DeSantis’s corporate donors under fire for ‘hypocrisy’ over Black History Month

Companies such as Amazon, Disney and Walmart funded Florida governor who has imposed curbs on teaching about race in schools

David Smith

Florida’s controversial rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, sought reelection in 2022. Many expect him to face Donald Trump in 2024. Photograph: Marco Bello/Reuters

Political activists in Florida have condemned the “hypocrisy” of large corporations that use Black History Month to denounce racism while donating hundreds of thousands dollars to the state’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis.

Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, Disney and Walmart are among the companies that publicly proclaim their commitment to anti-racist values, especially after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, an African American man in Minneapolis.

But research by the Center for Political Accountability, a non-profit organisation that tracks corporate political spending, shows that these same businesses donated directly and indirectly to the 2022 re-election campaign of DeSantis, who has imposed limits on how race and racism can be taught in Florida schools.

It’s a huge level of hypocrisy

Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Groundnone

“These corporations can say that they stand with the Black community but then also fund the governor and his work around dismantling Black history,” said Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, a progressive group based in Orlando, Florida. “It’s a huge level of hypocrisy.”

Corporations have increasingly taken a stand on social and racial justice issues in recent years and often see Black History Month as an ideal opportunity to promote themselves. Many express solidarity on social media or tout programs within the company to highlight the contributions of Black employees.

Amazon, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Comcast, DoorDash, General Motors and Walmart have all made public statements in celebration of Black History Month. Google posted online on 1 February: “Learn how Google is recognizing and celebrating Black voices, joy and success this Black History Month.”

But the Center for Political Accountability found that each of these companies donated significant sums of money to political groups that prominently supported DeSantis.

Disney writes on its Resorts website: “During Black History Month in February, the Disney Parks Blog will celebrate Black stories and highlight special experiences at Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World Resort.”

Yet early in the election cycle – and before its relationship with DeSantis fully soured – Disney contributed $50,000 to his re-election campaign and $125,000 to the Republican party of Florida, which supported his campaign and inauguration.

Charter Communications, a telecommunication firm, regularly celebrates Black History Month on its corporate site. It also gave $200,000 to Friends of Ron DeSantis, a political action committee supporting his re-election, as well as $125,000 to the Republican party of Florida and $205,000 to the Republican Governors Association – both huge donors to DeSantis.

Duke Energy tweeted on 1 February: “Sharene Pierce, Chief D&I Officer, reflects on influential figures who left an impression on her life. While #BlackHistoryMonth is a time to celebrate the impact of African Americans, our commitment to fostering a culture of diversity, equity & inclusion is year round.” The company also gave $2m to the Republican party of Florida, which has embraced DeSantis’s crackdown on “woke” policies on race, gender and public health.

DeSantis has sought to position himself on the frontlines of American “culture wars”, as he considers a 2024 bid for the White House and tries to outflank former president Donald Trump, the only official well-known candidate so far.

Earlier this month, the second-term governor announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on diversity, equity and inclusion as well as critical race theory, or CRT, which examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law and other modern institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people.

The DeSantis administration also blocked a new advanced placement course on African American studies from being taught in high schools, saying it violates state law and is historically inaccurate. In the new framework, topics including Black Lives Matter, reparations and queer theory are not part of the exam.

And last year, DeSantis signed the “Stop Woke Act” that restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in schools and businesses. The law bars instruction that defines people as necessarily oppressed or privileged based on their race.

The governor has imposed sweeping restrictions on books in public schools, forcing some teachers to remove books from their libraries or use paper to cover up their shelves. They face felony charges if unsanctioned books are present in their classrooms.

The implications reach far beyond Florida. At least 25 states have considered legislation or other steps to limit how race can be taught, according to an analysis by Education Week. Eight states have banned or limited the teaching of critical race theory or similar concepts through laws or administrative actions.

Burney-Clark said: “This man is attempting to be president of the United States. We could draw the line right now; these corporations had the true capacity and not the performative capacity to do that.”

Last year, Disney, under pressure from consumers and its own staff, took a stand against Florida’s “don’t say gay” law, which bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade as well as lessons deemed not age-appropriate. DeSantis sought retribution, and last week, Florida Republicans approved proposals to strip the company of its self-governing status in Walt Disney World’s Reedy Creek Improvement District.

They should be focused on the consumers who have built these publicly held corporations to where they currently are

Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Groundnone

But Burney-Clark urged companies not to be intimidated. “Disney, unfortunately, is going through a difficult time but has the power and capacity to be doing more than they’re actually doing.

