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Wednesday, September 17, 2025 |
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The NYT is vowing to fight President Trump's lawsuit. Stephen A. Smith is launching his new politics talk show. Meta is unveiling a new pair of AI-powered smart glasses. Here's the latest on Pam Bondi, NPR, YouTube Live, the Dallas Morning News, and more... |
Whenever American political discourse feels a whole lot angrier and toxic online than it does offline, I think about old columns like "We Should All Know Less About Each Other," by the NYT's Michelle Goldberg, and "People Aren't Meant to Talk This Much," by The Atlantic's Ian Bogost.
We are all members of the media now, thanks to the incredible publishing tools in our pockets. But with that power also comes peril — as previously private thoughts become public and algorithms amplify our differences, defects and delusions.
We're in the middle of another "how is social media warping society?" news cycle stemming from Charlie Kirk's murder one week ago. Perhaps it all relates back to the simple idea that we have access to way too much info about each other now, while we simultaneously have a hard time seeing each other in 3D through the flatness of the screen.
"Our human brains are attracted to anything that's unusual or that provokes us, makes us angry," San Diego State psychology professor Jean M. Twenge told CNN's Pamela Brown in this excellent segment. "And when you're thinking about a kid or a teenager, that's even more true. So when our kids and teens are spending so much time online, they're being exposed to a lot of these radical and extreme ideas, particularly because their brains are really attuned to seek out those things that are unusual or disturbing."
This NYT story points out that most social platforms "have stayed quiet and ducked the spotlight" as elected officials have blamed the internet for radicalizing the suspect in the shooting. The point: "Their reactions are starkly different from a decade ago, when executives at Google, Facebook, Twitter and other sites repeatedly vowed to work together to limit hate speech, remove violent content and root out disinformation from their platforms."
"We have regressed," Graham Brookie of the Digital Forensic Research Lab told the Times. "We are in a worse place now than when countries and companies came together to say never again to violence and hate speech online."
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Nepal as a glimpse of the future? |
WaPo contributing columnist Matt Bai has lost the hope he once had about tech bringing us together. He now suspects that "America can have social media, or we can have a healthy democracy," but maybe not both.
The online cacophony is "rewriting the American story," he says in a new column this morning. "It's affected the way we talk to each other, IRL. We inch toward actual civil war, egged on by a showman, because we've grown accustomed to the idea that the enemy tweets among us. The medium is the message — and the message is fracture."
Yes, but let's just recognize that we all put the "social" in social media. Each user is either part of the problem or part of the solution (or probably a bit of both). The same goes for news coverage: If we only concentrate on the arsonists — so to speak — and don't recognize the firefighters, we just contribute to the firestorm.
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Confessions and conspiracy theories |
The Kirk suspect's text exchanges, revealed yesterday by authorities, were stunning. The suspect wrote in one text that his engravings on the bullets were "mostly a big meme, if I see 'notices bulge uwu' on fox new[s] I might have a stroke."
Professional conspiracy theories immediately sowed doubt about the legitimacy of the texts, and X promoted their baseless theories to countless users, for the reasons we outlined above. More broadly, as Politico Playbook notes, there's a whole lot of disbelief and denialism about the suspect's ideological bent: "Even as the facts of the case are laid out, significant voices on either side still seem wedded to whatever version of events most helps their own political cause."
>> Expect to hear more of this from MAGA media: Steve Bannon said on his podcast that he is "absolutely not buying" the government's "lone assassin" narrative.
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Total disregard for the First Amendment |
Pam Bondi has been pretty much universally criticized for asserting that the DOJ will go after "hate speech," as CNN's Aaron Blake wrote here. "The attorney general has no idea what she’s talking about," The Free Press wrote. She "needs a free speech tutorial," the WSJ editorial board opined.
Bondi walked back her comments. But President Trump seemed to back her up yesterday, warning ABC's Jon Karl that "we'll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly." As I said on air, Trump was speaking emotionally, not legally, but his remark showed a total lack of respect and understanding of the First Amendment.
>> Related: From "The Source with Kaitlan Collins" last night: "Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche defends idea of prosecuting protesters."
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Experts say Trump's NYT suit lacks merit |
Trump's lawsuit against the NYT "is extraordinary, even in this already extraordinary media-law moment," RonNell Anderson Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told CNN's Liam Reilly yesterday.
