Hey there. Here's the latest on President Biden, Meta, Fox News, "Revenge," Rebecca Kutler, HuffPost, "Squid Game," and much more...
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We're thinking of all our readers and friends in Los Angeles right now. The city's mayor Karen Bass warned that "the windstorm is expected to worsen through the morning." And the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service in L.A., Ariel Cohen, told John Berman that it's "one of the worst situations that we've ever seen." Viewers could hear the emotion palpable in his voice...
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Outstanding local TV coverage |
When the fires are at their worst, southern California's TV stations are at their best. The hyperlocal live coverage alerts residents to evacuation warnings; gives real-time info about shelters and other resources; and shows exactly where and how the fires are spreading.
Here are a few observations from watching hours of local coverage:
>> Journalists earn trust and respect by being neighbors first. One KTLA reporter grabbed a garden hose and tried to protect a nearby house during a live shot overnight. Another reporter said "a couple of residents took shelter in our news van" after evacuating.
>> Local connections make a big difference. KABC's Josh Haskell grew up in the neighborhood where one fire started, and he brought that local expertise to his live shots. "It's honestly made me sick to my stomach," he said, seeing beloved local landmarks on fire.
>> L.A. stations are known for their helicopters, but the intense winds mean that virtually all the live shots are coming from the ground, not the air, making it difficult to see the full scope of the emergency. Live shots have been occasionally interrupted due to the brutal conditions, and some stations have relied on backup generators due to power outages.
>> The fires "show how important it is to follow reliable sources on this platform and other social platforms," David Clinch wrote on X. "So many people are sharing misleading content and opinions about what is happening."
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Terrifying moments for news crews |
"There were some terrifying moments for our CNN crews. Both Nick Watt and Natasha Chen had to race to safety" overnight, Sara Sidner noted on "CNN News Central." Read about Chen's experience here. During one of Watt's harrowing live shots, he noted that his own family members had just received an evacuation order and were "getting out" – a reminder that journalists in the field are often juggling the personal and the professional.
>> Correspondent Stephanie Elam, who is live from Pacific Palisades this morning, said "getting here was the scariest drive I've had to make to a wildfire." For more, check CNN's live updates page...
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Making sense of Meta's changes |
Mark Zuckerberg's rightward shift "worked" yesterday, in that the announcements attracted lots of attention; won some approving words from President-elect Donald Trump; and put others on notice.
Some people, frankly, are still trying to process the breadth and depth of the changes. For every person cheering the news (like the WSJ editorial board) there's another person wondering whether they still belong on Meta's platforms. "Without these necessary hate speech and other policies, Meta is giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanizing narratives," GLAAD chief Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement.
Here's another part I want to highlight this morning:
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Meta scrapping its fact-checking partnerships – and putting some journalists out of work – is part of a much bigger shift in media and politics. The very notion of fact-checking is under assault by a wide array of fact-challenged politicians and interest groups. Particularly on the right, "fact-check" has been turned into a dirty word, one that presupposes the fact-checker is actually suppressing some inconvenient truth.
CNN's Donie O'Sullivan heard this time and time again when he interviewed Trump rallygoers. They resented the fact-checks on Facebook. And they trusted Trump over any attempt to fact-check him.
But for a wider audience, Meta's support for outside fact-checking outlets helped make the internet a little bit less polluted by lies and propaganda. I personally remember being thankful when a Meta-funded fact-check group debunked a made-up story about me being arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2022. The current turn against fact-checkers calls to mind the 2016 phrase "war on truth."
Some of those groups may shut down once Meta's financial support dries up. "This is a blow to our website and the work that we do," Jesse Stiller, managing editor of Check Your Fact, told CNN's Liam Reilly yesterday. "We are going to be impacted greatly and our operations will be grounded to a halt. This is not good for discourse and dialogue." Check out our full story here...
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>> Elon Musk has grown fond of saying "you are the media." Zuckerberg is joining him and saying "you are the fact-checkers." (NYT)
>> Adi Robertson says "Meta's fact-checking changes are just what Trump’s FCC head" Brendan Carr had "asked for." (TheVerge)
>> "There will be a lot of devil in the details here," Peter Kafka notes. (BI)
>> But some of the changes are already evident. Users of Meta's platforms may now "refer to 'women as household objects or property' or 'transgender or non-binary people as it,'" Clare Duffy reports. (CNN)
>> Speaking on CNBC’s "Squawk Box," outgoing FTC chair Lina Khan – who has been pursuing a huge antitrust case against Meta – said the company might "want a sweetheart deal" from the Trump administration, "and I hope future enforcers wouldn’t give them that." But "hope" is all she can do now. (The Hill)
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MSNBC promotes Rebecca Kutler |
CNN vet Rebecca Kutler, who joined MSNBC in 2022 as senior VP for content strategy and developed shows like "Inside with Jen Psaki," already oversees all of the brand's non-linear content, like podcasts, films, live events, and digital. This morning Rashida Jones announced that Kutler is adding oversight of all daytime programming to her portfolio. It's a sign that Kutler is well-positioned as MSNBC moves from Comcast to SpinCo...
