Aaron Ackerley
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aaronackerley.bsky.social
Aaron Ackerley
@aaronackerley.bsky.social
240 followers 440 following 25 posts
Modern British History. Press and Media. Empire. Economics. Knowledge and Power.

Associate Professor in History, University of Stavanger

https://www.uis.no/nb/profile/aaron-matthew-ackerley
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aaronackerley.bsky.social
Aaron Ackerley @aaronackerley.bsky.social · Oct 29
Happy to see my article 'Editorial control, the division of responsibilities, and journalistic autonomy' in Journalistica is now live.

Available open access here: tidsskrift.dk/journalistic...

#mediahistory #journalismhistory
Vol. 19 No. 1 (2025): Journalistica 2025 | Journalistica
tidsskrift.dk
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
karenattiah.bsky.social
Today, 8 years ago, my friend, Saudi Journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered.
October 2, 2026 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
adambienkov.bsky.social
The Conservative party Shadow Culture Secretary to speak at conference tomorrow about how to "defend press freedom", whilst her own party bans journalists whose coverage they don't like
October 2, 2026 at 8:59 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
adambienkov.bsky.social
Was just on LBC with @mrjamesob.bsky.social to discuss Kemi Badenoch's banning of @bylinetimes.bsky.social from attending Conservative conference after calling such bans by Reform "authoritarian" and an assault on free speech

bylinetimes.com/2026/09/30/k...
Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives Block Byline Times From Conference After Condemning Reform for Journalist Ban
The ban comes just weeks after the Conservative leader called Reform's barring of critical journalists from their conference an "authoritarian" attack on the free press
bylinetimes.com
October 2, 2026 at 11:53 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
josiahmortimer.bsky.social
New GB News accounts are out. Here are their losses to date. Or "spent political donations" if you prefer
Line chart titled 'GB News has lost £142m to date', showing cumulative losses in pounds rising steadily from around £3m in 2020/1 to £142m by 2025. The red line climbs most steeply between 2021/2 and 2023/4, reaching roughly £110m, then flattens as growth slows towards £142m. A note states the latest figures cover the seven-month period to 31 December 2025. Chart by Press Gazette, source: Companies House
October 2, 2026 at 10:14 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
lingdustin.bsky.social
I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:
Screenshot of a Tweet from Pope Leo XIV. It reads: "In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgen to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."
October 2, 2026 at 3:56 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
debalie.bsky.social
How does dirty money shape our world? This Thursday at De Balie, @oliverbullough.bsky.social and Thomas Bollen (@ftm.nl) expose the global system of money laundering. An evening about shell companies, tax havens, crypto, empty high-end apartments and more.

Tickets & info: debalie.nl/programma/th...
The Dark Economy: How Dirty Money Shapes the World
Together with investigative journalists Oliver Bullough and Thomas Bollen we dive into the shadow world money laundering. A world of shell companies, tax havens, crypto and empty high-end apartments.
debalie.nl
September 29, 2026 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
brokenbottleboy.bsky.social
NEW | Another day, another columnist selectively quoting Orwell…

ALLISON PEARSON’S ACTION MAN FETISH

A deranged defence of the SAS and a dismissal of war crimes accusations is exactly what we expect from one of the Telegraph’s worst.

brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/allison-pe...
Allison Pearson’s Action Man fetish
A deranged and bloodthirsty defence of the SAS and a dismissal of war crimes accusations is exactly what we can expect from one of the Telegraph’s worst.
brokenbottleboy.substack.com
September 30, 2026 at 12:21 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
richardlittler.bsky.social
Would that be Matt Brittin, former Google executive tech-bro, who has no broadcast experience?
September 30, 2026 at 7:35 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
richardlittler.bsky.social
The BBC's new director general's brain is smaller on the inside.
ign.com IGN @ign.com · 3d
The BBC's new director general has described a 50-minute AI-generated episode of Doctor Who as "pretty good," and suggested that the technology now enabled the creation of content "at the standard of a Hollywood studio." https://bit.ly/4rD8rmh
September 30, 2026 at 7:26 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
edgranter.bsky.social
Do you know how low that is for a population our size?
eicathomefinn.bsky.social Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 4d
'The Westminster government’s contribution to funding domestic undergraduates studying in England fell in real terms from £8.9 billion in 2012-13 to just £3.3bn in 2024-25, a drop of more than 60 per cent, an analysis has found.'
resprofnews.bsky.social Research Professional News @resprofnews.bsky.social · 4d
Government funds just 16p in every £1 spent on teaching.

Balance of higher education funding now “badly out of whack”, says Universities UK chief.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...
September 29, 2026 at 6:49 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
katemac.bsky.social
Remember when we thought investors might mobilize in ways sufficient to protect the world from climate change
pickardje.bsky.social Jim Pickard @pickardje.bsky.social · 4d
as a satire on so-called late stage capitalism how could one beat investors pouring a trillion into a company offering to wipe out humankind
September 29, 2026 at 7:00 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
eicathomefinn.bsky.social
'The Westminster government’s contribution to funding domestic undergraduates studying in England fell in real terms from £8.9 billion in 2012-13 to just £3.3bn in 2024-25, a drop of more than 60 per cent, an analysis has found.'
September 29, 2026 at 6:32 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
davidhendy.bsky.social
Today would have been the 80th birthday of the Third Programme - BBC Radio 3’s remarkable predecessor.