Jones and half a dozen other lawyers and scholars told Reilly and me that the suit is meritless. But Trump's chances in court are almost beside the point. "To pick through its legal defects, such as the complaints about statements about Fred Trump — a deceased man who cannot be defamed — is to ignore its purpose: to threaten any criticism of Trump," Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School said.
>> Both the Times and Penguin Random House, which was also named in the suit, are signaling that they will defend themselves forcefully. Read more of the reactions here...
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TikTok deadline punted, but deal imminent? |
Trump has done it again, signing another executive order delaying any enforcement of a TikTok ban for another three months — "an action that may be superseded later this week with an agreement to sell the social media app's US assets," David Goldman reports here. But "nothing is final until it's final," as Hadas Gold noted on air just now. According to the WSJ, the US business "would be controlled by an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz..."
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👓 Meta's 'Hypernova' reveal |
Meta Connect is getting underway today. In a live-streamed keynote at 5 p.m. PT, Mark Zuckerberg is "expected to reveal a number of new smart glasses, including the company's anticipated Hypernova glasses, which feature a built-in display that can provide users with walking directions, translate text, and more," reports Yahoo Finance's Daniel Howley. Here's the live stream link...
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NPR to trim $5 million from budget |
Ahead of an all-staff meeting at NPR today, the network's media correspondent David Folkenflik reports that NPR "plans to make trims totaling more than $5 million over the course of the coming fiscal year" as local member stations grapple with the impending loss of federal funding. At the national level, NPR "does not plan layoffs or major programming shifts," Folkenflik writes. He has loads of detail about the state of play here...
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Dallas bidding war continues |
"The ongoing drama over the sale of the Dallas Morning News has taken a new turn," MediaPost's Ray Schultz writes. Alden Global Capital's MNG Enterprises has once again raised its offer price, this time to $20 per share, in an attempt to outbid Hearst, which made a best and final offer of $16.50 per share on Monday. A shareholder vote is slated for next week, and the paper's largest single shareholder, Robert W. Decherd, "has repeatedly stated he will not agree to a sale to Alden..."
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>> Stephen A. Smith "makes $33 million per year between his ESPN and SiriusXM deals," with the potential to make $40 million a year, Andrew Marchand reports. Smith's weekly talk show on SiriusXM's politics channel starts today. (The Athletic)
>> "Stories featuring a 'royal cleaner' who claimed to have worked for the Royal Family for more than a decade have been withdrawn after questions were raised by Press Gazette about their authenticity," Rob Waugh reports. (Press Gazette)
>> Business Insider editor Jamie Heller sent staffers a memo outlining the outlet's AI rules, which include allowing reporters to pen first drafts using the tool so long as the final draft is the reporter's own writing, Oliver Darcy reports. (Status)
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Major studios sue another AI firm |
Disney, Universal and (CNN's parent) Warner Bros Discovery have "jointly filed a copyright lawsuit against China's MiniMax alleging that its image- and video-generating service Hailuo AI was built from intellectual property stolen from the three major Hollywood studios," Reuters reports.
>> More tech talk: OpenAI announced "new teen safety features" for ChatGPT... Apollo "is in talks to possibly sell" AOL... YouTube Live is getting "a major update."
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Entertainment notes and quotes |
>> "The Morning Show" has been renewed for season five, Apple TV+ announced, just as season four launched on the streamer. (Usual disclosure: I'm a producer of the show, so let me know what you think if you watch.) (Variety)
>> Speaking of... "Morning" is on this list of "25 exceptional workplace series from the last 25 years." (CNN)
>> John Lithgow will star in "Giant," a Broadway play that looks at accusations of antisemitism against Roald Dahl. (AP)
>> James Gunn's "Superman" will hit HBO Max on Friday. (THR)
>> VF's loss is THR's gain: The publication has hired David Canfield as senior entertainment writer. (THR)
>> Alan Sepinwall, who was Rolling Stone's chief TV critic until a round of layoffs earlier this week, says his Substack, "What's Alan Watching," will be the primary home of his regular writing. (Substack)
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SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST... |
Woodward's tribute to Redford |
If you haven't read Bob Woodward's eulogy for Robert Redford, who depicted Woodward in "All the President's Men," check it out. Woodward posted the two-page statement on X. Redford "will be remembered as one of the great storytellers in our country's history," Woodward wrote. |
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