Reed F. Richardson

@reedfrich.bsky.social

2148 Followers 1078 Following

Managing Editor, Global Investigative Journalism Network (@gijn.org). Army veteran. Press freedom. Pro-democracy. Past bylines: FAIRMediaWatch, The Nation, TPM, Alternet, Salon, Mediaite, et al. “Someone has to investigate the bastards” — Chuck Lewis

Screenshot from a 2012 The Nation blog post on the stubborn recurrence among the right wing where 27% of them believe false or absurd claims.

Screenshot of WSJ story on how Costco's pay and benefits helped one worker succeed there for nearly four decades.

Last paragraph from NYTimes editorial that bemoans a lack of practical, concrete policy focus by Democrats in discussing the Graham Platner candidacy meltdown, while conveniently ignoring the city's mayor, who is doing exactly what they call for the party to do, and racking up policy successes on housing and affordability issues.

Screenshot of Apple News feed of back-to-back stories, one on Wall Street setting records, the other on how grocery prices are skyrocketing. A symbolic representation of the so-called K-shaped economy where the rich get richer and the poor/middle class struggle more and more.

Screeshot of NYT article where an expert on drug and substance abuse dismisses the Trump admin's boat strike policy as completely ineffective in stopping the drug trade in the US, while making an analogy about how it's equivalent to bombing a few McDonalds' and claiming you've solved unhealthy eating.

Screenshot of WaPo's Make It Make Sense YouTube channel where its well-funded hot take opinion videos are getting a pathetically low number of views, money that might be better off spent on investigative journalism if Jeff Bezos cares so much about that.

Screenshot of UK Independent story with the headline "Tesla recalls Cybertrucks due to risk of wheels falling off" and a sub-head punchline "Poor sales mean that only 173 of the stainless steel pickup trucks will actually need to be recalled". Very bad news, good news vibe here.

Screenshots of a Goldman Sachs 'analysis' from early March 2026, right after the US attacked Iran, that assumed—based on absolutely no evidence—that the oil flows from the Gulf would start to recover in less than a week and that would be higher than before the war started by now.

Screenshot from the *latest* Atlantic scoop on FBI Director Kash Patel’s deranged, unprofessional behavior, which notes that Patel is suing the reporter over her *previous* scoop about his deranged, unprofessional behavior.

NYTimes article on a McClatchy reporter byline strike over the company's use of an AI tool to suck up and regurgitate their reporting into many different versions, instead of, you know, HIRING MORE REPORTERS to create more stories.

Monty Python meme of 'let's not bicker and argue about who killed who'

Screenshot of Bulwark post noting that the Blaze author of a story falsely accusing a federal official of planting bombs at the DNC and RNC on Jan. 5, 2021 was Jan. 6th defendant himself.

Screenshot of Wired exposé detailing how an Indian college student had a lucrative side business making AI-generated hot MAGA girl content, which he also levereged into a money-making soft-core OnlyFans knock-off account — and that he generated nude images using X's GrokAI, even though that functionality is supposed to be forbidden.

Screenshot of the NYTimes story on how Trump's war on Iran is playing in conservative parts of the country, and which completely memory holes the massive millions of anti-Trump, anti-war protests in red and blue states just two weekends ago.

Screenshot of ProPublica story on how many of the arrests and prosecutions of anti-ICE protesters are based on flawed or false law enforcement claims and the cases have quickly fallen apart.

Screenshot of MS NOW post detailing all the many lawsuits Trump has filed against news organizations — all of them dismissed or otherwise failed — for daring to actually report on him, showing how he stands far and away as the most anti-free press president of the modern era.

Screenshot from GIJN story on the impact of the Panama Papers cross-border investigation 10 years later, with a former partner at one of the complicit law firms accepting his sentence for his crimes.

Two screenshots from a Freedom of the Press Foundation newsletter detailing the completely contradictory stances toward FOIAs that the Trump administration is pushing to conveniently avoid real transparency and responding to the press.

Screenshot of passage from Press Gazette story on the latest US newspaper circulation numbers, which found the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, both owned by billionaires who have made very public pivots toward Trump/the right wing, were the two biggest losers of readers last year.

Karen Hao on AI narratives to deconstruct for GIJN Tech Focus project.

Screenshot of NBC News report that includes detail of Trump calling a military commander because he seemed to have been fooled by an online AI-generated video of the ship sustaining damage from an Iranian attack.

Screenshot of final score and win probability graph of #12-seed High Point Univ's upset victory over #5 Wisconsin in the first round of the men's NCAA basketball tournament, showing the Badgers were heavily favored to win right up until the last few seconds.

Screenshot of NYT article confirming US military investigation that the US was responsible for bombing of girls school in Iran that killed 175 civilians. And that the AI tool from Claude that is supposed to help with targeting was not the root cause of the misidentification.

Screenshot of The New Republic post detailing absurdly exorbitant purchases by the Defense Department at the end of the 2025 fiscal year. This included include a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.)

In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.

Screen still from Goodfellas during montage where all of Jimmy's partners from the Lufthansa heist are found dead because he decided to cut them off as loose ends.

Screenshot of Politico article on how the Trump administration didn't plan for the war on Iran, has made deadly mistakes, is scrambling to staff up properly and has no clear strategic objective or endstate in mind.

