Happy Monday! Here's the latest on Charlamagne tha God, Spotify, David Ellison, CPB, Stephen Colbert, "Odd Lots," ESPN, Dude Perfect, secular praise music, and much more... |
Controlling info and ideas |
Climate change reports, deleted. Local stations, defunded. DEI initiatives, banned. History lessons, purged. Books, removed from military academies. Names of civil rights leaders, erased from ships.
President Trump and his government appointees keep asserting more control over ideas and information. Friday's abrupt firing of the Labor Statistics chief is one of the most dramatic examples yet.
But it's been evident all throughout his second term. Remember the headlines about "vaccine data and LGBT references" being scrubbed from government websites? Or the bogus math on DOGE's "receipts" page? How about the "Friday night purge" of impartial watchdogs investigating abuse within the government?
Yes, every administration tries to shape reality to its liking, but "Trump's statistical purges have been faster and more sweeping — picking off not just select factoids but entire troves of public information," the Washington Post asserted in March.
"Trump increasingly is playing the role of information gatekeeper," Clay Calvert of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in February, by "dictating access on his terms" – i.e. promoting MAGA media outlets while punishing The Associated Press for not immediately adopting Trump's "Gulf of America" name. That, too, was about control over information.
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'Trump pushes war on facts' |
☝️ That's one of the above the fold headlines in today's NYT. Peter Baker says Trump's efforts to "force his facts on the government and get rid of those standing in the way" increasingly remind scholars of actions by "authoritarian leaders."
George Stephanopoulos raised this point on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday. "Suppressing statisticians is a time-honored tool for leaders trying to solidify their power and stifle dissent," he said. "It's happened throughout history, most recently in Venezuela and Turkey." His guest Lawrence Summers said "firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms... This is really scary stuff."
Yet Trump aides and allies are being pressed to defend the firing. National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said on CNBC this morning that the jobs data "could be politically manipulated."
>> Trump said last night that he'll name a new labor stats chief in the next few days. "He's probably combing Fox News right now for a qualified replacement," David Axelrod quipped on X.
>> WSJ editorial board's latest message to Trump: "There are bound to be monthly revisions when tariff and deportation policies are so volatile."
>> Recommended reading: CNN's David Goldman explains "how the jobs report really works."
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Media scrutiny still matters |
I see ample evidence that press attention and public pressure does make a difference. Think back to March, when The AP revealed that an anti-DEI crusade at the Pentagon led to images of war heroes, women, minorities and even the famed "Enola Gay" being flagged for removal. The bad press forced Pete Hegseth's aides into a defensive crouch.
And just the other day, WaPo reported on the Smithsonian removing Trump from an impeachment exhibit at the National Museum of American History. The whiff of scandal was so overwhelming that the museum had to issue a statement on Saturday denying any White House pressure and pledging to update the exhibit in the coming weeks.
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'Flip flopped once again' |
Some commentators shrugged off Sunday's Washington Post report stating that the WH "has no plan to mandate IVF care" despite the idea being one of Trump's "key campaign pledges." ("He was lying about this from the get-go, which was obvious if you looked at literally anything he had done in his first term related to fertility care," MSNBC's Catherine Rampell remarked.)
But this is one of those highly personal subjects that could arouse real anger from unexpected sources. Anti-"woke" comedian-podcaster Andrew Schulz, who hosted Trump on "Flagrant" last year and said he voted for him, wrote on Instagram yesterday that Trump has "flip flopped once again" on a promise. "You don't break your word, your word breaks you," Schulz wrote. (Hat tip: Edward-Isaac Dovere.)
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It's intriguing that Lara Trump booked Charlamagne tha God on her Fox News show, right? Normally her show features Trump admin officials singing her father-in-law's praises. Sometimes the president even comes on and does it himself. But this time Charlamagne was there blasting Trump and, referencing the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, envisioning a "political coup going on right now in the Republican Party." He also said he'd love to see Jon Stewart run for president with Stephen Colbert as his running mate in 2028.
Trump, who is well aware of his "very wonderful and talented" daughter in law's ratings success at Fox, raged against her guest in a middle of the night Truth Social post, awarding the radio host with a multi-day news cycle for his comments...
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'Brendan Carr declares victory over the First Amendment' |
That's the biting headline on Adi Robertson's latest for The Verge. She argues that a new form of the "fairness doctrine" — something conservatives opposed for decades — is now taking shape at the FCC: "A Republican commissioner just put the government's thumb straight on the scale of American culture, insisting that networks shouldn't build their businesses on what customers like — they should look to Donald Trump."