My latest for the BBC marks the occasion with a dip into the programme archives, unearthing some forgotten gems from the Third’s early years…
The Third at 80 – a brief history of the unexpected
Weird and wonderful highlights from the early years of BBC Radio 3’s celebrated forerunner The Third Programme
www.bbc.co.uk
September 29, 2026 at 7:28 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
bylinetimes.bsky.social
📚 GEOPOLITICS (Edition 90)

The different stories of the Cambridge academics Jason Arday and James Orr reveal the wider cultural and ideological forces at work around hierarchies and structural…

Read the full piece below.
The different stories of the Cambridge academics Jason Arday and James Orr reveal the wider cultural and ideological forces at work around hierarchies and structural power. Hardeep Matharu reports
The different stories of the Cambridge academics Jason Arday and James Orr reveal the wider cultural and ideological forces at work around hierarchies and structural power. Hardeep Matharu reports
subscribe.bylinetimes.com
September 27, 2026 at 5:01 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
larryglickman.bsky.social
Elite universities mea culpas about the “loss of trust” in higher education so often fail to consider the force of the longterm propagandistic attack on universities, given extensive play in conservative media, that long preceded Trump, but which he has massively accelerated.
September 26, 2026 at 12:09 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
larryglickman.bsky.social
The NY Times has repeatedly used the phrase “to heel” in reference to Trump’s crackdown on universities, implicitly clarifying that Trump goal is to establish dominance. And what exactly constitutes this “woke” ideology in higher education?
During the meeting, Mr. Trump repeatedly complained about his administration’s failure to bring Harvard University in particular to heel. The administration has been unable to hammer out a deal with the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, a central plank of his broader push against “woke” ideology in higher education.
September 26, 2026 at 11:54 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
josiahmortimer.bsky.social
🔴 Rupert Murdoch Flew Kemi Badenoch and Her Deputy to Mediterranean for Summer Trips Worth £12,000

The Conservative leader and Alex Burghart MP held “off-site meetings” with the billionaire media mogul in August
bylinetimes.com/2026/09/25/r...
Rupert Murdoch Flew Kemi Badenoch and Her Deputy to Mediterranean for Summer Trips Worth £12,000
The Conservative leader and Alex Burghart MP held "off-site meetings" with the billionaire media mogul in August
bylinetimes.com
September 25, 2026 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
npjgarland.bsky.social
Kind of grimly fascinating as always, coming from the former director of strategy to a Labour PM. There just isn't a future for a centre-left politics that is this hostile to pretty basic progressive values.
September 25, 2026 at 4:42 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
petergeoghegan.bsky.social
🔴 BREAKING: BP, Uber, Amazon and more paying Tony Blair's think tank $25,000 for “networking” opportunities with politicians and policy makers at party conferences

Experts say "looks and smells like cash for access"

Full story on Democracy for Sale
democracyforsale.substack.com/p/breaking-t...
BREAKING: Tony Blair Institute’s $25,000 corporate network “smells like cash for access”
Exclusive documents show Tony Blair's think tank offers corporate members such as BP and Uber "networking" at party conferences and "a stronger voice" in policy debates.
democracyforsale.substack.com
September 25, 2026 at 6:10 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
rooseveltinstitute.org
This is where the logic of media consolidation inevitably leads: fewer companies, fewer owners, and more of what we see and hear decided by a few billionaires.

Decades of treating media as a market, rather than democratic infrastructure, created the conditions for this oligarchic system.
The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis - Roosevelt Institute
Bilal Baydoun, Shahrzad Shams, and Victor Pickard trace the roots of the US media crisis to decades of deregulation and commercial capture, outlining how consolidation, news deserts, and platform domi...
rooseveltinstitute.org
September 24, 2026 at 4:53 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
casmudde.bsky.social
Indeed. But Watson’s move is much less problematic than what he and other Labour leaders have done for Palentir when in power. This is just the logical next step.
Tom Watson’s move to Palantir is the latest sign of how far the rot has spread in UK politics | Clive Lewis
When a former Labour deputy leader joins a firm built on surveillance and military targeting, it deepens public cynicism – and democracy depends on trust, says Labour MP Clive Lewis
www.theguardian.com
September 25, 2026 at 2:18 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
ayoub.bsky.social
it's so great and normal that we're spending trillions of $ worth of money we don't have on these people
mford.bsky.social Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 8d
Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?”

Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading. What do you think when you hear that? The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter? That’s my question for you. Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does. But there must be some set of skills that matter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those. There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address. And I —— I don’t really believe that to be true. It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you. One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it. But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded —— Yeah. I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books. You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans. Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off. Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off. Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers. Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker. What do you mean by systems thinker? They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things. So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.
September 24, 2026 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
jonmcgregor.bsky.social
tfw when you open a 5000 word chapter that a PhD student has worked really hard on and the UNIVERSITY SOFTWARE cheerily says "ooh this looks like a long document do you want me to summarise it for you?"
September 24, 2026 at 10:02 AM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
markfollman.bsky.social
NEWS: My new investigation uncovers the horrific ChatGPT history of the Tumbler Ridge school shooter. OpenAI’s chatbot fueled the shooter's violent fantasies and plans up to the day of the massacre. Chats about guns, timing of attacks, becoming infamous, and more. www.motherjones.com/media/2026/0...
ChatGPT helped the Tumbler Ridge school shooter focus on guns, tactics, and terror, our investigation reveals
OpenAI’s chatbot fed the shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre.
www.motherjones.com
September 24, 2026 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by Aaron Ackerley
radleybalko.bsky.social
Raskin made a holy shit observation on MS Now this afternoon: Since taking office, Trump has made a million dollars per hour for himself.

Every hour, he has made more than twice the president’s annual salary.
September 25, 2026 at 12:18 AM