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Monday, November 17, 2025 |
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Happy Monday. Here's the latest on Sinclair, Olivia Nuzzi, Seth Meyers, Scott Pelley, "Charlotte's Web," Paul McCartney, the Wayback Machine, and so much more... |
Exposing MAGA media's cracks |
Marjorie Taylor Greene's break with President Trump is highlighting the cracks within MAGA world, which are increasingly apparent through MAGA-aligned media brands and commentators.
"With power and clout come turmoil, conflict and rivalry," as Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen put it in this great Axios overview of the "metastasizing mess."
What stands out to me is not the number of the cracks but the sheer variety of them:
– Mickey Kaus argued that "three unforced errors" are hurting Trump: "1. Ballroom 2. Epstein files 3. H-1Bs." Laura Ingraham pressed Trump last week about H-1B visas, sparking an "uproar" on the right.
– Numerous Fox pundits have criticized the "50-year mortgage" idea and warned that the president's answers about "affordability" are a problem for the party.
– Steve Bannon told Axios that many Trump base voters feel he is spending "too much time on Palestine and not enough on East Palestine," Ohio.
– Mike Cernovich tweeted last week that during a "recent visit in DC, the talk of everyone was how overt the corruption was. It's at levels you read about in history books. In nearly every department. Lots of, 'Do people just think Democrats will never win and they'll all get away with this?'"
– Candace Owens and other figures have been attacking FBI director Kash Patel for a while, and his girlfriend (who is suing some far-right podcasters) is "driving MAGA nuts," The Bulwark's Will Sommer wrote.
– Tim Dillon recently garnered attention for saying on his podcast that "this is the end of the Trump administration" and the "beginning of the lame duck presidency," and "it's obvious to everyone." (The aforementioned Kaus dismissed that line, saying the internet "encourages wild attention-getting overreactions.")
– And, of course, there's the all-consuming battle over Israel, with the movement reshaping around its two poles: Tucker Carlson, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and Owens on one; Ted Cruz, Mark Levin and more mainstream conservatives on the other.
As Fuentes gets more and more attention, it's worth remembering that the far-right white nationalist "constantly slams Trump by name, says he is corrupt, a conman, and compromised, and advocated against him winning last November," Yashar Ali noted on X.
Last night, Trump was finally asked to weigh in on the chummy Carlson chat with Fuentes that ignited a thousand right-wing feuds. He vaguely defended Carlson's right to book controversial guests. Fuentes thanked Trump in response.
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A 'political reinvention' in progress |
In an interview with Dana Bash on CNN's "SOTU" yesterday, "Marjorie Taylor Greene did something politicians almost never do: She said she was sorry."
The interview furthered "her own intriguing political reinvention," CNN's Stephen Collinson wrote this morning. The reinvention includes where MTG shows up in the media. There's a lot of intrigue about her boyfriend Brian Glenn, too, given how he stands out as a pro-Trump sycophant in otherwise serious WH press scrums. Glenn defended MTG in social media posts over the weekend...
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Trump urges NBC to fire Seth Meyers... |
Among Seth Meyers' many jabs at the president recently: "Trump claimed his top priority would be lower prices for hardworking Americans, but instead he's spending his time dodging Epstein questions and remodeling the White House." (Trump's ballroom preoccupation is another concern of some MAGA media thought leaders, by the way.)
Rather than ignoring Meyers, Trump hit back, again, on Saturday night, saying the late-night host has "an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome" and "NBC should fire him, IMMEDIATELY!" But the notable part is what happened next:
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...and the FCC chair promotes it |
Trump's man in charge of regulating NBC's stations, FCC chair Brendan Carr, screengrabbed and reposted Trump's Truth on X. Conservative attorney Gregg Nunziata said it best: "Why in the world is the FCC chairman posting this?" Fox News posted a story about how the repost was "raising some eyebrows online..."
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Great Q: 'Does he know that's not true?' |
Yesterday, on ABC's "This Week," Jon Karl "stopped Trump economist Kevin Hassett mid-sentence" as Hassett "started regurgitating the claim that Thanksgiving dinner is cheaper than it was under former President Joe Biden," Mediaite's Jennifer Bowers Bahney wrote.
Karl probed about the president's bogus sources of info, saying, "The president claims that Thanksgiving costs are down 25%. I mean, does he know that's not true?” (Daniel Dale and others have dismantled the Walmart talking point.) Hassett dodged...
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Pelley describes 'fear' among sources |
Last night's "60 Minutes" led with Scott Pelley's report about Trump granting "a pardon to a billionaire felon after the felon's company enriched a Trump family business." (Well, when you put it that way...)
Pelley's report contained this telling comment to Elizabeth Oyer: "We have talked to dozens of people who are involved in all aspects of this. And they have informed our reporting, but have declined to sit down for an interview on '60 Minutes' for fear of retribution. And I wonder why you are doing this." Here's the segment video/transcript with her answer.
