“Taste is a new core skill,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman declared earlier this year—one voice in a growing chorus of pronouncements about the centrality of judgment and preference in an economy built on artificial intelligence. And yet taste itself is largely undefined by many of its loudest proponents. Celine Nguyen considers the historic relationship between automation and taste; the “seemingly irrelevant, unimportant” inputs that shape our critical perceptions; and the perils of wielding taste like a cudgel. A striking, insightful blend of criticism and personal essay.

Today’s frontier models are trained on enormous quantities of data. One takeaway from Anthropic’s 2025 settlement with a group of authors, in which the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion (or an estimated $3,000 per book) for scraping copyrighted books from shadow libraries like LibGen, is that its models have “read” at least 482,460 books. But even Claude Opus 4.8 hasn’t written a short story that I enjoy more than those by Lydia Davis or Jessi Jezewska Stevens — both of whom, despite being prodigiously well-read, have almost certainly read fewer books.

Once again, anti-semitism is being cynically—and falsely—​​redefined in the press and broader Discourse as “pointing out uncomfortable facts about the nation state of Israel.”

This past weekend, the Israel Crybully Lobby, using a familiar script I’ve detailed before, led a smear campaign against actor Mark Ruffalo because he had the temerity and integrity to note that the family vying to control not only 60 Minutes and CBS News, but CNN and HBO, is a committed and open supporter of Israel and its genocidal military. 

Ruffalo is leading a broad coalition of antitrust activists, creatives, and filmgoers to oppose the pending Skydance Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger and, in doing so, violated an unwritten rule against noting that the father-son duo behind the merger, David and Larry Ellison, are well-documented and open zionist advocates that not only lobby for and support Israel, but “privately” donate to their military. A military that—it’s worth noting—Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, OxFam, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and dozens of other humanitarian and human rights organizations have determined is committing genocide in Gaza. Ruffalo also pointed out that the Ellisons’ $400 billion fortune was largely built on military and surveillance technology from Oracle that is used, in part, to surveil, imprison, and kill Palestinians, as well combat opposition to Israel stateside.  

Ruffalo simply noted the open and well-documented ideological commitments that the Ellisons themselves have long championed.

Predictably, the Israel Crybully Lobby and its one-note propaganda organs in the nonprofit and media world responded to these comments by accusing Ruffalo of “antisemitism” and engaging in “tropes”—many of which are not, of course, tropes in any traditional sense, but simply Things That Are Awkward To Mention. Paramount Skydance released a whiney and self-indulgent statement saying “We are, as always, troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked.… Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong—they’re a bridge too far.” This statement, and related scandalizing of Ruffalo’s otherwise true and banal comments, were echoed by Hollywood press outlets such as Variety magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Wrap, the latter of which is owned by Sharon Waxman, an open supporter of Israel and its genocide in her own right. Needless to say, the Wrap has been covering this like Watergate, with nonstop breathless headlines, even laughably citing NATO-funded think tanker Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib as a “Leading Palestinian Activist.”

This campaign failed at shutting up Ruffalo, who defended himself on Twitter/X, where he received an outpouring of support. But more zionist advocacy organizations—always posing as “antisemitism” monitors, such as the Anti-Defamation League, Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Creative Community for Peace, and L.A. Jewish Federation—joined the pile-on. All four groups are openly supportive of Israel and its genocidal military and largely exist to smear Israel critics as antisemites regardless of the tone or nature of the criticism. 

Despite the “antisemitism scandal” playbook being less and less effective, it’s not stopping the Israel Crybully Lobby from using it to discipline Ruffalo and other actors who dare support basic human rights, or in this case, actors who connect Oracle’s obscene wealth with their intimate involvement in the US and Israeli security state. The whole “antisemitism” and “trope” charge is even more absurd since, in context, in addition to Ruffalo simply citing Oracle’s Executive Vice-Chair Safra Catz’s own dystopian words about their “really profoundly scary technologies,” Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison is open in his support for not just Israel as some romantic abstraction, but the IDF itself. In 2024, upon announcing his purchase of Paramount, Ellison’s Skydance issued a dressed-up press release in the Jerusalem Post detailing how his buying of Paramount would be good for Israel:

“These two young men [Ellison being one of the men] love Israel, are connected to their Judaism, have Zionist values, and it’s very encouraging to see that in such successful families, the values are passed on to the younger generations. Both quietly donate quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF. It is positive news for the Jewish world that Korff and Ellison are the next generation of global Jewish leadership, connected to Israel and holding Zionist values.” 

The piece would go on to note that the “article was written in cooperation with SkyDance” which is another way of saying it’s a touched-up press release issued by Skydance. So here is Ellison using his own company to boast how great his purchase of Paramount would be for Israel (setting aside how funny it is to point out how you “quietly” support a cause in your own company’s press release), thus openly acknowledging that his media properties would reflect Israel’s line. A promise immediately confirmed by Ellison’s first major hire post-Paramount purchase: self-identified “zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss, who he immediately put in charge of all of CBS News. The family patriarch, Larry Ellison, has even deeper ties to Israel: In addition to being the single largest private donor to the IDF, leaked emails revealed last year that in 2015 the elder Ellison vetted then-candidate for President Marco Rubio on behalf of the Israel ambassador to the UN. 

