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--:-- Georgia Howe: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- John Bickley: And I'm John Bickley, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It's Tuesday, September 5th. Today, we're discussing the Biden administration's move to legalize marijuana at the federal level. We'll also be talking about a new study that found Google is suppressing certain search results and a report that shows the Associated Press is being funded by left-wing organizations.
--:-- John Bickley: That's right, Georgia. Let's start with the marijuana news. Last week, the Biden administration urged the Drug Enforcement Administration to loosen federal regulations on marijuana, paving the way for the most significant shift in federal drug policy in decades.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Hi, I'm Cabot Phillips, Senior Editor at the Daily Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Cabot, tell us a little bit about this move.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, so last week, President Biden's Department of Health and Human Services recommended that the DEA enact more lax regulations on marijuana at the federal level. Specifically, the White House is calling for the agency to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule 3 substance under the Controlled Substances Act.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Now, at the moment, weed is classified as Schedule 1, which the DEA considers substances or chemicals with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. That means the federal government technically puts marijuana at the same level as drugs like heroin, LSD, meth, etc.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But that could soon be changing. Right. So proponents of legalization have long said that classification is outdated and out of step with common sense, and they've called for it to be reclassified. And the White House seems to agree.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: In a letter to the DEA, HHS Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine said the FDA had completed a comprehensive scientific evaluation of marijuana at the president's directive and concluded its federal classification should be amended.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: The DEA will now conduct their own review and likely make a final ruling in the coming year. Now, a move to Schedule 3 would put marijuana in the same category as substances like testosterone and codeine, which the DEA considers to have a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Remember, President Biden campaigned on decriminalizing marijuana at a federal level, and this is not the first action we've seen from his administration on marijuana. Last fall, he offered blanket pardons for those convicted on federal charges of simple marijuana possession, but this latest action would be a much larger step toward federal decriminalization.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So if the DEA complies, what would it actually mean to move marijuana to a Schedule 3 designation?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, it would have an immediate impact on marijuana businesses that are operating in the 23 states where cannabis possession is currently legal. Even though states may have legalized it, though, because marijuana is a Schedule I substance, the businesses selling it are currently restricted from most tax exemptions for expenses like salaries and benefits.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: A Schedule III classification would allow them to immediately begin paying far less in federal taxes. As a result, cannabis stocks exploded on Wall Street last week with the largest marijuana ETF jumping 19% the day the news of this move came out.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Reclassification would also open the door for more research on the drug, which has been difficult from a legal perspective because of its technical status as a dangerous narcotic.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, where does the public stand on this issue?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, it's interesting. There's really been a major cultural shift on marijuana over the last few years. Throughout the last few decades, the majority of Americans opposed legalization, but that has started to shift rapidly.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: The latest polling from Gallup shows that 6 in 10 Americans support legalization for recreational use, while nearly 9 in 10 Americans say it should be legal for medical use. That support is strongest among young people and registered Democrats, but even among Republicans, just 15% say it should be totally legal, while a plurality support legalization for recreational use.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: That shift in public support comes at a time when weed use is more common than at any point on record. Recent polling shows that half of Americans have tried marijuana at some point in their lives, while one in six use it regularly. That is double the rate we saw a decade ago.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And now for the first time ever, more Americans are smoking marijuana than cigarettes. So quite a change underway.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, what about critics of this move? What are they saying?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, it's definitely worth noting. There are plenty of folks who oppose the drug's normalization and legalization. While it's essentially impossible to overdose on marijuana, critics say that does not mean it's harmless.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Today's weed is far more potent than what was out there in decades past, and those increasingly high levels of THC, the psychoactive component in weed, can have detrimental impacts on human health.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: A number of studies have shown that regular marijuana use increases rates of psychosis and anxiety and exacerbates other existing mental health disorders, especially among young people who are one of the fastest growing demographics for weed use.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, I admit I actually have mixed feelings on this one. Cabot, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Anytime.
--:-- Georgia Howe: A recent study from Media Research Center found that Google search results appear to be suppressing the campaign websites of Republican presidential candidates. Search results for the term presidential campaign websites were analyzed by MRC using a clean algorithm not affected by previous search histories or cookies, and the results are rather surprising.
--:-- David Marcus: Hi, I'm David Marcus, a contributor to the Daily Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So what exactly did these clean search results glean, David?
--:-- David Marcus: Morning. The most shocking thing they found was that in the first page or batch of results, not a single Republican candidate's website showed up, nor for that matter did Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s.
--:-- David Marcus: What did show up was Joe Biden. There's no surprise there. Marianne Williamson, who is in a distant third in the Democrat race, as well as the campaign websites of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who listeners may have noticed are not even actually running for president at the moment.
--:-- David Marcus: It's worth pointing out that this study was conducted the day before the GOP debate when one would assume interest in those candidates would be pretty high.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Do we have any sense of why this would be happening? Has Google acknowledged that there actually an issue here?
--:-- David Marcus: Look, there are only two ways that it could be happening. Either it's intentional, which Google strenuously denies, or else the bias of the employees, the software engineers, product safety team, and others is somehow making its way into the algorithm and is reflected in search results.
--:-- David Marcus: 88% of political contributions by Google employees go to Democrats, so we know the basic political makeup of the company. Google has maintained that there is no bias.
