Hey, happy Monday. Warner Bros. Discovery is splitting up, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is celebrating a judge's split decision, and The Guardian is promoting a new source-protection app. But first... |
As federal agents prepared to fan out in Los Angeles for a controversial immigration crackdown, the officers were greeted by a familiar face: Dr. Phil McGraw.
The television personality and his camera crew were embedded with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement when some of the raids took place on Friday. The footage is being incorporated into a special report on "Dr. Phil Primetime," a program on McGraw's conservative TV channel Merit TV. The special hasn't been promoted yet, but a spokesperson confirmed the plans to me.
McGraw's presence on the ground in L.A. reinforces the made-for-TV nature of Trump's immigration crackdown. You might remember that the former daytime talk show host was also embedded with ICE officials in Chicago back in January, when some federal agents were told to be camera-ready for a show of force at the very start of President Trump's second term.
McGraw was on hand Friday "to get a first-hand look at the targeted operations," according to his channel. He also interviewed Trump border czar Tom Homan. |
The visual spectacle of the ICE actions and the aftermath — military-style raids, Mexican flags at protests, isolated instances of cars set ablaze by vandals — is central to the story of what's going on in L.A. right now. Trump watched some of the unrest unfolding, and the unsettling visuals undoubtedly factored into his decision to federalize the National Guard on Saturday. The chaos led CNN to add many extra hours of live coverage overnight Sunday and again Monday. I commented that the line of Waymo robo-taxis set on fire Sunday afternoon was like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel... |
'Authoritarian tendencies' |
California Governor Gavin Newsom is well-aware of the media spectacle, too. A photo on his X feed showed CNN and KTLA on monitors in the background as he met with local and state emergency officials. Later in the evening he granted an exclusive interview to Jacob Soboroff on MSNBC. "All of this is about immigration enforcement—" Soboroff began to say. "I think it's something much more," Newsom responded. "This is about authoritarian tendencies. This about command and control. This is about power. This about ego. 'My way or the highway.' This is a consistent pattern of practice of recklessness. This guy has abandoned the core principles of this great democracy." | Journalists struck by projectiles |
In scenes reminiscent of the 2020 uprisings across the country, some members of the media were caught in the crossfire over the weekend. (And that's a generous assessment; some critics of the police activity have charged that journalists were being targeted on Sunday.) Lauren Tomasi, a US correspondent for Nine News in Australia, was hit by a rubber bullet during this live segment. And Sergio Olmos, an investigative reporter at CalMatters, shared a video captioned "a less lethal round hits this reporter in the chest." >> Adam Rose, the Press Rights Chair at the Los Angeles Press Club, has been compiling other examples in this Bluesky thread. "ALL press have explicit legal protections in California," he noted. >> Remember this case? "A journalist shot by police during the 2020 Minneapolis unrest following the murder of George Floyd is dying from her injuries, friends say." |
What splintered social media feels like |
"What's happening in LA is an a good reminder of how ever more fragmented our information landscape has become," the WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims observed, taking the words right out of my mouth. "On Bluesky it's almost entirely about executive overreach; on X it's 'LA is burning; deport them all.' Americans occupy non-overlapping realities and I see no end in sight to the splintering of viewpoints." |
Misinfo 'adds to the chaos' |
Last night Senator Ted Cruz shared a shocking video clip of L.A. Police Department cars on fire and wrote "this… is… not… peaceful." It was not from 2025, either. Cruz's post on X implied the video clip was brand-new, but it was actually from 2020, one of many examples of misinformation proliferating amid the current clashes.
