Inside the Hive by Vanity Fair Vanity Fair

Ever since the rise of social media, news publishers have always been playing an unwinnable game of catch-up, chasing the changes in Big Tech’s byzantine algorithms to ensure the clicks keep coming. But with AI now in the picture, the playing field is about to get even more lopsided, according to Wired editor in chief Katie Drummond and Axios Senior Media Reporter Sara Fischer. Joining Brian Stelter on the latest episode of Inside the Hive, the two media mavens discuss how tech companies like OpenAI have painted outlets into a corner by offering lucrative licensing deals that could later come back to bite them. “If you strike a deal, you get to experiment with the top technology in generative AI while your competitors do not,” says Fischer, but you “don’t fully understand…the risk of what you're giving up and how valuable it could be.”

Parsing fact from fiction is a requisite skill for any journalist. But for Steven Brill—the founder of Newsguard, a website dedicated to countering misinformation by ranking the reliability of news sources—it’s his life. Fresh on the heels of his new book, The Death of Truth, Brill joins host Brian Stelter to discuss Big Tech’s catastrophic moderation failures, how “pink slime” sites have infiltrated the news deserts, and why regaining public trust in the “referees” of real information is paramount for the 2024 election. 

In a special episode, host Brian Stelter discusses the Donald Trump guilty verdict with Mary Trump, a writer, psychologist, and niece of the former president and now-convicted felon. She describes how Trump has long tried to suppress feelings of humiliation and why she expects him to lash out even more after his conviction.

Host Brian Stelter is joined by veteran Democratic operative Lis Smith to examine the campaign inside the Democratic Party to stop Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from spoiling the presidential election. They discuss why the Democratic Party is "leaving nothing to chance" this election cycle and the motives behind implementing a war room to explicitly ensure that third-party candidates receive the same type of scrutiny that major-party candidates traditionally receive. They also reflect on Kennedy's affinity for conspiracy theories, his running mate Nicole Shanahan, and what it means that his rhetoric and policy positions have shifted to the far right.

As the Trump hush money trial heads toward closing arguments, CNN's chief legal correspondent Paula Reid tells host Brian Stelter about the biggest surprises thus far and previews the range of possible outcomes from the jury. Reid also shares an inside look at day-to-day television news coverage of the trial.

From ‘Scandal’ to social justice, Black Twitter has dominated digital discourse, a phenomenon Prentice Penny explores in his new Hulu docuseries, “Black Twitter: A People's History,” based on Jason Parham's 2021 feature for Wired. Penny and Parham, along with J Wortham of the New York Times Magazine, join host Brian Stelter to discuss Black Twitter's cultural impact, and its future.