“I don’t think that they should worry about the threat of losing support or favor with the governor. They should be focused on the consumers who have built these publicly held corporations to where they currently are right now with the scale that they have.”

The Center for Political Accountability, based in Washington, has been engaging companies about a model code of conduct that would give them control over spending and protect them from the type of threat that Disney and others are facing.

Bruce Freed, president of the Center, said DeSantis is attracting money for two reasons. “One, because he’s the governor of Florida up for re-election and he’s the dominant figure in the state so you have the whole issue of giving for access.

“Secondly, he is a potential presidential candidate and so you have companies looking to build relationships. But today that’s fraught with much greater risk because of the sharp polarisation that we have and the positions that he has taken that in quite a few instances conflict with company policy positions.”

That could be a problem. Studies show that consumers are more willing to boycott brands, and would-be employees are more likely to reject opportunities at companies that do not align with their values.

Jeanne Hanna, the Center’s research director, said: “Companies are trying to engage in politics as usual but consumers and employees and shareholders are recognizing the change in the cultural norms around companies and political engagement. They want to see companies taking proactive stances to back up their values with action and then who they engage with when it comes to politics.”

“Opinion The Chiefs proudly broke racial barriers. Kansas City erected them.

February 9, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EST

(Washington Post Staff illustration; AP photo

Mark Dent is the co-author of the forthcoming “Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once-Swingin’ Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback.”

When Mike Garrett, a Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Southern California, was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in 1966, the only thing he knew about his new home was the song.

The city surprised him. The 12th Street and Vine jazz district praised by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in “Kansas City” was floundering, but the Country Club Plaza — a Spanish-influenced medley of department stores, boutiques, restaurants and luxury apartments that is the city’s equivalent of Georgetown — seemed like a great place to live.

Garrett was turned down at every open apartment he visited.

The Chiefs, who play the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday in a Super Bowl featuring two Black starting quarterbacks for the first time, have a proud legacy of elevating Black talent. The franchise’s early teams were stocked with overlooked stars from historically Black colleges and universities. Lamar Hunt, the team’s owner, saw the NFL’s racial biases as a market inefficiency to exploit.

But the city wasn’t nearly as hospitable. Black players such as Garrett struggled to find housing in a metro area that was among the most redlined in the country.

No place epitomized segregation like the Country Club District. In the first half of the 20th century, developer J.C. Nichols built a wonderland of posh homes, tree-lined vistas and cul-de-sacs that spanned more than 5,000 acres, emanating from the middle of Kansas City, Mo., into Kansas, where he planned several more suburban communities. “If Webster was asked to provide another synonym for city planning,” wrote one New York City journalist in 1925, “his answer would be Jesse Clyde Nichols, Kansas City, Mo.”

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Restrictive covenants were key to Nichols’s neighborhoods. He legally bound entire subdivisions to ban Black people from buying homes. To ensure no one broke the covenants, he created homeowners associations to enforce the rules. Nichols wasn’t the first person to use these innovations, but he was the first to apply them over such a large area in a systematic fashion, and he spread his techniques across the country as an influential member of various real estate trade groups.

The story of Nichols and Kansas City’s extreme segregation, exemplified by a de facto dividing line at Troost Avenue, have become an increasingly discussed subject among residents over the past decade. What is less known is how those policies were applied to Kansas City’s emblem of pioneering equality in the NFL: the Chiefs.

When the American Football League’s Dallas Texans moved to Kansas City and became the Chiefs for the 1963 season, the team’s Black players discovered Kansas City’s segregation patterns applied to them. In August of that year, running back Curtis McClinton, the son of a prominent Kansas legislator, enthralled Kansas City fans by scoring the team’s first home touchdown on a 73-yard run during the preseason. He lived in a Kansas City basement apartment he rented for $7 a week.

It wasn’t any better in the suburbs. Future Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Bell says he looked at more than 200 houses for his family in the mid-1960s, getting denied by realtors and bankers who refused to underwrite his mortgage. Head coach Hank Stram, who was White and lived in the Nichols-planned suburb Prairie Village, Kan., made calls on Bell’s behalf to no avail. “You couldn’t do anything,” Bell said. “They didn’t want to take you.”

The discrimination diminished the team’s roster. After Kansas Jayhawks running back Gale Sayers, another future Hall of Famer, was drafted by the AFL’s Chiefs in 1965, he chose to play for the NFL’s Chicago Bears instead. “He knew Kansas City,” McClinton said at the time. “He knew what the housing situation was.”

