TGIF. We'll be off on Monday and back in your inbox Tuesday morning. Hope you can make it to a Memorial Day parade near you. 🇺🇸 Now here's the latest on Stephen Colbert, CBS News Radio, Penske Media, Meta, Baby Yoda, and many more...
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Today's must-read is a speech that will stand the test of time.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger spoke last night at a launch event for the Press Clause Coalition, a much-needed new collection of groups advocating on behalf of journalists and news outlets.
The publisher "had some pointed words for his peers atop U.S. media organizations," as Erik Wemple said on X afterward.
Sulzberger named some names, calling out CBS and Nexstar for currying favor with the Trump administration, and alluded to others, like the Washington Post, for transforming its opinion section "to placate the president."
Settling "winnable cases," letting the president "rewrite their styleguides," and writing "unusually large checks for the benefit of the president" are all acts of capitulation, Sulzberger said, that serve only "to embolden the administration to keep attacking the press."
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'Pushing back' is necessary
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Sulzberger's message last night was a version of use your rights or lose your rights.
"Our country has some of the strongest legal protections in the world for free expression and due process," he said, but "they mean nothing if the press is too timid to defend them."
Confirming what other sources had previously indicated, Sulzberger said that some some big newsrooms were reluctant to join the NYT's First Amendment lawsuit against the Defense Department over Pete Hegseth's press restrictions.
Several "peers" "told me directly that they feared sticking their necks out would invite retaliation," Sulzberger said. "But rights are just ink on paper unless they’re exercised. Standing up for press freedom in court and losing is still a much healthier outcome than standing down and letting the administration simply rewrite the rules."
Sulzberger saved his strongest criticism for the Trump administration's "anti-press" pressure efforts, citing lawsuits, FCC actions and other steps.
"More troubling still, the administration has shown a growing interest in using law enforcement powers to aid these efforts, too," he said.
So news organizations have to rise to the occasion "by pushing back." A summary won't do the speech justice, so you can read Sulzberger's remarks in full on the NYT's corporate website.
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CBS News Radio signing off
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"An American institution is what we're losing here," Steve Kathan says.
Kathan is a longtime anchor of the "CBS World News Roundup," which is ending today as Paramount shuts down CBS News Radio once and for all.
The final news update will air at 11:31 p.m., led by veteran broadcaster Christopher Cruise. "The 11 p.m. report will consist entirely of a tribute to CBS News Radio through the years," DCRTV reports.
The CBS TV network has also aired retrospectives about the radio division on "Sunday Morning" and the "Evening News" – a classy touch.
"CBS Radio should be remembered for becoming a national institution" that was "very important to the development of news" in the United States, Dan Rather said in a "Sunday Morning" interview. "It, for many, many years, was a part, and I would argue not a small part, of what held the country together."
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The fiscal reality – and I know you've heard this before – is that the radio division was unprofitable and probably unsalvageable. CBS had been cutting back for years. The few remaining radio staffers had described the operation as a ghost town. Audio investments have logically been pointed toward podcasts, not linear radio, for a while now.
Still, Brooke A. Byers, granddaughter of CBS founder William Paley, wrote in an essay for The Guardian that the shutdown "represents another crack in the crown jewel that we once relied upon to be educated citizens."
"There's a reliability to radio that makes it stand apart," Former CBS correspondent Scott MacFarlane said in a video this morning, arguing that radio is "the most intimate" medium ever created.
So, "this week marks the end of two eras here at CBS," as "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan put it in a social video. Speaking of...
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Stephen Colbert just put on a master class in how to go out with grace and gratitude.
On the finale of "The Late Show," he thanked his viewers, credited his staff and brought his family up on stage. He notably did not mention Trump's name at all during the episode. Nor did he dwell on the symbolism of his show being taken off the air. Here's my recap for CNN.com.
>> When I tweeted about the absence of Trump commentary, Gavin Newsom comms aide Brandon Richards replied, "Colbert knows exactly how to get under his skin, it's why he's been kicked off the air, and it seems he did it one final time — keeping Trump out of this moment in history,"
>> Trump posted on Truth Social at 1:52 a.m. ET, "Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he's finally gone!"
>> The president, of course, is cheering the loss of American jobs. Last night Anderson Cooper said it's sad "to see Stephen sign off; to see so many who work on that show now out of work; to see a president who can't take a joke go after anyone who can make one."
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One last joke about Paramount
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The reviews of the finale are all over the place. TheWrap's Krystie Lee Yandoli called it a "masterpiece." Variety's Daniel D'Addario called it a "letdown."
"The final Late Show episode ever tried to just be a normal Late Show episode, until it couldn't," D'Addario wrote.
But I loved that stab at normalcy – it was a clever commentary about what was happening to the show and to the industry writ large. Colbert just wanted to tell jokes but he kept getting interrupted by celebrity guests, tech difficulties and eventually an "interdimensional wormhole" that threatened to swallow all of late-night.
Colbert's late night rivals-slash-friends arrived to help with the wormhole. "At some point, this may come for all of our shows," HBO's John Oliver quipped.
ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, alluding to the Trump admin's pressure, said it showed up on his stage last year, "but it went away after about three days."