Israel is a nation state, a political entity; zionism is an ideology, a worldview that violently privileges Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. Neither are protected religions, cultures, or identities. Adults have to be able to separate these two things—one being an ethno-religious identity and the other being an ideological choice—when discussing the dispossession, occupation, and mass killing of Palestinians, and how this right-wing worldview dovetails with media ownership, US imperialism, the military state, and free speech suppression in the United States. It is certainly possible to criticize Israel and its supporters while engaging in antisemitic tropes, but Ruffalo did not come remotely close to doing this, and it’s deeply cynical to claim he did without presenting any credible evidence. Instead we just get mindless working of the refs, increasingly hollow pro forma language about “tropes” and “antisemitism,” whining and chauvinist solipsism from deluded rich ideologues high on their own zionist media supply. Ruffalo simply noted the open and well-documented ideological commitments that the Ellisons themselves have long championed. Adults should be able to talk about very rich people’s connections to militaries without everyone reaching for the antisemitism smelling salts. This script—where powerful, wealthy and deeply ideological actors cry and whine and piss and moan about being the victims of racist abuse because someone dares highlight their backing of a nation state and its military—is as dangerous and sleazy as it is tedious and, one can only hope, diminishing in its returns.

As progressive, DSA, and DSA-adjacent candidates win primaries throughout the US, corporate media is rushing to prop up their favorite “centrist” and “moderate” critics—who, ostensibly, are just looking out for the wellbeing of the Democratic Party—to explain why these candidates people are voting for are actually dangerous and “unelectable.” What the media is refusing to do, on an institutional level, is disclose the glaring conflicts of interests these groups—backed by billionaires, health insurance giants, pro-Israel lobbying firms, and massive corporations —would have in attacking candidates who undermine their sponsors’ bottom lines and ideological agendas. 

As progressive, DSA, and DSA-adjacent candidates win primaries throughout the US, corporate media is rushing to prop up their favorite “centrist” and “moderate” critics—who, ostensibly, are just looking out for the wellbeing of the Democratic Party—to explain why these candidates people are voting for are actually dangerous and “unelectable.”

As I noted in TRNN in June, certain personalities and parties with blatant conflicts of interest are being boosted by US media—presented as mere neutral observers who are Deeply Concerned About Electability—to dump on insurgent candidates such as Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila-Chevalier, Melat Kiro and, most recently, Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed’s primary victory in Michigan signaled serious upward momentum for the latest progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party—and triggered a PR crisis for the Democratic establishment. That momentum was stemmed this week, if only for now, as DSA-endorsed candidate for Wisconsin Governor Francesca Hong was narrowly defeated—a defeat that was reportedly due, in part, to voter concerns over “electability.” 

But who shapes “electability” perceptions in our media? 

Let’s examine a recent article in The New York Times, which broke the news on August 6, in the wake of El-Sayed’s primary victory, about a $15-million effort by “moderate” group Third Way to attack the DSA specifically and socialism more broadly (despite El-Sayed explicitly being neither a socialist nor a DSA member, but he still champions Medicare for All and cutting US support for  Israel, so the distinction to these groups is purely academic). In response to socialist and progressive primary wins, Third Way President Jonathan Cowan told the Times he is “preparing for war” against candidates he views as insufficiently “moderate.” Central to Third Way’s argument are supposed concerns over the “electability” of Democratic candidates facing MAGA Republicans in the November midterms—a motive taken at face value by The New York Times. 

Third Way does not publish their donors and refuses to answer media inquiries about who keeps their operation financially afloat.

Not once did Times reporter Shane Goldmacher inquire about or address—much less investigate and unearth—who is funding this operation. The money is simply said to come from Third Way. But Third Way does not generate revenue. They are backed by specific interests. “Who are these interests?” seems like a fairly obvious question that a reporter should ask. Alas, it’s not one Shane Goldmacher seems the least bit interested in. 

So who is backing Third Way? 

Third Way does not publish their donors and refuses to answer media inquiries about who keeps their operation financially afloat. But reporting in The Nation in 2013 revealed the group was being backed then by the US Chamber of Commerce, Deutsche Bank, Intel, the Business Roundtable, and the Pharma lobbying giant PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America). More recent digging by The Sludge revealed major donors now include the Republican-run insurance industry front group Better Solutions for Healthcare, PhRMA, CVS Health, pharma giant Johnson & Johnson, and the Business Roundtable. Other major corporate backers include Entergy, Yum! Brands, Amazon, and Meta––all corporations with much to lose in the event Congress passes measures to impose higher taxes on corporations and the rich, or to provide single-payer healthcare for all. 

