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Friday, December 12, 2025 |
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TGIF. Here's the latest on Paul Thomas Anderson, WBD, OpenAI, Mother Jones, Reddit, "Supergirl," and more. Plus: A sneak peek at Netflix's "Cover-Up" film. But first... |
🔑 Key reads for this week |
It's been a busy week! Rather than starting with a long-winded report of my own, lemme recommend some stories and columns from across the media web that help make sense of this week:
>> President Trump's "media meddling is straight out of Viktor Orbán's playbook," Paul Farhi says. (MS NOW)
>> Susan Glasser says "we can expect a whole lot more expletives" from the president, as he is now "by many measures more unpopular than ever before." (New Yorker)
>> David Ellison is "positioning himself as the next great media consolidator," with the "same empire-building instinct Murdoch rode to global influence," Andy Meek writes. (Forbes)
>> But "Ellison is playing a dangerous game," the headline on Steven Zeitchik's new essay for the NYT says. Zeitchik argues that a Trump-aligned Paramount-WBD combo would "inch us scarily close to a culture of state-run media." (NYT)
>> On the other hand... Paramount-owned "South Park" taking on Trump this season was "an act of patriotism," Kevin Dolak writes. (THR)
>> As for Netflix's deal to buy Warner Bros. and HBO, Ben Thompson says "everything Netflix does has to be framed in the context" of YouTube being its greatest threat and competition. (Stratchery)
>> Related: TIME named YouTube's Neal Mohan the CEO of the year, calling him "the pilot of the world’s most powerful distraction machine." (TIME)
>> Meanwhile, "for the first time since 2017, pay-TV subscriptions actually grew quarter over quarter," Sara Fischer reports, saying "it offers hope that the live video subscription business can survive longer than expected, but only if video providers are willing to offer streaming bundles" with their channel packages. (Axios)
>> Bloomberg's Emily Chang went for a walk with Disney entertainment boss Dana Walden. One of the many intriguing takeaways: Walden said the reports about Disney+ and Hulu bleeding subscribers over Jimmy Kimmel's suspension "were highly exaggerated." (Bloomberg)
>> The "bizarre" posts painting Taylor Swift as a white supremacist and a Nazi were a "coordinated attack" from "a network of inauthentic accounts," Miles Klee reports. (Rolling Stone)
>> James Ball persuasively argues that "the war on disinformation is a losing battle." (The Verge)
>> And here's something thought-provoking via a new Cornell research paper: "It's not just humans who suffer from the effects of misinformation. So do fish, flies and even bacteria." As one data scientist says, "it shows that misinformation is not an anomaly or a moral failure, but a structural consequence of communication systems operating under noise, limited context and imperfect decoding." (NYT)
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How Disney's OpenAI deal is playing |
Disney's deal with OpenAI, bringing its characters to Sora, has everyone talking. CNN's Allison Morrow calls the deal "a $1 billion hedge on the future of slop." Business Insider captured some of the other reactions here.
Disney is "choosing to play ball instead of fighting over the rules of the game," Eric Vilas-Boas wrote for Vulture. "On the surface, there appears to be some dissonance with Disney embracing OpenAI while poking its rivals," Wired's Brian Barrett wrote. "But it's more than likely that Hollywood is embarking down a similar path as media publishers when it comes to AI, signing licensing agreements where it can and using litigation when it can't." Witness Disney's new cease-and-desist letter to Google.
Putting aside the likely deluge of user-generated Disney slop, some experts see this deal boosting Disney's creative team. The deal "instantly turns a century of carefully guarded intellectual property into raw material for a new kind of crowd‑sourced, AI‑assisted creativity," Fortune's Nick Lichtenberg wrote. Plus, Disney will stream some of the fan-made content on Disney+. Axios has a primer on what you can and can't do with the Disney characters...
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Warner Bros. Discovery shares briefly topped $30 for the first time after Charlie Gasparino reported after the bell that Paramount, after publicly offering $30, "is considering raising its takeover offer" by "as much as 10% as it plots its next move to break up a merger agreement with Netflix."
But is Paramount "good for the money," so to speak? Lauren Hirsch gets into that in her new NYT story this morning. "Larry Ellison is backstopping Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers, but Warner Brothers is concerned that the billionaire has not provided a personal guarantee to pay," Hirsch reports. Puck's William Cohan also explored this in a column titled "The Ellisons at the Gates."
>> WBD has to respond to Paramount's initial hostile bid by Dec. 22; insiders expect the response to come sooner than that.
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At yesterday's WH press briefing, WSJ reporter Brian Schwartz, who has been delivering scoop after scoop about Trump's desires for CNN, asked Karoline Leavitt about the matter. Leavitt used it as a cue to go after CNN. "Their ratings have declined, and I think the president rightfully believes that network would benefit from new ownership," she said.
The White House has also been complaining about CNN's booking practices. Here's the New York Post's headline about that: "CNN denies banning Stephen Miller after top WH aide claims it rejected offer to 'discuss any topic with any host at any time.'" VP JD Vance even took the time to tweet about it.