McClinton, with the financial backing of Bell and other teammates, proposed an integrated apartment complex that featured central air conditioning and a pool shaped like a football. The city council denied the plan over zoning issues.

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He pushed on, starting a branch of Jim Brown’s Black Economic Union to promote business opportunities for Black Kansas Citians and joining Freedom Inc., a local civil rights group, to push for housing reform. The activists’ work culminated in Kansas City passing a fair-housing ordinance that forbade racial discrimination in July 1967, six months after the Chiefs played in the first Super Bowl.

Garrett believes the Chiefs’ success helped improve the city’s race relations. When he looked at the Plaza again in 1968, he got an apartment.

Similar laws came to the suburbs. Bell eventually bought a house in Prairie Village in 1968, after a White man purchased it and rented to Bell until he could find a willing mortgage underwriter. Shortly after Bell moved in, a White neighbor showed up at his door with a flier organizing a protest against him. Bell was undeterred: He stayed at the house and, soon, other Black teammates moved nearby. After the Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 1970, the mayor of Prairie Village gave him a key to the city.

Decades later, the racial dividing line of Troost Avenue has blurred in certain neighborhoods, the suburbs have started to diversify, and residents pushed for the removal of Nichols’s name from a prominent fountain and street by the Plaza in 2020. After working as the athletic director at USC, Garrett moved back to Kansas City a few years ago — and into a J.C. Nichols neighborhood.

Yet Kansas City is also seeing the displacement of working-class and Black residents as rents increase in long-neglected neighborhoods that still have limited economic opportunities. The Chiefs, even with Patrick Mahomes at quarterback, can’t fix all of the city’s deep-rooted problems. Still, the team — and especially Mahomes — is a balm. No matter the neighborhood, red-and-gold flags abound. So do No. 15 jerseys.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when Kansas City thrilled to the Chiefs’ first Super Bowl teams, the city was split on its favorite player, one longtime Kansas Citian told me. Most White Kansas City fans tended to favor quarterback Len Dawson, and most Black fans favored wide receiver Otis Taylor. Now, Mahomes is almost everyone’s favorite.

“His presence makes us more tolerant of one another,” the longtime resident, who is Black, said, “more accepting of one another, more likely to engage in conversation with one another that can have some meaningful results.”

Especially if the Chiefs keep winning.“

Opinion The Chiefs proudly broke racial barriers. Kansas City erected them.Opinion The Chiefs proudly broke racial barriers. Kansas City erected them.“Opinion The Chiefs proudly broke racial barriers. Kansas City erected them

There’s a Ring Around This Dwarf Planet. It Shouldn’t Be There.

“Quaoar, which orbits the sun in the distant Kuiper belt, is the latest small object shown to have a ring like the ones around Saturn.

Feb. 8, 2023

An artist’s concept of Quaoar, a small icy world about four billion miles from the sun. Even the most powerful telescopes have revealed Quaoar as only an indistinct blob, which also has a moon, Weywot.European Space Agency

A small icy world far beyond Neptune possesses a ring like the ones around Saturn. Perplexingly, the ring is at a distance where simple gravitational calculations suggest there should be none.

“That’s very strange,” said Bruno Morgado, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Dr. Morgado is the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday that describes the ring that encircles Quaoar, a planetary body about 700 miles in diameter that orbits the sun at a distance of about four billion miles.

Quaoar (pronounced KWA-wahr, the name of the creator god for the Indigenous Tongva people who live around Los Angeles) is a little less than half the diameter of Pluto and about a third of the diameter of Earth’s moon. It is likely to be big enough to qualify as a dwarf planet, pulled by its gravity into a round shape. But no one can say that for sure, because images taken by even the most powerful telescopes have revealed Quaoar as only an indistinct blob. The blob also has a moon, Weywot (the son of Quaoar in Tongva belief).

Quaoar orbits the sun in the Kuiper belt, a region of frozen debris beyond Neptune that includes Pluto.

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The ring is not visible in telescope images. Rather, astronomers found it indirectly, when distant stars happened to pass behind Quaoar, blocking the starlight. From 2018 through 2021, Quaoar passed in front of four stars, and astronomers on Earth were able to observe the shadow of the eclipses, also known as stellar occultations.

