TGIT! The National Spelling Bee finals air tonight. To prep, see if you can find all the typos in this terrific Washington Post column about spelling. Now here are your morning headlines about the NYT, "Sirens," Paramount, Business Insider, "Original Sin," "Sinners," and more...
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Consider just the past 24 hours of headlines about President Trump's court battles. CNN: "US court blocks Trump from imposing the bulk of his tariffs." Politico: "Trump administration's bid to deport Mahmoud Khalil is likely unconstitutional, judge rules." Reason mag: "A federal judge lists 8 ways that Trump violated the Constitution by punishing a disfavored law firm." The New Republic: "Judge uses 26 exclamation points to strike down Trump's terrible order." WSJ: "Big Law Firms 3, Trump 0."
The losses are enough to make one think of Trump's infamous "tired of winning" line. And yet Trump is prevailing in some of the fights he has instigated with media institutions. Here are three examples:
– Paramount is suffering mightily in the court of public opinion as it tries to pay Trump to drop his legally dubious lawsuit against CBS News. According to the WSJ's Jessica Toonkel and Josh Dawsey, "the parties remain far apart on terms," with Paramount offering $15 million (the same price ABC paid last December) and Trump wanting $25 million or more.
– All of the remaining staffers at the Trump-despised Voice of America network are about to receive termination notices, "likely closing the book on the network founded 80-plus years ago to combat Nazi disinformation during World War II," Politico's Ben Johansen reported yesterday. Legal attempts to save VOA have stalled out in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals for the time being.
– Yesterday in Florida the president "won a key victory in his ongoing defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board as a Sunshine State court on Wednesday decided an immunity issue in his favor," Colin Kalmbacher reported for Law&Crime.
Trump celebrated the procedural win in the Pulitzer case with a lengthy Truth Social post last night, which underscored that, for him, the process — the publicity, the platform, the financial price paid by his opponents — is in and of itself a victory.
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Trump's one media setback |
Trump has been dealt one setback on the media front this week. The same DC appeals judges who sided with the administration re: VOA also restored the grant funding for Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia, two of the US-funded broadcasters that were targeted by Trump in March. Those networks will get the money they were promised while the appeals court considers their cases on the merits. Radio Free Europe previously received the same relief from the court.
The ruling "is a critical step toward ensuring that we can continue our vital work," RFA CEO Bay Fang said. Kari Lake tweeted, "we will appeal to a higher court."
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"Rule No 1 of this administration continues to be: A lot happens under Trump, and a lot unhappens too," Derek Thompson said yesterday, reacting to the stunning blow to Trump's tariffs.
The broader legal picture evolves every day. Many legal experts believe NPR and other outlets have strong cases against Trump's actions. But they said that about The Associated Press, too. The AP prevailed in court but the Trump White House pushed forward and found other ways to punish the wire service.
Earlier this week Lawfare editor in chief Benjamin Wittes found himself wondering, "Why does the administration keep picking First Amendment fights it can't possibly win?" His best guess is that "they just can't help themselves."
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'Tangible impact' of delayed deal |
CBS journalists winced, yet again, at the WSJ's new reporting about the Paramount settlement talks. Everyone can see "what’s up: Trump wants money and a pound of media flesh" before the administration approves the Skydance deal, Deadline's team wrote in this followup story.
One more note about Paramount: As "The Studio" star Matt Belloni put it, this next story is a "tangible impact of Paramount's inability to close the Skydance deal: Jeremy Strong's Sept. 11 aftermath show '9/12' has now been delayed to at least 2026."
The series "was the first and so far only Skydance production budgeted against the new Skydance-Paramount deal," Deadline's Nellie Andreeva explained, so for now the planned August filming kickoff is off and everything is on hold...
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Stop me if you've heard this one before: The White House is planning to send "a small package of spending cuts to Congress next week," including the rescission of funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Politico reports. Russell Vought previously indicated this would happen in April. CNN's team has context about the new plan here...
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Amazon licenses NYT content |
While The New York Times Co. remains locked in a legal battle with OpenAI, it is striking AI deals elsewhere. This morning the company announced a multi-year pact for Amazon to license editorial content "for AI-related uses." Per the press release, "this will include real-time display of summaries and short excerpts of Times content within Amazon products and services, such as Alexa, and training Amazon's proprietary foundation models."
