We're coming to you with a rare "evening edition" US time. It's been a day full of bulletins — about the US and Israel striking inside Iran, about Iran's retaliation across the Middle East, and about the death of Iran's supreme leader. Here's the latest on the news media's coverage, plus some followups on the Paramount-WBD deal... |
Iran's supreme leader killed |
Google Trends tells the extraordinary story: This afternoon, "Iran" was the top trending search in the US followed by "Khamenei." Below that, CNN was trending. So was Reuters and the BBC. Also: "World War 3."
The data shows that people are searching for answers to questions: "Why did we bomb Iran?" "Why is Iran attacking Dubai?" "Did Congress declare war on Iran?" "Are we at war now?"
News outlets definitely don't have all the answers yet. "We're early in all of this," Fox's Bret Baier said tonight.
Often the best, most honest thing to say is "we don't know" – and those words were uttered literally hundreds of times on TV today.
But newsrooms are certainly helping people navigate the fog of war with context and verification. And they're formulating the best, nuanced questions to ask — ones that can't be Googled.
"What is the strategic objective here?" Jim Sciutto asked during the 7 p.m. ET hour on CNN. The other guest, Beth Sanner, asked, "Where does this end? Defining the end point is really important" since President Trump's push for regime change "relies on the people rising up and being successful."
Anchor Jake Tapper asked: "Has that ever worked? Has it ever worked that the US has" ousted a foreign leader and enabled a revolution "and then a better leader came?"
You can find more of these questions in this excellent analysis piece by CNN's Stephen Collinson.
Just now Katy Tur framed things this way on MS NOW: "Was it worth it? The president launched preemptive strikes on Iran this morning without saying what exactly he was preempting. Now he's telling the Iranian soldiers to defect and the Iranian people to rise up. Will they? Can they?"
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In the American TV commentary, you can hear hopefulness — "so far, so good," Fox's Brit Hume said tonight — and feel the distance. Iran can sometimes seem like an information vacuum. It is one of the most hostile places on the planet for journalists. NetBlocks said it detected a "nationwide internet blackout" again Saturday, making it even harder to ascertain what's happening.
But the blackout has not seemed as extensive as back in January. Some messages to Iranians are getting through. And some videos and accounts of the strikes are getting out.
The emergence of eyewitness videos are thanks part to Starlink connections. (You might recall this WSJ story from two weeks ago: "US Smuggled Thousands of Starlink Terminals Into Iran After Protest Crackdown.") CNN's team has compiled some of the geolocated videos here.
>> "Before the blackout," the BBC reported, "some people posted messages on social media in case they were killed in air strikes."
>> Moments ago an Iranian television announcer confirmed the news of the supreme leader's death and "broke down in tears as he read the statement."
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Notes about the TV news coverage |
Per Deadline's Ted Johnson, CNN broke in with news of the strikes "during The Story Is with Elex Michaelson, its live show from Los Angeles, at 1:31 a.m. ET; Fox News broke into regular programming at 1:38 a.m. ET, and MS NOW at 1:48 a.m. ET. NBC News started coverage at 1:44 a.m. ET, ABC News' first special report came at 2:02 a.m. ET and CBS News was on the air at 2:28 a.m. ET."
The differences between CNN and CBS coverage will obviously garner more attention now that Paramount is on track to own both newsrooms.
CNN, of course, is far better equipped for round-the-clock emergencies. CBS reaches a more general-interest audience. (Its Saturday morning show included some usual fare, even a musical performance.)
The CBS News 24/7 live stream simulcast the BBC's Iran coverage for long stretches, and then showed a series of podcast-style discussions by The Free Press, the news division's new sibling.
In the afternoon, one of Bari Weiss's new CBS contributors, Masih Alinejad — who has been the target of Iranian assassination plots — criticized Zohran Mamdani's opposition to the attack on Iran. Weiss shared the video on X with a 🔥 emoji, renewing accusations that the head of a major news org has blurred the lines between partisan advocacy and journalistic impartiality.
For what it's worth, I think Weiss would say that her opinions are no secret and that it's better for journalists to be honest about their views rather than pretend they don't have any.
