Happy Saturday! All week long we gather links that you might like to check out over the weekend. Here are some great reads, featuring headlines about Anna Wintour, Elon Musk, Caitlin Clark, OpenAI, Carrie Underwood, Mark Cuban, and Journalism the horse... |
Reporters and editors have their own ideas of what constitutes "news" – and what doesn't. But what do consumers think? The Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation are out with an intriguing new study about what Americans understand as news and what they expect from news.
Among the findings: "Defining news has become a personal, and personalized, experience;" people make "clear distinctions between news versus entertainment and news versus opinion;" and news overload continues to be a very real phenomenon.
As you might expect, peoples' stated preferences sometimes conflict with their behaviors. Check out the findings here... And/or read Pew researcher Kirsten Eddy's essay about it for NiemanLab...
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This weekend's biggest shows |
The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest final streams at 3 p.m. ET on Peacock for US viewers. CNN's Rob Picheta ranked all 26 Eurovision songs from worst to first here.
Back stateside, Journalism the horse is the favorite to win the Preakness Stakes this evening, and Scarlett Johansson is hosting the season finale of "SNL" tonight on NBC.
Tomorrow, Anderson Cooper has a report about Trump's cutbacks to the IRS on CBS's "60 Minutes" season finale, and a two-year investigation by Dr. Sanjay Gupta culminates in an hourlong special called "Animal Pharm" on CNN at 8 p.m.
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'Feelings, facts, and our crisis of truth' |
Claire Lehmann's essay for The Dispatch about our "largely postliterate culture" has been in my head all week. She describes "a clash of cultures" between people like reporters and researchers who primarily live "in the world of printed text" and others like podcasters who live "in the world of conversation and storytelling."
Lehmann says the US "is at a crossroads: Trade policy is conducted according to vibes, anti-vaccine propaganda is spread by the highest health official of the land, and children now die of a once-eliminated disease. A path forward requires a counter-counter-Enlightenment. This doesn't require censorship or an appeal to authority, but a return to rigor and the written word." Read the rest here...
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Fun with White House numbers |
"I've always been good with money," Trump boasted to Fox's Bret Baier on Friday. He bragged about doing "trillions" of dollars in deals with Middle Eastern countries. That's why Glenn Kessler's latest Washington Post fact-check is titled "how to produce a statistic for a White House news release."
Kessler shows how the administration came up with a completely implausible "$1.2 trillion" figure tied to Trump's visit to Qatar. "The goal," he says, "is to have a number for headlines. No one is going to bother to check in 10 years whether any of this stuff actually happened."
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'Media reckoning' over Biden |
The reviews for "Original Sin" keep coming. Maureen Dowd read an early copy, and she says Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson "show how Biden and his inner circle created an alternate universe that they tried to sell to the media and the public — the sort of corrosive mirage of unreality that Trump excels at building."
Day by day, a "media reckoning" over past coverage of Biden is underway, Margaret Sullivan writes for The Guardian. (Yesterday's audio adds to it.) "As a media critic, I'm always happy to see a good reckoning," Sullivan writes. "But this one makes me wonder. When is the reckoning coming for the failures to cover Trump effectively? At what point will there be a general acknowledgment and some serious self-scrutiny about the way big media failed to adequately convey what would happen if Trump were elected again?"
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Political media notes and quotes |
>> The Department of Homeland Security is in the "very beginning stages" of reviewing "a reality TV pitch where immigrants would compete for American citizenship." (CNN)
>> Public media is a "collective investment we're making as a country," PBS CEO Paula Kerger says in this Q&A about the Trump administration's "all-out effort to take us out." (NYT)
>> "How to sell a corporate merger to Donald Trump: Tell him it's going to Make America Great Again." Peter Kafka says that's how Charter is positioning its Cox acquisition. (Business Insider)
>> "Each day brings a new demonstration of the idiocy of our politics," and today it's the James Comey story, Andrew C. McCarthy writes. (National Review)
>> Comey has a long history of "weird" and "self-promoting" social media tendencies, Jeremy Herb writes. (CNN)
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Wemple watched 18 hours of MSNBC... |
"I could not agree more!" Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple watched 18 hours of MSNBC and found "vast expanses of predictable programming in which people passionately agree with one another." Wemple came away feeling like he leans toward "the CNN model" because "at least CNN viewers get to hear the pro-Trump arguments in all their fact-deprived glory."
