Three buzzy stories right now
Hey, hope you’re having a superb Labor Day Weekend. We’re back from summer break with this in-case-you-missed-it edition recapping the past week of media news. Here’s the latest on Maria Bartiromo, Nathan Fielder, Norah O’Donnell, Stars and Stripes, Brendan Carr and more…
• “60 Minutes” starts its new season this Sunday under a microscope. One of the stories will be Jon Wertheim’s “in-depth look at the Los Angeles Rams, the favorite of oddsmakers to win the Super Bowl,” the LAT’s Stephen Battaglio reports. The other two segments will be announced later this week.
• Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s secret documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is the talk of the film world. A24 says the film, “You Can See Everything,” will come out in theaters in October. Vanity Fair’s Rebecca Ford, who attended the surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, says “it’s full of unexpected twists and turns and shocking reveals.” She described the “shock and awe” here.
• The Wall Street Journal’s exclusive report about John Fetterman showing “little interest in the work of a senator” continues to make waves. The Journal’s conservative editorial board said “his support for Israel is the reason he’s now under attack from anonymous staff and Senate leaks.” Fetterman responded Sunday in a statement to CNN’s Manu Raju, rejecting the “lies, half-truths, innuendos, smears and anonymous.” As Raju noted, the Journal report “is not the first to cite aides raising alarms over Fetterman’s behavior…”
Bill Grueskin summed it up best last week: “Usually reporters get leaks FROM the White House — but at Fox News, a reporter appears to have leaked TO the White House.”
Grueskin later apologized for describing Maria Bartiromo as a reporter, which underscores the strange circumstances of this story.
Bartiromo’s ouster was the biggest surprise out of Fox since Tucker Carlson was fired in 2023.
She was increasingly isolated inside Fox, but the apparent final straw was the “leak”: She shared internal network guidance with Trump aide Peter Navarro, who then forwarded it “up the chain,” as Navarro told Puck’s Dylan Byers.
Oliver Darcy of Status, who broke the story wide open last Thursday, wrote that “Bartiromo not only effectively betrayed her employer, but also disclosed confidential company information, violating the terms of her employment agreement.”
Bartiromo’s attorney Bryan Freedman, who also aided Carlson, said reporters were wrong to say she was “fired or is no longer an employee of Fox.”
Well, she was canceled, benched, forced out in the middle of a contract cycle. In TV-speak, this situation is known as pay-or-play, meaning Fox doesn’t have to “play” Bartiromo on air; they just have to pay her for the remainder of her contract.
“The contract could also keep her from appearing on other networks,” the NYT’s postmortem noted.
Remember headlines like this one from July? “Trump’s Favorite News Show Totally Ignores His Election Fraud Speech.”
Now we know why. The Bartiromo tiff revealed that Fox management sent internal guidance stating that shows should not follow Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole relating to the 2020 election.
When Bartiromo passed it on to the White House, “basically she was calling daddy to tell on mommy,” S.E. Cupp said. “She was basically saying, ‘Mommy won’t let me do this, dad. What are you going to do about it?’ Gross.”
Fox execs were understandably mad when they found out. In this CNN.com piece, I wrote that the episode reveals “the limits of Fox’s loyalty to Trump.”
When Fox said Bartiromo’s exit was a “business decision,” it’s true — the business often involves promoting the president’s agenda, but when his election lies endanger the bottom line, Fox will put its corporate interests ahead of its political interests. And this might matter quite a bit in the months ahead…
While I was off, President Trump got more explicit about weaponizing the FCC. He said NBC’s Kristen Welker would be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment” for saying he’s had a “mixed” endorsement record recently.
By law, the FCC can’t punish Welker, but Trump’s post led to speculation that Brendan Carr would try anyway, perhaps targeting NBC’s parent company Comcast, which he’s already investigating for supposed DEI discrimination.
Trump also decried “fake polls” and typed four words that have probably never been uttered by anyone before: “FCC to the rescue!”
Carr, appearing on Fox yesterday, tried his best to appease Trump while knowing there’s little he can do: “We’re looking at a lot of actions,” he said vaguely, and “the FCC might put guidance out soon to remind broadcasters about their obligations with respect to not airing ‘fake polls,’ particularly if they are done to suppress people heading into the fall.”
There are genuine problems with bad polls right now, but the government is not the polling police, and Trump’s complaints have to be put in the context of the expected “blue wave” this fall…
On Friday, the Supreme Court “endorsed a request from Republican campaign groups that want to buy discounted TV advertising for this year’s midterms, the latest in a series of emergency rulings from the high court benefiting the GOP,” CNN’s John Fritze and Fredreka Schouten wrote.
The decision effectively upheld the FCC’s guidance that gives lower TV ad rates to party committees, potentially hurting TV stations that bank on the influx of ad spending…
Investigators “have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the US military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions,” the NYT’s Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman and Eric Schmitt scooped.
Key point: “The show of force appeared aimed at not just ferreting out anyone who may have shared information, but intimidating others who might do so in the future, according to people with knowledge of the effort.”
Liam Reilly writes: A federal judge on Friday ruled that the Pentagon can fire three Stars and Stripes journalists, days after the trio sued and claimed they were illegally pushed out over personal statements protected under the First Amendment.
US District Judge Trevor McFadden denied TRO requests from the journalists, allowing the Pentagon to move forward with their firings. It’s the latest in a series of blows to press freedoms in the military. Read on…
…And for foreign students who charged that their freedom of speech was infringed: “A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students when it sought to deport them for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza,” the NYT’s Chris Cameron wrote. His story explained why The Stanford Daily brought the case…
>> Norah O’Donnell rejoined “CBS Mornings,” which she co-hosted until 2019. (Deadline)
>> “60 Minutes” “named Maria Gavrilovic and Chris Stewart as its new executive editors.” (TheWrap)
>> Beloved MS NOW anchor Alex Witt signed off from her weekend perch on Sunday. (Mediaite)
>> The Athletic released its review of Dianna Russini’s work and found she was “in clear violation” of the outlet’s standards. (CNN)
>> The Saturday Evening Post announced that it will stop printing next year. (Inquirer)
>> The New York Times, OpenAI and Microsoft filed key motions in their copyright battle. (NYT)
>> Sony fired “Wheel of Fortune” announcer Jim Thornton following what it called a “thorough investigation.” (Variety)
The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman writes: “On Wednesday, the feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem died, at ninety-two. The news broke on Thursday morning. By 5 P.M. Eastern time, Netflix had dropped a new episode of ‘Famous Last Words,’ a fascinating series that offers celebrity postcards from the beyond.” You can watch the Steinem episode here.
“My hope is that we’re changing the conversation around fame and around death,” the show’s host and exec producer Brad Falchuk says. Read Schulman’s full piece…
Last night, CNN re-aired the breathtaking documentary “9/11,” and tonight the network will premiere “Top of the World,” a documentary about the restaurant atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
The aforementioned Stephen Battaglio writes that Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s film “reconstructs the restaurant through its former staff, drawn largely from a workforce of immigrants who called it “the U.N. of restaurants.”
For more about the film, read Faith Karimi’s piece for CNN.com here.
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.