CNN shakes up its morning lineup, Snap slashes staffers, James O'Keefe posts a mea culpa after Project Veritas settles a lawsuit, Tucker Carlson is spotted in Moscow, the Grammy Awards soar in ratings, and so much more. But first, the A1.

Biden's Media Scramble

CNN Photo Illustration/Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

President Joe Biden will be sitting on the sidelines this Sunday as the campaign for the 2024 election heats up.

The White House recently informed CBS News that Biden had chosen not to participate in the traditional pre-Super Bowl interview, the second consecutive year that the president has declined an offer to speak directly to the country's largest assembled live audience.

Biden's advisers have said that the decision to skip the interview was because they wanted to give the already fatigued public a break from politics during the big game. A White House official underscored that argument to me on Monday, adding that they believe the value of the interview has dropped, given it has over the years shifted from a more lighthearted media opportunity to a politics-focused affair. 

Regardless, the Super Bowl snub reflects a larger Biden strategy: The president is leaning far less than his predecessors on the traditional media apparatus to get his message out, opting instead for alternative mediums to address the American people.

"We are being more creative," a Biden campaign adviser told me Monday, "and relying less on formulas of the past."

To that end, the Biden team has worked to make inroads with online influencers who create content for platforms like TikTok and YouTube, briefing social media personalities on key events and inviting them at times to the White House. Biden's team has made the president available for podcasts, where he has chatted with Conan O'Brien and Anderson Cooper about grief and tragedy. And, just last week, he made calls into four Black radio stations ahead of the South Carolina primary.

"We are being less traditional because less people get their news from traditional mediums than ever before," the Biden campaign official said.

While the rise of social media and other platforms have given politicians new ways to communicate with the public, it has also allowed those in power to bypass the traditional press and, thus, avoid scrutiny. Biden's media strategy has renewed such questions, with critics skewering him for keeping an arm's length from the establishment press.

Biden's advisers insist that the president's embrace of alternate forms of media is about diversifying his outreach, not about shielding him from hard-hitting sit downs with tough journalists. They point to interviews Biden did last year with CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley for "60 Minutes" and CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria ahead of the G7 gathering.

"President Biden is crisscrossing the country at a rate that often exceeds his predecessors’ travel schedules, talking to the American people about their lives and the issues that matter most to them and executing an aggressive, modern, all-of-the-above communications and digital strategy that highlights how he’s fighting for families and their values," Andrew Bates, the deputy White House press secretary, told me in a statement Monday.

But the numbers point to Biden participating in far fewer interviews and news conferences than his predecessors. According to The White House Transition Project's Martha Kumar, Biden has sat for roughly one-quarter as many interviews as Donald Trump at this point in his presidency, and one-fifth as many as Barack Obama. 

While the president has regularly engaged in gaggles with the White House press corps, such forums don't naturally lend themselves to the type of aggressive questioning that might come in a sit-down interview. For those who want to see their elected leaders regularly sit down for hard questions from the free press, regardless of political party, Biden's strategy does not sit well. 

Whether it is an effective political strategy, time will tell. While Biden advisers are more than confident in it, others are more skeptical. Frank Sesno — a former CNN White House correspondent, bureau chief, and current director of George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs — argued that it could backfire, noting that while it "keeps him out of harm's way, it reinforces the narrative that he's running from a fight."

"The Super Bowl is super ratings and generally a full-house free pass for a president," Sesno told me. "The interview is more apple pie than food for thought. So for Biden to take a pass on this (so to speak) will be taken by the over-the-hill crowd as another piece of evidence that he’s not in the game. It’s safer for him — no interview means no gaffes, no viral video of a mangled answer. But it also gives another punchline to the standup comics and the armchair quarterbacks."

