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Welcome to August! This Friday edition features some fantastic weekend reads; they're designated with a ✅. Plus, we have the latest on Kamala Harris, Sydney Sweeney, Shari Redstone, Reddit, Vogue, Greg Gutfeld, and much more...

RECOMMENDED! 

Eight thought-provoking pieces

✅ "The full force of a federal agency" is being deployed "to coerce advertisers into supporting conservative media," Julia Angwin writes in this NYT guest essay about the FTC's recent maneuver with two ad agency giants. She says it was both a "thinly veiled attempt to prop up X" and "an attempt to tilt the media landscape in favor of the government in ways that are simply un-American."

✅ "Satire is the first weapon against authoritarian overreach," Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein write in this excellent column about "South Park" declaring "war on the extortion-industrial complex."

✅ Mediaite's Colby Hall makes a strong case here: "Megyn Kelly is the new Rush Limbaugh — and prototype for the future of political media."

✅ New Washington Post Opinions editor Adam O'Neal wants writers to communicate "with optimism about this country in particular and the future in general." Jonathan Capehart, one of the many boldface names leaving the Post, responds on Substack here.

✅ In a blog post titled "RIP, CBS," former ABC correspondent Terry Moran says "the CEOs always think they can somehow pacify Trump or buy him off with concessions. And they are always wrong."

✅ I loved this history lesson by The Atlantic's new in-house historian and archivist Jake Lundberg. He details how "the rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century created the first true attention economy" and "remade how Americans engaged with the world."

✅ WSJ editor Emma Tucker has "completely revitalized the staid Journal with her suffer-no-fools attitude and upscale tabloid instincts," and now the paper is "eating the Times’s lunch in the second Trump era," Puck's Dylan Byers observes. 

✅ Governments are "focusing on creators' giant fan bases as a new strategy for soft power," treating influencers to all-expense-paid trips in exchange for videos, WaPo's Drew Harwell reports.

Covering Trump's tariff rewrite

CNN.com's homepage headline right now: "Stocks drop after Trump makes his tariff plan clear." In just six months, the president "has remade global trade and upended a century of precedent," CNN Business editor David Goldman writes here.

 >> Hmmm: Most of the pro-Trump sites I checked this morning, like Breitbart and The Daily Wire, are leading with culture-war bait, not Trump's sweeping tariffs.

 >> Opponents like Paul Krugman continue to be frustrated by how the tariffs are covered by the mainstream press. "No, Trump isn't winning his trade war — except, possibly, in the media, which have apparently decided that shooting yourself in the foot and not facing retaliation is a victory," Krugman comments.

 >> "The White House fact sheet should be called a fact-less sheet when it comes to basing trade decisions about Canada on the fentanyl emergency," the CEO of Canada's Chamber of Commerce remarked overnight.

Fox goes all-in on Sweeney 'outrage'

Between Monday and Thursday, Fox News mentioned Sydney Sweeney (and her American Eagle jeans ads) 181 times, and the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal just 18 times, per my SnapStream searches.

As CNN's Abby Phillip pointed out, right-wing media outlets are hyping a left-wing "meltdown" that isn't really happening. This "outrage ecosystem" "starts with a random person online who gets amplified by people who need these stories to maintain their relevance," she said.

 >> In this morning's new episode of the "Ruthless" podcast, VP JD Vance claimed that "the Democrats" are saying that "everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi. That appears to be their actual strategy." But as CNN's Alejandra Jaramillo pointed out, "no prominent Democratic Party leaders or officials have commented on the ad."

✅ For a thoughtful piece about why Sweeney "seems to be everywhere," check out this article by NYT's Yola Mzizi.

Harris chooses Colbert

The medium was the message. Kamala Harris chose "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" for her first interview since losing the election, and she said the aspect of Trump 2.0 she didn't see coming "was the capitulation." Here's the full interview on YouTube.

Strong first-day sales #s 

Harris used the Colbert platform to preview her book "107 Days," which was announced by Simon & Schuster on Thursday morning. Before Colbert, the book was already #3 on Amazon's "best-selling new and future releases" list, indicating strong first-day preorder sales; after Colbert, it rose up to #1. 

In other late-night news...

Fox News Channel's version of a late-night star, 10 p.m. host Greg Gutfeld, is making a real late-night appearance next week, going on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon" for the first time. Gutfeld is understandably psyched. "It's kind of nice that he's taking this risk," Gutfeld said on "The Five" yesterday, overstating how much of a "risk" it is. I think it's a savvy move on Fallon's part. As LateNighter's Jed Rosenzweig wrote, "Gutfeld’s appearance may indicate a willingness to engage a broader ideological mix of guests—or may simply be a high-profile ratings play..."

CPB's five stages of grief?

Ever since the rescission was passed last month, some Corporation for Public Broadcasting officials have been holding out hope that federal funding for NPR and PBS affiliates could be restored through the normal appropriations process.

In the five stages of grief, this would be IDed as the bargaining stage. But it's time to move toward acceptance, and here's why: "Republican appropriators in the Senate zeroed out new funding for public media in a draft bill released in a committee markup session Thursday," WaPo's Scott Nover noted. "There is no Republican appetite for spending new money on public media in the immediate future."

