Happy Tuesday. Here's the latest on OpenAI, John Oliver, Jeffrey Toobin, Tamika D. Mallory, Will Cain, "Euphoria," and more...
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'Constitutional crisis looms' |
The warnings are getting serious.
"A Showdown Emerges Over the Limits of Presidential Power" is the banner headline atop The New York Times this morning.
"Constitutional crisis looms as Trump overhauls government" was the lead story on CNN's homepage overnight.
Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes is asking: "Are the federal courts institutionally up to the job of checking President Trump’s current wave of lawlessness?"
"On Monday alone," this morning's Playbook notes, "five different judges around the U.S. issued temporary blocks on five different Trump-ordered executive actions."
The looming crisis, as CNN's Joan Biskupic explained here, is that "some of Donald Trump's top advisers have cast doubt on whether rulings on those lawsuits would even constrain the president."
"If you listen to what the president and vice president are saying, it certainly suggests that it's a real possibility that they'll simply ignore what a court says," Jeffrey Toobin said on "Anderson Cooper 360" last night.
A little while later on "The Source," Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told
Kaitlan Collins "this isn't hyperbole to say that we are staring the death of democracy in the eyes, right now."
National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru said Murphy is "right to say that there is a potential constitutional crisis here, and right to say also that we're not quite there yet."
"Look, there's a long history of Republicans championing a strong executive, and saying the courts are going too far and trying to micromanage things that they shouldn't be in charge of," Ponnuru said on the show. "What is different now is the level of aggressiveness from Trump, and the level of recklessness. They are spoiling for this fight. They are pushing the limits, in order to see how far they can go."
And as Democratic strategist Karen Finney said during the discussion, "most of the American people are not quite clear on what's going on."
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"There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis," the NYT's Adam Liptak writes, "but legal scholars agree about some of its characteristics. It is generally the product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings. It is not binary: It is a slope, not a switch. It can be cumulative, and once one starts, it can get much worse."
Another key paragraph from Liptak's piece: "The distinctive feature of the current situation, several legal scholars said, is its chaotic flood of activity that collectively amounts to a radically new conception of presidential power. But the volume and speed of those actions may overwhelm and thus thwart sober and measured judicial consideration."
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>> John Oliver was a surprise guest on "The Daily Show" last night. "I'm here to gloat," the British comedian said – "let me be the first to welcome America to its monarchy era." (YouTube)
>> "Under the surface, some GOP lawmakers are growing concerned by the effort to usurp Congress' control of the federal purse strings," Annie Grayer reports. (CNN)
>> But this is a key sentence in every story: "Conservatives have generally hailed the actions" Trump has taken. (Wash Post)
>> AP headline: "With firings and lax enforcement, Trump moving to dismantle government's public integrity guardrails." (AP)
>> Maggie Haberman's latest: "Trump Muses About a Third Term, Over and Over Again." (NYT)
>> "How Democracies Die" co-author Steven Levitsky says the U.S. "is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition." (The Atlantic)
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Silence on Ye's hate speech |
Hadas Gold writes: The silence is deafening. Kanye West spent days spouting antisemitic, homophobic and misogynist hate speech on X. He bought local airtime during the Super Bowl in some Fox markets for his fashion brand – and after the ad aired the brand's website began selling a single item, a swastika T-shirt.
West was posting his hate tweets well before the Super Bowl. Why was his ad still allowed to air? Was the ad subject to any review ahead of time? So far Fox is silent. X and Elon Musk haven't really said anything. (Musk replied to one person who complained about West posting porn.) Politicians have also largely been silent about the matter. "Republican needs to condemn this shit," former Trump adviser Bryan Lanza commented last night.
Maybe there is so much other news. Maybe people don't want to draw more attention to something so vile. But the lack of condemnations can also send a (hopefully) unintended message – that it's OK, it's fine.
It's not OK. It never is, never was.
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Toobin's newest page-turner |
This morning the aforementioned Jeffrey Toobin is out with a new book, his tenth, titled "The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy." The book is fantastically timed, with Trump pardoning former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich just yesterday.
"Pardons," Toobin told me, "turn out to be X-rays into the souls of presidents. From Trump to Biden to Gerald Ford, there's no better guide to who presidents are -- and what they will do -- than how they exercise this nearly absolute power."
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Today's other new nonfiction releases |
Tamika D. Mallory, an activist who helped lead the Women's March in 2017, is releasing a memoir, "I Lived To Tell The Story;" NYT columnist Ross Douthat is out with "Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious;" and Kelsey McKinney, host of the "Normal Gossip" podcast, is out with "You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip."
