Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly walks away from Paramount talks, ABC News boss Kim Godwin blasts Donald Trump's recent comments as "shocking" and "racist," OpenAI accuses The NYT of "hacking" its ChatGPT bot, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade (accurately) labels Steve Bannon an "extremist," and "Dune: Part Two" looks to breathe life into movie theaters across the globe. But first, the A1. 

The Social Distortion Field

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Social media companies are soaking up the billions in advertising dollars that once flowed to legacy media companies — a trend that continues to accelerate despite an ever-growing mountain of evidence indicating the Silicon Valley titans govern their ballooning kingdoms with little regard for how their products negatively impact society.

While the dramatic shift has empowered these companies, it has also simultaneously dealt massive blows to news organizations, most of which are struggling to survive as they see their one-time revenue sources sour on their products in favor of tech platforms.

Just two months into 2024, several news organizations are already collapsing in plain sight. The Messenger shuttered last month; an already-slimmed down BuzzFeed announced it would slash 16% of its remaining staff; and Vice Media said it would lay off hundreds of employees and cease publishing on its website as it pivots to an entirely new business model. Over the last few years, the situation has grown more dire, with nearly every major news organization cutting their workforces to survive — if they can. Hundreds of local outlets have not been so lucky, closing their doors as advertising dollars disappear.

Not only are these news organizations crucial to the communities — both local and national — that they serve, but they also diligently work to ensure that their platforms are grounded in facts and free of abuse. You're not going to find articles promoting body dysmorphia in the pages of The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal is not going to casually elevate carelessly risky investment advice. CNN will not enrich itself through imagery exploiting children.

And if any of these companies engaged in such behavior, it would be a major scandal that would not only leave their reputations scarred, but also chase away advertisers. As a result, these organizations invest heavily in content moderation, providing a stream of hand-curated content for their audiences and brands to advertise around.

But the technology platforms, for some reason, are judged by markedly different rules. It's not fair to say the road is littered with examples pointing to bad behavior. It's buried in them. Time and time again, companies like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and others have been caught allowing harmful content to exist on their platforms. In many cases, such content has not only been permitted to exist, but turbocharged via powerful algorithms. Child exploitation? Check. Promoting eating disorders? Check. Batshit crazy conspiracy theories that radicalize audiences? Check.

But when the executives of those companies, the very humans who control the platforms, find out about such content and are questioned about it? Well, plenty of evidence has shown they've often run the playbook of releasing vague public statements while failing to address the root causes in a meaningful way.

Just take last week for example. The Journal and The Times published reports (see here and here) indicating that Meta willfully allowed child sexual exploitation to exist on Instagram. The reports were both disturbing and damning, outlining how the popular platform is abused by some parents willing to sell content to predators. "The content, often featuring young girls in bikinis and leotards, was sold to an audience that was overwhelmingly male and often overt about sexual interest in the children in comments on posts or when they communicated with the parents," The Journal's Jeff Horowitz and Katherine Blunt reported.

The duo noted that Meta said it is committed to child safety and monitors its platform for abuse. But they also reported: "A review by the Journal of some of the most popular parent-run modeling accounts on Instagram and Facebook revealed obvious failures of enforcement. One parent-run account banned last year for child exploitation had returned to the platforms, received official Meta verification and gained hundreds of thousands of followers. Other parent-run accounts previously banned on Instagram for exploitative behavior continued selling child-modeling content via Facebook." 

Of course, this doesn't represent the vast majority of the content on Meta's platforms. But could you imagine if a legacy news organization trafficked in such behavior, even on rare occasion? The company would immediately be abandoned by advertisers and publicly excoriated, with executives having to issue apologies and beg for forgiveness. But when it's Big Tech? Outside some brief boycotts that have sprouted up over the years and the occasional Capitol Hill committee hearing in which lawmakers (most of whom don't understand the basics of these platforms) implore them to do more, the world largely turns a blind eye and endlessly scroll.

