Click on image to watch the show at Contrarian Boston.
On the latest edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we examine criticism from the left and the right of how the war in Iran is being covered by the media.
Plus: Why the mainstream media have shied away from showing fetish photos of Bryon Noem, husband of Kristi Noem; how CNN is trying to reach a younger audience with a show featuring online influencers; and our panel’s Rants and Raves.
With Emily, Contrarian Boston publisher Scott Van Voorhis, Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe, and me, with production by Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Production.
On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.
In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.
Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” interviews Marjorie Taylor Greene. Photo via Paramount.
A Dec. 7 “60 Minutes” interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene by veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl raised hopes that new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and her corporate overlords, Larry and David Ellison, wouldn’t destroy the legendary news program. Greene criticized Donald Trump, and Trump in turn complained that “60 Minutes” “has actually gotten WORSE!” since the Ellisons acquired CBS earlier this year, as CNN media reporter Brian Stelter writes.
Well, hope springs eternal — or, in this case, two weeks. Because now the worst has happened. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” postponed a heavily promoted story about the Trump regime’s cruel practice of sending Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, where they have reportedly been mistreated and even tortured.
Liam Scott and Scott Nover report for The Washington Post that Weiss decreed that the story be postponed in order to give the White House another opportunity to respond, even though “60 Minutes” had already contacted administration officials in an unsuccessful effort to obtain comment.
CBS News said in a statement that the story “needed additional reporting.” But “60 Minutes” reporter Sharyn Alfonsi said in an internal email that Weiss was giving the White House a “kill switch,” explaining, “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.” The Post story continues:
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
Weiss said in a statement late Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”
Weiss, lest you have forgotten, is a right-leaning opinion journalist with no experience in straight-news reporting or in television journalism.
Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum writes that CBS News announced the story would be pulled just three hours before airtime. Grynbaum also reminds us that the Ellisons’ path toward purchasing CBS was greased by the previous owner’s decision to settle a bogus lawsuit brought by Trump over the entirely routine manner in which “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Kamala Harris just before the 2024 election. Trump got $16 million from that corrupt transaction. And how’s this for condescension? Grynbaum writes:
One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.
Now the Ellisons are seeking White House assistance in derailing Netflix’ pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. There are lots of reasons having to do with antitrust law that WBD shouldn’t end up in the hands of either Netflix or Paramount Skydance, as the Ellisons’ company is known. But Netflix, at least, plans to spin off CNN from WBD, giving the news outlet a fighting chance of remaining an independent voice.
An Ellison acquisition, on the other hand, would most likely put Weiss in charge of CNN.
I like to say that friends don’t let friends watch cable news. I rarely watch any of the prime-time talk shows on cable — certainly not Fox, but not MS NOW or CNN, either. They all rely on the same formula, which I’d describe as keeping you enraged and upset so that you don’t touch that dial.
On the other hand, I will tune in to CNN when there’s significant breaking news. And I think it’s vitally important that we have news organizations that aren’t totally in thrall to the Trump regime, which is why I’m glad that CNN and MS NOW are there even if I don’t watch them very often.
So I was relieved at the recent announcement that Warner Bros. Discovery would sell itself to Netflix, even though that left the fate of CNN uncertain. And I was horrified when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, the new owners of Paramount, decided to launch a hostile takeover attempt after losing the initial sweepstakes.
How bad is this? Let us count the ways.
► Paramount recently acquired CBS News, and its head, conservative opinion journalist Bari Weiss, is lined up to run CNN as well should the Ellison bid prevail. Not only does that raise ideological concerns, but it also would likely lead to major job cuts as the two operations are consolidated.
► After CBS News’ “60 Minutes” broadcast an interview in which ex-MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized Trump, Paramount executives all but apologized to Trump, reports Charles Gasparino of the New York Post.
► Investors in the Paramount bid include the Saudi, Qatari and United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth funds. As Oliver Darcy of Status News observes, “Most startlingly, Saudi Arabia, which ordered the brutal killing of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi just a few short years ago, would effectively own a slice of one of the world’s leading newsrooms, if Ellison should get his way.
► Another investor in the Paramount quest is Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, by way of his private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Dan Primack writes at Axios, “Paramount is telling WBD shareholders that it has a smoother path to regulatory approval than does Netflix, and Kushner’s involvement only strengthens that case.”
