (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/trump-mass-deportation-plan-immigration-border-patrol-ice-dhs-migrants-undocumented/)

[3]      Gillam, C., Gibbs, M., & DeBre, E., 9/27/24, “Revealed: The US government-funded ‘private social network’ attacking pesticide critics,” The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/26/government-funded-social-network-attacking-pesticide-critics) In addition to The Guardian and Lighthouse Reports, the consortium producing the report included Le Monde (France), The New Lede (US), Australian Broadcasting Corp., Africa Uncensored (Kenya), The Continent (South Africa), The Wire News (India), and The New Humanitarian (Switzerland).

[4]      Queally, J., 9/27/24, “‘Appalling’: US funded secret industry network targeting pesticide critics,” Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/news/pesticide-industry-critics)