‘Minutes’ away
Hey, welcome to a special Saturday weekend reads edition. Here’s the latest from Dario Amodei, Anderson Cooper, McClatchy, Matt Belloni, Maggie Haberman, Jim Rutenberg, and more…
Earlier this week, “video billboards began to play in Times Square on the outside of Paramount’s building, ending with the quote ‘It’s time to see for yourself,’” THR’s Alex Weprin noticed.
The ads are for Sunday’s season premiere of “60 Minutes,” as if “daring viewers to see just how radically different… or not… the show is.”
Sunday will air the first episode from executive producer Nick Bilton and will be a milestone in a nearly yearlong effort by Bari Weiss to reshape the newsmagazine.
In this Page One WSJ story the other day, Joe Flint reported that “CBS leadership gave Bilton the option to wait to premiere the new season until October, according to people familiar with the matter. But he decided to go ahead. ‘We’re ready,’ he told the network.”
Due to the NFL lead-in, the “60” premiere is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Eastern, though that time could slip depending on the football action.
Norah O’Donnell’s report on “one of the largest and most complex rescue operations in U.S. military history” — including her exclusive interview with the US colonel shot down in Iran — is the first story. Jon Wertheim’s L.A. Rams feature is the third story. In between will be a Lesley Stahl probe of President Trump’s “pardon economy.”
More on that below, but first, a CNN exclusive…
CNN’s Zachary Cohen with the scoop: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and political appointees in his office pushed for the two crew members of an F-15 who were shot down over Iran in April to participate in Sunday’s highly-publicized ‘60 Minutes’ report about the ensuing rescue operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.”
“Both airmen initially expressed reservations about doing the interview,” and Hegseth met privately with both of them, Cohen reports. One man ultimately agreed and the other declined.
Hegseth “played an unusually hands-on role… engaging in the planning process for the ‘60 Minutes’ interview far more than is typical for a Defense Secretary,” he adds.
Here are all the details. I teamed up with Cohen to report out the “60 Minutes” side of the story, recognizing that many major news outlets, including CNN, were eager to interview the service members.
The media competition was intense. At CBS, producer Keith Sharman, a 25-year veteran of “60 Minutes,” reached out to longtime US military contacts on the day of the rescue to start pursuing an interview.
And the booking effort went all the way to the top: Weiss personally lobbied Hegseth to give CBS exclusive access. She also reached out to other Trump administration officials. She told colleagues that the bookings were “top priorities.”
The process took several months and involved several people. Bilton also spoke with Hegseth and DC sources. The interview was finally taped in mid-August.
“This entire story is a complete lie,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said when asked about CNN’s reporting on plans for the segment.
“The decision to participate in the interview was each pilot’s alone — because it is their story,” he added.
Cohen has more reporting about reservations voiced by the military chain of command. He says “the episode underscores how Hegseth’s office is working to craft the narrative around the Iran war, which has become increasingly unpopular and put pressure on Hegseth to claim victory.” Read the rest here…
For all the talk about whether Weiss made the right changes at “60 Minutes” in the right ways, many recognize that some aspects of the “60” culture needed to change. Like this, as recalled by Scott MacFarlane: “When I was a correspondent at CBS News and needed to use a clip of a 60 Minutes interview for a report on the CBS Evening News, I had to ask the show for formal permission. And sometimes they said ‘no.’ In writing.”
That’s clearly changing. Stahl’s Sunday report about pardons “relied on months of reporting” by the CBS News Investigative unit, “led by Matthew Mosk, including Michael Kaplan, Gabe Kaminsky, and Daniel Klaidman,” Puck’s Dylan Byers tweeted last night.
Notably, the CBS promo says it is a “hidden camera investigation,” something Weiss and Bilton have been wanting to feature on the newsmag…
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in an essay this morning. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk both responded and said they agreed. CNN’s Auzinea Bacon has a full recap here.
Today’s statements are further evidence that, as Stephen Witt wrote, “the biggest vibe shift in artificial intelligence since the release of ChatGPT is currently underway…”
>> CNN’s Anderson Cooper had the first interview with Amodei this afternoon. Here’s the first clip.
While I was writing this week about The Washington Sun’s relaunch and the revived newsroom competition in DC, McClatchy was showing how the nation’s capital is the exception to the terrible rule right now.
The big-city publisher, owned by Chatham Asset Management, made severe cuts at papers like The Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee. “More than 90 journalists across the country were affected, according to estimates by the unions,” Poynter’s Angela Fu wrote.