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>> The president spoke on the phone with reporters from WaPo, Axios, ABC, NBC, and CBS at various points throughout the day. Apologies if I'm excluding someone there.
>> However, he did not appear before the traveling press pool's cameras. Instead, he posted a video on Truth Social announcing the combat operations. NYT fact-checker Linda Qiu said it contained "unsupported and exaggerated claims."
>> Noting tonight's broadcast special reports as a sign of the day's significance: NBC's Tom Llamas anchored an hour at 8 p.m. and Tony Dokoupil is anchoring at 10 p.m. on CBS.
>> Of all the YouTube live streams about the conflict, Al Jazeera English – which has prioritized YouTube for years – seems to have the biggest viewing audience at any given time.
>> Here, via Sky News, are Sunday morning's UK front pages.
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When experience really matters |
"Today is the kind of day where it’s very clear why we need foreign correspondents with extensive experience on the ground," BBC and NBC alum Suzanne Kianpour wrote this morning.
Indeed, it makes all the difference. Many observers pointed out that the Washington Post's decision to gut its international coverage looks especially shortsighted right now.
Throughout the day, TV viewers saw exactly what Kianpour meant.
"This is CNN," a friend texted me, evoking the famous tagline, when the UAE-based anchor Becky Anderson's phone loudly sounded an alarm about Iran's retaliatory strikes. The phone alert urged everyone to seek shelter. Victor Blackwell picked up anchoring from Atlanta, but Anderson was back within minutes, unflappable as ever, describing the sound of booms nearby as she anchored from Abu Dhabi.
Later in the day, correspondents like CNN's Jeremy Diamond and Fox's Trey Yingst moved from rooftop live shot locations into stairwells as sirens warned of incoming Iranian missiles.
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VOA's parent agency highlights its transmissions into Iran |
The US Agency for Global Media, fresh off another wave of please-quit-your-job emails to employees, focused on its broadcasts into Iran on Saturday morning — and made sure Fox News knew about it. The positive Fox coverage made me think that Kari Lake was trying to make sure Trump heard about her efforts.
USAGM was also aggressive about promoting itself on X. VOA veteran Kim Andrew Elliott noted, though, that the agency's "transmitting and newsgathering resources [have been] much reduced since the end of the Biden administration."
>> To that point, The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum says the Trump admin has been "dismantling tools that could have helped promote civic engagement and build a united opposition in Iran. The administration has taken money away from Iranian-human-rights-monitoring groups and defunded media projects."
>> Patsy Widakuswara's POV: "Instead of delivering authoritative journalism and piercing state censorship in Iran and elsewhere, VOA is producing limited content in a handful of languages, broadcasting almost exclusively the administration's point of view."
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Taking the temp on the right |
Tucker Carlson told ABC's Jon Karl that the US-Israel attack was "absolutely disgusting and evil."
But "much of MAGA media erupted in cheers" after the attack began, Jon Passantino observed for Status.
Laura Ingraham asked Dan Bongino to answer "our friends on the right who say Trump ran on no regime change and he's now doing regime change," and he said, "Can you give the man a chance to cook a little bit? He just deposed and decapitated the entire upper-level infrastructure of the Iranian 'death to America' regime! Maybe give the guy five minutes?"
>> "Not sure what to make of this," Matt Boyle wrote on X, "but I just got off the air from three hours of radio hosting Breitbart News Saturday on Sirius XM Patriot and we had basically zero callers on the Iran strikes. The public isn't very interested in this right now — far more focused on economy, immigration, election integrity." He concluded there is "just no energy on the Iran issue at all — not for, not against."
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Paramount 🤝🏻 WBD — now what? |
Paramount and WBD said Friday that the boards of both companies had approved Paramount's takeover deal. Paramount paid Netflix the required $2.8 billion breakup fee and said it expects the deal "to close in Q3," i.e., by the end of September. Analysts say that's a very aggressive timetable.
And then, as Variety's Brent Lang and Cynthia Littleton put it, "comes the even harder part." Paramount-Warner will be "servicing more than $78 billion in debt" with "a debt ratio of nearly 7 times its annual earnings — a huge red flag for credit agencies and many investors. Paramount has pledged to swiftly cut its debt-to-earnings ratio down to 4.4 times earnings, which means finding billions of dollars in cost savings from the jump."
