Swelling nationalism and religious tensions are coloring two of the world’s largest democratic exercises, in India and Indonesia, thanks in part to incendiary misinformation proliferating on social media.
The big picture: Both countries have among the largest populations of social media users on the planet, and cheap smartphones mean more people are being connected every day. The propaganda and fearmongering we’re seeing isn’t new, but powerful tools are spreading it farther and more rapidly than ever before.
AT&T has sold its minority stake in Hulu back to the streaming video joint venture, which includes Disney and Comcast Corporation. The transaction valued Hulu at $15 billion, with AT&T’s 9.5% interest valued at $1.43 billion.
Why it matters: The sale gives Disney a 66% stake in the streaming company and 33% to Comcast/NBCUniversal. The transaction helps AT&T pay down its debt and helps Disney bolster its streaming offerings.
The 2019 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced Monday.
The big winner: Local news outlets swept the major awards categories, winning the top prizes in public service, breaking news and investigative reporting.
French ad giant Publicis announced Sunday it will acquire Epsilon, the data marketing arm of Alliance Data Systems Corporation, for a net price of $3.95 billion, and at a total cash consideration of $4.4 billion after a tax step-up.
Why it matters: It's one of the biggest agency acquisitions in years. It gives Publicis access to the information of 250 million people (per Epsilon's estimates) that it can use to build better ad-targeting strategies in-house.
Johnson & Johnson and UnitedHealth Group are lighting the Q1 earnings torch this week, per usual, but Wall Street investors are uneasy about the industry’s forecast even though companies are still immensely profitable right now.
Driving the news: Medicare for All legislation, the Trump administration’s drug rebate regulation and another legal battle over the Affordable Care Act have created volatility with health care stocks, which have traded below the broader market.
Markets are the world's greatest mechanism for turning enormous amounts of information into a single agreed-upon valuation. Price discovery, as it's known, is one of the most important things that any market does. But it doesn't always work efficiently.
Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was mentioned 3,181 times on Fox News and Fox Business during the 6 weeks from Feb. 25 to April 7 — 75 times a day — according to the liberal Media Matters for America.
The big picture: "Not a day went by when she wasn’t spoken about on Fox," AP notes. Among the names that Fox hosts called Ocasio-Cortez include "little girl," "Comrade Cortez," an "idiotic wind bag," "the Steve Bannon of the left" and more. Fox Business host Stuart Varney even acknowledged: "We have an AOC segment every single day almost every single hour” because "she is good for our ratings."