“We are waist-deep in the quicksand and we are still sinking,” Carol Marbin Miller, deputy investigations editor of The Miami Herald, told The AP. I highly recommend her X thread warning that “Miami is on the precipice of becoming a news desert” and urging civic leaders “to begin serious, earnest discussions about the future of journalism.”
“Jimmy Kimmel isn’t fired,” Puck’s Matt Belloni wrote on Friday, refuting Page Six’s story claiming the late-night host’s ABC show is “set to end in 2027.”
Instead, negotiations are underway about his future. After Kimmel’s summer break, he “informed Disney/ABC that he’d like to re-up for another season beyond the current deal’s end in May,” Belloni writes.
So that’s the starting point for a negotiation that will likely revolve around significant budget cuts, given that Disney “is in the middle of a massive cost purge.” Here is Belloni’s full report, which the trades all matched with headlines about Kimmel and ABC being “in talks to renew…”
His interview with James Talarico has topped 6 million views on YouTube thus far. I highly doubt it would have garnered so much attention if it had aired on ABC. The same thing happened when Stephen Colbert’s Talarico interview was relegated to YouTube last winter. In both cases, of course, the hosts could have conceivably offered equal time to Talarico’s rivals, but this dispute is part of a much broader battle between the broadcasters and the FCC…
“No network has borne the brunt of the president’s ire as much as the Disney-owned ABC network,” Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman write in an authoritative new piece titled “How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech.”
They add up all the ways Trump is doing so, calling it “a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once.” It took more than 3,000 words to analyze all the levers…
Ousted editor-in-chief Erik Slavin shared “the inside story of what happened at Stars and Stripes” in this piece for The Atlantic.
He says “the Pentagon has articulated a remarkably narrow view of press freedom. The government may stop short of censoring an individual story. But it will seek to fire newsroom leaders for opposing the replacement of accurate reporting with press releases. It will strip an organization of basic reporting tools it deems unnecessary or distasteful. And it will discredit the source of the reporting if a story is perceived as unflattering to the president or his secretary of defense.” (See above.)
On Page One of the NYT earlier this week, Peter Baker analyzed how Trump’s social media “reflects his version of reality,” which is often not real.
With the help of AI image generators and MAGA meme makers, Trump “has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before — as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself,” Baker wrote.
The “rat-a-tat” of wild posts are “seen more and more as a barometer of his mental state,” and not in any complimentary way. Baker got into the normalization problem; pieces like his are one way to avoid normalizing it…
>> One year after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, his lieutenant Blake Neff has become a target of conspiracy theories “alleging that Kirk’s shooting was orchestrated by his allies at TPUSA,” Ian Ward writes. Now, Neff is “pursuing a starkly different objective: reconstructing some sort of barrier between the MAGA mainstream and the right’s online fringe.” (POLITICO)
>> “People who lost their jobs for criticizing Charlie Kirk are still suffering under the erosion of free speech,” Jessica Washington writes. (The Intercept)
>> Vanity Fair features an excerpt from Rebecca Blumenstein and Diana Kapp’s new book, “The Last Free Women,” about “how The New York Times pulled off the historic evacuation of 124 Afghans.” (VF)
>> Speaking of new releases, I’m eager to read Natasha Singer’s “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.” In an interview with The 74, she calls out the “collective amnesia” of schools’ romance with tech giants. (The 74)
>> “A new generation of Islamic terror supporters are using AI to spread ‘Slop Jihad’ to new audiences on TikTok,” David Gilbert writes. (WIRED)
>> Monica Hesse wonders: “Are tech bros Hollywood’s new serial killers?” (WaPo)
Some authors are “wrangling” with their publishers over Anthropic’s $1.5 billion AI settlement, which allocates $3,000 for each book that was “illegally downloaded and stored by Anthropic in the development of its online chatbot Claude,” Neil Vigdor reports for the NYT. Here’s a gift link that explains what’s going on…
>> Former “Hard Fork” hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton “are working with UTA to shop around for a potential partner” for a new show. Ashley Carman says they are “nearing a deal that could be worth up to $5 million a year.” (Bloomberg)
>> San Francisco nonprofit news outlet The Frisc “will shut down by the end of the month,” citing a lack of financial support, Max Harrison-Caldwell writes. (SF Standard)
>> IMDb “is adding ‘Digital Creator’ as a new professional category.” (Variety)
>> Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is launching “his own film and TV production banner.” It will “focus on Canadian stories for global export.” (THR)
>> Last but not least: “Have I Got News For You” returns on CNN tonight. Jed Rosenzweig has a new piece about how the show has “turned into one of CNN’s most unlikely ratings successes.” (LateNighter)
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.