In Mr. Reed’s telling, his work with the Swift Boat group was a matter of serendipity. It began with a May 2004 email from an uncle, Adrian Lonsdale, a retired Coast Guard captain who had been one of Mr. Kerry’s commanders in Vietnam and was on his way to Washington for a news conference.

“I said, ‘What’s this about?’” Mr. Reed recalled last year in an interview with the podcast “First Right.”

Captain Lonsdale, Mr. Reed said, replied that he and “a bunch officers from Vietnam who served together” were coming to “talk about” Mr. Kerry, who had effectively locked up the Democratic nomination to challenge Mr. Bush in that year’s race.

Mr. Reed went to the news conference, where Captain Lonsdale and others denounced Mr. Kerry, primarily because of an issue that had been simmering since the 1970s: his antiwar activism upon returning home after a tour of duty commanding Swift boats — 50-foot aluminum Navy vessels used to patrol Vietnam’s waterways — in the Mekong Delta.

The news conference was lightly attended and generated modest coverage. But Mr. Reed, a longtime partner at the political advertising firm Stevens Reed Curcio Potholm, was struck by the veterans’ arguments against Mr. Kerry, which also included challenging his honesty about how he had earned some of his medals.

“I said, ‘Boy, this story has to get out,’” he recalled in the “First Right” interview.

Get out it did.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/28/us/politics/rick-reed-dead.html

In 2018 the families of 10 Sandy Hook victims filed four defamation lawsuits against Mr. Jones in Texas and Connecticut. Mr. Jones, an avid supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, is also under scrutiny for his role in organizing events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Late last year, shortly before Mr. Jones lost all four Sandy Hook lawsuits by default after refusing to submit business records and testimony ordered by the court, he began transferring up to $11,000 per day and up to 80 percent of Infowars’s sales revenue to PQPR, the families’ filing said. Infowars’s explanation for the payments has shifted over time, with the company’s representatives most recently saying that the money was payment on debts to PQPR for merchandise.

The families’ sweeping victory in the four suits set the stage for three trials in which juries would decide how much he must pay the families in damages. Shortly before the end of the first trial, which resulted in the award of nearly $50 million in damages to the Sandy Hook parents, Mr. Jones put Free Speech Systems into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The families say the payments are “fraudulent transfers designed to siphon off the debtor’s assets to make it judgment-proof” — in essence, an effort by Mr. Jones and his family to be the first party paid in any liquidation of his empire. The families are also pursuing a fraudulent transfer of assets lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his companies in Texas.

Contrary to Mr. Jones’s company’s claims, the new filing said, “PQPR performs no services, has no employees and has no warehouse,” adding that “money that Free Speech Systems pays PQPR ends up in Alex Jones’s pockets.”

Mr. Jones has continued to parlay his Sandy Hook lies and the Texas jury award into a boon for his business. Like the former president, Mr. Jones claims he is being pursued by “deep state” enemies, and the Sandy Hook lawsuits are part of a sweeping conspiracy to silence him.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/us/politics/alex-jones-lawsuits-bankruptcy.html

“I didn’t want the usual kids’ TV scoring,” he continued. “Some shows just use one track for an entire season, or a variation of it. I’d worked on ‘Charlie and Lola’ years ago, and they had a couple of musicians who played multiple instruments, and every episode had its own score. So that was the norm for me; it’s definitely not the norm for a lot of shows.”

The music of “Bluey” is a collaborative endeavor, but it is primarily the task of its composer, Joff Bush. Bush, 37, switched from jazz piano to composition as a student at the Queensland Conservatorium, and he later attended the Australian Film Television and Radio School. He leads weekly, hourslong Wednesday sessions, at which Brumm and others talk through the philosophy and the psychology of an episode while he improvises at the piano, before later writing a score. It’s work that Brumm is so proud of that he has given Bush his own character in tribute, a musician called Busker.

Far from every episode of “Bluey” uses classical music, and Bush’s tastes are eclectic. Some of its more than a hundred shows take inspiration from folk, jazz or rock, and almost all of them are then filtered through what Brumm calls the distinctively “jangly” sound that comes from Bush’s collection of old guitars and his habit of ignoring his mistakes. Even when Bush does color with the classical canon, there is a charmingly offbeat oddness to his work, something that helpfully reminds you that no real family could possibly be as agreeable, as forgiving or as functional as the Heelers, however much your children might reason otherwise.

“There’s a humanness to it, I hope,” Bush said.

