Good morning. Taylor Swift is previewing her next album, Sinclair is exploring mergers, and Elon Musk is raging against Apple and OpenAI. Plus, the latest from TBPN, Jonathan Mahler, Jimmy Pitaro, Reddit, and Billboard. But first... |
From Fox to Trump and back again |
Fox's Will Cain last Wednesday: "Washington, DC, is less safe than some capital cities in third-world countries."
President Trump on Monday: "The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth."
The mimicry is no coincidence. At his press conference announcing a federal takeover of the DC police, Trump held up graphics and bar charts taken from Cain's Fox telecast. Fox's website then completed the loop-de-loop with a story titled,
"Trump claims DC crimes trounce stats from notoriously violent cities worldwide."
I found it unintentionally funny that the writer asked the White House for copies of the charts and citations... when Fox was the source to begin with. (The right hand didn't know what the other right hand was doing.)
Of course, Fox was not the only motivating factor behind what Stephen Collinson called a "political stunt" in DC. Allies told CNN that his takeover was spurred by "high-profile incidents of violent crime — most notably the assault last week of a former DOGE employee — and his own observations of homeless encampments and roadside debris."
"When he saw a report on Fox about how bad it was in D.C., that was the final straw," a Trump advisor told Axios this morning.
|
It's all about the pictures |
Maybe you've noticed the same thing I have: Partisan media personalities talking past one another, having almost entirely different conversations about crime and safety. Harvard Law scholar Adrian Vermeule put it well on X: "Some people are talking about crime in the strict legal sense, and some are talking about pervasive social disorder."
News outlets have produced a small mountain of fact-checks about violent crime in DC. But the public discussion — and certainly the defense of Trump's crackdown — is mostly about perceptions, fears and feelings.
There is also a widespread recognition that Trump prioritizes pictures and PR, and he's getting the pictures he wants. He cares deeply about what Fox shows him; what Fox shows his base; and he wants viewers far from DC to see that something is being done.
The DC action is certainly a unifying moment for the MAGA media base that seemed splintered earlier this summer. Figures like Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich, who have been highly critical of the Trump admin over its Jeffrey Epstein stonewalling, are 100% behind Trump on this one.
By the way, this is especially odd considering Jones rose to prominence as an anti-government radio host who hyped conspiracy theories about the feds wanting to impose martial law. I don't see many pro-Trump media personalities wrestling with concerns about government power now. Instead, it's figures like Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who said last night that Trump "wants US military force deployed on US soil, facing inward, as a show of force to the American people about what he and the government can do to you."
|
Coverage in only one direction? |
NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie remarked on Bluesky: "The issue is that producing stark declines in crime and public disorder is generally not reported on, but that any instance of violence is given sensational coverage, so that the perception is of growing crime even when American cities are safer than ever."
>> CNN's Richard Quest remarked yesterday that this DC episode reminded him of the 1997 film "Wag the Dog," which features a White House that concocts a fake war to distract from a real sex scandal. I pointed out that by the end of the film, the fake war had started to turn real...
|
Growing outrage over Israel's targeting of Al Jazeera team |
"I think I speak for a lot of Western journalists when I say that so many of us feel angry and outraged and powerless and ashamed," CNN's Clarissa Ward said in an Instagram video after Anas Al-Sharif and four other Al Jazeera staffers were killed by Israel in Gaza.
"We are confronted by a stream of accusations from the IDF that seek to dehumanize our Palestinian colleagues, that seek to justify their killings," she said. And the "carefully calibrated language that we are using in our stories" just feels, to many people, "so detached and so — not proportional to the agony and outrage of the moment," she added.
>> Read more about Al-Sharif, and how he was "the face of the war in Gaza for millions," in this piece by CNN's Mostafa Salem.
|
Sinclair exploring spinoffs, mergers |
A giant reordering of the broadcast TV business is well underway. Last week, the WSJ reported that Nexstar is pursuing Tegna. And last night, Sinclair said that it is launching a "strategic review" of its broadcast stations that could lead to a merger. "The company is also looking to separate or spinoff its ventures business, which includes pay-TV network the Tennis Channel," CNBC's Lillian Rizzo wrote. Sinclair shares are up almost 25% in premarket trading, which sounds great, except that shares have declined about the same amount year-to-date...
|
Taylor's 'Showgirl' era begins |
Tick tock, tick tock! Taylor Swift announced her 12th original studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl," "as a countdown clock on her website ticked down to 12:12 a.m. Eastern," CNN's Kathleen Magramo writes. Swift "did not say when the album would be released or any other information about it," but she is clearly planning to share more on her boyfriend Travis Kelce's "New Heights" podcast. They've already taped the episode, and it will drop on Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET.
