Good morning. Here's the latest on the Washington Post, the California Post, "60 Minutes," Amazon, "Mercy," X, "desocialized media," and much more. But first...
|
And/or is it naive to even ask that question?
The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel is noticing the same thing I am: The video footage of Alex Pretti's death in Minneapolis "seems to have broken through the usual informational chaos—at least to some extent," he wrote yesterday. "On Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook pages, the videos of Pretti's last moments appear to have galvanized people who don't normally engage or post about politics."
The Verge's Terrence O'Brien says he's seeing this all across YouTube, podcasting and live-streaming spaces. "Even the most seemingly apolitical creators have had enough" with ICE, O'Brien wrote: "When fitness influencers, duck-painting TikTokers, football subreddits, bourbon Instagramers, and even Second Amendment rights activists have finally broken their silence, it seems like the government has lost control of the narrative."
Even President Trump seems to know it, judging from the tentative comments he gave to the WSJ's Josh Dawsey last night. Just now, Trump said he is sending Tom Homan to Minnesota, writing, "Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me."
As I wrote in Sunday's special edition, the pileup of Pretti video clearly contradicted Trumpworld's claims. Now, as CNN's Stephen Collinson wrote this morning, "a national reckoning is building" over Trump's brazen use of federal power.
The administration's lies about Pretti may have hastened that "reckoning." CNN's Daniel Dale found a "torrent of claims that are either contradicted by video footage or unsupported by any evidence presented so far."
On the opinion side, outlets ranging from the NYT to The Free Press are decrying the administration's blatant dishonesty. This Free Press editorial is titled "Kristi Noem's Reckless Lies." The NYT editorial board goes further, of course, and says admin officials are "lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power."
|
It is so cold in Minnesota right now that your hands can freeze shut. CNN's Sara Sidner described this in an Instagram post last night as she gave thanks to a local business owner who let Sidner's CNN crew take refuge after "getting a face full of tear gas."
"My hands [were] frozen shut. My eyes full of chemical tears. She helped us keep safe in the worst conditions," Sidner said while delivering donuts to say thanks.
>> As Loyola U Chicago journalism professor Jill Geisler wrote on X, it's "impossible to overstate appreciation for the on-the-ground journalists in the Twin Cities covering this overwhelming series of events. Support their independent, ethical reporting under immense stress."
|
How Fox News is covering it all |
Not surprising, but still important to note: Most Fox News coverage of the shooting has been "laser focused" on backing up "the Trump administration's official narrative," Ken Bensinger reports for the NYT.
Yes, but... Bill Melugin, who has covered immigration for Fox for years and often gets tips from agency officials, wrote in a viral X post last night that "more than half a dozen federal sources" say "they have grown increasingly uneasy and frustrated with some of the claims and narratives DHS pushed in the aftermath of the shooting." (CNN's Priscilla Alvarez published similar reporting earlier in the day.)
This morning, "Fox & Friends" host Griff Jenkins cited Melugin's report to directly ask Deputy AG Todd Blanche, "Do the actions of Alex Pretti amount to domestic terrorism?"
When Blanche hemmed and hawed, Jenkins followed up, "It doesn't appear to most of the country that have watched the available video... to have met that definition of domestic terrorism." He asked whether Blanche thinks Noem and Stephen Miller "may have gone too far," and the deputy AG said he doesn't think they were really calling it domestic terror. C'mon, man...
|
What it means to bear witness |
In the Pretti case, as in the case of Renee Nicole Good, "the proliferation of videos — of 'angles' — has begun to blurrily expand what we mean by the words 'witness' and 'evidence,'" Vinson Cunningham writes in this column for The New Yorker.
"People physically close to these brazen displays of brute, fatal force gather crucial seconds of visual proof, and then send them off, like messengers, into the digital world. Before long, all of us are pulled 'close,' in a morbid, substitutionary way, to the site of disaster — closer than we'd like to be."
>> Cunningham says "our ability to participate in witnessing, to corroborate each other's commonsense... is a threat to the administration's assumption of total power, not only over events but over how those events are interpreted and made into history."
>> Correction: The other day, I misspelled Arizona Republic media columnist Bill Goodykoontz's name. Apologies! Goodykoontz asked a crucial question over the weekend: "Since when did believing what you see with your own eyes and what you hear with your own ears become controversial acts that the government tries to talk you out of?"
|
Layoffs loom at Washington Post |
Something big and bad is about to happen at The Washington Post. On Friday, Semafor reported that the Post has scrapped its expensive plans to cover the Winter Olympics in person. "The decision comes as major layoffs are expected in the coming weeks," Max Tani tweeted.
On Saturday, the NYT wrote about the abrupt change in more detail. On Sunday, Post alum Erik Wemple reported that a group of foreign correspondents has sent a letter "to owner Jeff Bezos raising alarm over impending staff reductions." Overnight, Natalie Korach reported for Status that "upwards of 100 newsroom layoffs" are "expected to hit the sports, metro and foreign teams hardest, according to multiple people familiar with the matter."
One of the Post's best reporters wrote to me and said the staff is understandably very rattled. "There were many of us who had other options last year when The Post offered buyouts and chose to stay anyway," they wrote. "Misguided maybe, but we believed in the mission and our coworkers and hoped The Post was already at rock bottom. There's now a strong sense that neither Jeff Bezos nor Will Lewis are serious, good-faith stewards of The Washington Post."