However, they also observed some dimming of the starlight before and after the star blinked out. That pointed to a ring obscuring part of the light, an international team of astronomers concluded in Wednesday’s Nature paper. (Another stellar occultation occurred in 2022, not reported in the Nature paper. “We saw the ring again,” Dr. Morgado said.)

The ring appears to be uneven. In some places, it seems to be very thin, a few miles wide, while in other parts, it may be more like a couple of hundred miles wide. The ring particles, if collected, would form a moon about three miles wide, Dr. Morgado said.

“I’m impressed by the thoroughness of the analysis that they did,” said Richard G. French, an emeritus professor of astrophysics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who has studied planetary rings for decades. He was not involved with the research.

For a long time, astronomers thought asteroids and other small bodies were too small to have companions like moons and rings. But in the past few decades, they discovered moons around many asteroids and Kuiper belt objects. They then spotted rings — essentially moons that failed to coalesce — around smaller objects.

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In 2013, astronomers discovered a couple of rings around Chariklo, a body known as a centaur that orbits the sun between Saturn and Uranus. In 2017, a ring was discovered around another Kuiper belt object, Haumea, also from dimming during a stellar occultation. But those rings are fairly close to their worlds.

In 1848, Édouard Roche, a French astronomer, calculated what is now known as the Roche limit. Material orbiting closer than this distance would tend to be pulled apart by tidal forces exerted by the parent body. Thus, a ring within the Roche limit would tend to remain a ring, while a ring of debris outside the Roche limit would usually coalesce into a moon.

The rings around the giant planets of the solar system — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — generally fit within the constraints of the Roche limit. Among the distant smaller worlds, Chariklo’s rings actually lie a bit beyond the Roche limit. The ring around Haumea is within the limit.

Then there is the Quaoar ring.

At a distance of 2,500 miles, it is way beyond the Roche limit, which the scientists calculated to be 1,100 miles. At that distance, according to the physics underlying Roche’s calculations, the particles should have coalesced into a moon in 10 to 20 years, Dr. Morgado said.

“It really shouldn’t be there,” he said. “We should look at this limit again and better understand how the satellites are formed.”

A potential explanation for Quaoar’s distant ring is the presence of Weywot. The moon may have created gravitational disturbances that prevented the ring particles from accreting into another moon. At the ultracold temperatures in the outer solar system, icy particles are also bouncier and are less likely to stick together when they collide.

Michael E. Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who was a co-discoverer of Quaoar in 2002, said the discovery of the ring baffled him.

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“If the data weren’t so convincing, I would insist they weren’t real,” he said.

Dr. French said the discovery demonstrated how much remained to be learned about rings and that many more are likely to be discovered around the small bodies in the outer solar system.

“The fact that we’ve found rings around three of them already means that rings around things are really pretty common,” Dr. French said.

Rings around small solar system bodies billions of miles away may seem esoteric, but the clumping — or non-clumping — of the particles is key to understanding the beginnings of the solar system.

“You might think that a small ring around a small object in the distant solar system doesn’t have broad applicability,” Dr. French said. “But actually this process, of how particles accrete, is really the beginning step of planet formation.”

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Americans Flunked This Test on Online Privacy

“Many consumers want control over their personal details. But few understand how online tracking works, says a new report from the University of Pennsylvania.

Feb. 7, 2023Updated 8:21 a.m. ET

Customers looking at phones and laptops in the East Village in New York.George Etheredge for The New York Times

Many people in the United States would like to control the information that companies can learn about them online. Yet when presented with a series of true-or-false questions about how digital devices and services track users, most Americans struggled to answer them, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The report analyzed the results of a data privacy survey that included more than 2,000 adults in the United States. Very few of the respondents said they trusted the way online services handled their personal data.

The survey also tested people’s knowledge about how apps, websites and digital devices may amass and disclose information about people’s health, TV-viewing habits and doorbell camera videos. Although many understood how companies can track their emails and website visits, a majority seemed unaware that there are only limited federal protections for the kinds of personal data that online services can collect about consumers.

Seventy-seven percent of the participants got nine or fewer of the 17 true-or-false questions right, amounting to an F grade, the report said. Only one person received an A grade, for correctly answering 16 of the questions. No one answered all of them correctly.

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Americans struggle to answer questions about online tracking practices and privacy policies

Researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania asked 2,014 people in the United States a series of true-false statements. The correct answers are in bold.

Most people correctly understood some of the ways companies can track their activities online …

When I go to a website, it can collect information about my online behaviors even if I don’t register using my name or email address.