>> Carr was on Fox yesterday talking again about the media's "credibility crisis" – here's a recap of how he is justifying his actions.
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CPB prepares to close up shop |
On Friday morning I wrote about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting going through the five stages of grief following the successful Republican effort to strip its funding. On Friday afternoon there was acceptance: "We now face the difficult reality of closing our operations," CPB CEO Patricia Harrison said in a statement, confirming that staffers will be laid off when the money runs out on September 30.
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Four newsy notes this morning |
>> David Ellison has "officially named his senior leadership team" for the new Paramount. (THR)
>> Spotify says it will "increase the monthly price of its premium individual subscription in select markets" starting next month. (Reuters)
>> "As podcasting becomes video-oriented, Amazon is shuffling Wondery into Audible and a new 'creator services' team while cutting approximately 110 staff members." (Bloomberg)
>> "Is It Still Disney Magic If It's AI?" The WSJ says the studio is "caught between how to use artificial intelligence in the filmmaking process and how to protect its famed characters against it." (WSJ)
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Today: IAC reports earnings after the close.
Tuesday: New books include Garrett Graff's atomic bomb oral history and Thomas Chatterton Williams' summer of 2020 reflection.
Wednesday: Disney and Reuters report earnings before the bell.
Thursday: The Paramount-Skydance transaction is expected to close. Also: WBD (CNN's parent) reports earnings.
Thursday: New releases include "Freakier Friday" and "Weapons."
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ICYMI over the weekend... |
>> Senate Republicans confirmed Jeanine Pirro as the top federal prosecutor for D.C. (WaPo)
>> Andrew Marchand broke the news that the NFL and ESPN have reached "a blockbuster agreement" to place Redzone and other key NFL holdings with the sports network "in exchange for equity in ESPN that is potentially worth billions." (The Athletic)
>> Benjamin Wallace profiled Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway's Bloomberg podcast, observing that "few media outlets have felt as essential as 'Odd Lots' to understanding the economic moment." (NYT)
>> Nintendo raised the price of the original Switch and many accessories in the US, citing "market conditions." (Polygon)
>> Joe Adalian scooped that Stephen Colbert is going to appear on Robert and Michelle King's "The Good Fight" spinoff "as the host of … a late-night talk show called 'Way Late with Scotty Bristol.'" (NYMag)
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'This is the news from TikTok' |
What is it really like to consume news via TikTok? The Atlantic's Amogh Dimri talked with "newsfluencers" and analysts for this new essay. Speed is of the essence, he says, not original reporting – it's a medium that "seems unlikely to serve up holistic coverage of current events." Yet "the challenge of packaging news for distribution by a black-box algorithm seems here to stay."
>> Meanwhile, the biggest news about TikTok over the weekend was the app's decision to remove a video by beauty mogul Huda Kattan pushing hateful conspiracy theories about Israel. CNN's Elizabeth Wagmeister has the story here.
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Marvel's "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" easily stayed atop the domestic box office chart, but suffered a "sharp decline" in its second week, THR's Pamela McClintock reports. "Bad Guys 2" (which my son loved!) "started off with a better-than-expected domestic opening of $22.2 million" and "The Naked Gun" reboot "also opened on the high end of expectations..."
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'Dude Perfect' in theaters next month |
Next month Regal will release "Dude Perfect: The Hero Tour," "a documentary that follows the YouTube stars' performances nationwide, on more than 800 screens across the US, UK, Western Europe and Australia," Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw reports. Hey, it worked for AMC and Taylor Swift!
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Secular praise music strikes a chord |
"Artists like Benson Boone, Teddy Swims and Alex Warren have tapped into a genre of music that sounds religious, but isn't," and it's working, Kelsey Weekman writes for Yahoo! Entertainment. Warren's "Ordinary" is a perfect example. Secular praise music takes the emotions of a worship hymn, "harnesses those elements and markets it to both religious and nonreligious audiences."
>> "Musical tastes are cyclical, and this format is resonating right now because people are craving emotional release," music professor Amani Roberts says. "We're living in a time where everything feels loud — digitally, socially, politically. These songs slow things down, pull you in gently and then give you that euphoric burst in the chorus. It's a structure that mimics the arc of a personal breakthrough."
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