Good evening! Have you connected with us on Instagram? Make sure to smash that follow button if you haven't already. Now, onward to the news: Bob Iger rejects Marvel fatigue and addresses Nelson Peltz fight at MSTMT, The NYT Guild files grievance over management's leak probe, Rupert Murdoch shuts down TalkTV's linear operation, a bipartisan bill targets TikTok, A.I. experts sign open letter, Dakota Johnson dishes all on the "Madame Web" disaster, and so much more. But first, the A1.

Stupor Tuesday

CNN Photo Illustration/Jamar Coach/Jackson Sun/USA Today Network

It's Super Tuesday. Or is it? 

Typically, Super Tuesday is a closely watched and highly anticipated brawl in which candidates fight to secure the nomination of their party. If Election Day is akin in the world of politics to the Super Bowl, Super Tuesday is the conference championship ahead of it. The stakes are usually high and, thus, so is audience interest. That leads news organizations, particularly on the broadcast side, to program their platforms to be chock full of special coverage. 

But this year, the state of affairs is notably different.

The 2024 presidential primary season has been a dud. Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump face no serious challengers and, short of a dramatic turn of events, the two are both expected to receive their respective party's nomination during the summer conventions. In other words, this Tuesday feels anything but super.

"This is the quietest Super Tuesday in my lifetime," Michael Socolow, a professor and media historian at the University of of Maine, posted on X. "It's weird to imagine it'll make no real news (despite the best efforts of cable TV news anchors & producers)."

Indeed, media outlets will certainly do their best to eventize the evening. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and NewsNation will all offer viewers special television coverage with their most prized anchors and analysts throughout the evening. And online, expect to see outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post offer rolling coverage on their websites.

And, to be fair, outside the presidential primary races (if you can call them that), there are some key elections to keep an eye on. As CNN's Simone Pathe smartly noted, "The first down-ballot primaries of the year on Super Tuesday are likely to be even more consequential than the day’s presidential contests, which are unlikely to change the trajectory of the Democratic and Republican races." Pathe pointed to the primaries for the House, calling them "by far the most important for the balance of power in Washington," given the thin majority Republicans currently enjoy.

Of course, whether coverage of those down-ballot races calls for a full day and night of wall-to-wall special coverage from every major national outlet is another story entirely. Jay Rosen, a media critic and journalism professor at New York University, argued on X that this year Super Tuesday is only "worth a paragraph in the news columns and a couple minutes on TV."

To play Devil's Advocate, however, the fact that 16 states are voting in elections from coast-to-coast is easily the biggest domestic news story of the day. Relegating coverage of it to only a few sentences would feel inadequate. And news organizations, for a string of reasons, are never going to surrender the day to their competitors. 

There might, however, be a middle ground approach that allows outlets good cause to cover the races. Instead of playing up the presidential primary stakes (which are quite low), news outlets could use the evening as a hook to explore some of the disturbing, broader trends occurring in the U.S. — many of which are often consigned to the back burner during special coverage nights in favor of Washington-style campaign process chatter.

For example: Why are so many GOP voters supporting a man who openly fantasizes about being a dictator? Why don't most Republican primary voters believe that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election? Where exactly do they get their news and information and how much of a role does the poisoned information environment play in twisting reality for voters trying to sort through the issues? 

Those big picture topics are certainly worth exploring. Whether newsrooms take the opportunity to candidly do so is up to them. 

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Iger's Insights: Bob Iger spoke on Tuesday at the annual Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom conference. The Disney boss addressed a number of hot button issues, including superhero movie fatigue, the Nelson Peltz fight, and the Magic Kingdom's new partnership with Epic Games. Some highlights:

► On Peltz: Iger said he is doing his best to ignore the proxy battle. "I am working really hard to not let this distract me because when I get distracted, everybody who works for me gets distracted and that’s not a good thing," he said. "I’ll leave it at that."

► On Marvel fatigue: Iger rejected the notion audiences have grown tired of superhero films, saying that it was "not an accident" Marvel's first 33 films delivered nearly $30 billion in box office receipts. "A lot of people think it’s audience fatigue, it’s not audience fatigue. They want great films. And if you build it great, they will come and there are countless examples of that," Iger said. (My personal POV, as a longtime but now disillusioned Marvel fan: Might it not be a bit of both?)

► On Shelving Projects: Iger revealed that Disney has quietly killed projects that the company no longer believes in, saying that the entertainment Goliath is "doing a lot" to get its creative issues turned around. "It’s not an easy thing, but you got to make those tough calls," Iger said. "We’ve actually made those tough calls. We’ve not been that public about it, but we’ve killed a few projects already that we just didn’t feel were strong enough." 

► On Epic Games: Iger said that he wants Disney to use its $1.5 billion partnership with Epic Games to build a "Disney Universe" where users can interact with the company's iconic characters. Iger added that this universe will launch "in a few years" and that he is "calling this a universe, just so that we don’t use the word metaverse."

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Rupert Recedes: Goodbye, TalkTV. Rupert Murdoch pulled the plug on the television broadcast of his right-wing U.K. outlet on Tuesday, marking a blow to the media mogul who launched the opinion-focused venture just two years ago with the aim of replicating the success of Fox News across the pond. In a memo to staffers, TalkTV boss Scott Taunton said the company will shutter its linear offering and instead pivot to its streaming operation. "While linear TV has been a good marketing and awareness window for Talk, we now need to focus our investment on where the eyeballs are and where the revenues are in growth," Taunton said. "In order to be successful, we need to prioritize being where the audiences are, rather than asking them to come to find us down the channel guide." That may all be true, but it's an acknowledgment the core product has not worked. Jon Passantino and I have the details here.

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Targeting TikTok: TikTok is back in the Washington crosshairs. A pair of bipartisan lawmakers, Reps. Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, on Tusday introduced a bill that would force TikTok's parent, ByteDance, to divest from the company. "This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users," Gallagher said in a statement. TikTok, naturally, pushed back strongly on the legislation, saying that if it passes, it would amount to "an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it." CNBC's Jonathan Vanian has more here.

CNN Photo Illustration/Columbia Pictures

Dakota Talks 'Madame Web' Disaster: Dakota Johnson is not being shy about how she feels after starring in the widely-criticized "Madame Web." Asked about the nasty reviews the film earned, Johnson told Bustle editor-in-chief Charlotte Owen that she is "not surprised that this has gone down the way it has." Johnson explained that she believes in the film business key decisions are now "made by committees, and art does not do well when it's made by committee." The actress added, "You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bulls**t." Johnson went on to say it was "definitely an experience" for her to star in the movie, saying she "probably will never do anything like it again." She concluded saying "it’s not nice to be a part of something that’s ripped to shreds, but I can’t say that I don’t understand." Read the full interview here.