An ugly reflection
Lots going on this morning. CNN just called the Michigan Senate Democratic primary for Abdul El-Sayed — follow along with live coverage here. Meanwhile, Disney is touting a deal with TikTok; The New York Times is dealing with a subscriber growth slowdown; and Tucker Carlson is teasing a big announcement…
On Ezra Klein’s show the other day, Maggie Haberman said that if someone could make a chart of President Trump’s “mind share,” “70 percent of it would be on his renovations.”
That’s one of the reasons why, as the former BBC correspondent Nick Bryant put it, the shoddy Reflecting Pool renovation “has become perhaps the most emblematic news story of Trump 2.0, because it brings so many narrative strands together in a true Trump weave.”
Yesterday, Slate’s Patrick Reis dubbed it a “delicious metaphor for his second term: Claim you can easily fix something difficult, fail miserably, and get some corruption in along the way.”
Now the dispute between Trump and Jeanine Pirro continues to metastasize. Her crime, of course, was contradicting Trump’s far-fetched claims about far-left pool vandals. Reporters have been reconstructing Trump’s “tense meeting” with Pirro and asking whether the former Fox News host — who took a big pay cut to join Trump’s DOJ — will soon be out of a job.
“I told her I was not happy,” Trump said on the way home from L.A. last night. A reporter asked, “Is she safe? Are you going to keep her in the position?” Trump replied, “Uhh, I haven’t made a determination.”
I continue to believe, as I told Kaitlan Collins on Monday night, that Trump will keep Pirro around and make her life miserable. For what it’s worth, today’s Page One NYT story says Pirro “has told friends (some of them skeptical) that she sees her current post as a capstone, not a steppingstone, and does not fear a ‘you’re fired’ moment.”
“The Reflecting Pool story is about Trump’s grip on reality, but the press corps won’t go there,” Dan Froomkin says in this blog post, arguing that news outlets are being too timid about the “absurd” vandalism narrative.
News organizations “need to provide the essential context when Trump makes preposterous claims,” Froomkin concludes. “They must stop the sanewashing. And that’s going to require them to address Trump’s relationship to reality and use words like delusional.”
Over at National Review, Noah Rothman says the Reflecting Pool is “now a serious scandal” because “innocent people” were targeted by the government “because the president wanted to see someone catch a charge.”
The average American, Rothman asserts, can’t really relate to the politically motivated cases against James Comey and Letitia James. “By contrast, they are likely to see at least shades of themselves in the nameless pawns whom the federal government viewed as expendable losses in Trump’s failed face-saving maneuver.”
Just now, CNN’s Devan Cole and Katelyn Polantz reported that one of those “pawns,” former Olympian David Hearn, “is asking a judge to order the Justice Department to turn over potentially embarrassing information about how they pursued” the case against him. More to come…
Tucker Carlson says he’s sharing something on his website tonight at 6 p.m. ET. “MAGA was betrayed. We all were. It’s time for a new path forward,” he wrote in a teaser post last night while sharing a photo of his recent get-together with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, Joe Kent and their spouses. “The movement has begun,” MTG wrote on X the other day, so the posts have many people speculating about a 2028 play…
…Yes, seven long months from today.
At least there’s now some relative certainty about the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery timeline. Yesterday afternoon, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín set a March 2, 2027, trial date for Paramount’s legal showdown with the state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America.
This is yet another setback for Paramount, since it had wanted the trial to start much sooner, ideally in November. As I noted for CNN.com, the March timing will cost Paramount well over $1 billion in “ticking fees.”
Paramount also reported earnings after the bell, beating estimates and raising its full-year profit guidance. During the investor call, David Ellison said the company is “absolutely open to finding a solution out of court, but we also really believe that we’ll win at trial.”
Meantime, California AG Rob Bonta wrote on X yesterday, “My office isn’t backing down.” Analyst Rich Greenfield concluded: “Paramount wants to settle before trial in March, California AG does not seem interested.”
We led yesterday’s Reliable Sources with Ellison’s NYT op-ed defending the deal and pledging independence for CNN. As the day went on, criticism of the op-ed piled up. One of the most-liked reader comments said, “Impressive and lofty thoughts. However, actions say otherwise. How do you explain Bari Weiss and 60 Mins?”
Others criticized Ellison for not mentioning Trump at all. Business Insider’s headline said that “Ellison seeks to distance himself from partisan politics after courting Trump.” And Fox News said that “CNN insiders don’t buy ‘lip service’ about network.”
Last night, THR’s Steven Zeitchik connected the dots about Paramount’s apparent strategy: “The sudden burst of friendly voices and platforms from the Democrat side of the aisle appears to be part of an anti-AG plan.”
Indeed it is: This morning, THR published a guest column by Chris Wallace, a senior advisor to Paramount investor RedBird Capital, arguing that “if you think it’s wrong for the Trump Justice Department to use legal weaponization for political purposes, it is just as indefensible for a dozen Democratic AG’s to do the same thing. And that is what is going on here.”
This morning Adam Piore is out with a profile of CBS News president Tom Cibrowski for Columbia Journalism Review. Cibrowski did not participate, but his friend Morgan Hertzan did, and Hertzan said, “Tom’s superpower is being calm and making rational decisions in highly charged situations. In the hurricane, he just becomes the calm in the center. And I think that was and currently is exactly what CBS News needed.”