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Hadas Gold reports: In his forthcoming book "Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power," Politico's Alex Isenstadt reports that Trump seriously considered tapping Fox's Maria Bartiromo as his running mate, before being talked out of it by his team. Trump "was dead serious," Isenstadt writes, but aides told him there "was no time to vet Bartiromo."
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Trump campaign's 'jackpot' |
In another excerpt from the book shared exclusively with CNN, Isenstadt reports that the Trump campaign was fed questions for a Fox town hall in advance from an unknown person inside the network.
He says it happened last January: "About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s--t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started."
A Fox spokesperson responded: "While we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network." Check out Gold's full story here...
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Layoffs hit Wash Post and Huff Post |
The Washington Post laid off roughly 100 staffers from its business side yesterday. The cuts were made mostly in the ad sales division. Liam Reilly has details here.
HuffPost, citing "ongoing and growing challenges to our business," expects to cut "upwards of 30 editorial positions" in the weeks ahead, according to a memo from editor-in-chief Danielle C. Belton.
>> Big picture: Lots of outlets are cutting costs as the new year begins. As Chris Cillizza recently wrote, "I think this month could well see more media layoffs than any month on modern memory. And that 2025 could well shatter previous records for total media layoffs."
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USA Today rolled out Susan Page's exit interview with President Biden this morning. Page writes: "His biggest disappointment, Biden said, was his failure to effectively counter misinformation, including that from Trump. He said that challenge reflects the revolution in how Americans get their news, and whom they trust to tell it." Biden lamented a lack of editing. Read on...
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>> "Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist who was locked up in Iran last month, has been freed and is on a plane that departed from Tehran on Wednesday." (Politico)
>> The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, will represent J. Ann Selzer against Trump’s lawsuit that accuses the veteran pollster of violating the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which prohibits deception when advertising or selling merchandise. (X)
>> RIP: "Richard Cohen, a journalist who was married to former ‘The View’ co-host Meredith Vieira for 38 years, has died after living with multiple sclerosis for decades," Lisa Respers France reports. (CNN)
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>> At CES, Reddit shared "new trends tools aimed at businesses and a new ad format for its Ask Me Anything (AMA) Q&A sessions," Kyle Wiggers reports. (TechCrunch)
>> Tatum Hunter has a fun look at the "best and weirdest new tech" at CES this week. (Wash Post)
>> Meta's HR team "is deleting internal employee criticism of new board member" Dana White, Jason Koebler reports. (404 Media)
>> Lemon8, TikTok's sister app, has been sponsoring TikTok posts "encouraging users to migrate to Lemon8 amid a looming ban threat," Sara Fischer and Maria Curi report. (Axios)
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>> I meant to link to this yesterday: Matthew Belloni writes that Amazon is shelling out $40 million for its Melania Trump documentary, "plus a previously undisclosed two-to-three-episode follow-up docuseries on the first lady." (Puck)
>> "Squid Game" Season 2 has become one of the biggest non-English hits in Netflix history, Loree Seitz reports. (TheWrap)
>> Armie Hammer's comeback "is picking up steam after nabbing the starring role in Uwe Boll’s latest film, 'The Dark Knight,'" Ed Meza writes. (Variety)
>> Stephen Colbert’s "Late Show" will "air on Sunday, January 26 after the AFC Championship Game for the first time," Peter White notes. (Deadline)
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Globes audience down slightly |
Elizabeth Wagmeister writes: New numbers provided by Nielsen indicate that the ratings for the Golden Globes were actually slightly down from last year — not up, as was originally provided to the press on Monday by Dick Clark Productions and CBS, which used VideoAmp numbers, not Nielsen data. According to Nielsen, 9.3 million viewers tuned in for Sunday night's show – still an impressive number in relative 2025 terms, particularly while going up against the Vikings-Lions game on NBC.
>> This is not the first time VideoAmp has inflated the audience size of Paramount programming, compared to Nielsen. Last month, Paramount initially reported that 11.4 million viewers tuned into the "Yellowstone" series finale, but Nielsen measured 8.1 million viewers...
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