A Smart TV can help advertisers send an ad to a viewer’s smartphone based on the show they are watching.

A company can tell that I have opened its email even if I don’t click on any links. 

… but often misunderstood the limited role the federal government plays in regulating online tracking practices.

In the United States, the federal government regulates the types of digital information companies collect about individuals.

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The federal government requires that companies ask internet users to opt-in to being tracked.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act prevents apps that provide information about health from selling data collected about app users to marketers.

The survey results expose a stark knowledge gap among Americans as the Federal Trade Commission is poised to curb online consumer tracking by companies — or, as regulators have termed it, “commercial surveillance.” And the report could bolster regulators’ agenda as it highlight weaknesses in a framework that has for decades served as the basis for online privacy regulation in the United States.

That longstanding approach is known as “notice and consent.” It generally allows online services to freely collect, use, retain, share and sell a wealth of details about individual consumers — as long as the companies first notify users about their data practices and obtain users’ consent.

The report adds to a growing body of research suggesting that the notice-and-consent approach has become obsolete. Researchers and regulators say apps and sites often use long and sometimes unintelligible privacy policies to nudge people into agreeing to tracking practices that they may not understand. These critics say the “notice and consent” practices for online services may preclude informed consent.

Genuine “consent requires that people have knowledge about commercial data-extraction practices as well as a belief they can do something about them,” the Annenberg School report said. “Americans have neither.”

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Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents said they had “little control over what marketers” could learn about them online, while 73 percent said they did not have “the time to keep up with ways to control the information that companies” had about them.

“The overarching idea that consent, either implicit or explicit, is the solution to this sea of data gathering is totally misguided — and that’s the bottom line,” said Joseph Turow, a media studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania.Matt Edge for The New York Times

“The big takeaway here is that consent is broken, totally broken,” Joseph Turow,a media studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was the lead author of the report, said in an interview. “The overarching idea that consent, either implicit or explicit, is the solution to this sea of data gathering is totally misguided — and that’s the bottom line.”

Some prominent regulators agree.

“When faced with technologies that are increasingly critical for navigating modern life, users often lack a real set of alternatives and cannot reasonably forgo using these tools,” Lina M. Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a speech last year.

In the talk, Ms. Khan proposed a “type of new paradigm” that could impose “substantive limits” on consumer tracking.

Leigh Freund, the chief executive of the Network Advertising Initiative, a digital ad industry group, said that while the “notice and consent” approach was “outdated in its application in many regards,” it could still be a helpful tool “in conjunction with reasonable limits on data collection and use, particularly with respect to sensitive data.”

She added that her trade group supported a current effort in Congress to pass a comprehensive federal consumer privacy law that would put meaningful limits on data use “while protecting the benefits of data-driven advertising for consumers, small businesses and the economy.”

Americans want control of their data, but don’t trust companies with it

Researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania asked 2,014 people in the United States about their feelings toward control of their personal data and the privacy trade-offs consumers face online.

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The survey results challenge a data-for-services trade-off argument that the tech industry has long used to justify consumer tracking and to forestall government limits on it: Consumers may freely use a host of convenient digital tools — as long as they agree to allow apps, sites, ad technology and marketing analytics firms to track their online activities and employ their personal information.

But the new report suggests that many Americans aren’t buying into the industry bargain.

Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they didn’t think it was fair that a store could monitor their online activity if they logged into the retailer’s Wi-Fi. And 61 percent indicated they thought it was unacceptable for a store to use their personal information to improve the services they received from the store.

Only a small minority — 18 percent — said they did not care what companies learned about them online.“

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This comparison actually blew my mind...

CNET pushed reporters to be more favorable to advertisers, staffers say

by Mia Sato, theverge.com
February 2, 2023 11:41 AM

Last October, CNET’s parent company, Red Ventures, held a cross-department meeting to discuss the AI writing software it had been building for months. The tool had been in testing internally ahead of public use on CNET, and Red Ventures’ early results revealed several potential issues.

The AI system was always faster than human writers at generating stories, the company found, but editing its work took much longer than editing a real staffer’s copy. The tool also had a tendency to write sentences that sounded plausible but were incorrect, and it was known to plagiarize language from the sources it was trained on. 

Red Ventures executives laid out all of these issues at the meeting and then made a fateful decision: CNET began publishing AI-generated stories anyway. 

“They were well aware of the fact that the AI plagiarized and hallucinated,” a person who attended the meeting recalls. (Artificial intelligence tools have a tendency to insert false information into responses, which are sometimes called “hallucinations.”) “One of the things they were focused on when they developed the program was reducing plagiarism. I suppose that didn’t work out so well.”

