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Wednesday, January 28, 2026 |
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Welcome to Wednesday. Here's the latest on Oracle, ICE List, Tim Cook, Caitlin Clark, Neil Young, Amazon, the BBC, and much more... |
POTUS and the permission structure |
"As people marvel at Trump's backtracking and contradicting his subordinates' lies about Minneapolis and 'news' that he is somehow shocked, shocked by Noem et al's brazenness and incompetence, has everyone forgotten who erected the permission structure for them to behave this way?"
That's what veteran political reporter Jon Ralston wants to know.
CNN's Stephen Collinson hasn't forgotten: "The tone President Donald Trump is changing in Minnesota is the tone he set," he wrote in a new column this morning.
Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, he wrote, "were operating under the policies, tense atmosphere of confrontation and expectations of hyped public performance established by the president."
Trump normalized the lying and smearing, too. Now he's "taking part in a rare rhetorical climb-down," as CNN's Daniel Dale put it in this new piece.
Pro-Trump TV hosts are cheering Tom Homan's arrival in Minnesota, arguing he will change the "optics" of the ICE surge. "He is the velvet hammer here," Charles Hurt said on "Fox & Friends" this morning.
Liberal columnists aren't buying it. Homan "swaggers around on Fox News like a conquering general," The New Republic's Greg Sargent wrote in a piece arguing that the "media verdict" about Trump "softening" his stance is BS.
"Rumors of the pivot are greatly exaggerated," Liz Dye wrote for Public Notice this morning.
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'Pink coat' witness speaks |
Gov. Tim Walz, in his first TV interview since Pretti's death, told Anderson Cooper that he appreciates the news media's presence on the ground in Minnesota. He said he thinks the Trump admin's "tone shift" is probably due to "the press."
Walz also referenced what Pretti's family is going through — first, "the horror of losing their son, and then also to see him slandered like that." Look, Walz said in a glancing blow at Fox, "for one whole day, certain news stations, that's all they were running. And that's one of the problems here."
Later in the hour, Cooper aired an incredible interview with Stella Carlson, who was known as the "woman in the pink coat" who filmed the Alex Pretti killing on her phone.
Carlson talked about feeling powerless with just a whistle and a phone on the streets of Minneapolis in recent weeks. And yet, when Pretti was accosted, "you stood there with a phone, and you documented this. You didn't run away," Cooper said. Read and watch here...
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Minnesota notes and quotes |
>> Quoting Shawn McCreesh's column about Bovino losing his X account privileges: "It is one thing to be demoted. It is another thing entirely to lose your social media megaphone. In this administration, there may be no worse fate." (NYT)
>> Meta "has started blocking its users from sharing links to ICE List, a website that has compiled the names of what it claims are DHS employees," David Gilbert reports. (WIRED)
>> OpenAI's Sam Altman and Apple's Tim Cook "become latest CEOs to criticize ICE after Minneapolis killing." (Reuters)
>> “What we're seeing in Minneapolis is how powerful visuals tied to real people can shift public understanding almost instantly," professor Allissa Richardson told Catherine E. Shoichet for this step-back story about "how four faces changed the way many Americans see Trump’s immigration crackdown." (CNN)
>> 🔌: CNN is hosting a town hall with Minnesota officials and community leaders tonight at 8 p.m. ET. Cooper and Sara Sidner will moderate.
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'Please don't let them have the show' |
A pack of local and national news crews were present at Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar's town hall when she was attacked and sprayed with an unknown substance last night. Immediately afterward, she urged the crowd to stay put while she briefly stepped away from the podium: "Just give me ten minutes. I beg you. Please don't let them have the show."
Omar is a longtime "social media villain on the right," Audie Cornish pointed out on "CNN This Morning." And there are, her guest Antjuan Seawright said, "some sick, deranged people out there who are celebrating online when members of Congress are attacked."
Trump, meanwhile, is suggesting it was all a hoax. "She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her," the president told ABC's Rachel Scott late last night. A quick glance at X shows that many MAGA influencers are now following that script. Again, as Jon Ralston said, Trump "erected the permission structure" for all of this...
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Leadership transition at the BBC |
Davies to replace Davie: "The BBC has named Rhodri Talfan Davies as its interim director general and confirmed that outgoing director general Tim Davie will exit in April," Variety's Ellise Shafer reports. |
Making CBS more like The Free Press |
By now, you've likely heard all the quotes from yesterday's Bari Weiss town hall. I posted the full text of her prepared remarks on X and Bluesky. Her plans to make CBS News more like The Free Press are clear: She said CBS should stream "breaking news mixed with brilliant conversations," commission stories that "surprise and provoke," put greater emphasis on "scoops of ideas, scoops of explanation," and make a lot more socially-native video. She also announced a bunch of Free Press-adjacent contributors.