► Trump himself has been lashing out at CNN this week, pushing for a sale and saying he might get involved in any antitrust proceedings over whether the sale of WBD to Netflix would be legal or not, reports NPR’s David Folkenflik. It goes without saying that a sale to Paramount would be just as problematic, but we all know that Trump will use antitrust law to reward his friends and punish his enemies.
We should not be in the position of having to root for Netflix to win the WBD sweepstakes. Giant media monopolies are bad for the economy and bad for democracy. In this case, though, a sale to Netflix would at least give CNN a fighting chance of remaining an independent monitor of power — rather than yet another news outlet that’s sold its soul to the forces of authoritarianism.
On the latest edition of the public radio program “On the Media,” co-host Micah Loewinger engages in a wonderfully contentious interview with right-wing influencer Cam Higby, a newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps. Higby is among a gaggle of MAGA promoters who’ve moved in after actual reporters walked out rather than sign Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s directive that they agree not to report any unauthorized news.
Jon Keller, left, and I kicked around some media topics on WBZ-TV back in 2018, when we were both a little less gray.
Old friend Jon Keller was laid off Thursday by WBZ-TV (Channel 4) as part of wide-ranging cuts at Paramount-owned CBS, writes Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan (sub. req). Keller, a political analyst at the station for 20 years, was one of five staff members who lost their jobs, although he was the only on-air journalist.
Earlier this year the station laid off medical reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall, and veteran reporter Beth Germano retired. The departures represent a significant blow to the station given that television news depends on recognizable, trusted journalists.
Back during the heady early years of the Jeff Bezos era at The Washington Post, the paper competed head to head with The New York Times for web traffic. Generally CNN would come in first, with the Times and the Post battling it out for second place. For instance, in April 2017 the Times recorded nearly 89.8 million unique visitors and the Post 78.7 million. Among news sites, they were outranked only by CNN.com, with 101.2 million.
But though the Times has thrived in the years following Trump’s first term, the Post has struggled, and has been in free fall since Bezos suddenly transformed himself from a model newspaper owner into the mogul from hell, starting with his decision last fall to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election.
The latest numbers from Similarweb, reported by Press Gazette, tell an ugly tale. The Times recorded 444.9 million unique visitors in May 2025, finishing first among U.S. news websites. CNN was second, with 311.7 million. And the Post was all the way back at 17th, with 72.2 million.
Most of the sites recorded a drop compared to 2024, but the Post’s decline was especially steep — down 24% versus just 8% at the Times. (CNN was down a whopping 28%.) The Post was only a little ahead of The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian and behind The Associated Press and Newsweek, which it once owned.
Last week I dismissed as irrelevant a steep decline in print circulation at the Post. The erosion of web traffic, though, is a much bigger deal. The goal is to sign up paid digital subscribers, and web traffic is how you get those subscribers. In business terms, those monthly visitors are at the top of the conversion funnel and paid customers are at the bottom. If there are fewer visitors to pull through the funnel, then there are fewer opportunities to sell them subscriptions.
As for the Times, we all know that its success in selling digital subscriptions has a lot to do with its non-news offerings such as games, food and consumer advice. That has nothing to do with raw web traffic, though. The reality is that dramatically more people are enticed to click on New York Times links to check out its journalism. Both the Times and the Post offer 10 gift links per month, yet five times as many people are accessing the Times compared to the Post.
Bezos has single-handedly transformed the Post from one of the newspaper business’ great success stories into a disaster. And he’s too rich to care.
Trump and Jennings on stage in Michigan. Click on image to view the clip.
This morning I want to defend the honor and integrity of opinion journalism, which is the side of the street I’ve worked for most of my career.
Done well, opinion journalism combines reporting, research and, yes, opinion that illuminates issues in a way that goes beyond what straight news reporting can offer. Above all, we honor the same rules of independence as everyone else in the newsroom. We don’t make political donations, put signs on our lawns or (I think you know where I’m going with this) speak at political rallies.
On Tuesday, CNN’s MAGA talking head, Scott Jennings, leaped up on a Michigan stage at President Trump’s invitation, embraced his idol, and then took the mic. I’ll let media reporter Oliver Darcy describe what happened next:
After Trump asked Jennings to come up on stage, Jennings obliged and then very briefly spoke from the podium. The CNN commentator joked he was looking at perhaps buying a farm in Michigan “because when you own as many libs as I do, you have got to have a place to put them all.”