Of the 77 articles published on CNET using the AI tool since it launched, more than half have had corrections appended to them, some lengthy and substantial, after use of the tool was revealed by Futurism. CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo, EVP of content and audience Lindsey Turrentine, and Red Ventures vice president of content Lance Davis defended the tool in an internal meeting with staff in January but said the company would pause the use of the tool “for now.” In a follow-up blog post, Guglielmo said publishing using the AI software was on hold until CNET was confident it could “prevent both human and AI errors,” but she was clear that this wasn’t the end of AI tools in the newsroom.

“Expect CNET to continue exploring and testing how AI can be used to help our teams as they go about their work testing, researching and crafting the unbiased advice and fact-based reporting we’re known for,” Guglielmo wrote.

“Everyone at CNET is more afraid of Red Ventures than they are of AI.”

But the controversial use of an AI system to generate stories even in the face of known issues with plagiarism and accuracy is merely the most visible outcome of Red Ventures’ ownership of CNET. Under the ownership of Red Ventures, a private equity-backed marketing firm that’s bought up more than a dozen digital publishers since the mid-2010s, staff at the storied tech news outlet say they have been fighting to protect CNET’s editorial independence and rigor amid a push toward sponsored content and affiliate marketing by its new corporate owners. As one staffer told The Verge for a previous piece, “Everyone at CNET is more afraid of Red Ventures than they are of AI.”

Multiple former employees told The Verge of instances where CNET staff felt pressured to change stories and reviews due to Red Ventures’ business dealings with advertisers. The forceful pivot toward Red Ventures’ affiliate marketing-driven business model — which generates revenue when readers click links to sign up for credit cards or buy products — began clearly influencing editorial strategy, with former employees saying that revenue objectives have begun creeping into editorial conversations. 

Reporters, including on-camera video hosts, have been asked to create sponsored content, making staff uncomfortable with the increasingly blurry lines between editorial and sales. One person told The Verge that they were made aware of Red Ventures’ business relationship with a company whose product they were covering and that they felt pressured to change a review to be more favorable.

“I understood a supervisor to imply in conversation that how I proceeded with my review could impact my chances of promotion in the future,” they say. 

Red Ventures ignored an emailed list of questions from The Verge about its AI tool as well as CNET’s editorial independence and ethics, advertising, and staffing. The company instead offered to send a short statement about CNET’s editorial integrity but refused to provide it on the record attributable to anyone.

This apparent breakdown of the traditional barriers between editorial and advertising content is worlds away from CNET’s history, according to former staffers. Now more than 25 years old, the site has long been known for its thorough news coverage and comprehensive reviews program, which examines everything from laptops and phones to bookshelf speakers and home projectors. 

“[The reason I came to CNET] was the opportunity to be able to tell the truth no matter what,” a former staffer says. To them, working at CNET was different from other journalism jobs, where journalists can be honest but may need to self-edit. “You get to tell the truth [at other jobs], but a lot of times, you’re not allowed to say things that you really feel.” 

Are you a former or current CNET / Red Ventures employee? I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at mia@theverge.com, and I’ll share my Signal. 

But the CNET operated by Red Ventures is a very different place than the CNET it acquired in 2020. CNET, along with other Red Ventures-owned publications, is loading up on cheap SEO-driven articles to game Google’s search algorithm and fill search results with content designed to deliver affiliate links to readers. As a result, CNET’s independent journalism and the people who produce it — the thing that once made CNET valuable and rank highly in search to begin with — feel that they are being pushed out in favor of whatever and whomever else makes Red Ventures the most money, according to multiple former employees. 

“When you’re [covering] products and not people, it’s really easy to be like, ‘This new Apple thing sucks.’ I just thought that was a refreshing change of pace to be able to say things as they are,” the former staffer says. “And that continued all the way until Red Ventures took over.”

---

After Red Ventures scooped up CNET for $500 million in 2020, CEO Ric Elias promised the outlet would be able to continue to be an independent publication known for its robust offering of reviews and in-the-weeds tech news coverage. CNET staff had nothing to worry about, Elias told The New York Times. There was a “nonnegotiable line” separating the journalism from the money, and CNET’s staff of tech journalists could call him on his personal cellphone if there were ever a problem.

“I told them, ‘There’s a red line,’ and they’re like, ‘OK, we’ll see,’” Elias said.