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Big layoffs at Business Insider |
"We are reducing the size of our organization, a move that will impact about 21% of our colleagues and touch every department," Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng told staffers in a memo this morning. The overall goal, she said, is a "more focused" and AI-proofed brand. With "ongoing volatility in traffic and distribution for all publishers," Peng said "we must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control, so we're reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility." BI is also "exiting the majority of our Commerce business, given its reliance on search." Her memo also has talk of "fully embracing AI."
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☝️ I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, since Elon Musk and his allies say DOGE's efforts will continue, but we'll see about that. "He came in with a chainsaw; he went out with a tweet," Dasha Burns said on the Playbook podcast this morning. Musk is being quite explicit about his exit — which comes as a relief to frustrated Tesla shareholders and leaves politicos wondering how influential Musk will be with Trump from now on...
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"He risked so much — to save you money," Ainsley Earhardt said on "Fox & Friends" this morning. "And because people hate Trump so much, they decided they hated Elon, even though they loved him before because he developed the EVs and did so much for the environment." So he's going back to his companies, and "we wish him all the best."
That's the simple story Fox is telling about Musk's time in DC. The real story is so much more interesting and complex. Musk kept misstating and exaggerating DOGE's work. The actual work caused all sorts of chaos, with significant job losses and disruptions to essential services that angered voters. And ultimately some DOGE staffers concluded that government was "not as inefficient" as they thought.
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Lifetime's forthcoming reality show about the Chrisley family now has a brand new storyline, thanks to Trump's pardoning of Todd and Julie Chrisley. Cameras are in place for the reunion. A source told People mag that "the show is still filming and will continue to, though the family’s situation is evolving rapidly."
>> TV face time can help MAGA Republicans win a pardon from the president, as I discussed on "Laura Coates Live" last night. Pardon attorney Ed Martin's words, "No MAGA left behind," are like a skeleton key to understanding the Trump era. CNN's Aaron Blake has more on that here...
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Political media notes and quotes |
>> "She's been very, very successful at a thing called television," Trump said as he celebrated Jeanine Pirro's arrival as DC's interim US attorney.
>> Kash Patel and Dan Bongino were both on Fox in the past 24 hours, evidently trying to appease Trump voters who are loudly complaining about the FBI not confirming their preferred conspiracy theories.
>> This morning the National Association of the Deaf filed suit "to compel the White House to immediately resume providing American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters during broadcasts of their press briefings."
>> Sen. Cory Booker is writing a book, "Stand," expanding on his record-breaking Senate floor speech, and some folks are outraged by it. (NYPost)
>> Take-Two Interactive "is forgoing any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and promoting 'diversity of thought' in its latest annual report." (WIRED)
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>> Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's "Original Sin" has debuted at #1 on the NYT nonfiction best seller list. (X)
>> Other new titles on the Times list this week: "Uncommon Favor" by Dawn Staley, "Apple in China" by Patrick McGee, "Who Knew" by Barry Diller, "Is A River Alive?" by Robert Macfarlane, "Empire of AI" by Karen Hao, and "Yet Here I Am" by Jonathan Capehart. (NYT)
>> David Leavy, who helped steady CNN at a very tumultuous time, is departing as CNN COO. (THR)
>> Last night an appellate court ruled that CBS can continue to distribute Sony's "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy!" while the network "appeals a lower court’s ruling," Meg James reports. (LAT)
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Liam Reilly writes: Newsroom AI blunders continue to happen when human staffers neglect journalistic standards and forget to verify their work. Chicago Public Media CPO Tracy Brown told me that staffers can use the tool, they just have to do so "responsibly," and in a way "that keeps your editorial standards and integrity intact."
Ultimately, the best way to do so remains having humans as a backstop, since AI is still incapable of doing inherently human newsroom tasks, like making moral calls, challenging power, inserting nuance, and highlighting what matters. Read on...
>> In other AI news, Musk's xAI "will pay Telegram $300 million to deploy its Grok chatbot on the messaging app." (Reuters) And Mark Zuckerberg says Meta AI now has one billion monthly active users. (CNBC)
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Entertainment odds and ends |
>> Sophie Gilbert declares that the buzzy new Netflix miniseries "Sirens" is the "show of the summer." (The Atlantic)
>> "Sinners" is being screened in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the city where the film was set, this week, "with director Ryan Coogler and other members of the filmmaking team set to attend." (CNN)
>> News for "The Morning Show" fans: Season four will start streaming on September 17. Full disclosure: I'm a producer of the show. (Variety)
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