In effect, a substantial portion of the advertising dollars that once supported the carefully manicured gardens of legacy media outlets have migrated over to a free-for-all hellscape ruled by mostly unregulated Silicon Valley deities who prioritize profits and growth over the public good. As a result, the news organizations which work tirelessly to behave responsibly are seeing their business models collapse and future jeopardized, while executives like Mark Zuckerberg tout record profits.

To be fair, brands would likely prefer to advertise on the platforms of responsible media actors versus the risky world of social media. But Big Tech offers these brands much more effective targeting, while boasting a larger and younger audience than legacy news organizations. To make matters worse, news companies have been far too slow to adapt to the changing technological landscape, often sporting ugly websites and apps (sorry, it’s true!) and lacking the tools necessary to hone in on specific audiences advertisers want to spend their dollars to reach.

It's a cocktail for disaster — one that will have profound impacts on civilization in the years ahead. News organizations, crucial to a functioning society, are being hollowed out, if not outright dying. Meanwhile, technology giants, which have allowed for harmful content to gain a foothold in the digital public square, are thriving.

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Warner Walks: No deal! Talks between Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global about a possible acquisition have ended, CNBC's Alex Sherman reported Tuesday. The bosses of each company, David Zaslav and Bob Bakish, had held preliminary talks back in December, exploring over lunch at Paramount's Times Square offices whether there was an opportunity for the two companies to unite. But, as WBD's stock hovers around record lows, it has moved to stop pursuing such a deal, per Sherman. Spokespeople for WBD and Paramount declined to comment. But Zaslav told investors last week during the company's earnings call that while WBD does "have the optionality" this year to start "looking at other assets," any move would need to clear a "very high bar." Read Sherman's full story here.

🔍 Zooming in: That leaves David Ellison's Skydance Global as the only apparent serious player pursuing a deal with Paramount. According to Sherman, Skydance is "still performing due diligence on a potential transaction." Byron Allen has, as he so often does, made a very public bid for the company, but it's unclear how serious it is.

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Godwin Lays Down the Gauntlet: ABC News boss Kim Godwin  sent a weekend note to a number of her staffers, which I obtained, blasting Donald Trump for recent comments he made equating the legal cases against him to the persecution of Black people. In the note, which weighed in on a larger editorial conversation, Godwin described the remarks Trump made at the Black Conservative Federation Gala as "mind blowing" and "shocking." The ABC News boss added that the comments "are as racist as they come."

🔍 Zooming in: What's quite strange about this story is that ABC News hasn't appeared to have reflected its own network chief's strong beliefs about Trump's remarks in its own coverage. A spokesperson for ABC News declined to comment when I reached out on Tuesday. But it's notable that ABC News described Trump's comments in its coverage over the last several days as widely criticized as racist — not outright racist, as Godwin candidly declared to her staff. In other words, as Semafor's Max Tani wrote, "Godwin's private comments ... are more critical than ABC News has been willing to go in its coverage of Trump thus far." Tani has more here.

CNN Photo Illustration/Carlos Barria/Reuters 

OpenAI Strikes Back: In a fiery legal filing made public this week, OpenAI hit back at The NYT, which is suing the ChatGPT-developer for copyright infringement, claiming the paper hacked its A.I. bot to build its legal case against the company. "The allegations in the Times’s complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards. The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products," the Sam Altman-led company alleged in the filing. "It took them tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results that make up Exhibit J to the Complaint." The NYT, for its part, denied it engaged in any nefarious hacking. "What OpenAI bizarrely mischaracterizes as 'hacking' is simply using OpenAI’s products to look for evidence that they stole and reproduced the Times’s copyrighted works," a lawyer for the paper said in a statement. "And that is exactly what we found." The WSJ's Ben Glickman has more here.

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Theaters to Ride the Sandworms: Movie theaters are set to come to life this weekend as "Dune: Part Two" hits big screens around the world. The delayed and highly anticipated sequel (yes, I have already purchased by Dolby Digital tickets for Friday evening) is tracking to post somewhere between $150-175 million at the global box office, THR's Pamela McClintock reported. And the film should have some legs in theaters, given it is boasting a stellar 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes. McClintock has more here.