THERE IS A LONG HISTORY entwining classical music with animation, one that dates back well beyond Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit!” to strains of Wagner in “What’s Opera, Doc?” “If cartoons have become associated over time with any one musical genre, it is classical music,” the musicologist Daniel Goldmark writes in his book “Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon.”

But the Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1930s to the ’50s used classical music as an “endless source of jokes at the expense of concert hall culture,” Goldmark writes. When concert music and opera were more prominent than they are now, many viewers had certain expectations about Romantic-era music — Wagner most of all — that could easily be subverted, and puncturing its pretensions with a cartoon rabbit was anyway inherently funny.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/arts/music/bluey-disney-plus-classical-music.html

Twitter said it had no comment on the Stanford and Graphika report. Meta did not respond to requests for comment. While the companies have regularly revealed influence operations they remove from their platforms, they have not published a report on the pro-U.S. campaign.

The only U.S. operations that Meta has previously named were domestic efforts, such as when the company revealed in October 2020 that a marketing firm, Rally Forge, was working with the conservative organization Turning Point USA to target Americans.

In an email, YouTube said it had terminated several channels posting in Arabic, Farsi and Russian to promote U.S. foreign affairs, including channels linked to a U.S. consulting firm, as part of an investigation into coordinated influence operations. It said its findings were similar to those in the Stanford and Graphika report.

Ms. DiResta said the tactics used in the pro-U.S. influence campaign resembled those used by China. While Russia often seeks to sow divisions in its online campaigns, China is more focused on promoting a rosy picture of life in the country, she said. With the pro-U.S. campaign, the goal was also “to show how awesome the U.S. was in comparison to the other countries,” she said.

The researchers were notified of the pro-U.S. online campaign by Meta and Twitter so they could analyze and study the activity, according to the report. The researchers found that the operation largely focused on messaging that favored the United States and the West through memes and false news stories, while criticizing Russia, China and Iran.

The accounts tailored their language and messaging to different regions, the researchers said. In one effort, a group of 12 Twitter accounts, 10 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook profiles and 10 Instagram accounts were created between June 2020 and March 2022 to focus on Central Asia. Some pretended to be media outlets with names like Vostochnaya Pravda. At least one account posed as an individual using a doctored profile photo based on an image of the Puerto Rican actress Valeria Menendez.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/technology/facebook-twitter-influence-campaign.html

I’ve long considered One Direction to be the quintessential boy band of the fan-service era — expertly primed to respond to the demands of their devoted, social-media savvy stan army — and after catching Styles’s show on Sunday night, I’m ready to declare him the defining solo artist of that era, too. I am not sure I’ve ever seen a pop star wave so much from the stage in my entire life? Roughly a third of his performance seemed to comprise waving, pointing and blowing kisses to various sections of the audience, whose volume approximated a jet taking off. Most of the time I could not hear Styles’s voice well enough to determine if he was hitting all the notes, though the crowd’s reaction was energetic enough that they did not seem to care. This show felt, as so much of Styles’s music does, first and foremost for the fans, which — I agree — can sometimes make the man at the center of it all feel like a bit of an enigma.

CARAMANICA Let’s try to distill the Harry Styles musical proposition. He has nowhere near the determined agita of, say, Shawn Mendes; nowhere near the vocal litheness of Justin Bieber. (Also:#FreeZayn) And it goes without saying that despite the rampant Eltonisms on display throughout Styles’s solo catalog, and the (sub?)conscious echoes of John’s sartorial glamour in Styles’s Gucci gear, he has nowhere near John’s verve or panache. It is all quite a brittle foundation upon which to build this fame skyscraper.

But yes, the waving. Also the utterly-at-ease shimmying. And that thing he did mid-show where he took a fan’s cellphone and tried calling her ex on it. (Josh, if you’re reading this, you got washed, buddy — everyone at Madison Square Garden hates you.) See also: him singing “Happy Birthday” to his friend Florence. Florence Welch, of the Machine? No. Florence Pugh, his co-star in the upcoming film “Don’t Worry Darling”? Also no. Florence, daughter of Rob Stringer, chairman of Sony Music Group? Yes.