Cruz was reacting to actor James Woods, who promoted the 2020 video on Sunday while trying to lump violent rioters and peaceful protesters together. Newsom responded to Woods and told him "this video is from 2020" — showing that the governor's office is on the lookout for false and misleading content that might distort public opinion. "Misinformation like this only adds to the chaos the Trump Administration is seeking," the governor's press office wrote on X. "Check your sources before sharing info!" |
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Warner Bros. Discovery is splitting up |
It's happening: CNN's parent Warner Bros. Discovery is splitting into two separate publicly traded companies — one oriented around the HBO Max streaming service and Warner Bros. studio, and the other around CNN and other cable networks. CEO David Zaslav will run the streamer company and CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels will run the networks. They intend for the corporate breakup to take effect by mid-2026. As I wrote for CNN Business here, this morning's announcement is WBD's answer to investor pressure and intensive industry-wide change. As the cable television business contracts in the streaming era, Zaslav is offering shareholders a way to invest in the growing HBO Max part of the business without exposure to cable. That said, the networks that are part of the second company continue to boast strong profits and global audiences. WBD shares are up more than 6% in premarket trading... |
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| Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference begins with a keynote this afternoon. The Mirror Awards for excellence in media reporting take place in NYC tonight. (Fingers crossed because I'm a finalist.) Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final is tonight on TNT. |
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ABC vet suspended; now what? |
Terry Moran's early Sunday morning missive against Trump and his top aide Stephen Miller infuriated the White House — and Moran's bosses at ABC. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt publicly called on ABC to punish Moran, but by the time she did so, a suspension was already in the works. "ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others," a spokesperson said. The question now: Will Moran ever return to ABC's airwaves? Here's my full story... |
'Court recognizes CPB's independence' |
Yesterday a federal judge declined to immediately intervene in Trump's attempt to remove three Corporation for Public Broadcasting board members, "ruling the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate a strong likelihood the firings were unlawful or that they would suffer irreparable harm," The Hill's Sarah Fortinsky reports. "But CPB officials celebrated the ruling as a win, pointing to part of the ruling that acknowledges that 'Congress intended to preclude the President (or any subordinate officials acting at his direction) from directing, supervising, or controlling the Corporation.'" The entity's statement on the matter is titled "Court Recognizes CPB's Independence." The bottom line: CPB is keeping its board members in place and continuing to fight. |
Scott Pelley's sharp words |
"You cannot have democracy without journalism. It can't be done," Scott Pelley said in a sit-down with Anderson Cooper after Saturday night's CNN telecast of "Good Night, and Good Luck." It was an exclusive interview with Pelley, who has been at the center of the "60 Minutes" battle with Trump, and an insightful conversation between two "60" correspondents, since Cooper also reports for the program. I wrote up the highlights here. >> Pelley said that Paramount settling with Trump would be "very damaging to CBS, to Paramount, to the reputation of those companies." >> "While I would like to have that public backing," Pelley said, "maybe the more important thing is the work is still getting on the air." |
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The Guardian and the University of Cambridge have launched Secure Messaging, a new app that protects sources who speak to news organizations by "making the communication indistinguishable from other data sent to and from the app by our millions of regular users," Katharine Viner writes. (The Guardian) |
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The DNC launches YouTube show |
"The Democratic National Committee is launching its first-ever live, daily show on YouTube," Stef W. Kight reports for Axios. Titled the "Daily Blueprint," the show will tee off today at 10am ET and will focus on "Democrats' messaging" and highlight "how Democrats are countering Trump's moves." |
>> Since Trump's return to the White House, YouTube "has encouraged its content moderators to leave up videos with content that may break the platform's rules rather than remove them," a move that, unlike Meta and X, has not been via "public statements about relaxing its content moderation," Nico Grant and Tripp Mickle report. (NYT) >> Elon Musk "has been forced to rebuke Grok, his own AI chatbot integrated into X, after it falsely suggested the tech billionaire wrote a post saying he 'took' the wife of Stephen Miller." (Daily Beast) >> China's Rednote "has released an open-source large language model, joining a wave of Chinese tech firms making their artificial intelligence models freely available." (Reuters) >> Getty Images' landmark copyright lawsuit against Stability AI begins in London starts today. (Reuters) |
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Cole Escola and Sarah Snook took home the top actor in a play awards at the 78th Annual Tony Awards on Sunday, while Darren Criss and Nicole Scherzinger took home the top laurels for actors in musicals. CNN's Alli Rosenbloom has a roundup of the award winners, and Naveen Kumar has all the best moments from the show here. |
"Ballerina" finished the weekend "well behind expectations to score the lowest start of any 'John Wick' pic since the first film," THR's Pamela McClintock reports. "Lilo & Stitch" was #1 for the weekend once again; the film is approaching $800 million globally. |
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