BRUSSELS — European Union negotiators reached an agreement Friday on the European Media Freedom Act, the bloc's new set of rules aimed at safeguarding the independence of newsrooms and fostering media pluralism.

The new law will introduce requirements for media to provide transparency over ownership and funding and it will force national governments to set up an oversight system that guarantees editorial freedom, including for public media. It also requires checks on mergers and sets up a new European watchdog to oversee it all.

[...] The media freedom proposal was presented by the Commission in September 2022 in a bid to counter media concentration and limits on editorial independence in parts of the EU. It has met a lot of resistance from national governments that feared the law would hurt their powers to oversee the media sector.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-negotiators-reach-agreement-on-media-law-to-curb-spying-on-reporters/

"Students will learn none of this from a 1619 Project that has botched the history of the slave economy, misconstrued the origins of Northern economic development, erased the history of antislavery, and rendered emancipation irrelevant. And, having failed in all these ways, the 1619 Project leaves its readers ignorant of one of the great problems in the history of the United States, indeed of the modern world. The problem can be stated succinctly: capitalism gave rise to both slavery and antislavery. Put differently, slavery became a problem within the history of capitalism. [...] The problem of slavery is not that it was a forerunner of modern capitalism. It wasn’t. The problem is not that slavery “fueled” the economic growth of the North. It didn’t. The problem, all along, was capitalism itself. And once the problem of slavery was resolved by the Civil War and emancipation, there remained, and still remains, the problem of capitalism."

https://jacobin.com/2023/12/1619-project-jake-silverstein-history-distorted-slavery-race/

With our co-authors, Dr. Patrick Holder and Dr. Haris Tabakovic, today we published a working paper that estimates the amount of money that Meta and Google should pay US news publishers for the value of the journalism and information they produce. Based on our analysis, we estimate that fair compensation by the platforms to US publishers would amount to as much as $13.9 billion a year.

https://www.techpolicy.press/google-and-meta-owe-us-publishers-14-billion-a-year/

The oft-used denoscription of early humans as “hunter-gatherers” should be changed to “gatherer-hunters,” at least in the Andes of South America, according to groundbreaking research led by a University of Wyoming archaeologist.

Archaeologists long thought that early human diets were meat-based. However, Assistant Professor Randy Haas’ analysis of the remains of 24 individuals from the Wilamaya Patjxa and Soro Mik'aya Patjxa burial sites in Peru shows that early human diets in the Andes Mountains were composed of 80 percent plant matter and 20 percent meat

[...] “Conventional wisdom holds that early human economies focused on hunting -- an idea that has led to a number of high-protein dietary fads, such as the Paleodiet,” Haas says. “Our analysis shows that the diets were composed of 80 percent plant matter and 20 percent meat.”

For these early humans of the Andes, spanning from 9,000 to 6,500 years ago, there is indeed evidence that hunting of large mammals provided some of their diets. But the new analysis of the isotopic composition of the human bones shows that plant foods made up the majority of individual diets, with meat playing a secondary role.

Additionally, burnt plant remains from the sites and distinct dental-wear patterns on the individuals’ upper incisors indicate that tubers -- or plants that grow underground, such as potatoes -- likely were the most prominent subsistence resource.

https://www.uwyo.edu/news/2024/01/uw-professors-research-challenges-hunter-gatherer-narrative.html

In June, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a motion to study the feasibility of implementing a type of public campaign financing called “democracy vouchers” that could boost engagement in local elections. The city’s chief legislative analyst and the Ethics Commission were tasked with issuing recommendations for a program that would give every Los Angeles resident a set of vouchers that could be donated to participating candidates for city office, who could then redeem them for campaign funding.

https://readsludge.com/2023/12/08/los-angeles-considers-democracy-vouchers-to-expand-engagement-in-city-elections/

A key lesson of The Destruction of Reason is that, whether or not one thinks Lukács’s strict materialist dialectics offers the complete truth, the Left should not cede the terrain of reason and justice to the Right. Doing so is not only strategically unsound — too often the result of internalizing arguments that have their basis in reactionary thought — it also breaks with a long tradition of leftist critique that saw democracy, freedom, and equality as providing the rational basis for a better society. This is a tradition we can and should reclaim in a new millennium whose politics are once more defined by the spread of prejudice and hate.

https://jacobin.com/2023/09/georg-lukacs-irrationalism-right-wing-thought-philosophy/