That skepticism now appears prescient. Former CNET staff say the guardrails that keep editorial content independent, like a divide between revenue teams and journalists, or a clear chain of command among leadership, were repeatedly breached after the Red Ventures acquisition. “Most of the time, [Guglielmo] seemed to just be relaying orders” from Red Ventures, a former staffer says. In turn, journalists were placed in difficult positions as they tried to fend off the encroaching influence of the business side. 

Former CNET staffers describe being asked to work on ads for companies that the outlet covers, including Volvo and home security company Arlo and having to push back against such requests from executives at the company. Three people told The Verge that they believe resistance to Red Ventures initiatives caused various CNET staffers to lose their jobs, with one saying that the pressure to be a “yes man” was a “collective experience” for some teams.

Multiple former CNET staffers point to the demise of the CNET Smart Home as an example of Red Ventures’ overreach. The Smart Home — a four-bedroom, five-bathroom home in Louisville, Kentucky, that the outlet had purchased in 2015 to test and produce videos on home products like robot vacuums and thermostats — had become something of a brand in and of itself. Since Red Ventures’ takeover, Smart Home staff repeatedly refused to work on sponsored content, saying it went against the integrity of their work. Readers look to tech reviewers for honest, unbiased assessments of companies’ products and services, and working on content that is paid for by these same companies can cast doubt on a reviewer’s ability to be independent.

“It’s a culture that if you disagree with them, they’re going to get rid of you and replace you with a zealot.”

In 2022, a Red Ventures executive named Marc McCollum stopped by the Smart Home for a short walk-through. McCollum, according to his LinkedIn profile, led the acquisition of CNET Media Group. A former staffer says he played a key role in the transition, with a focus on increasing profits.

Shortly after McCollum’s visit, teams working out of the Smart Home learned that the company was planning on selling the house, and people working at the house believed their jobs would be at risk if the space were sold. But McCollum indicated that the company may be able to keep the house if it secured a lucrative advertising deal with GE Appliances, which had expressed interest in using the Smart Home for a commercial, multiple former employees say.

Hoping to avoid layoffs, some CNET staff pitched in on the GE Appliances deal in early talks and planning, and Red Ventures inked a deal. But CNET editorial staffers refused to shoot the ad itself, and contractors were ultimately used to work on the commercial, a former staffer says.

The GE Appliances shoot was ultimately moved from the Smart Home to an off-site location due to space limitations at the house, a GE Appliances spokesperson who would only identify themselves as “Whitney” told The Verge via email. GE Appliances was not aware of Red Ventures’ plans to sell the house, “Whitney” added.

But by the time the GE Appliances ad was released in September, many staff on the Smart Home team had already left the company. Seeing the “writing on the wall” — that the house would soon be put up for sale — some people were able to land new roles, a former staffer says; others were laid off that summer. The house was put up for sale shortly after the GE Appliances ad anyway, eventually selling in December for $1.275 million, according to Zillow. 

“It’s a culture that if you disagree with them, they’re going to get rid of you and replace you with a zealot,” a former employee, who was laid off, says of Red Ventures. “Somebody that’s absolutely a true believer, [that] drinks the Kool-Aid.”

Former CNET staffers say their colleagues have also been pressured into appearing in ads for companies the outlet covers despite the murky ethics of using reporters in sponsored content. On-camera video hosts were uncomfortable with the idea of being in ads and pushed back against it, according to several former staffers. Using recognizable journalists for video content that’s paid for by advertisers can blur the lines and make it hard for viewers to tell what is and isn’t an ad. 

In one recent video, titled “Moen Unveils Innovative Smart Sprinkler Product at CES,” a CNET host takes viewers through the company’s booth at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, interviewing company representatives and testing products. The video is an ad, but the host doesn’t say that, and neither the video description nor title included a disclosure until recently. The only disclaimer was a small pop-up that YouTube inserts when an uploader has indicated there’s a paid promotion in a video, though CNET doesn’t actually specify what in the video is promoted. Moen did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the nature of the sponsorship or its labeling. After The Verge asked Red Ventures about the ad, a disclosure was silently added to the video’s description.

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One of the key priorities for Red Ventures seems to be the company’s focus on affiliate links, which pepper its portfolio of sites like The Points Guy, Bankrate, and CreditCards.com. Over time, a focus on affiliate revenue has crept into CNET’s editorial decisions, causing frustration among staff.

