The question Emily Bell posed in Columbia Journalism Review in January has only grown sharper: are technology companies allies of the press, or threats to it? The answer, as of March 2026, is that they are both — which is worse than either [1].

Palantir, the surveillance contractor whose clients include the CIA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been actively seeking partnerships with news organizations, offering its data analytics platform for newsroom investigations. The proposition sounds generous until you consider that Palantir's primary customer is the national security state, and its primary product is the capacity to see everything. A newsroom that runs its investigative data through Palantir's infrastructure has, in effect, invited the intelligence community's preferred contractor to sit beside its reporters [1].

Meta, meanwhile, completed its retreat from news in the opposite direction. Having spent years building a fact-checking infrastructure that employed thousands of journalists worldwide, the company dismantled it in early 2025. Content moderators — many on H-1B visas with employer-dependent immigration status — were laid off with minimal severance. The message was plain: the platform that once claimed to care about truth decided truth was not worth the political cost [1].

At a CJR-convened conference, delegates workshopped a concept that would have seemed absurd five years ago: a "NATO for news" — a collective defense pact among media organizations against the platforms they depend on for distribution. The analogy is imperfect. NATO members share a common enemy. Journalism's relationship with technology is a dependency, not an alliance. The dealer does not join a mutual defense pact with the addict [1].

The Faustian bargain was always implicit. Now it is structural.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin