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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 |
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Welcome to October. Here's the latest on Sora, Jane Fonda, Jimmy Kimmel, Amazon, Bari Weiss, YouTube TV, "SNL," Hunter S. Thompson, and much more... |
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images |
Arrested while covering a protest. Shot in the face with a pepper ball. Shoved to the ground and taken away on a stretcher.
Journalists have repeatedly been injured and impeded while reporting on action by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in recent days.
Yesterday's video of journalists being shoved at a Manhattan immigration court prompted condemnation from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who said, "This abuse of law-abiding immigrants and the reporters telling their stories must end. What the hell are we doing here?"
One of the journalists, identified as L. Vural Elibol, chief videographer for Turkey's Anadolu Agency, hit his head and was later hospitalized. The other reporters were not injured, according to the AP. (And at least one of them, amNewYork's Dean Moses, was back at the court doing his job this morning.)
The Department of Homeland Security defended the grabbing and shoving, and CNN has a full account of who said what here. It was not the first altercation and likely won't be the last...
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'A direct attack on reporters' |
In Broadview, Illinois, just outside Chicago, journalists have repeatedly felt attacked at ongoing protests outside an ICE facility. The US Press Freedom Tracker says it is working to "verify and document around a dozen aggressions against journalists in and around Chicago in recent weeks."
In one recent instance, Raven Geary, co-founder of Unraveled Press, said she was struck in the cheek by a pepper ball. "To me it felt like a direct attack on reporters," she told the Tracker. "It felt like it happened right as I was raising my lens to try to take a photo of them."
Homeland Security has urged members of the media to "exercise caution" while ICE apprehends violent "rioters." But in another recent case, CBS Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei said a pepper ball was fired at her truck when no one else was around. (CBS noted it is "unclear if she was targeted as a member of the media.")
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has cited the treatment of reporters as part of a broader pattern. "In any other country," he said Monday, "if federal agents fired upon journalists and protesters when unprovoked, what would we call it? If federal agents marched down busy streets harassing civilians and demanding their papers, what would we say? I don't think we’d have any trouble calling it what it is: authoritarianism."
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GBH says 'Love it? Fund it' |
"Congress told us to 'go fund ourselves,' and that's exactly what we are going to do," GBH president and CEO Susan Goldberg says. With federal funding for public media officially expiring today, the Boston-based public media giant is announcing a three-year "Fund the Future" campaign that seeks to raise $225 million "and secure a sustainable future for the organization." The campaign will promote the phrase "Love it? Fund it" to turn viewers into paying supporters.
>> ICYMI, I wrote about how the PBS/NPR defunding is really starting to hit home. For a state-level example, check out David Folkenflik's report from South Dakota for NPR...
>> A DC court has rejected NPR’s request for a temporary restraining order against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting re: station interconnection...
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>> Tom Johnson, the former CNN president, is releasing "Driven: A Life in Public Service and Journalism from LBJ to CNN." Johnson opened up to Christiane Amanpour in this recent interview.
>> Jane Fonda is announcing a "brand-new initiative focused on freedom of speech." She will be joining a special episode of "The Rushfield Lunch" at 1 p.m. ET. (The Ankler)
>> Karoline Leavitt is holding a WH press briefing at 1 p.m. ET. Here's a question: Where is Trump getting all this AI slop all of a sudden?
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📉 Polling Trump's media pressure |
Speaking of AI slop, the president reposted an imagined picture of YouTube CEO Neal Mohan handing him a $24.5 million settlement check. To date, Trump has received $90 million in settlements from media/tech companies, the LAT notes.
With that in mind, check this out: According to a new NYT/Siena poll, 61% of Americans say Trump has gone "too far" in "pressuring media organizations" that treat him "unfavorably." Even more notably, a mere 7% of Americans say he hasn't gone far enough re: pressuring the media.
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Kimmel: 'We have to stick together' |
"We have to stick together," Jimmy Kimmel said during his visit to Stephen Colbert's show last night. Colbert also visited Kimmel's show on the same night — "a move that has never happened before in late-night," Deadline's
Peter White notes. LateNighter's Bill Carter recapped it here.
"We thought it might be a fun way to drive the president nuts," Kimmel said during his monologue. The two late-night hosts swapped stories about how they learned they were (in Kimmel's case, temporarily) canceled, as CNN's David Goldman wrote here.
>> Meantime, this Variety headline speaks volumes. It says "Jimmy Fallon Plans to 'Keep My Head Down' and Avoid Politics on The Tonight Show: 'We Hit Both Sides Equally'"
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Political media notes and quotes |
>> CNN.com's banner right now: "Government shuts down amid blame game." As always, shutdown explainers are a valuable service to readers! (CNN)
>> Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan's recap of yesterday's Quantico meeting: "Hundreds of Generals Try to Keep a Straight Face." (The Atlantic)
>> Sometimes the lies are the story: Trump made "numerous false claims" to his audience of generals and admirals, including falsehoods about the military itself, Daniel Dale reports. (CNN)
>> Since Pete Hegseth invited generals and admirals to quit, the NYT has posted its own invite, encouraging any leaders who do quit to contact Carol Rosenberg confidentially. (NYT)
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Mass judge's stunning ruling |
I continue to believe that TV anchors and podcasters should devote time to reading federal judge rulings out loud for viewers/listeners who otherwise wouldn't ordinarily read the legalese. This is especially important to do when the cases involve free speech rights.
The latest (and arguably greatest) example: Yesterday, Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee, ruled that "the administration impermissibly chilled the protected political speech of university professors and students by targeting non-citizens on college campuses who have spoken out in support of Palestinians," CNN's Devan Cole and Holmes Lybrand report. Young called it a "full-throated assault on the First Amendment."
Check out CNN's story here, and the PDF of the 161-page rebuke here...
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Ex-Fox Newser's ongoing 1A clash |
A DC Circuit panel has upheld a civil contempt finding against former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge, "who refused to reveal an anonymous source while being deposed in a privacy dispute with a Chinese American scientist." Herridge says she remains "committed to protecting reporters' First Amendment rights and confidential sources," reports Courthouse News.
>> Trevor Timm, exec director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the panel's decision "does real damage to bedrock principles of press freedom, and we urge the Court of Appeals to re-hear this case with a full panel of judges."
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>> "Bari Weiss' appointment to the top of CBS News is imminent," Oliver Darcy reports. "Paramount is set to formally announce its acquisition of The Free Press in the coming days, with Weiss set to be named editor in chief of CBS News." (Status)
>> Speaking of CBS: Sunday's "60 Minutes" season premiere scored 10 million viewers, enough to rank as "the week's #1 non-sports primetime program."
>> Colorado investigators "will be conducting a review into the case of renowned journalist and activist Hunter S. Thompson's death more than two decades after it was ruled a suicide." (CNN)
>> Amazon is “introducing a number of new streaming features, including onscreen updates of betting odds during the course of a game, as it gets set to begin its long-term NBA rights deal,” Dade Hayes reports. (Deadline)
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☝️ That's the smart framing from Business Insider's Peter Kafka about yesterday's rollout of Sora 2, the new AI video creator/TikTok competitor/disruptor to all things media. OpenAI is "trying to set new rules of the road when it comes to Hollywood and Big Tech," Kafka says, requiring copyright holders to opt out while encouraging everyone to make their own mini-movies.
So, as THR's Steven Zeitchik asks, "Where does all this leave high-end Hollywood-type video? There are only so many hours in the day, and if these tools catch on we’ll be spending a lot more of them watching or creating our own slop-y videos instead of the professional kind. Studios and even influencers will feel the squeeze."
Meanwhile, Hollywood types are "fuming over a new 'AI actress,'" and CNN's Clare Duffy can get you caught up on that here...
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YouTube TV drops Univision |
As two of its big carriage contracts expired overnight, YouTube TV reached a short-term extension with one big content provider, NBCUniversal, and dropped another, Univision, without a deal.
The Univision dispute "has already drawn scrutiny from members of Congress," the LAT's Meg James reports. And from the National Association of Broadcasters: A rep told me, "The unchecked dominance of Big Tech companies like Google and its ability to dictate what millions of households can and cannot watch through its YouTube TV platform is a problem for competition and consumers..."
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FCC moves to 'modernize' TV rules |
The FCC has, as expected, "launched a new review of its media ownership limits, amid broadcasters' lobbying push to modernize the restrictions in the face of competition from tech giants," Deadline's Ted Johnson reports. Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency's lone Democrat, says station owners are "pushing to reduce regulatory guardrails so they can grow even bigger."
>> A smattering of protesters disrupted yesterday's FCC meeting with chants of "Fire, fire the censorship czar." The livestream was quickly muted, showing a smirking FCC chair Brendan Carr, before proceedings resumed.
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>> Disney has sent "a cease and desist letter to Character.AI demanding the personalized AI chatbot developer immediately stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization." (Axios)
>> Paramount Pictures has "inked an overall deal with 5x Oscar nominated filmmaker James Mangold." (Deadline)
>> "SNL" has added seven new writers ahead of this weekend's season premiere. (Variety)
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