This is the essence of his appeal — his is not a top-down sort of fame. He’s the approachable but protective friend, the one who leads with good judgment and progressive wholesomeness. (At previous shows, he’s helped people come out, or to confess their love.) That’s part of why, even though public discussion of Styles often centers on his dating life or the ways he flirts with gender fluidity, his actual show is conventional and chaste. The most risqué bit was when he explained how the in-the-round performance would work. Sometimes, “we’ll be ass to face,” he said. “I’ll be sure to distribute face and ass equally throughout the show — there’s plenty to go around.” It was cheeky. Even “Watermelon Sugar,” his lightly erotic hit, was dry.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/arts/music/harry-styles-love-on-tour-review.html

The film is part of Roku’s effort to persuade those who use the device to access paid apps like Netflix and Disney+ to spend more time perusing the free content offered on the Roku Channel, which now includes 40,000 movies and television shows and 150 linear channels. Keeping viewers on the platform longer is a way to bolster its advertising revenue for a business that has come to rely more heavily on ad spending and content distribution than device sales. Currently, device sales contribute just 12 percent to the company’s bottom line. Keeping users on the Roku Channel is imperative to its success.

David Eilenberg, Roku’s head of originals, said in an interview that the company’s strategy in this early phase of creating new content was to assure the creative community that when Roku takes on a new project, it will be willing to spend the money to support it properly.

“The spending strategy has always been surprise and delight rather than shock and awe,” he said. “‘Weird’ is a nice indicator of that, which is the sort of the thing nobody knew they wanted until it existed. That’s a very tricky thing to commission, but when you get one of those, you put both arms around it and support it to the best of your ability.”

Roku became a trending topic on Twitter at the end of July when it released the trailer for “Weird” as part of its upfront presentation, which the company says resulted in $1 billion in commitments from the seven major advertising agency holding companies for the upcoming television season.

Yet Roku’s expansion into originals comes at a difficult time for the company. During its second-quarter earnings call last month, the company pulled its full-year guidance because of the challenging advertising environment and lowered its third-quarter estimates to only 3 percent growth in total net revenues. (The analyst firm MoffettNathanson previously estimated growth for that quarter could reach 29 percent.)

The company has sought to assure investors that it won’t be laying off employees or changing its business strategy as it deals with the advertising slowdown. That hasn’t stopped some analysts from lowering their price targets for the stock, but most remain bullish on the company’s future as the connected television market continues to grow and consumers are increasingly interested in finding all their different streaming channels in one place (much like traditional cable).

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/business/media/roku-weird-al.html

He followed “The Horse Whisperer” with three more novels, all best sellers. “The Divide” (2005), explores what led to the death of a young woman whose body is found in a frozen mountain creek. The story was inspired, he told The Associated Press, by his own interrogations into what causes rifts in a marriage — a marriage come asunder is the book’s back story. His own 25-year marriage to Jenny Lyon ended in 1997.

Like his characters, Mr. Evans was an avid outdoorsman, a charming Bill Nighy look-alike who skied and hiked. And in August of 2008 he seemed to fall into the plot of one of his own stories, a family idyll turned into a near tragedy.

He and his second wife, Charlotte Gordon Cumming, a singer-songwriter, were staying with her brother, Alastair Gordon Cumming, and his wife, Lady Louisa, in the Scottish Highlands. They had picked and enjoyed a meal of wild mushrooms, which turned out to be poisonous. All four became sick, and their kidneys soon failed. Mr. Evans, Ms. Gordon Cumming and her brother required years of dialysis — and new kidneys. Mr. Evans’s daughter Lauren donated one of hers. Ms. Gordon Cumming was offered the kidney of her son’s best friend’s mother, and Mr. Cumming’s came from a patient who had died. Mr. Evans became a patron of a kidney donation charity. Ms. Gordon Cumming made a documentary film about her experience.

Mr. Evans’s survivors include his wife; four children, Finlay Evans, Lauren Evans, Max Evans and Harry Hewland; and a sister, Susan Britton.

His reviews grew more positive with every book. Nonetheless, he tended to avoid reading them.

“The book business is such a strange one — and the very definition of literary versus commercial fiction has always seemed to me to be bizarre,” Mr. Evans told The Guardian in 2011. “One is defined by how many it sells, and the other by its ideas and so-called literary merit. And there are all kinds of assumptions brought to bear on this. So for example, if you sell tons of books you can’t possibly have any interesting ideas or themes or things to say. And on the other hand, if nobody buys the book, it’s considered a mark of its esteem because nobody is bright enough to understand it.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/books/nicholas-evans-dead.html

TikTok’s design makes it a breeding ground for misinformation, the researchers found. They wrote that videos could easily be manipulated and republished on the platform and showcased alongside stolen or original content. Pseudonyms are common; parody and comedy videos are easily misinterpreted as fact; popularity affects the visibility of comments; and data about publication time and other details are not clearly displayed on the mobile app.

(The Shorenstein Center researchers noted, however, that TikTok is less vulnerable to so-called brigading, in which groups coordinate to make a post spread widely, than platforms like Twitter or Facebook.)