In one meeting after the Red Ventures acquisition, a former employee says editorial staff were shown how much the company earned through affiliate categories like home furnishings with the suggestion they keep it in mind when producing future content. CNET staffers were also told that a separate commerce team would begin writing video descriptions that included affiliate links, which many people worried would suggest on-camera hosts were endorsing specific products.

“Red Ventures’ big mantra is that they help people make life’s most important decisions,” a former staffer says. “And yet all of their influence has been to get people to make decisions that are going to be the most profitable to Red Ventures.”

CNET staff say that the proximity to revenue made it harder to maintain the editorial standards

“It’s very demoralizing. It’s actually soul-crushing. All you want to do is your job and you’re being told, ‘Don’t cover this,’ because the revenue potential is not there,” another former staff member says.

Advertising is what keeps most digital media companies afloat, and affiliate marketing is common across the industry. (The Verge earns a commission from affiliate links, as do other Vox Media-owned outlets, like The Strategist.) But in many newsrooms, there is a strict separation between the people dealing with advertisers and the people producing the news. At The Verge,for example, editorial staff never work on ads, and reviews writers don’t know how much parent company Vox Media earns through specific affiliate marketing links.

But under Red Ventures, former CNET staff say that the proximity to revenue made it harder and harder to maintain the editorial standards promised to audiences. 

“I do believe that the journalists who are doing the work at CNET are extremely ethical. I think that they have a lot of integrity, I think they work really hard,” they say. “But I think that they are under a great deal of pressure to make money for Red Ventures. And that’s just never a good situation for journalists.”

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Though the AI tool generating stories for CNET, Bankrate, and CreditCards.com was formally announced just weeks ago, Red Ventures’ “experiment” with enlisting artificial intelligence has been underway much longer. Like other publishers who’ve incorporated automated tools into their work, the Red Ventures proprietary AI software was sold to the newsroom as a way to more efficiently produce “the boring stuff” so writers could use their time instead to work on bigger projects. In actuality, enlisting artificial intelligence to write SEO bait accelerates the speed at which Red Ventures-owned websites can churn out search-optimized content loaded with affiliate links, cutting down the need for human writers — and the reporting they produce.

For Sarah Szczypinski, a former journalist on the CNET Money team who left the outlet in early 2022, the association with CNET in light of the AI-writing saga has been frustrating. Though Szczypinski quit many months before the AI-generated articles began appearing, people have started contacting her after the news broke, wondering if she, too, had used AI tools for her stories. Szczypinski maintains she wrote her stories on her own, without automation tools.

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“The leadership team gave no thought to what these unilateral decisions would do to the people working there, especially the people who are journalists and need their readers to trust them,” Szczypinski told The Verge. “We still have lives to live and careers to forge. And we can’t do that with something as damaging as this hanging over our heads.”

In late January, Szczypinski contacted Red Ventures and CNET, asking to have her author page and bylines pulled. Her name has been scrubbed from dozens of articles, now replaced simply by “CNET Staff.”

Throughout the time Red Ventures has owned CNET, the outlet’s leadership has promised readers time and again that its journalism is as strong as ever. Even as Guglielmo, Turrentine, and Red Ventures executives dodged questions from readers, staff, and reporters about the AI system, they pointed to CNET’s track record built over decades as evidence of trustworthiness. Audiences trust CNET for tech news, reviews, and recommendations, they reasoned, so they can trust CNET for how to move forward with artificial intelligence.

But even the more public ways CNET has tried to elicit trust from its audience have been hollowed out by a relentless drive toward optimization and gaming the search algorithm at the expense of the very work that had made CNET valuable.

CNET’s public ethics policy has not been meaningfully updated in years —  it still lists CBS as its parent company — but last year, the publication added nearly a dozen links detailing exactly how it tests and vets products to a hyper-specific degree, with separate posts for how CNET reviews everything from credit cards and TVs to vacuums and more. One way of looking at these posts is to provide readers — and potential customers — with as much detail as possible about CNET’s methodology. 

But for Red Ventures, these articles are just more fodder to boost its bottom line: Google likes when publishers demonstrate “experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness,” and the search algorithm factors in articles like these when it ranks search results. Articles packed with words like “unbiased,” “credible,” and “thoroughly vetted” are great for Red Ventures’ SEO-heavy strategy.

After all, Google can’t tell if it’s true.

This story originally stated that CNET and Red Ventures had an advertising deal with GE. The deal was with GE Appliances, which GE sold to Haier in 2016. We regret the error.

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