Our thoughts are with all of you in Los Angeles today. Here's the latest on Mark Zuckerberg, Jenna Bush Hager, Kelly Campbell, Letterboxd, "The View," and more... |
"We're used to covering wildfires out here, but this one felt different," CNN senior producer Jason Kravarik said, channeling how millions of Angelenos are feeling right now.
Last night, from the scene of a house fire in the northern Los Angeles suburb Altadena, Kravarik told me it has "felt like an assault on LA from all directions. Everyone you know is affected somehow. Even in Altadena we have coworkers who've been devastated. So it really reminds you of the human element. I'll never cover these the same again."
Veteran CNN correspondents have also appeared stunned on the air. Anderson Cooper described the fires as "surreal." Stephanie Elam, recovering after hours of live shots, said in an Instagram video that "no matter what you do, soot gets everywhere," even through her mask. "Think about what people are breathing in," she said.
This story is painfully personal for some of the correspondents. "After I finish speaking to you," Nick Watt told Kaitlan Collins last night, "I'm going to go to my house. I'm going to hose the whole thing down, just hoping that if everything is wet, if an ember lands on it, it won't ignite. And then I think I'm going to go with my family up to West Hollywood, although now we're hearing more fires up there."
Thankfully the fire activity in Hollywood significantly decreased overnight, but across the wider Los Angeles area there are still five major fires burning.
"From a reporting standpoint," this has been different, Kravarik said, "because usually there's an initial destructive wave that sweeps through a community and then you report in the aftermath. With this fire the destructive wave just kept going and going. Even tonight structures keep igniting. You just go from one fire to another and it seems endless."
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NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, a Pacific Palisades native, drove through his old neighborhood and said "there's a not a single house left standing here." Once he arrived at the burnt remains of the home where he grew up, he said "I don't really know what to say."
Then he FaceTimed his mom to show her that his childhood home was gone. Soboroff's first-person account aired at the end of Wednesday's "NBC Nightly News."
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Jon Passantino writes: Donald Trump, Elon Musk and right-wing media allies have ignited a political firestorm of their own. In X posts and on Fox News, MAGA world is blaming the wildfire disaster on Democratic policies, attempting to fault diversity initiatives, forest management, water storage, the war in Ukraine, and the protection of endangered fish. The result is a digital layer of soot, dirtying up the online and on-air discourse, and leaving everyone confused about what's true and what's false.
"While it takes time and effort to extinguish flames and dispatch reliable information in favor of the public interest, opportunistic liars need no such time to push their agendas," Nitish Pahwa writes for Mother Jones. In other words, they have a head start. Pahwa says "this is just how every major climate disaster is going to unfold online from here on out." Over at Cal Matters, Alastair Bland has a helpful fact check of some of the claims saturating social media...
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Fires halt Hollywood production |
It's obviously worthwhile to write about the celebrities who have lost homes and valuables. Millions of people feel personal connections to stars like Billy Crystal and Mandy Moore, and they want to know what's happened. But it's also crucial that the coverage not be too Hollywood-centric. WSJ media reporter Joe Flint noticed a Vulture feature about "the events, premieres, and productions delayed due to the fires as well as the celebrities affected" and he commented, "It's this coverage that makes the rest of the country think, oh well they can just go to their second homes. This is devastating to so many in SoCal who aren't rich and wealthy."
>> With production halted, the fires are another blow to "battered Hollywood crew members" who have recently "weathered multiple production slowdowns," THR's Katie Kilkenny writes.
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Coverage notes and quotes |
>> "I just had to call and tell my dad his house is gone," Washington Post reporter Brianna Sacks tweeted. Sacks, whose beat is "climate change-fueled disasters," said "I do this all the time with other people," but "to do it with my own father I can't even describe how hard this is." (X)
>> As the winds subsided a bit, L.A. TV stations are able to fly their news choppers again, and the aerial shots really convey the scope of the disaster. "This is horrific," NBC4's Julie Deng said from the air last night. (X)
>> ABC's David Muir is getting jeered for apparently "using clamps to cinch his flame-retardant jacket" while anchoring from a fire scene. (NYPost)
>> This morning, media critic Tom Jones credited CNN and the Los Angeles Times for "especially notable coverage." (Poynter)
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Televising Jimmy Carter's state funeral |
Every major network "will offer live coverage of Carter's state funeral" beginning around 9 a.m. ET. TVNewser rounded up the coverage plans here. Politico Playbook says "Carter will accomplish what perhaps no other president could do at this moment: bringing together all five living current and former presidents — two Republicans and three Democrats..."