This reporter, channeling what I've heard from many others, pointed out that the revamp of the Opinion section cost the Post hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and "now it looks like the staff will pay for it."
|
About '60 Minutes' last night... |
There's some chatter on social media, particularly in progressive circles, about "60 Minutes" reverting to repeats.
The Drudge Report is hyping this idea with a question-mark headline that says "'60 MINS' TO SHOW RERUNS WHILE BARI WEISS FIGURES IT OUT?"
The Drudge headline links to a Showbiz 411 story noting that CBS aired a repeat episode with three movie star profiles last night. This led Showbiz 411's Roger Friedman to conclude that "a show that was supposed to air" last night "simply has been pulled."
But that's not the case, multiple CBS staffers told me. The newsmagazine was always scheduled to be a rerun this week since it was up against the huge Rams-Seahawks game. A new episode of "60" will air right before the Grammys this coming Sunday.
>> Veteran TV critic Brian Lowry said it best on X: "Crappy part about being CBS News now? You make the reasonable decision not to waste an original '60 Minutes' against the NFC championship game and because of the other stuff you've done, you get bashed anyway."
|
The California Post launches today |
The first cover of the New York Post's spinoff says "OSCAR WILD," promoting a Page Six Hollywood story by Tatiana Siegel. (Breaker's Lachlan Cartwright tweeted out the cover image just now.) Here's the homepage for the new publication, plus a letter from editor in chief Nick Papps.
The newsroom on the Fox lot "is something of a coastal mash-up, melding the paper's brash legacy in New York and its aspirations in the West," TheWrap's Corbin Bolies wrote. Papps told him the paper (yes, in print as well as online) is a "mass market play" that will try to "make some noise" — and surely try to shift California's politics, too...
|
Amazon rolls out 'Melania' film |
Amazon MGM Studios' documentary about First Lady Melania Trump opens in theaters on Friday, one day after a premiere at the Kennedy Center, which Trump allies have renamed in the president's honor. A private screening was held at the White House on Saturday night, with "about 70 VIP guests," THR's Lexy Perez reports, including Amazon CEO Andy Lassy and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Now the question is: "Will the multimillion-dollar investment pay off? Approximately $35 million has been spent on marketing 'Melania,'" CNN's Betsy Klein reports, citing a source. "That's in addition to the roughly $40 million deal Amazon MGM Studios struck with the first lady." Suffice to say, none of that is normal for a documentary rollout.
"For all the expense, Melania is for an audience of one," Puck's Matt Belloni writes. Belloni has some key reporting about early ticket sales. "Presales are unsurprisingly falling fairly strictly along red/blue lines..."
|
And "the competition is fierce," as The AP reports here. A week full of Grammys parties starts later today: "After last year's happenings were largely canceled in the wake of the L.A. fires, the events are back in full force in 2026," THR's Kirsten Chuba writes...
|
EU opens major probe into X |
The European Union "has launched a wide-reaching investigation into Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot on X following global outrage over its ability to generate sexually explicit images, including of children,” CNN's Lianne Kolirin reports. Read on... |
More of today's tech talk |
>> Clare Duffy's latest, previewing the blockbuster court case that starts tomorrow: "Meta, TikTok and YouTube heading to trial to defend against youth addiction, mental health harm claims." (CNN)
>> Information "from the conservative-leaning, AI-generated encyclopedia developed by Elon Musk’s xAI is beginning to appear in answers from ChatGPT," Anthony Ha reports. (TechCrunch)
>> Apple is “planning an announcement of the new Siri in the second half of February,” Mark Gurman reports. (Bloomberg)
>> Google "won't stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI," Sean Hollister writes. (The Verge)
|
'Welcome to desocialized media' |
In his latest meditation for NYMag's Intelligencer, John Herrman describes the shift from "people seeing things mostly on purpose" to "people seeing things mostly because an algorithm thinks they might engage with them." He says the big platforms have become "desocialized media":
"The next era of the big platforms is shaping up to [be] one of increasing isolation, of passive consumption stripped of any sense of shared culture, and of, to borrow a term, comprehensive 'unconnection,' not as a condition to be corrected — at least by other people — but as a goal nearly achieved." Read on...
|
>> "Chris Pratt's sci-fi thriller 'Mercy' collected $11.2 million in its North American debut, enough to end the five-weekend reign of James Cameron’s behemoth 'Avatar: Fire and Ash,'" Rebecca Rubin reports. (Variety)
>> "The blizzards that have blasted across much of the United States took their toll on the box office, as Comscore reports that 250 theaters across 30 states were closed due to the severe weather," Jeremy Fuster notes. (TheWrap)
>> After Dan Primack "began asking questions," Verizon is now offering refunds to "TV customers in the Boston and Pittsburgh markets who've been without certain channels for over a month, including those carrying NFL football, due to a carriage dispute with Cox." (Axios)
>> "Sinners" and "One Battle After Another" will be back on IMAX 70mm screens in the coming weeks. (Variety)
>> “Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent feature ‘The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog’ has become possibly the first classic movie to be reframed as a microdrama,” Max Goldbart reports. (Deadline)
|
|
|
|
® © 2026 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
1050 Techwood Drive NW, Atlanta, GA 30318 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