Additionally, Goldmacher quotes two other “centrist” groups in his Times article—the Center for New Liberalism and Welcome PAC—without noting the patronage they receive from billionaire and corporate interests. The Center for New Liberalism, as I documented in 2023, is a front group for Third Way Foundation (which also goes by the name Progressive Policy Institute) and is funded by ExxonMobil, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Walmart, and Amazon. (The Third Way Foundation used to be related to the aforementioned Third Way, but is now its own independent corporate front group.) 

WelcomePAC, for its part, is funded directly by mega-billionaires: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman; six different relatives and heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton (the richest family in America); Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein; Rupert Murdoch’s son James Murdoch; and Mark Heising, the founder of private equity firm Medley Partners, among others.

Shouldn’t these obvious conflicts of interest at least be mentioned? Noted in passing, maybe? Especially in an article specifically about one of these groups spending $15 million to attack “the left,” shouldn’t a reporter be asking where exactly the $15 million came from?

Shouldn’t these obvious conflicts of interest at least be mentioned? Noted in passing, maybe? Especially in an article specifically about one of these groups spending $15 million to attack “the left,” shouldn’t a reporter be asking where exactly the $15 million came from? Or where the money behind these other Deeply Worried Centrist Groups comes from? Isn’t it relevant to note Third Way’s long history of being funded by Wall Street and the health insurance lobby? For a high school reporter, this would obviously be the first line of questions to ask. Presumably, Third Way didn’t just manifest the money out of thin air… So who is footing the bill? And shouldn’t potential voters know who is paying for this campaign, and others like it, to bombard them with falsely “objective” arguments about who is and isn’t “electable” in America? 

The Times isn’t alone. Recent softball coverage of, op-eds by, or interviews with Third Way and other “moderate groups” in mainstream media also did not disclose who is bankrolling Third Way, which has quickly emerged as a Sensible Voice opposed to the “radical left.” 

Shouldn’t potential voters know who is paying for this campaign, and others like it, to bombard them with falsely “objective” arguments about who is and isn’t “electable” in America? 

Last week, CBS News did a five-and-a-half-minute puff interview with Third Day’s Jon Cowan, in which Cowan was given free rein to bash the DSA and El-Sayed without mentioning that Cowan’s salary is paid by private health insurance companies and other corporate America behemoths that would all stand to lose a lot of money and power in the event Medicare For All became a mainstream Democratic position. The Washington Post, likewise, published an op-ed by Cowan and Third Way Executive Vice President Matt Bennett the next day, in which they lambast El-Sayed and other progressives’ supposed lack of “electability” without disclosing who backs their astroturf “think tank.” Earlier that same week, CNN ran an otherwise balanced segment on “The Left Insurgency” that nevertheless featured an interview with Cowan and introduced Third Way as a “Democratic centrist group” without mentioning the corporate funders paying him to go on CNN and lament about “electability concerns.”

Why is discussion of “electability” almost entirely being shaped by astroturfed corporate front groups with obvious conflicts of interest? 

It’s not that US media should never report on potential “electability” dynamics—with both the center and left––but why not turn to parties with fewer obvious conflicts of interest? Why not consult independent pollsters or academics? Why not ask Left-aligned experts as well as those on the dole of the Health Insurance lobby? Why is discussion of “electability” almost entirely being shaped by astroturfed corporate front groups with obvious conflicts of interest? 

Journalism is supposed to, at least in theory, be about questioning the motives of the powerful, following the money, and connecting the dots. It’s not supposed to be the practice of credulously reprinting the opinions of powerful people presenting themselves as having only the noblest of motivations. 

But here’s the rub: these billionaire- and corporate-backed groups, and their media mouthpieces, can’t talk about the forces propping them up, because to do so would give the game away. They can’t openly discuss or defend their attendant ideologies of capitalism, deregulation, imperialism, and Zionism because these are increasingly unpopular among the Democratic voters whose interests they allegedly care about. So what’s left? If they can’t speak openly about their elite patrons and make arguments from first principles, all that’s left is feigned concern over the “electability” of the “other guy.” That’s why it’s all they talk about. They can’t make arguments for “centrism” or against Medicare for All, so all they have is a nonstop posture of Deep Concern Over Electability, which, over time, gets repeated into becoming conventional wisdom despite no empirical basis for the narrative that “moderate” “centrists” are more electable. It apparently doesn’t matter how many times the centrist wing of the party loses Congress or blows it to Trump, they still claim, through sheer assertion and dogma and endless media spots, that they are uniquely positioned to “defeat republicans.” And this is a posture our media pundits echo without an ounce of skepticism. 

It apparently doesn’t matter how many times the centrist wing of the party loses Congress or blows it to Trump, they still claim, through sheer assertion and dogma and endless media spots, that they are uniquely positioned to “defeat republicans.”

“Moderate” groups like Third Way are fronts for corporate America and billionaire interests; they’re not just aw-shucks groups of concerned citizens with organic worries about Democrats losing in November. Those claiming to be journalists should ask deeper questions, follow the money, and provide readers essential context that the person being held up as a neutral—if vaguely ideological—expert on winning elections is sponsored by the very health insurance industry that stands to lose a great deal should the progressives they’re bashing ever ascend to positions of power.