Screenshot of Bloomberg story on the rise of 'mansionization' in New York City, where ultra-wealthy individuals are depleting housing stock to recreate suburbia inside the urban core.

Screenshot of moment from The Simpsons where Bart is playing newspaper with Todd and Rod and prints up a headline "Todd Smells" and Todd, as a good editor should, is questioning his source.

Bloomberg charts showing the wealth increase in the last three presidential terms, by quintile, which shows Trump's 2nd term being a clear win for the rich, with the top 1% seeing huge gains.

Reporter Georgia Fort, who was arrested and charged by the Trump DOJ for just doing her job as a reporter, speaks out in the NYTime about the administration's callous disregard for press freedom and the ominous signal it sends.

Screenshot of CBS News story about abrupt closure/re-opening of airspace around El Paso that gives alarming details about how DOD drones are operating outside normal flight paths and the Pentagon isn't informing the FAA of what's going on, making for a potentially dangerous situation.

screenshot of TPM post on the WaPo layoffs and how gutting the sports section is a huge tell that Bezos has lost interest in the paper as an actual independent news org and is content with just cutting his losses.

screenshot of Stars and Stripes article on how the extended deployment of DC ARNG soldiers in the District is not demonstrably lowering crime rates but is degrading unit readiness while they spend time walking around and doing banal beautification projects at the cost of more than $600 million/year.

Screenshot of Guardian article on the massive Washington Post layoffs, which have gone unremarked upon by owner Jeff Bezos and whose newsroom he was notably absent from, even as he chummed it up with Trump Defense Sec'y Pete Hegseth in an event about his Blue Origin business the day before 1/3 of the Post staff lost their jobs.

Screenshot of FT article on how Elon Musk is running a corporate caterpillar scheme where he keeps having one of his companies absorbs another of his companies that is struggling.

Screenshot from NYTimes story on the planned layoffs for the Washington Post, which is projected to severely cut news staff in the sports, local, and foreign sections.

Screenshot of NYT story on how the White House apparently used AI to alter an image of a black woman arrested for a protest inside a MN church to make her appear sobbing and humiliated.

Screenshot of WaPo article noting even more deaths in Gaza from Israeli strikes but framed as happening “despite” a ceasefire, rather than another violation of it.

Screenshot of NYT story on Trump's terrible polling, with a comment from a Trump supporter that goes all in on Dear-Leader-is-infallible, cult-of-personality thinking.

Screenshot of NYT story that did data analysis of Grok's new AI feature that let users request sexualized changes to any image of a person. To do so, the Center for Countering Digital Hate collected a random sample of 20,000 images produced by Grok between Dec. 29 and Jan. 8, and found that about 65 percent of the images were sexualized. The organization identified 101 sexualized images of children. Extrapolating across the total, the group estimated that Grok had produced more than three million sexual images, including more than 23,000 images of children.

Screenshot of Washington Post story about its legal filing to have materials of one of its reporters, seized by the FBI, returned. The filing Wednesday said that “almost none” of the seized materials were relevant to the search warrant. Instead, the filing said, “the FBI seized Natanson’s newsgathering materials, stored on devices including her Post-issued laptop and cellphone,” which “contain years of information about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished newsgathering materials, including those she was using for current reporting.”
“The government seized this proverbial haystack in an attempt to locate a needle,” the filing said.

Screenshot of WaPo editorial written by Jeff Bezos in late 2024 after the paper abruptly pulled its previously written endorsement of Harris for president: "You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened."

Screenshot of Stars & Stripes story on how job applicants for the newspaper are being asked how they would support President Trump's policies, a clear example of how the White House wants to kill independent journalism for and by service members in exchange for Dear Leader-type propagandists.

Screenshot of The News Guild article on the purely out-of-spite shutdown of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via a faceless, humanness, pre-recorded video on an emergency staff Zoom call.

Screenshot of news report from one week ago, when Trump bashed both 60 Minutes and Paramount after the news program's interview with GOP Rep. and recent Trump critic Marjorie Taylor Greene. The news report notes the timing that CBS News parent Paramount has just launched a takeover bid for WBD, which would ultimately need the Trump admin's FCC approval, a situation where the president would no doubt feel empowered to personally weigh in on the decision.

Screenshot of NYT data visualization showing how more than half of donors to Trump organizations since his election have been recipients of favorable actions by the White House or government.

Screenshot of a WSJ story about AI disastrously failing to manage a break room snack cabinet after an investigations editor convinced the tool it was a Soviet vending machine from the early 1960s.

Screenshot of ProPublica article detailing how a few Trump acolytes set about destroying the USAID program from the inside, devastating funding cuts that cost countless lives across the globe.

Bluesky wrapped word cloud of my most-used terms in 2025, which is almost absurdly predictable.

Graph from CBC story tracking post-ceasefire deaths in Gaza, which shows that the number of killings has continued on most days, with some notable mass casualty events where dozens of Palestinians have been killed.

Screenshot of NYT headline from 12/4/25 that uses the euphemism verb "test" for yet another example of killings during the supposed ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the territory since the ceasefire began and Israel claims numerous attacks by Hamas as well.

Washinton Post headline with edit clarifying that killing during a brokered ceasefire is actually a violation of said agreement, not "despite" it.

Screenshot of Grok falsely identifying the man who collapsed in the Oval Office yesterday.