It was left to Jon Stewart, who's part of the Paramount corporate family of course, to deliver a joke at the parent company's expense. He said he was there to read a corporate statement: "Paramount strongly believes in covering both sides of any black hole that is swallowing everything we know and love, and the coverage must also include the positive aspects of the insatiable emptiness."
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If you're wondering about that ending...
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The episode came to a close with two taped performances: First, Colbert, Elvis Costello and Jon Batiste performed an old favorite of Colbert's, Costello's 1977 demo "Jump Up."
In an old interview with Terry Gross, Colbert said the song is about a person "talking about insignificance in the name of power... and also talking about the hypocrisy of politicians." Costello once wrote that it was about "campaign lies and promises."
Then McCartney, Costello and others sang the Beatles classic "Hello, Goodbye," and the show concluded by imagining the Ed Sullivan Theater existing inside a snow globe – a reference to the ending of the 1980s drama "St. Elsewhere."
>> TVLine summed up the key moments and embedded the YouTube clips here...
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Spotted at the wrap party
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Colbert hosted a party for friends, colleagues and select past guests right after last night's taping. The invite said the dress code was "Fired & Festive!" Among the celeb sightings: Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad, Paul and Julie Rudd, Padma Lakshmi, Neil Degrasse Tyson, John Oliver, Jordan Klepper, John Dickerson, Ewan McGregor. Also: CNN's Jake Tapper, Kaitlan Collins, Anderson Cooper, and Clarissa Ward...
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'All we need is another Colbert'
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I can't write about CBS closing the curtain on "The Late Show" and cancelling its radio programming without pointing out that viewers, listeners, hosts, and guests are moving elsewhere. This media environment is continually generating more and more energy – just in new places.
Streamers like Netflix are becoming more like CBS every day. Witness Netflix's announcement yesterday about live-streaming "The Breakfast Club" – which, it's worth noting, regularly features feisty criticism of Trump.
But the new ecosystem does differ from the old one in some important ways. For more on that, I highly recommend Michael Hirschorn's new piece for the NYT contrasting the exec-driven network system with the creator-driven YouTube one.
"Perhaps," he writes, "there is a marriage here: the greater inclusivity and democratization of a distributed platform combined with the professional expertise and enduring star-making power of network TV. The money is there, and so is the attention. All we need is another Colbert..."
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CPJ warns World Cup reporters about US press risks
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The Committee to Protect Journalists is treating next month's FIFA World Cup as a press-safety risk. Yesterday, the org warned foreign journalists traveling to the US to cover the games that they "may face questioning or hostility from immigration officials at the border or around venues."
CPJ pointed to recent cases of journalists having visas revoked or being denied entry, as well as being assaulted or detained while covering protests.
"Based on the experiences of recent months in the United States, journalists traveling to the United States need to know that their press credentials won’t necessarily protect them at the border or when out reporting," CPJ's chief executive Jodie Ginsberg wrote. The org also published a safety guide for reporters covering the games...
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Penske eyeing the remaining Vox titles
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Penske Media "is likely to acquire one or more of the remaining brands" from Vox Media, "as it already has a 20% stake in the business resulting from a 2023 investment," Mark Stenberg reports for Adweek...
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Meta settles public school addiction case
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Meta has settled what was shaping up to be yet another landmark social-media addiction trial — this one from public schools alleging Instagram and other platforms "upended learning across America and pushed US public schools to spend enormous resources fighting a mental health crisis," Bloomberg's Alexandra S. Levine, Olivia Carville, and Madlin Mekelburg report.
The company "was the sole remaining defendant in a trial scheduled for June after Snap, Google's YouTube and TikTok settled a week earlier," they note. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed...
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>> Google, Meta and TikTok "were hit with complaints from European Union consumer groups on Thursday for allegedly failing to protect users from financial scams on their platforms, putting them at risk of regulatory fines," Foo Yun Chee reports. (Reuters)
>> "As nonconsensual explicit deepfakes continue to proliferate online, entire communities are now collaborating on this digital form of sexual abuse," Miles Klee reports in a piece that looks at 4chan's "Wizards." (WIRED)
>> "Ben Relles, who channeled a career as an early YouTube creator into an executive role at the video platform, is launching Make Believe, an AI lab that will focus on creating tech that enables videos that can talk back to viewers, betting that it will enable forms of entertainment never previously possible," Alex Weprin writes. (THR)
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AI deal juices Spotify shares
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Spotify shares "jumped 13% on Thursday after the music streaming platform laid out guidance for 2030 and reached an artificial intelligence deal with Universal Music," CNBC's Samantha Subin reports.
Spotify also "released the ability for users to explore a topic by creating a podcast about it," Ivan Mehta reports over at TechCrunch.
>> And the service is "hoping it can lend a hand in getting concert tickets to an artist's biggest fans, as the streaming service revealed 'Reserved' on Thursday during its investor day," THR's Ethan Millman writes...
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'Can Baby Yoda become a cultural touchstone once again?'
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That's what THR's Pamela McClintock asks "as 'Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu' opens on the big screen" this Memorial Day weekend.
"Tracking services show 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' opening to roughly $82 million at the domestic box office for the four days, while some exhibitors see it coming in as high as $95 million to $100 million," McClintock writes. The movie made about $12 million in preview showings last night...
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