Bad News for Farmers and Good News for News: Weekly Roundup

Friday? Already? Guess we’ll take it.

I dug into high-quality AI video generation that has the potential to make “video or it didn’t happen” obsolete, because the presence of footage won’t be a guarantee of authenticity.

Is the ad for the (entirely fictional) New York Mets Collapse Playset entertaining? Yes, especially if you’re not a Mets fan. But apps like OpenAI’s Sora 2, which turns your text prompts into very convincing videos, could have scary applications.

Imagine grainy, security-camera-style video of someone at night sabotaging a ballot box.

I looked at the plight of American farmers, who face ever more expensive inputs like fuel, machinery and seed and declining commodity prices, as well as trouble over President Donald Trump’s trade wars.

“Since 2020, the USDA says, labor costs are up 47%, seed expenses are up 18%, fuel costs have risen 32% and fertilizer expenses have climbed 37%,” I noted. “Meanwhile, since reaching a high above $7 per bushel in 2022, corn prices are down to about $4/bushel today.”

The Trump administration has doled out billions of dollars in aid to farmers since March, and the president is reportedly looking at a comprehensive bailout package of $10-15 billion. But it’s hard to know whether anything will move while the government is shut down.

Meanwhile, a Farm Journal survey of more than 1,000 farmers in August and September found nearly 80% of respondents say the U.S. is in, or on the brink of, a farm crisis.

The Gaza ceasefire is a rapidly evolving story with many moving parts and many unanswered questions (unanswered as of this week, anyway). I looked at the parts of the agreement that have not yet been fully fleshed out.

Does Hamas disarm? Who runs Gaza? Will the ceasefire hold? Will the regional pressure remain on Hamas? Who rebuilds Gaza and how? W(h)ither the two-state solution for Middle East peace?

There are a lot of hard negotiations and decisions ahead.

Per the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, the No. 1 thing Americans say they feel when they consume news is “informed.” And those who consume news all or most of the time are the most likely to say that.

Pew found that 66% of the biggest news consumers said they feel “informed,” against 40% of those who said they follow current events some of the time and 21% of those who reported doing so less often.

That’s great. It’s our mission, after all. But.

Across all news consumers, Pew found:

Now, I would argue that “informed” and “angry” or “sad” are not contradictory. You could be very well informed about this year’s shocking measles outbreak and not feel like dancing a jig.
But there is a bit of a contradiction between these numbers and Gallup’s findings that just 31% of Americans trust us a great deal or a fair amount to report fully, accurately and fairly.

As I always point out, though, everyone actually trusts the mainstream media. Americans – including this White House and Republicans in Congress – will happily cite mainstream news coverage that they feel reinforces their prior beliefs or serves their ideological purposes.