A few skeptical CBS staffers pointed out to me that CBS News currently has a far larger audience than The Free Press. But some listeners came away cautiously optimistic about her startup approach to the stodgy news division. The questions and concerns now are about day-to-day execution.
>> Weiss and her supporters viewed yesterday as a reset. Correspondent Jan Crawford shared a WaPo headline quoting Weiss saying that without a shift in strategy, "We are toast," and asked, "How can anyone argue with this? Bari Weiss is right. We have to adapt."
>> As for the naysayers, well, this Daily Beast headline captures it: "MAGA-curious CBS boss dares defiant staffers to quit in tense all-hands."
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Assuming 6:30 #s will keep sinking? |
Weiss's slide deck during the town hall showed decades of declining ratings for the big three nightly newscasts, and if you look closely, you'll see further declines projected for the next five years: |
In her remarks, Weiss also tried to refocus attention away from linear ratings, saying, "We are not competing primarily for ratings, but for audience share... We are competing for the attention of anyone in front of a screen. So winning isn't about ratings. It's about making things that people can't live without."
>> In the short term, however, CBS News PR is happy to tout linear ratings: Thanks largely to NBC preempting its "Nightly News" one day last week, the "CBS Evening News" posted "double-digit growth" last week, the network said yesterday.
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>> Gov. Gavin Newsom's office called a report out of the brand-new California Post "propaganda." Max Tani remarked that Newsom's criticism the day after launch was "pretty ideal for a new right-leaning outlet hoping to find an audience as the media opposition to California Democrats and Hollywood." (X)
>> NBC Sports has added Caitlin Clark as a special contributor for the NBA this season. (THR)
>> Former Paramount co-CEO Brian Robbins has "launched a new entertainment company, Big Shot Pictures, which will leverage the reach and scale of YouTube to develop new animated franchises." (THR)
>> "The Late Show" followed up on my scooplet about Fox's Brian Kilmeade urging Trump to send Homan to Minnesota and imagined "another important message from Fox News to President Trump." (YouTube)
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Oracle to TikTok users: Blame us |
TikTok US "is mostly back up and running," and Oracle has taken the fall for several days of glitches that raised suspicions among users.
"Over the weekend, an Oracle data center experienced a temporary weather-related power outage which impacted TikTok," a company rep told me last night. "The challenges U.S. TikTok users may be experiencing are the result of technical issues that followed the power outage, which Oracle and TikTok are working to quickly resolve."
Oracle's statement seemed to be the latest attempt to counter widespread conspiratorial talk about TikTok censoring criticism of the Trump admin...
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TikTok settles landmark case |
TikTok settled its way out of the landmark trial "accusing the company of creating addictive features and harming a young user’s mental health," CNN's Clare Duffy reports. Snap settled last week, and TikTok struck a deal Monday night.
But Meta and YouTube are still moving ahead as defendants. Jury selection began yesterday and will continue this morning — here is Duffy's video report from the L.A. courthouse...
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More of today's tech talk |
>> New and gnarly this morning: Amazon "is laying off 16,000 employees, the company’s second round of large-scale job reductions in three months as it fights to improve its standing in the battle for AI supremacy," Jordan Valinsky reports. (CNN)
>> Adding insult to injury, Amazon "bungled" today's layoff announcement with a "misfired internal email." (Reuters)
>> Jeff Horwitz's latest: "Meta CEO Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors, court filing alleges." A Meta rep says the filing amounted to “cherry-picking documents to paint a flawed and inaccurate picture." (Reuters)
>> "Days after Meta was sued by over alleged false privacy claims by its chat app WhatsApp, the company has rolled out a new setting to protect users against cyber attacks." (TechCrunch)
>> Google "is making Search less about links and more about AI," again, by
letting searchers "ask AI Overviews follow-up questions." (The Verge)
>> Matt Novak wonders: "Can you sue the White House over an AI deepfake?" (Gizmodo)
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>> Another big blow to the Kennedy Center: Philip Glass is pulling his world premiere from the venue because "the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message” of his Symphony No. 15. (WaPo)
>> Yorgos Lanthimos' "Bugonia" and Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" are seeing massive post-Oscar-nom streaming bumps. (TheWrap)
>> Paramount+ "generated about a million new subscribers on the day of its first-ever UFC event," James Faris reports, citing what an exec told staffers. (Business Insider)
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Keep on rockin' in the freeze world |
"Neil Young is offering Greenlanders a year's free access to his archives in what he hopes will 'ease some of the unwarranted stress and threats' they are receiving from the Trump administration," the BBC reports. |
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