Knight First Amendment Institute

On March 7, 2025, four federal agencies announced that they would be cancelling $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University due, the agencies said, to the school...

I don’t really see any new theories around, rather, I see the revival of old theories.

In the 20th century, regimes were on the whole much less reluctant to deploy outright violence. They didn’t worry so much about being seen as openly repressive, whereas in the 21st century, there was much more of an attempt to b...

Protecting institutional autonomy in the future requires a realignment of the power and incentive structures that produce policy outcomes. What we have, today, is largely the product of roughly 80 years of power concentration in the executive branch, which is governed by the White House and its components. In recent decades, this power has been focused primarily in the Office...

In April, McClatchy, the newspaper chain that owns the Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee, introduced an AI-powered “content scaling agent” (CSA). While AI summaries are now ubiquitous, McClatchy’s tool went a step further: It t...

Yesterday, the Knight Institute joined Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and lawful permanent resident who has been targeted for deportation, for a congressional briefing on threats to freedom of speech in the United States, including the Trump administration’s targeting of noncitizens because of speech and association the government d...