>> Swift's website temporarily crashed after the announcement.
>> WaPo's Emily Yahr explained all the Swift numerology here.
|
Some of today's new nonfiction |
I have been reading an early copy of Jon Lee Anderson's "To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban," an absolutely riveting book based on his 20+ years of dispatches for The New Yorker. It's out today, along with "The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990" by Jonathan Mahler and "The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life" by Arthur C. Brooks...
|
💡 Sending out a run of show |
The buzzy tech web show TBPN has launched a Substack page to expand the brand, and they're doing something savvy on it: Publishing the "run of show" document that the hosts use to organize each day's three-hour live stream. "We'll be sharing these on Substack as a quick preview of what's on the stream and what's top of mind for us," John Coogan wrote Monday. A good idea that many other shows could copy...
|
>> Well that's honest: "I don't want you to be comfortable," Trump remarked when Brian Glenn asked about a WH briefing room expansion. (Deadline)
>> Eye on the VP's far-right media diet: JD Vance praised The Gateway Pundit in an interview with its founder Jim Hoft. (Mediaite)
>> Alden Global Capital has raised its offer for The Dallas Morning News as it tries to outbid Hearst. But Joshua Benton says "it looks like DallasNews has Texas law on its side and that its lawyers have done the necessary i-dotting and t-crossing to keep Alden out." (NiemanLab)
>> Kevin Durant’s Boardroom magazine is eyeing a trial print edition. (THR)
>> The AP is going to stop publishing weekly book reviews. (Media Nation)
|
>> Elon Musk is raging against Apple and OpenAI. (CNN)
>> "Musk's X briefly suspended the verified account for Musk's Grok on Monday, and the AI chatbot can't make up its mind about why it happened — or if it happened at all." (Business Insider)
>> Yomiuri Shimbun has sued Perplexity, marking "the first copyright challenge by a major Japanese news publisher against an AI company." (NiemanLab)
>> "Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit," Jay Peters reports. (The Verge)
>> Brian Chen breaks down why "AI should make parents rethink posting photos of their children online." (NYT)
|
ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro sat down with Bryan Curtis on The Ringer's "Press Box" podcast for a wide-ranging convo. Re: the network's equity deal with the NFL, and whether the Trump admin could hold up the required regulatory approval, Pitaro said, "there's nothing but goodness here for the sports fan" and "we're looking forward to having the opportunity to be able to tell this story" to the DOJ.
Re: concerns that the NFL deal will change ESPN's journalistic principles, "the answer is 'No, hard stop,'" Pitaro said. "We made this very clear to the league from the get-go. There was no hesitation on my part, and there was no concern coming from the league. The league understands that we are the place of record, that we cover sports, we cover leagues, we cover conferences, we cover the industry objectively and fairly, or at least that is our North Star..."
>> ICYMI yesterday: ESPN and Fox "are forming a bundle of their soon-to-launch services" for $39.99 a month.
|
'Looser' new deal for Archewell |
"Netflix is keeping its ties to Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan. But those ties are getting looser," the NYT's Nicole Sperling reports. The streamer's new deal with Archewell Productions is "worth less for the royals than their last arrangement" since it is a first-look deal. Meghan's brand As Ever "will continue to grow in partnership with Netflix," Variety's Ellise Shafer notes...
|
As they say in the HUNTR/X song "Golden," "we're goin' up, up, up!" The song – conceived for the smash hit Netflix film "KPop Demon Hunters" – just hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Gary Trust reports. It is "the ninth song associated with Korean pop to conquer the Hot 100 — and the first by female lead vocalists." If you're not hooked on the song yet, that'll change when you listen...
|
|
|
|
® © 2025 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
1050 Techwood Drive NW, Atlanta, GA 30318 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