--:-- David Marcus: In response to previous studies showing the same results, they claim that vague search terms are being used. But other big tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter, now X, have admitted their algorithms produce bias results, though they claim not to know why or how.
--:-- Georgia Howe: How much of an impact can this manipulation or bias have on a campaign or for that matter, any organization that finds itself on the wrong side of this algorithm?
--:-- David Marcus: It's a big deal. MRC also found that in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Google was suppressing the websites of GOP candidates in the most high-profile Senate races.
--:-- David Marcus: Google's responsible for about 90% of search results. So for better or worse, it plays a major role in how Americans see the world. Search engine optimization is a major industry because companies, campaigns, and organizations want their names at the top of the list.
--:-- David Marcus: If the search engine has its thumb on the ideological scale, that's a kind of invisible censorship that can be extremely pernicious.
--:-- Georgia Howe: This is something that Congress has actually been looking into for several years now. What legislative options exist if, in fact, Google and the other big tech companies don't stop the bias?
--:-- David Marcus: So most of the potential actions by Congress center on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This is a mid-1990s law that establishes that most Internet companies are providing a neutral platform, not acting as publishers or editors.
--:-- David Marcus: Some in Congress, including Senator Josh Hawley, have been taking aim at this provision, given that, as we've been discussing, the results in both searches and in terms of social media content moderation, they're far from neutral.
--:-- Georgia Howe: What are the chances that any legislation could pass or that the industry could actually reform prior to Americans casting their ballot next year?
--:-- David Marcus: I would put that somewhere approximately between small and nonexistent.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Again, the fact that this is a form of information manipulation that goes on behind the screens, as it were, makes it hard to highlight and force into the spotlight.
--:-- David Marcus: But that having been said, there is a sense that policymakers are waking up to this issue and that some kind of legislation or regulation seems increasingly likely, at least eventually.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Yeah, I know that some of the lawmakers we've talked to have expressed a lot of interest in this very topic.
--:-- David Marcus: Yeah.
--:-- Georgia Howe: David, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- David Marcus: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Georgia Howe: A new report finds that the Associated Press, the country's top wire service, has received millions in funding from left-wing foundations that includes one connected to the controversial 1619 project.
--:-- Megan Basham: Hi, I'm Megan Basham, a culture reporter for the Daily Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So Megan, I know this was an investigative story from the Washington Free Beacon. What did they find?
--:-- Megan Basham: So last year, the AP introduced a new partnership program that allows various donors to subsidize specific reporting beats, things like climate change or racial issues.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, the Beacon reviewed that donor slate and they found that the vast majority have a history of also backing left political causes. A couple of the foundations were politically neutral, but there were none that could be characterized as conservative.
--:-- Megan Basham: I spoke to Beacon investigative reporter Chuck Ross, who broke this story, and he gave me some background on these organizations.
--:-- Megan Basham: One organization is the Ida B. Wells Society, which was founded by Nicole Hannah-Jones, the lady who created the 1619 Project, which, of course, has produced revisionist history about the United States' founding.
--:-- Megan Basham: There are other organizations, some of which aren't that well-known. The Jonathan Logan Foundation, they fund an organization called Take Back the Court, which advocates all sorts of hard left-wing positions related to the Supreme Court, such as expanding the Supreme Court.
--:-- Megan Basham: So this just shows a pattern, the Associated Press taking money from left-wing organizations, and the natural question is whether that influences the Associated Press's coverage of these issues.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And then there were other foundations like the Hewlett, Rockefeller, and Outrider Foundations. They've all taken a keen interest in pushing climate change legislation. And they've also given the AP millions to cover that topic.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, is there clear evidence that this funding is impacting how the AP actually shapes its reporting?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, an AP spokeswoman told The Beacon, and I'm quoting here, no funder has any influence over AP journalism.
--:-- Megan Basham: But Ross reviewed the AP's reporting in the areas that are part of these partnerships, and he did feel that some of that coverage showed bias.
--:-- Megan Basham: A good example, the Associated Press's chief political reporter published a story that got a lot of backlash on social media. We're trying to link the so-called quote-unquote rhetoric of Ron DeSantis to the terrible shooting in Jacksonville.
--:-- Megan Basham: There's no basis that I could see to link DeSantis to that. But of course, the Associated Press reporter tried to make that link.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So that's just one example of many. His story gave a few other examples, like a February report that said that GOP election tactics intentionally disenfranchised black voters in Wisconsin.
--:-- Megan Basham: And I think that's a debatable assertion. And this wasn't in the report, but I'll note that the AP Stylebook, which is a reference guide used by many, if not most, major media outlets and really sets the tone in a lot of ways for how the news is framed.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, in 2020, AP said reporters should not refer to mass looting and property destruction after George Floyd's death as riots. It said that term was stigmatizing and didn't give enough weight to the underlying grievance behind the riots.
--:-- Megan Basham: Instead, it said reporters should use words like unrest or uprising. So if you look at this funding and some of these style guide changes, that does seem relevant.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And as Ross noted in his reporting, All Sides, which is a watchdog group that tracks media bias, changed its rating recently for the AP from center to leans left, specifically because of what it called word choice bias and bias by omission of views.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, that brings up an important point that the AP is different from other news outlets in that it's the most widely used wire service. So its reporting will appear in newspapers and on media sites across the world. So this is pretty significant.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Megan Basham: Anytime.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more of the news you need to know.