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Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads yesterday and said he's "counting" on Meta's overhaul to actually make our platforms "better." A "community notes" approach will "be more effective than fact-checkers," he argued, and "reducing the number of people whose accounts get mistakenly banned is good," he added. Zuck predicted that "some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better." Note the ambition here: He thinks "many new users" will flock to Meta's platforms. The replies to Zuck's posts are... worth checking out.
>> Instagram and Threads boss Adam Mosseri also shared his plans for "adding political content to recommendations on Threads..."
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Cutting the fact-checkers |
Meta's contracts "with all 10 fact-checking organizations in the US will end in March, with payments continuing until August," Business Insider's Pranav Dixit scooped yesterday. While Meta intends to implement X-style community notes, the rollout "is expected to take time" – in other words, it might not immediately replace the existing fact-checks. The implication is that this is all happening rather suddenly. "It's all so sloppy," Kara Swisher commented on Threads...
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"Decades of human experience online shows that running any kind of community platform is like gardening — if you let the weeds go wild, the flowers will choke," Axios reporter Scott Rosenberg says. "This isn't Mill's free market of ideas; it's a world where bad speech drives out good speech. And if you think there's no such thing as bad speech, you haven't been on the internet for the last 25 years."
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>> Emanuel Maiberg says "Facebook is censoring 404 Media stories about Facebook's censorship." (404 Media)
>> "Meta exempted some of its top advertisers from its usual content moderation process," Hannah Murphy and Madhumita Murgia report. (FT)
>> "Meta offered to publish listings" from classified ads rival eBay on Facebook Marketplace "in an effort to comply with a landmark European Union antitrust order that was accompanied by" a $822 million fine, Samuel Stolton reports. (Bloomberg)
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Musk getting far-right flack |
Elon Musk "has seemingly become the first tech leader to fall down the rabbit hole of radicalization by his own product," former Twitter exec Bruce Daisley told the FT. This was the FT's most-read story overnight.
But even as Musk is embracing the far-right more and more explicitly, "some of its top figures" are rejecting him, the NYT's Ryan Mac and Ken Bensinger write. Online personalities like Laura Loomer are "raising alarms" about Musk's influence over Trump "and what they characterize as his willingness to silence critics on his social network." Read on...
>> In other Musk-world news, "the European Union's top digital officials have committed to 'energetically' push forward an investigation" into whether X "breached the bloc's content moderation law," per Bloomberg.
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>> It keeps happening: "An artificial intelligence feature on iPhones is generating fake news alerts." (CNBC)
>> "The View" is starting to tape a "Weekend View" episode for the ABC News streaming platform. (TheWrap)
>> Roku's latest push into live sports: A "two-year rights deal with the Pro Volleyball Federation." (TheWrap)
>> John Malone's Liberty Media has named board member "and seasoned sports executive" Derek Chang as its new CEO and president. (WSJ)
>> Piers Morgan "is leaving media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News UK" to take full control of his "Uncensored" brand. (Mediaite)
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Jenna Bush Hager, publisher |
"Today" co-host and book club leader Jenna Bush Hager "now plans to do more than just recommend books: She's going to publish them," the NYT's Alexandra Alter reports. Hager "is starting her own publishing venture with the Random House Publishing Group, called Thousand Voices x RHPG," with plans to publish "four to six books a year at various imprints." Details here...
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>> Execs from NBC, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, DirecTV, and Comcast pitched CES attendees on a new collaboration called Universal Ads... (Deadline)
>> Reorgs ahead: "Kelly Campbell, president of Peacock and direct-to-consumer at NBCUniversal, is leaving the company." (Puck)
>> "Wicked" and "Shōgun" led the Screen Actors Guild Award nominees with five nods each, Lisa Respers France reports. (CNN)
>> Notable growth for Letterboxd: The "cinephile social platform that's become perhaps the most effective tool for independent film" hit "17 million members in 2024," Jill Goldsmith reports. (Deadline)
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