AUGUST 21, 2026 OPINION MLive: promoting billionaire interests and disparaging homeless people JAY COOPER Groundcover contributor AI company mlive.com won't tell you how toxic data centers are going to bankrupt you and poison your water, but it will call homeless people aggressive and disruptive four times in a week. The only mention of landlords in MLive's "series on panhandling in Ann Arbor, exploring both the bigger picture issues of homelessness downtown and the concerns of residents, businesses and panhandlers themselves" was in the article titled “At least every block: Ann Arbor grapples with rising, aggressive panhandling." The article uncritically relays the delusional opinion of landlord Ed "Mr. Downtown" Shaffran that "Ann Arbor’s homeless problems are a product of state and national issues that need higher-level solutions." This unsubstantiated and absurd statement is what I would expect to hear from a landlord, because any factual interrogation into why people are homeless points directly at landlords. MLive printed this perspective without question, without any journalistic rigor whatsoever. While allowing Mr. Downtown-Shaffran to redirect the conversation toward mental health — the most common blame-target for why homelessness exists, even though mental health isn't evicting people, landlords and cops are — MLive does print factual quotes from the mouth of the landlord: “‘Those people need a place, because all we did is put them on the street,’ he said. ‘And in many respects, we created the problem.’” In every respect, Mr. Downtown-Shaffran, landlords created and continue to create this problem. Closing mental hospitals in the 90s did not put hundreds more on the streets of Washtenaw County this year, landlords did. Closing mental hospitals in the 90s did not ratchet up everyone's rent while wages stayed stagnant, landlords did. Closing mental hospitals in the 90s did not kick people out of their homes to renovate units and convert the complex to Airbnbs, landlords did. This garbage writing is only the tip of the iceberg at mlive.com. I struggle to summarize how shitty the writing is, how perverse the perspective is, how harmful the framings are, because there and partly because it produces hallucinated garbage that rarely stands up to even basic fact-checking. So, when friends of mine were talking about the unusual number of anti-panhandling articles MLive was publishing, I was shocked to see the only search function on the website was AI-powered. Turns out mlive.com is an AI company. While looking at the authors of hateful articles about homeless people on mlive.com, one author was not like the others: "Advance Local Express Desk." Was this some kind of Associated Press style pool of shared articles, or a collaborative team? No. "The Advance Local Express Desk uses AI tools to assist in producing content, which is reviewed and edited by staff. Advance Local is the parent company of AL.com, Cleveland.com, lehighvalleylive.com, MassLive.com, MLive.com, NJ.com, OregonLive. com, PennLive.com, SILive.com and Syracuse.com.” So not only is MLive one small arm of a massive publishing company distributing AI garbage, it's owned by the billionaire Newhouse family under their "Advance Publications" umbrella. S.I. Newhouse IV described his family's wealth in the 2003 documentary "Born Rich.” "It would be a low estimate, a very low estimate for me to say 20 billion, but I can't, and I can't get too exact with it but, in attainable assets, that's what, that's the range our family's in." Advance.com lists the highlights of the Newhouse family's publishing monster: "Advance’s portfolio of exceptional Condé Nast, Advance Local, Stage Entertainment, companies The includes IRONMAN Group, American City Business Journals, Leaders Group, Turnitin, and POP. Advance is also among the largest shareholders in Charter Communications, Reddit and Warner Bros. Discovery." The Newhouse family owns innumerable crimes within Advance Publications: Condé Nast's white supremacist business practices are well-documented. Turnitin's notoriously flawed plagiarism detection service, which it charges universities millions for, now offers the option (for millions more) to do AI detection. Advance Publications is inventing are too many examples. I don't generally use AI. Partly because it's burning down the planet, the disease and selling the cure. What is the point in detecting AI written papers by students, when massive publishing demons are ensuring writing jobs are being annihilated and replaced with jobs reviewing and editing AI generated slop? For those who have always lived under Comcast's (aka Xfinity's) localized monopoly, Charter (aka Spectrum) is a very similar grotesque, sitting on public communications infrastructure and charging rent for access to it. They got caught by a jury in Texas forging documents to avoid paying damages to the family of a woman killed by a tech they sent to her home while they knew he was mentally unravelling. When I looked at the environmental news section of mlive.com I was not shocked to see very little mention of data centers, the most pressing local environmental issue. The one article that mentioned data centers in a heap of mind-numbingly impactless articles was an article by Danielle James, titled "Data center protesters disrupt Trump at Michigan speech." The article opens with a gallery sporting five nearly identical pictures of the protesters in the moment they had before they were removed by police, interspersed with seven pictures of Trump in various states of smug shit-eating grin and that face babies make when they're pooping their diapers standing up. The article does not address the documented toxicity of data centers, or the math that proves there's no way to build one without raising energy prices on people already struggling. It portrays people fighting like hell, risking arrest to stop the destruction of our local environment in the softest possible terms. "Residents across Michigan have pushed back on data center proposals in recent months, raising concerns about water and electricity demands and noise pollution ... but the projects continue to spark local resistance across the state, with residents concerned about water and electricity consumption, noise pollution, reduction in property values, and in some cases the loss of their community's rural character." This is a total mischaracterization of the material harms feared. They highlight noise pollution rather than toxic waste dumps because it makes protesters seem like ridiculous, frivolous crybabies, when that's low on the list of very real damage to local people's health that data centers consistently create. The article did take the time to repeat lies about jobs and tax revenue that unnamed "proponents" are telling, and Trump’s excuses for data centers, including the non-existent AI competition with China. For those out of the loop, let me catch you up on this "US-China AI War:" Companies in the US/NATO empire are burning the world down building data centers to make nearly useless chatbots so Nvidia can pretend there's demand for their absurdly expensive bloodsoaked processors; and Chinese researchers are periodically and with little expense examining the stupid chatbots U.S. companies say will rule the world, writing better ones, and releasing the source code to show the world how stupid said chatbots really are. Not even Fortune magazine pretends China and the United States are in competition on AI. In the June 16 Fortune article "China isn’t trying to beat the U.S. at AI — it’s playing a completely different game," Noel Ngai and Nick Leung cited Jensen Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, who admits restricting chip sales to China would only accelerate China's AI lead, because China does not need Nvidia chips, because there is no actual demand for Nvidia chips: they are radiators heating pointless data centers crunching meaningless numbers. The Danielle James' MLive article also uncritically prints the lies about jobs and tax revenue unnamed "proponents" are telling. This is not a local paper. These are not the thoughts of local people. Mlive is eight local tentacles of the billionaire publishing machine. MLive Media Group owns eight local Michigan papers: The Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, The Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Kalamazoo Gazette, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Muskegon Chronicle and Saginaw News. Protesters holding up signs and chanting before being removed by police is not news, it is happening every day across this country. I was able to find with mlive.com's AI-powered "Smart Search" (mlive.com's only search function) that they actually wrote two articles about the same non-story. Mike Jay's article embedded a video of the entire non-story, which you can watch play out in 77 seconds. MLive writer Jennifer Eberbach has done damage control around Saline allowing a data center to dump 15,750 gallons of wastewater into the Saline River daily, citing how many jobs it will supposedly create; and a wordy piece about hundreds in Augusta Township that signed a petition to remove their elected leaders over see MLIVE page 13 GROUNDCOVER NEWS 11
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