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'Riding the coattails' of 'Charlotte's Web' |
Charlotte is the latest stop on the Trump admin's immigration enforcement blitz, with bystander videos providing the best sense of what it's like for locals. DHS has dubbed the operation "Charlotte's Web," invoking the beloved children's book, prompting the granddaughter of author E.B. White to decry the attempt to ride the book's "coattails without permission."
>> Martha White said her grandfather "certainly didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons." CNN's Cindy Von Quednow and Chris Boyette have details here...
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Is anyone better than Ezra? |
NYT columnist Ezra Klein "isn't content with opining about the Democratic Party — he's positioned himself as a powerbroker inside of it," Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein assert in this Axios piece. They say Klein's "columnist-turned-operative role is raising concerns inside the Times and the Democratic Party," citing sources, though the NYT expressed strong support for him in a statement. And the only Dem critics in the piece are anonymous — a further testament to Klein's power.
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A 'crime drama' at the BBC? |
As the BBC braces for Trump to follow through on his lawsuit threats, the organization's newsroom is buzzing about this Observer cover story by Ceri Thomas. The piece asserts that the crisis at the BBC — with its "strange beast" of a board — has "all the hallmarks of a crime drama."
>> Thomas asks: "How can the BBC respond proportionately" to controversies "when its critics turn editorial complaints into attacks on the whole institution, its values and its leadership?" |
First excerpt from Olivia Nuzzi's book |
Olivia Nuzzi's new employer, Vanity Fair, has published the first excerpt from her tell-some "American Canto," days after that NYT profile landed. Nuzzi never names RFK Jr. as her lover, but she writes about RFK stories everyone has heard, like "the worm that was not a worm in his brain."
"I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein," she writes.
Nuzzi doesn't use Trump's name in the excerpt here, but she describes him as "the mirror through which the country was reflected back at itself." Here's the rest...
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>> I'd hoped Ben Smith would weigh in on Michael Wolff, and now he has. Wolff "knows he played a morally ambiguous role in exchange for access," Smith says. "For that, he got a first-person view, and hours of tape, of one of our century's big monsters." (Semafor)
>> Sinclair said this morning that it has built "a roughly 8% stake in E.W. Scripps and is vying to acquire the local TV broadcaster," Lauren Thomas and Joe Flint report. (WSJ)
>> "Starz is interested in acquiring A+E Global Media," Lucas Shaw reports. (Bloomberg)
>> Jane Pauley was awarded the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism at the Bowtie Ball on Saturday night. (Poynter)
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John Oliver raises $ for PBS/NPR stations |
As telegraphed in the weekend edition of Reliable, John Oliver devoted the Season 12 finale of "Last Week Tonight" to the woes of public media. Here's the full segment on YouTube. Oliver launched "an online charity auction stocked with a decade's worth of the series' most recognizable oddities," Jed Rosenzweig writes at LateNighter, with all proceeds going toward the Public Media Bridge Fund, which supports the local stations that are most at risk...
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'Why Can't I Just Watch Sports on TV?' |
>> The "SNL" cold open imagined a WH press briefing, with Chloe Fineman playing Kaitlan Collins. (YouTube)
>> Irina Aleksander tries to keep up with Matthew Belloni, who "feels like the loudest voice covering Hollywood," and who sees himself "as the guy with a megaphone on the Titanic." (NYT)
>> Scott MacFarlane profiles a priest, a poet and a teacher "who are trying to give radio a future" in this excellent "CBS Saturday Morning" segment. (X)
>> Clare Duffy talks with Avi Schiffmann about how his Friend pendant "became a symbol for the backlash against AI." (CNN)
>> Karen Weise describes how The Stranger, the famed Seattle alt-weekly, has "become one of the most influential forces in one of the most progressive cities in America." (NYT)
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>> According to this FT report over the weekend, "Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts," with SVP of hardware engineering John Ternus "widely seen" as Tim Cook's "most likely successor, although no final decisions have been made." (FT)
>> Speaking of Apple, "Major League Soccer's streaming partnership with Apple will now end three-and-a-half years earlier than the original decade-long term." (Sportico)
>> Jeff Bezos "is throwing his money and time into an AI start-up that he will help manage as its co-chief executive." (NYT)
>> Paul McCartney "is releasing a track of an almost completely silent recording studio as part of a music industry protest against copyright theft by artificial intelligence companies." (The Guardian)
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Meet the people preserving the web |
CNN's Hadas Gold visited the physical home of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, one of the most important pieces of the internet, which "just logged its trillionth page last month." About 200 staff members work in SF out of a former church just blocks from the Presidio. Gold explored the reasons why "archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before." Check out her story here...
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"Lionsgate Films' 'Now You See Me: Now You Don't' stole the show at the domestic box office," CNN's Auzinea Bacon writes. Paramount's "The Running Man" came in #2. Universal's "Wicked: For Good" opens this Friday, and it's tracking well ahead of last year's "Wicked" part one...
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