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A rare Anna Wintour interview |
The interviewer is WaPo's Robin Givhan and the subject matter is "fashion as identity, the importance of diversity in the current political climate and her personal — and very public — learning curve."
"While the Trump administration aims to halt all diversity programs," Condé "continues to make a public effort," Givhan writes. "Wintour presses on. And in 2025, that alone is something of a win." The Vogue EIC and Condé Nast chief content officer says "it's a challenging time" and "I feel we need to be courageous."
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Seven more great weekend reads |
>> Stuart A. Thompson recreated a version of Elon Musk's X account to better understand what Musk "sees when he opens X." His feed "represents a flattering alternate reality filled with boundless praise" and him, "and it mirrors his own deepening allegiances to the far-right." (NYT)
>> Does Stephen A. Smith really want to be president? No, he wants to be Joe Rogan. That's what Matt Flegenheimer concludes in this long read. (NYT)
>> Paramount critics have focused on what Shari Redstone could gain by settling Trump's lawsuit and closing the Skydance deal, but she also "has the most to lose," a source tells Claire Atkinson in this feature. (VF)
>> Anna Cooban writes about "Trump's movie tariff plot twist: What's a Hollywood movie anyway?" (CNN)
>> Emily Yahr went to Carrie Underwood's Vegas residency show for this piece about "the enduring enigma of Carrie Underwood." (WaPo)
>> Ann-Marie Alcántara captures the cult-like obsession with AMC’s A-List program. (WSJ)
>> A new report by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism explores "AI's impact on platforms and publishers," finding "some hope and a lot of trepidation." (CJR)
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First excerpt from 'Empire of AI' |
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>> "A 'rogue employee' was behind Grok's unprompted 'white genocide' mentions." Who was it? xAI won't say. Liam Reilly and Hadas Gold have the story here. (CNN)
>> Lauren Feiner writes that the "long-simmering tension between Silicon Valley and the press that covers it is surfacing during the FTC's antitrust trial against Meta." (The Verge)
>> Apple "is trying to dissuade Europeans from using iOS apps that support alternative payment options by making them look scary," Jess Weatherbed reports. (The Verge)
>> TikTok "is launching in-app guided meditation exercises" as the platform looks to "help users improve their sleep quality and encourage them to put the app down during those late-night endless scrolling sessions," Aisha Malik writes. (TechCrunch)
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The WNBA's 'viewership unicorn' |
Yesterday was the first day of the 2025 WNBA season, which is "poised to be the greatest in the league’s history," The Ringer's Seerat Sohi writes.
She says Caitlin Clark "remains a worldwide senMartin Meissner/APsation" – which brings us to Richard Deutsch's column of advice for the league. It's simple: "Put every Caitlin Clark game on national television."
Deitsch says the league has practically done so already – the Fever are playing on ABC right now – but he would go even further. "Clark helps the league bring in casual fans, which is how sports leagues grow," he writes. Here's his column... |
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Entertainment notes and quotes |
>> Mark Cuban said farewell to "Shark Tank" on last night's episode. (Deadline)
>> "Eddington" has ignited "an already politically-charged Cannes Film Festival," Thomas Page reports. (CNN)
>> In an interview at Cannes, Bono says "the world has forgotten what 'freedom' and 'democracy' mean." (THR)
>> Trump attacked Bruce Springsteen after The Boss called him "treasonous" and "incompetent." (CNN)
>> As for the president's jab at Taylor Swift, well, she is still "hot." (NYMag)
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