 >> CPB issued a statement saying it is "deeply concerned" — and focusing on helping stations "prepare for adjust to the loss of federal support."

A ray of hope for the cable bundle?

"It's at least possible that pay TV losses are finally subsiding after more than a decade of losses," CNBC's Alex Sherman reports. Citing recent data from Charter and Comcast, he says "it's possible most of the U.S. households that want to cancel cable have now canceled, and the ones remaining plan to stick around for a little while. If that's the case, cable TV may effectively morph into the primary aggregation video service for sports." Here's what that means...

Redstone: Content is still king

Paramount held a pared-down earnings call yesterday ahead of next week's expected completion of the Skydance transaction. Heiress Shari Redstone joined the call for a farewell of sorts; she said it was an "honor" to serve as the "stewards of these assets," and she invoked her late father Sumner.

"While people often debated whether content or distribution ruled the day, my father's steadfast belief was that content was king," she said. "Even against the backdrop of enormous change, that core business philosophy remains the reality for our business and industry. That is a reality that Skydance surely understands."

 >> Except that, as Matt Belloni wrote overnight, Redstone is handing Paramount "to the family of a tech billionaire…"

Six more great reads

✅ Joe Adalian and Chris Lee enumerate "the eight biggest headaches facing new Paramount." Only eight? 😉 (NYMag)

✅ VF's Laura Bradley spoke with late-night TV writers and insiders who question Paramount's claim about cancelling "The Late Show" over its unprofitability. "What kind of negotiation is just handing down a sentence to a show without giving them an opportunity to trim costs?" asked one writer.

✅ CJR's latest look at the impact of Google AI Overviews: "For media publishers whose business models rely on referral traffic to bring them advertising revenue, this shift feels nothing short of catastrophic," Klaudia Jaźwińska writes.

✅ "Podcasts are giving film and TV stars a path to something rare in Hollywood: IP ownership," Digiday's Alexander Lee writes.

✅ David Ingram's look at age-check laws: "Who should keep kids safe on smartphones? Many point at Google and Apple."

✅ Have you heard about the Guess ads using AI-generated models in the August issue of Vogue? Let CNN's Kati Chitrakorn catch you up on the controversy.

Briefly…

 >> Apple services revenue, which includes TV+ and Music, grew 13% to a new record in Q2. Overall "the tech giant easily beat Wall Street expectations." (Variety) 

 >> Reddit reported its "fastest revenue growth in three years" and assuaged concerns about Google traffic flows, sending its stock up nearly 20%. (Yahoo)

 >> Dotdash Meredith is rebranding as People Inc. (TheWrap)

 >> Fox Corp is acquiring one-third of Penske Entertainment, "owner of auto racing’s IndyCar Series and Indianapolis Motor Speedway." (WSJ)

Tech talk 

 >> "Meta is prowling for partnerships with startups that use artificial intelligence to create and edit videos," Rocket Drew, Stephanie Palazzolo, and Kalley Huang report. (The Information)

 >> Epic Games "has won again," Sean Hollister writes. This time it's a victory over Google, "and Android may never be the same." (The Verge)

 >> A new study from Microsoft assesses "jobs' vulnerability to being replaced by AI." (Axios) 

 >> CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta taped this buyer-beware video are discovering that "scammers are using his likeness in AI deepfake videos and doctored images to sell bogus health cures and fake health products." (CNN)

Weekend box office preview

"Superman" has "leapt past the $300 million mark at the domestic box office in less than three weeks in a major milestone for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios," THR's Pamela McClintock reports. 

This weekend the new "Fantastic Four" flick is expected to "stay atop the domestic box office chart this weekend." McClintock says this weekend's "wild card" is Paramount's revival of "The Naked Gun." I'll be seeing "The Bad Guys 2" with my son this weekend...

The Hollywood A-list

 >> Shirley Halperin is departing The Hollywood Reporter "to become co-editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone — the first woman to fill that role in the brand’s 60-year legacy." THR co-editor Maer Roshan will become that publication's sole EIC. (THR)

 >> United Talent Agency "has reached an undisclosed settlement with Michael Kassan after the MediaLink founder's exit last year led to a legal battle." (TheWrap)

>> Nintendo "sold more than six million units of the Switch 2 in the seven weeks following its June launch." (Reuters)

LAST BUT NOT LEAST...

A few more fantastic reads 

✅ "Rupert Murdoch has no professional mountains left to climb, but part of the 94-year-old media baron's last act could be unexpected: Becoming one of the few moguls to stand up to Trump," Brian Lowry writes.

✅ "As TV collapses, digital firebrands are suddenly in demand," THR's Alex Weprin writes.

✅ For this NYT profile, Timothy Bella spent time with "Naked Gun" star Liam Neeson, who says "the film is a giggle, and we need that, I think."

✅ THR's Seth Abramovitch explains why some see the demise of E! News as "the end of a golden age for celebrity news."

This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.