All of this led Vanity Fair's Aidan McLaughlin to quip, "If traditional media is dead you would not be able to tell from the amount of time the White House spends going after CNN."
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It's 'wildly inappropriate' |
As for Trump's public push for CNN to be sold, we heard yesterday from Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who said: "It's none of the president’s business who runs CNN or whether it should be sold. President Trump's comments calling it 'imperative that CNN be sold' so it can install leadership and produce coverage he finds more favorable is wildly inappropriate and has no place in a free society." |
Trump WH promoting these press #s |
The White House Stenographer's Office compiled a list of the president's press availabilities this year, and the WH shared the data with Fox News yesterday. Trump "has participated in at least 433 open press events" this year, Fox's Emma Colton wrote. The stenographer's office "transcribed 2.4 million words from open press events with Trump as of Monday."
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'Publish your article and get smeared' |
Liam Reilly writes: A day after Mother Jones senior reporter Dan Friedman "sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth," the reporter received a threat from far-right activist and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.
Posobiec lobbed false claims at Friedman that "seemed to mirror my questions." Both the Pentagon and Posobiec "denied coordination," per Friedman. "But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec's links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared." You'll want to read the full story here...
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This morning, we have an exclusive clip from "Cover-Up," the forthcoming Netflix documentary about investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. The Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus project is being promoted as "both a portrait of a relentless journalist and an indictment of institutional violence."
In this clip, Hersh discusses how Henry Kissinger influenced The New York Times in the early '70s. Kissinger "sure as hell didn't like what I was doing," Hersh says. The documentary "will open theatrically in New York on Dec. 19, before premiering on Netflix on Dec. 26..."
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>> The Pulitzer Prize Board "continued its legal fight" against Trump yesterday by "filing a discovery request and insisting it will 'not be cowed by the president's attempt to intimidate journalists or undermine the First Amendment,'" Brian Flood reports. (Fox)
>> "Olivia Nuzzi's new book 'American Canto' sold only 1,165 hardcover copies in its first week on the shelves," per NPDBookScan, which is not exhaustive, but is a good snapshot of nationwide sales. (Politico)
>> NewsNation has named Robert Sherman its first international correspondent. (Variety)
>> Bloomberg's Shelly Banjo is becoming Semafor's deputy editor in chief, reporting to Ben Smith. (X)
>> Darya Folsom, the Bay Area's longest-running AM news anchor, is off the air at KRON after 27 years. She says "I'm done spreading news, and judgement, and stress, and sickness. I want to spread love, right?" (SFGate)
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WaPo's choose-your-own-error |
The Washington Post "has used AI to build a pick-your-own-format news podcast, letting listeners choose the topics, hosts and length to create custom versions," Digiday's Sara Guaglione reported earlier this week.
Unfortunately for the Post, "less than 48 hours since the product was released, people within the Post have flagged what four sources described as multiple mistakes in personalized podcasts," with errors ranging from "relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content," Semafor's Max Tani wrote yesterday. Staffers have "revolted," Oliver Darcy reported last night...
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Federalizing the AI playing field |
As expected, Trump has signed an executive order that "blocks states from enforcing their own regulations around artificial intelligence and instead aims to create a 'single national framework' for AI." CNN's Samantha Waldenberg, Hadas Gold and Clare Duffy have all the details here...
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>> Reddit has "filed a lawsuit in Australia's highest court seeking to overturn the country's social media ban for children." (Reuters)
>> OpenAI "has debuted a new AI model, GPT-5.2, that it says beats all existing models by a substantial margin across a wide range of tasks." (Fortune)
>> And on the same day, "Google launched its deepest AI research agent yet." (TechCrunch)
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🪿 One Geese after another |
Andrew Kirell writes: Paul Thomas Anderson appears to be working on his next project following Oscar favorite "One Battle After Another." The director was seen last night at Carnegie Hall, filming a very sold-out solo performance by Cameron Winter, frontman of Geese, the Brooklyn band currently receiving generational levels of hype. Eagle-eyed attendees may have noticed 70mm film canisters displaying the project title, "Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall." You heard it here first! Also spotted working with Anderson: fellow filmmaker Benny Safdie.
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>> Jacob Shamsian with the lead of the day: "Carl Rinsch spent years in director jail. Now he's facing real jail." Yesterday, a jury "found Rinsch guilty on charges that he scammed Netflix out of $11 million in a lavish spending spree." (Business Insider)
>> The first two episodes of Taylor Swift's new Disney+ documentary "The End of an Era" came out this morning. Issy Ronald watched and recapped. (CNN)
>> Netflix's "Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery" is also out today. (CNN)
>> Showrunners "Robert and Michelle King have renewed their overall deal with CBS Studios, their creative home for nearly 20 years." (Variety)
>> DC Studios has dropped the official teaser trailer for "Supergirl." (YouTube)
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