Kinda stupid. It was okay but parts of it really turned me off and the whole concept has been done much better including in books I've already posted in this thread probably. He laments misinformation but gets a good number of things wrong himself and cites things that don't even support them. He sticks a chapter on Lincoln inbetween chapters on Adams and Wilson suppressing the press but it makes it about how abolitionist Lincoln was supposedly convinced by the press to end slavery and never supports this in any way. Then in the last section of the chapter he offhand mentions how Lincoln jailed journalists, never mentions that this was without trial and against the orders of the Supreme Court. The majority of the book focuses on Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump which is odd to me because those are the things most readers are already going to be familiar with. The Trump section is barely about the press as the rest of the book conceives of it and most people do, it's mostly about Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, QAnon, Steve Bannon, etc. Which is fine in that they're forms of the press but it doesn't support the central thesis of the book about the press clashing with the President, these all supported Trump! It just offhand mentions some of the rest of the press investigating Trump in the TWO Trump chapters. Then he does the worst thing possible, a final chapter with the "lessons" and "solutions" for the problems of the "press" that led to January 6th, which NOT THE THESIS OF YOUR BOOK DUDE, and his solutions are all the standard things like having the government fund journalists who report what it likes, having the government "force" Facebook and Twitter to ban more people and post more "fact checks", and of course Congress repealing Section 230. Also he says that Pepe is a neo-Nazi symbol. The funniest part of all to me was in the Trump chapters he complains a lot about Trump's attacks on the press but only briefly in one sentence mentions Trump's legal threats and desire to change the laws in this regard while quoting and sharing a bunch of different times that Trump called some media person stupid or ugly lmao
If I had known that the prior book was going to end with demanding the repeal of Section 230, I wouldn't have put these back to back but alas, reality is funnier than I intend it to be. Pretty much is just a straight forward history of how we got Section 230 and the major court cases that have interpreted it. He only briefly touches on how it's yet another example of American superiority over other loser countries (aka all of them that aren't America) and thinks there could be a narrow carveout made to address sex trafficking but isn't optimistic about opening up the entire opportunity to revisit it considering how bad politicians and others (like, say, journalism professors irrationally worried about non-journalists posting on the internet) want to eliminate it completely. He notes but doesn't completely get into how attempts to do this for a variety of issues have died because people who claim they just want to stop [thing X] by tweaking Section 230 almost always seem to reveal that they want to gut the entire thing and so even minor reform efforts fail quickly. The book does end around 2018 though so this isn't entirely his fault as some of these have been more recent.
Overall, I didn't mind this but I can't call it good once I started to reflect on it in the slightest ways. The "battle" doesn't take place until 2/3rds into the book. Uber starts, it's getting ready to go live in San Francisco and then suddenly it's a multibillion dollar enterprise in every city with thousands of employees. How did Uber grow? Who gives a shit apparently, why are you reading a book about Uber to find this out, what do I look like a famous New York Times journalist who got famous for "covering" Uber for years? Starts talking about people by their last names but not actually introducing them until chapters later. Spend a chapter talking about Uber buying some company. Three chapters later introduce the company and what it did, then repeat everything about it being bought. All kinds of irrelevant focuses on minor things and actions by journalists (like the author) while everything about the actual subject is completely unexplained and never investigated in detail. All kinds of weird assumptions like that being able to calculate how long it will take you to get somewhere is evidence of being a "math savant" and, crucially, this being the only detail needed to ever to show that someone is one. A whole book about business and "tech" but a constant display of no basic understanding of either, I don't even think he himself understood if the Uber security dude was talking to him about actual physical safety or like online safety about one subject. Then the "battle" happens, it kinda gets fun and it's immediately over. There seems like an interesting story here and some of the characters seem quite fun, some of the executives sound absolutely hilarious for being people at head of such an unicorn company and nobody caring that they were the people in charge, but it felt like the dude either completely botches or yada yada over what could be the best or most important parts of the story.
Fine, pretty straight forward history of Teddy's first term and his battles with J.P. Morgan and the coal miners strike. But that's really all it is, which is totally fine, but the subtitle and the intro and final chapter try to pretend there's more here. There's no actual battle for capitalism or anything, there's a single court case. She mostly treats the miners strike as an amusing aside that comes halfway through so you don't finish too quickly. Sure, she claims that single court case was the most important thing ever and changed the world, but she fails to mention that Teddy's administration never brought another significant antitrust case after the first one, then when Taft succeeded him Teddy spent years attacking Taft for doing too many antitrust cases and this was a huge reason Teddy claimed he had to challenge Taft and give us the infinitely worse Wilson. Then she tries to do that dumb thing where she explains how there's lots of important lessons from back then because now we live in the most important moment ever and we're facing even worse problems and the dangers are even greater, which omg stahp, Mark Zuckerberg as he currently stands is a lowly multibillionaire not J.P. Morgan 2.0 and Facebook is not remotely a monopoly that needs to be broken up by the government for restricting trade. I don't even know what she was trying to say about Putin/Trump other than the fact that she clearly thinks her readers are idiots who need CURRENT THING mentioned for them to have any connection to it.