Darcy writes that a CNN spokesperson told him the network was fine with Jennings’ appearance with Trump, even though Fox News once upbraided talk-show host Sean Hannity for doing the same thing. Which leads to where I think the line is being drawn.
The cable networks employ journalists, including straight news reporters and opinionators; talk-show hosts like Hannity; and partisan hacks. (Yes, Hannity is a partisan hack, but his primary allegiance is to Fox, not Trump.) Since we’re talking about CNN, I’ll observe that it’s brought on board MAGA sycophants like Jeffrey Lord, Rick Santorum and Jennings as well as Democratic operatives such as Donna Brazile and David Axelrod. Brazile actually tipped off the Hillary Clinton campaign about a CNN debate question while she was working for the network, according to an email unearthed by WikiLeaks.
This is all sordid stuff, and it stems from cable executives’ desire to have predictable partisan commentators offering predictable partisan talking points rather than honest opinion journalists who might say something contrarian. Scott Jennings is merely a symptom. The disease is that the cable nets have elevated talk over actual news.
I want to express a contrarian view regarding Jim Acosta’s departure from CNN. As you may know, Costa announced this morning that he’s leaving after CEO Mark Thompson told him he was being moved off his 10 a.m. program, which draws good ratings. Costa decided to leave after rejecting Thompson’s offer to be moved from midnight to 2 a.m.
This is widely being portrayed as another example of a media outlet doing Donald Trump’s bidding. Costa is not one of Trump’s favorites, to put it mildly; his White House press credentials were briefly revoked following a confrontation between him and Trump in 2018, and he has used his morning show to speak truth to power. That’s something we need more of.
Acosta’s admirers have been erupting in outrage on social media. Political commentator Chris Cillizza did not offer a benign interpretation, writing, “Acosta’s removal … is rightly understood as a piece of a broader movement of the legacy media to accommodate Trump — or at least take a far-less adversarial tack in covering his second term.”
Media writer Oliver Darcy, who first broke the news that Acosta might be leaving, wrote that the “move … conspicuously coincided with Donald Trump’s return to power.”
“Just Jack,” who has nearly 435,000 followers on Bluesky, added, “Jim Acosta is leaving CNN. He will not capitulate to his oligarch bosses. He will not kiss the Trump ring.”
Now, I don’t have any insight into what went on behind the scenes at CNN, but I don’t think this is as bad as it sounds. As Darcy observes, Acosta’s midnight special would have run in prime time, from 9 to 11 p.m., on the West Coast, which is traditionally underserved by network television.
About 50 million Americans live in that time zone, which includes major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Portland and Seattle. Moreover, CNN was reportedly willing to pay for Acosta to move to Los Angeles.
I can also understand why Thompson might want to move away from an opinionated show in the morning and replace it with straight news. The 10 a.m.-to-noon slot will now be anchored by Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown.
Could this be an example of CNN caving in to Trump? Yes, it could. As I said, I have no insight into what’s going on behind the scenes. But more news and less opinion in the morning coupled with a capable host like Acosta anchoring during prime time on the West Coast does not strike me as unreasonable. In fact, it seems like it could have been a pretty smart move.
But Acosta said no, leave us to wonder what’s next. In his sign-off, he said he’ll be announcing something soon. MSNBC is a possibility, although its lineup seems to be getting pretty crowded. Maybe he’ll do something completely unexpected.
I find my Northeastern journalism ethics students’ analyses of the news fascinating and insightful, so I want to share with you their latest. I asked them to find a piece of journalism related to the inauguration — straight news, opinion, whatever — and share it along with some commentary of their own. They came up with a great mix of mainstream and alternative sources, and all of the pieces are worthwhile. It’s a small class, so I’m going to present the eight that I received plus one I thought was worth adding to the mix.
On day one, Trump pits his administration against transgender people, by Orion Rummler and Kate Sosin, The 19th. Student comment: “I think a lot of journalists and platforms will have to test the limits of our good friend neutral objectivity over the next four years, especially when it comes to reporting on the trans community. With trans rights being a popular and divisive issue right now, a lot of questions about objectivity come to mind…. If news organizations continue to give a lot of space to this ‘debate’ on trans rights (although trans people represent less than 2% of the US population), it almost validates the idea that there is a debate to be had on whether or not trans people deserve to exist.”
