Why would Amazon even want a heads-up from citizens seeking answers? The company’s founder and chief is Jeff Bezos. Mr. Bezos owns The Washington Post. You know, the newspaper with the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Demanding notice of public information requests so that you can stifle them is pro-darkness.

The Fox News Caravan Crew

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Pete Hegseth, a “Fox & Friends” weekend co-host, said that the slow-moving “caravan” of migrants making their way toward the United States “looks more like an invasion than anything else.” A frequent Fox guest, Sidney Powell, accused the migrants of bringing diseases with them, and another Fox News guest, David Ward, got more specific, claiming that they would bring to the United States “smallpox and leprosy and TB.” (Smallpox was eradicated as of 1980!) Chris Farrell, a guest on Lou Dobbs’s Fox Business Network show, said that the groups supporting the migration were propped up by the “Soros-financed State Department,” a callback to anti-Semitic tropes about the Hungarian-born liberal financier George Soros, who is Jewish. Fox later condemned the comments and banned the guest from future appearances. But it all played to President Trump’s xenophobic message at the close of the midterm campaign. And more recently, Tucker Carlson, a Fox News prime-time host, said immigration made the United States “poor and dirtier and more divided.”

Claas Relotius / Der Spiegel

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In a less heated political environment, the story of a star journalist who was found to have passed off fiction as fact would be worth little more than a chuckle from general readers and a scolding from media critics. But now that people from both ends of the political spectrum routinely accuse reporters of creating “fake news,” this kind of thing hurts journalists everywhere. Claas Relotius, a writer for Der Spiegel, a German magazine known for its fact-checking department, is the latest in a line of fabulists (Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, among others) to have made a name for himself by hoodwinking editors and readers with stories that really were too good to be true. Pick a new field, Herr Relotius. We hear Hollywood’s hiring.

Charter Spectrum

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It wasn’t me, Charter Spectrum — it was you! How many commercials did you run promising higher internet speeds? A million? Well, last week came the news that you have agreed with the New York attorney general that Charter Spectrum did not deliver the speeds it had advertised. Sure, Time Warner, which was previously running the service, started the pattern of bad-faith promises. And the company will try to make good by offering its customers payments of either $75 or $150. But that’s not going to get back the eBay bid that the cursed spinning pinwheel caused me to lose.