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Charting CNN's Course: New CNN boss Mark Thompson is shaking up the network's morning show lineup. Thompson announced Monday that the current form of "CNN This Morning," anchored by Poppy Harlow and Phil Mattingly, will end later this month. The show, which launched under former boss Chris Licht and struggled to find an audience and identity, will move to Washington, D.C., where it will be anchored by Kasie Hunt during the hours of 5am to 7am. Thompson said in an all-staff memo that CNN is in talks with Harlow and Mattingly about new roles at the network, though it's unclear what those might be (I'm told that Harlow, Mattingly, and executive producer Lauren Mensch learned news about the changes Sunday). Thompson also said that the changes "mean that we will no longer produce morning programming in New York and will be disbanding the team that currently produces 'CNN This Morning' in that city." A CNN spokesperson declined to say how many roles will be impacted as part of the changes, but a source told me it will affect dozens of people. Mattingly wrote on social media that his "only regret" was that he "couldn't deliver a different outcome" for the "talented team" that worked on the show. Here's my full story.

► As a result of the "CTM" changes, "CNN News Central" will start earlier, airing from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. That move in turn makes way for two fresh hours of programming. Filling those new hours will be a show anchored by Jim Acosta at 10am and a program anchored by Pamela Brown at 11am. Since Brown is on maternity leave, Wolf Blitzer will anchor in the interim.

🔎 Zooming in: The changes mark a dramatic dismantling of CNN’s morning offerings implemented by Licht less than two years ago. The former CNN chief, once considered a morning show wunderkind for his work on "Morning Joe" and "CBS This Morning," made it his first programming priority to launch "CNN This Morning." But the show immediately struggled, with the original trio of anchors — Harlow, Kaitlan Collins, and Don Lemon — noticeably lacking on-air chemistry and reports of infighting making their way into the press. Less than a year later, CNN dismissed Lemon and moved Collins to prime time, leaving Harlow as the sole original anchor of the show. Mattingly began his role as co-anchor later last year. Regardless, the show’s troubles are representative of the larger ratings struggles at CNN, with Licht’s programming changes chasing viewers away from the network, and executives now trying to recalibrate and win them back.

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Snap Slashes Staff: More painful layoffs are rocking Snap. The Snapchat-parent said Monday it will lay off 10% of its workforce, or some 500 employees. "We are reorganizing our team to reduce hierarchy and promote in-person collaboration," a Snap spokesperson said. The Information's Erin Woo reported that senior leadership was targeted in the staff reduction. The brutal round of cuts — which comes just a day before the company is set to report earnings — comes after Snap already laid off 20% of its staff in 2022, and another 3% just last year. CNBC's Rohan Goswami has more here.

🔎 Zooming in: "The layoffs don’t bode well for the state of Snap’s business ahead of its Q4 2023 earnings," noted Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg. " Meta’s blockbuster report is a tough act for Snap to follow, and Snap is likely trying to garner some goodwill with investors, who rewarded its competitor for its cost-cutting measures and its continued 'do more with less' mantra going into 2024. We expect Snap to report a 2023 year-over-year ad revenue decline of 3.3%."

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Veritas Via Veritas: Project Veritas is finally acknowledging the truth — albeit after the organization has effectively shut down. The former right-wing group, which ousted James O'Keefe as its leader last year, leading to its ultimate demise, settled a lawsuit with a Pennsylvania postmaster whom it had accused of engaging in 2020 election shenanigans, NBC News' Ryan J. Reilly reported Monday. O'Keefe posted on X that the person whom he had relied on for the allegations "has since come to learn that he was wrong." O'Keefe added, "With this update, I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie Post Office during the 2020 Presidential Election." That's quite the about-face! Reilly has more here.

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Music's Biggest Night: Music's biggest night got even bigger. The CBS broadcast of the Grammy Awards on Sunday evening averaged 16.9 million viewers, a 34% bounce back from last year. The show, hosted by Trevor Noah, featured star-studded performances, including by musical icons Tracy Chapman and Billy Joel. It also featured a surprise appearance by Céline Dion — and, of course, the presence of Taylor Swift, who took home album of the year, setting a new record and becoming the first artist to have won four such awards. The AP's Mark Kennedy has more on the ratings here.

🔎 Zooming in: The audience for the Grammys has still fallen considerably over time. While this year's viewership of the awards ceremony is a big boost over recent years, becoming the most-watched since 2020, it remains substantially lower than years past when the annual ceremony would reliably draw an average of 20-something million viewers. But as traditional networks see their once massive audiences dwindle in the streaming era, high-profile live events continue to still be a big draw.