Three ways Democrats are breaking with tradition before inauguration,by James FitzGerald, BBC News. Student comment: “Democrats have emphasized the importance of peaceful transfers of power but are seemingly following in Trump’s footsteps by abandoning the traditions in place…. Democrats following Republicans’ lead in breaking with tradition could further destabilize democracy and the public’s trust in institutions.”
Pomp, Policy, and Pardons, by Jon Allsop, Columbia Journalism Review. Student comment: “I’m still burnt out from the first four years of Trump, to be honest, so I appreciate round-ups like this CJR one.”
Bishop Asks Trump to “Have Mercy” on Immigrants and Gay Children,by Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Tim Balk and Erica L. Green, New York Times. Student comment: “As member of LGBTIAQ+ community, hearing President Trump talk about taking away millions of people’s right, including my own, was dehumanizing…. It was courageous of the Bishop to speak out in that particular enviroment — most of the people invited might have been too afraid to do so — therefore I applaud her for that.”
Welcome Home, by Tom Scocca, Defector. Student comment: “What I enjoyed most from this article was its forthrightness. Scocca understands that getting to a point like this means that almost everyone, whether consciously or not, has played a part. To elide that while laying out ethical issues as they currently stand is itself unethical.”
6 takeaways from Trump’s inaugural address, by Aaron Blake, Washington Post. Student comment: “From the journalist’s perspective, I think fact-checking is a fundamental part of journalism, but it became even more critical under the Trump administration. Given his frequent use of misleading statements and false claims, journalists had a greater responsibility to verify information and contextualize his rhetoric.”
Trump’s Inauguration Speech Threatened New Depths of State Cruelty,by David Renton, Truthout. Student comment: “While I, personally, may not need a terrible amount of convincing to believe Trump’s intentions are cruel, I think this simple and concise piece would do a fine job of leading anyone to understand this underlying connection. That being said, most ardent supporters would likely entirely dismiss every claim. So maybe Renton is preaching to the choir.”
4 takeaways from Trump’s second inaugural address,by Domenico Montanaro, NPR. Student comment: “What caught my eye in the article is that Trump spoke of very specific plans for the next four years during his official address to the country. However, this was all on a script he read off a teleprompter. Later on, he gave a non-scripted speech to supporters to purposely reveal more plans. The questions I, as a journalist have, start with, if journalists have to be transparent with the public, why does the president not have to? Should a president not be held to a higher standard when dealing with the public? Why is Trump not being criticized more for this?”
And, finally, my own find:
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Oliver Darcy, Status. My comment: “Darcy documents all the national media figures who’ve been highly critical of Donald Trump in the past but who rolled over for him on Monday…. I thought Darcy did a great job of combining reporting, opinion and attitude. By focusing on how the media covered the inauguration rather than the inauguration itself, he provided valuable insights into an aspect of the day that wasn’t center stage.”
Media notes
• Too much Trump? Joshua Benton, writing at Nieman Lab, introduces a daily newsletter from Vox that catches you up on the major Trump news of the day without wallowing in it. The Logoff, produced by a top Vox editor, Patrick Reiss, comprises one short item and then hands you off to something more uplifting at the close. I’ve signed up, and I think it will definitely be useful for some people, though it’s probably not enough for someone who needs to be immersed in the news — like Reiss, for instance. Or me.
• This was CNN. Mark Thompson, the news network’s chief executive, explains his plans to implement cuts on the broadcast side, beef up digital and stave of the apocalypse as the audience for linear TV continues to shrink and age. Thompson may have saved The New York Times in his last job. But based on what he says in his interview with the Times’ Benjamin Mullin (gift link), I’d say his mission to save CNN sounds infinitely more complex, and perhaps undoable.
• The end of social media. It is surely worth noting that all of our major social media platforms are now in thrall to Trump — Twitter/X, TikTok and Meta’s various services, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Bluesky (where I’m most active these days) and Mastodon are barely a blip. Writing at 404 Media, Jason Koebler argues that what we need are decentralization combined with interoperability. It’s a great idea — and firmly rooted in a democratic vision for media that has been receding almost from the moment that the internet evolved into a mass medium.