During the first quarter of 2022, more than 60 percent of videos with harmful misinformation were viewed by users before being removed, TikTok said. Last year, a group of behavioral scientists who had worked with TikTok said that an effort to attach warnings to posts with unsubstantiated content had reduced sharing by 24 percent but had limited views by only 5 percent.

Researchers said that misinformation would continue to thrive on TikTok as long as the platform refused to release data about the origins of its videos or share insight into its algorithms. Last month, TikTok said it would offer some access to a version of its application programming interface, or A.P.I., this year, but it would not say whether it would do so before the midterms.

Filippo Menczer, an informatics and computer science professor and the director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, said he had proposed research collaborations to TikTok and had been told, “Absolutely not.”

“At least with Facebook and Twitter, there is some level of transparency, but, in the case of TikTok, we have no clue,” he said. “Without resources, without being able to access data, we don’t know who gets suspended, what content gets taken down, whether they act on reports or what the criteria are. It’s completely opaque, and we cannot independently assess anything.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/business/media/on-tiktok-election-misinformation.html

In an interview, Mr. Beckerman called TikTok’s data collection “all very minor” compared with other social apps. To reduce security concerns, the app has said that it plans to store all its American data solely on Oracle servers in the United States, deleting its backups in Singapore and Virginia, and managing access from the United States. The process, Mr. Beckerman said, would probably be finished this year. He did not offer a specific date.

The White House may be preparing to act soon on broader policy around apps that could expose data to foreign adversaries. Earlier this year, it circulated a draft of an executive order that would give the government more power to intercede in cases where data is at risk of being exposed to an adversary. The Biden administration is also expected to issue guidance soon for a committee that vets transactions involving foreign companies, telling it to be especially sensitive to cases that could expose Americans’ data to other governments. It is also considering ways to review whole classes of potentially risky deals, rather than approaching them on an individual basis.

“The Biden administration is focused on the challenge of certain countries, including China, seeking to leverage digital technologies and Americans’ data in ways that present unacceptable national security risks while advancing authoritarian control and interests,” said Saloni Sharma, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “The administration is also reviewing additional potential actions to address this challenge.”

TikTok has faced security questions for years, especially in 2020 when Mr. Trump issued an executive order to block it from the Apple and Google app stores unless ByteDance sold the app to an American firm. He later announced a deal to sell part of the app to Oracle, the American cloud computing giant, but it never came to pass. Federal courts eventually ruled that Mr. Trump’s order blocking TikTok was illegal, along with another blocking the Chinese-owned app WeChat, and last summer, Mr. Biden rolled both back.

But the government has continued trying to reduce risks associated with TikTok. The app and the committee on foreign investment in the United States, which vets international involvement in deals, have been quietly negotiating a resolution to the government’s concerns, according to people tracking the discussions.

While a larger team is working on how to cordon off U.S. user data, only around 10 TikTok employees have seen the draft agreement between the company and the government, TikTok said, reflecting the closely held nature of the negotiations.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/technology/tiktok-china-washington.html

The remaining publications have found their moment. Readers outraged over the erosion of abortion rights across the United States seemed to be seeking outlets that match their reactions and provide updates and analysis as well as practical information on what new legislation means for their state, how to help other women or even how to obtain an abortion themselves.

Alexandra Smith, the audience director of The 19th, which was founded in 2020, said growth in traffic had been “exponential.” She said an increase in search traffic had continued well after the June 24 court decision, with readers now looking for information on how the decision could impact access to Plan B and IUDs. They were also looking to read about the impacts on other civil rights, such as marriage equality.

“We didn’t launch with a focus on just providing the daily news updates, because so many other sources already have that covered,” she said. “So we see people looking for this context, looking for implications for other parts of their lives and that’s kind of the niche we’ve been able to fill.”

The 19th’s content is free to readers and available to other publications that want to republish it.

Priyanka Mantha, a spokeswoman for New York magazine, said The Cut had increased coverage of abortion in anticipation of the Dobbs decision, including putting together the cover story for the May 23 issue: “This Magazine Can Help You Get an Abortion,” which offers a guide for access to abortion, legal help and aid. Ms. Mantha said traffic to abortion rights coverage at The Cut had sharply increased in June, though engagement dipped in July.

Jezebel has focused on explainers and news updates and has spotlighted local news reporting. Jezebel saw the most traffic to its website all year in June, the month the Supreme Court handed down its decision, according to Mark Neschis, a spokesman for G/O Media, the owner of Jezebel.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/business/media/abortion-womens-media.html