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Watching right-wing media |
>> FCC chair Brendan Carr "is boasting to friends that he is having 'the time of his life'" right now, Corbin Bolies reports. (Daily Beast)
>> Peter Kafka suggests Fox's purchase of Red Seat Ventures could be a hedge, since the rise of independent podcasters/creators may be "a threat to Fox News, especially as the channel's audience continues to age." (Business Insider)
>> That said, "The Will Cain Show" is Fox's latest success story, proving yet again that the network's audience strongly prefers pro-Trump talk over traditional news coverage. Loree Seitz has the #'s here. (TheWrap)
>> Maggie Severns calls Steve Bannon's "War Room" the "hottest stop on DC's media circuit" right now. (WSJ)
>> Tal Axelrod is joining Axios for a "new project covering the conservative/MAGA media." (X)
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👀 on the billionaire beat |
The billionaire beat has never been busier. Reporters who know what makes Elon Musk tick are in high demand. Yesterday MSNBC added Teddy Schleifer, who covers "billionaires and their impact on the world" for The New York Times, as a contributor... |
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Two digital media success stories |
When I was in NOLA over the weekend I missed two excellent Times stories that say so much about the present digital media moment.
The first, by Emmanuel Morgan, is a look inside Shannon Sharpe's podcast "Club Shay Shay," which "became a must-stop destination for Hollywood after Katt Williams aired his grievances" last year. The show works, in part, because Sharpe gives guests time and space to "open up," and because it gets sliced and diced: The podcast team tries to produce "at least 30 clips from each interview" for social media platforms. Here's the full story.
The second piece, by Jessica Testa, is a much-needed profile of Emily Sundberg and her Gawker-esque newsletter Feed Me, "Where the Dealmakers and Strivers Get Their Gossip." Sundberg maps the "moneyed junction of tech, culture and hospitality" – sometimes by shrewdly trawling "job board openings to speculate about the direction of companies" – and says her newsletter is "growing too fast for me to even consider" any tie-up with a big media company. Sundberg wrote yesterday that she went dancing til 3 in the morning to celebrate the Times feature...
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Surprise! A Super Bowl record |
Apparently America really likes watching the Chiefs suffer! I spoke too soon when I suggested that the Eagles' dominant victory meant a ratings record was out of reach. Fox Sports said Monday evening that the Super Bowl telecast is on track to top 126 million viewers in the U.S., which would be a new all-time high.
Michael Mulvihil said "final updated numbers" will come from Nielsen in the morning, but Fox "conservatively projects 126 million viewers for the game" (that's the average audience # across every minute of the four quarters) plus "131.2 million for the halftime and a peak of 135.7 million."
Fox's streaming platform Tubi "was absolutely a difference maker for Fox in setting a record audience," SBJ's Austin Karp tweeted...
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This year's Ad Meter winner |
The front page of this morning's USA Today features the winner of its Ad Meter, a/k/a its panel-based measurement of the Super Bowl's best commercial:
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It was Budweiser and the beloved Clydesdales. Overall "Anheuser-Busch had four ads finish in the top eight," the paper reports.
The WSJ's main takeaway is that "AI can't compete with sentimental stories." At least not yet!
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AI Action Summit continues today |
The AI Action Summit continues today in Paris. To bolster France's position in the AI race, Emmanuel Macron announced that "foreign and domestic companies will invest a total of $113 billion in artificial intelligence projects in France," per this Bloomberg report.
This morning VP JD Vance spoke at the summit and said "we believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off."
"I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety," Vance said. "I'm here to talk about AI opportunity." CNN's Olesya Dmitracova has more here...
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'Kendrick vs Drake for nerds' |
Jessica Toonkel and Berber Jin's scoop about a Musk-led consortium making an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for control of OpenAI is reverberating everywhere right now. Sam Altman initially responded by writing on Musk's X that he would "buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." Musk called him a "swindler," prompting a follower to say "This is Kendrick vs Drake for nerds."
This morning at the Paris summit Altman told Bloomberg TV's Tom Mackenzie that "I think he's probably just trying to slow us down." CNN's David Goldman has the latest here...
>> Altman also asserted that Musk's "whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy... I don't think he's, like, a happy person." (X)
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A few more tech + entertainment headlines |
>> "More than 3,000 artists have written to protest against plans by Christie's to auction art created using artificial intelligence in the latest backlash by the creative industries against the threat posed by generative AI models." (FT)
>> A new Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study shows that "as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can 'result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.'" (404 Media)
>> "At long last, 'Euphoria' is coming back," with production now officially underway, "three years after its second season premiered." (TheWrap)
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