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Will state AGs intervene? |
Deadline calls it the "Coalition of the Unwilling": Democratic state attorneys general are talking about suing to block the deal. "It is pretty much the usual suspects of New York, Washington, Virginia and Pennsylvania at this point, with more on the go," Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson wrote... "So, lots of moving pieces, and lots of AGs."
>> And then there's Europe. Enders Analysis media and telecoms analyst François Godard told Deadline, "It is difficult to see (the Paramount-WBD) deal collapsing because of Europe saying no. But you can expect many more issues being raised by the regulator in Europe than the U.S."
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Orbán analogies abound, but... |
Today's Washington Post quotes an anonymous CNN employee saying uncertainty is, well, paramount: "Is this a Viktor Orbán-style takeover of a network, or is it not? We simply do not know yet."
Margaret Sullivan also cites the Orbán model in her new column titled "Trump just got much closer to bringing CNN to heel."
So, for a refresher on "Orbánism" and how news outlets in Hungary were "captured" by Orbán's government, here's my story from last September. Some longtime media critics are making the case that it's currently happening in the US: Victor Pickard tweeted yesterday that "the new Ellison-controlled media combine will check the boxes for all three types" of capture, "capitalistic, oligarchic, and authoritarian."
However, CBS News has not been "captured." I suspect liberals who claim CBS has gone MAGA aren't really watching the network.
Tomorrow, "60 Minutes" is scheduled to air what sounds like a hard-hitting Bill Whitaker piece about federal judges being "under siege." CBS says the investigation "found that judges who have ruled against the Trump administration have become top targets."
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About the anxiety within CNN... |
Paramount's press release about the deal did not mention CNN by name. But I wrote yesterday about what David Ellison has said about the news marketplace. Today, the NY Post's Charlie Gasparino quoted a "person inside Paramount Skydance" who acknowledged the anxieties some CNN staffers have shared, but echoed Ellison's talk about appealing to a big broad audience:
"Yes, I know people are scared but we're looking to produce a news product that appeals to 70% of the country that is either center left or center right. Why be scared of that?"
Much of the anxiety stems from the way the deal went down. Several CNNers sent me this quote from The Bulwark's Sonny Bunch yesterday: "Paramount may be a better or worse owner of WB than Netflix. One thing that's certain: the process by which Paramount gained control of WB is grotesque and un-American."
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Four more Paramount-WBD reads |
FCC approves $34.5 billion Charter-Cox combo |
The green light came on Friday. "The FCC said Spectrum-owner Charter will invest billions of dollars to upgrade its network and deliver high-speed service, and the company committed to onshoring jobs," Reuters reports. Also: "Like other recent transactions involving Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T and Paramount, the FCC required Charter to commit to not use diversity, equity and inclusion programs."
The deal still "needs clearance from the Justice Department," Deadline notes. (Disclosure: My wife is a Spectrum TV host.) |
Some WaPo editor nailed it with this headline in the print edition of today's paper:
"New name for Kennedy Center Honors (You have one guess)"
Yes, the center's president Richard Grenell says the annual gala will now be called the "Trump Kennedy Center Honors," and will still take place at a new venue while the center itself undergoes renovations. Check out Travis M. Andrews' full story here...
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OpenAI swoops in as Anthropic gets sidelined |
"OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced late Friday that the company had signed a deal with the Pentagon for its AI tools to be used in the military's classified systems, but with seemingly similar guardrails rival Anthropic had also requested," CNN's Hadas Gold writes. The deal with OpenAI came the same day Trump said all federal government agencies must cease using Anthropic's AI tools. Read on...
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Netflix announces Murdoch 'Dynasty' docuseries |
"The real-world drama that is said to have inspired the hit HBO show Succession is set for its own four-part series when Netflix debuts 'Dynasty: The Murdochs'" on March 13, The Guardian's Jeremy Barr reports. The docuseries "presents an exhaustive history of Rupert Murdoch's rise while homing in on the tensions that have built for decades" between him and his children. Watch the first trailer for the series here...
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