Online influencers, through their postings on Instagram, Threads, TikTok and elsewhere, have created an exuberant universe of news and commentary that often outruns mainstream media in reach and even impact. They work the same waterfront as journalism and public relations, but their relationship with those mainstay practices built around fact and advocacy is an uneasy one. For the past month, social media has been ablaze with postings about a provocative story alleging improper political influence among left-leaning online commentators. Headlined 'A Dark Money Group is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers,' it ran in Wired, the San Francisco-based magazine that specializes in tech, and was written by Taylor Lorenz, a high-profile reporter who has built a stormy career of tech coverage for outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Atlantic. The 3,600-word article focused on Chorus, described as a secretive arm of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, whose wide-ranging support for progressive causes totals more than US$100 million a year. Starting in spring 2025, Lorenz reported, Chorus quietly recruited and supported a coterie of liberal political influencers, with monthly stipends of anywhere from $250 to $8,000....

In September 2025, podcaster Pablo Torre published an investigation alleging that the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers may have used a side deal to skirt the league's strict salary cap rules. His reporting, aired on multiple episodes of 'Pablo Torre Finds Out,' focused on star forward Kawhi Leonard. Leonard, one of the NBA's most sought-after free agents, signed a four-year, US$176 million contract renewal with the Clippers during the 2021-22 off-season ' the maximum allowed under league rules at the time. But Torre reported that in early 2022, Leonard's LLC, KL2 Aspire, signed a cash and equity deal amounting to roughly $50 million through a brand sponsorship with Aspiration, a now-bankrupt financial technology startup that marketed itself as a climate-friendly bank. Torre highlighted how the sponsorship coincided with major investments in Aspiration by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and another team investor. The arrangement, Torre suggested, looked less like a conventional endorsement deal and more like a 'no-show' side payment that could have helped the Clippers keep their star without technically violating the salary cap....

Victor K. McElheny, the celebrated journalist and author who founded MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program more than 40 years ago and served for 15 years as its director, died on July 14 in Lexington, Massachusetts, after a brief illness. He was 89. Born in Boston and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, McElheny's storied journalism career spanned seven decades, during which he wrote for several of the nation's leading newspapers and magazines, penned three critically acclaimed books, and produced groundbreaking coverage of national stories ranging from the Apollo moon landing to the sequencing of the human genome. He is remembered as a steadfast champion of science journalism who eloquently made the case for the profession's importance in society and worked tirelessly to help the field ' and its practitioners ' thrive. 'Victor was a pioneering science journalist, at publications that included The Charlotte Observer, Science, and The New York Times, and an author of note, especially for his biographies of scientific luminaries from Edwin Land to James Watson,' says Deborah Blum, who now heads the MIT program McElheny founded. 'Yet, he still found time in 1983 to create the Knight Science Journalism Program, to fight for it, find funding for it, and to build it into what it is today.'...

The U.S. Senate narrowly approved on July 16, 2025, a bill that would claw back federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to NPR, PBS and their affiliate stations. The US$9 billion rescission package will withdraw $1.1 billion Congress had previously approved for the CPB to receive in the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years. In addition, it makes deep foreign aid cuts. All Democrats present voted against the measure, joined by two Republicans: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. As long as the House, which approved a previous version, votes in favor of the Senate's version of the bill by midnight July 18, Trump will be able to meet a budgetary deadline by signing the measure into law in time for it to take effect. Both NPR and PBS receive money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an independent nonprofit corporation Congress created in 1967 to receive and distribute federal money to public broadcasters. More than 70% of the money it distributes flows directly to local stations. Some stations get up to half of their budgets from the CPB....