Others were less charitable: Piore quotes a source saying friends have urged Cibrowski to draw some red lines so that he doesn’t take a “thirty-five-year reputation and flush it for Bari Weiss.”
I know I’m a broken record, but folks should watch/read CBS and judge the actual coverage for themselves. Variety’s Brian Steinberg has a new story about how Tony Dokoupil is leaning into his own voice and writing analytical segments for the “CBS Evening News…”
The New York Times Company posted double-digit revenue and profit gains in the second quarter of the year. But shares are down nearly 8% this morning, likely due to the challenges associated with continued subscriber growth. It’s a steep uphill climb, as every exec in the subscription business knows.
The Times is leading the overall pack, with 12.8 million digital-only subscribers, a gain of about 280,000 from the previous quarter. But “subscriber growth slowed from the roughly 310,000 net digital subscribers the company added last quarter, and missed Wall Street forecasts for roughly 350,000 net new digital subscribers,” the WSJ’s Connor Hart reports.
“Disney’s Josh D’Amaro stepped out with solid numbers and some news in his first full quarter as CEO,” Deadline’s Jill Goldsmith and Dade Hayes report. Among the takeaways: “‘Toy Story 5’ drove studio revenue, theme parks saw an uptick in attendance, and streaming profits more than doubled for the three months ended in June.”
The company also announced a first-of-its-kind deal with TikTok this morning. The NYT’s Brooks Barnes calls it a “step toward making Disney+ into something that looks a little more like a social media app.”
Disney will give a select group of TikTok creators access to clips from its library; the creators will do what they do, and then Disney+ will curate some of the best content inside its vertical video feed called Verts.
Barnes says “the agreement is another sign that Disney has become more willing to let outside creators experiment with its prized intellectual property,” a la the OpenAI pact that fell apart earlier this year.
>> During this morning’s earnings call, D’Amaro said Disney is considering FAST channels as a free “‘funnel’ for consumers to sign on for Disney+, Hulu and other subscription services,” Variety’s Cynthia Littleton reports.
The E.W. Scripps Company “is eliminating 268 positions” and restructuring how it operates local TV stations, TV News Check reports. Scripps CEO Adam Symson says “streaming requires a different model for producing the news,” so stations will move away from broadcast dayparts (like a 6 p.m. newscast) and toward a 24/7 streaming model. Much of the production work will be done at a national “hub,” though Symson promises “deeper local coverage” too.
Scripps said its stations will “increasingly depend on technology, AI and automation.” But local news outlets in Scripps markets are filled with stories today about the human impact.
The layoffs are “gut-wrenching,” with at least a dozen employees affected at just one station in Corpus Christi, Texas. A source told the San Antonio Express-News “that the only people left” at KRIS 9 “are multi-media journalists, one evening anchor, the meteorologists, a digital director, an operations staffer and the Telemundo team.”
“I can’t remember the last time a 20-minute-plus live interview with a politician was compelling in its entirety — but this CNN encounter between Rep. Max Miller (R) and Jake Tapper definitely counts,” The Hill’s Niall Stanage wrote on X, and he was absolutely right. Jonathan Swan called it “one of the most astonishing interviews I’ve ever seen with a politician,” crediting Tapper’s “power of preparation.”
>> Very worrisome headlines about Perez Hilton this morning: “Gossip blogger appeared to harm himself on a livestream. His audience called the police.” (CNN)
>> New reporting from John Liu and Hadas Gold: “AI agents fake identities, target real people in new security incident.” (CNN)
>> “Substack says its Defender legal support program has won its first federal court victory, helping Jeff Stein, editor-in-chief of SpyTalk and Substack author, beat a $1 million defamation lawsuit filed against him in 2024 by former CIA official Keith Bass,” Sara Fischer writes. (Axios)
Netflix “is handing its Spanish-language Oscar hopeful ‘La Bola Negra’ the longest theatrical runway in the streamer’s history,” with the queer epic hitting theaters on Oct. 16 and then streaming on Dec. 2, marking “a 47-day exclusive window and the widest theatrical commitment the company has given one of its titles to date,” Variety’s Clayton Davis reports. The film is “one of the streamer’s awards priorities for the fall.” Read more on that here…
>> Elsewhere in Hollywood: “‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ surpassed $1 billion globally in near-record time,” notching “the milestone after six days of release, a mind-boggling pace,” Rebecca Rubin reports.
>> It’s a done deal: Hearst “will acquire Disney’s 50% stake in A+E Global Media, the parent company of Lifetime, History Channel, A&E Network and other assets in a deal that calls for Hearst to pay Disney $1.2 billion in cash,” Cynthia Littleton reports. (Variety)
>> The Telegraph has published a “flurry” of pieces taking climate change seriously, leading “experts to wonder whether the Telegraph’s view — and the wider debate on the right — may be shifting,” Michael Savage reports. The tonal change, he notes, coincides with the paper now being owned by Axel Springer. (The Guardian)
>> Speaking of Axel: The media giant “has named Business Insider’s interim CEO Christian Baesler as the outlet’s permanent chief executive.” (Axios)
>> People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel says the company isn’t turning off Google crawlers just yet, though “we are nearly on the other side of search being a material driver of value for us.” (Digiday)
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.