Shorter newsletter for a short week! No Objective stories this week, but we’ll have more for you in coming days.
In our media round-up this issue: Student protests cancel a Bari Weiss talk, new report offers insight into Palestinian journalist experiences in Israeli prisons, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr goes after The View, Fox News underreports Epstein files, progressive newsrooms head offline to build community, and a follow-up on who the Post layoffs impacted (spoiler alert: largely Black and brown workers).
—James Salanga
WHAT’S HAPPENING
A bit more media
✊ Student protests cancelled a talk from CBS News EIC Bari Weiss on the “future of journalism” at UCLA. The lecture would have been a part of a memorial series for David Pearl, a journalist murdered in 2002, and is set to be rescheduled. CBS is rumored to have offered buy-outs to 40 staffers at the end of January, and faces layoffs in the spring.
❗ A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalist chronicles the abuse and experiences of Palestinian journalists in Israeli prisons during detention and incarceration from Oct. 2023 to Jan. 2026: “We returned from hell.”
📻 Brendan Carr is now going after The View, on the basis that the ABC show (and The Colbert Show) are not “news programs” and must observe equal-time rules for political candidates.
📺 According to analysis from Media Matters, Fox News is underreporting the Epstein files. While other cable news mentioned Epstein thousands of times (including Newsmax TV), Fox News mentioned Epstein only 239 times from Jan. 30 to Feb. 17.
📰 “Good old-fashioned human interaction is the way that you actually build [movements]. Not through a virtual world that is owned and manipulated by corporations and the right.” Some progressive media newsrooms are de-prioritizing the world-wide-web, instead working to open in-person third spaces for community.
👉 Follow-up from last week: The Washington Post layoffs disproportionately affected Post Guild members of color.
Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.
JOURNALISM IN A GRAF
Quote of the week
“We had gone from trying to do aggressive work about race and racism to sort of sliding into covering it as a cultural issue, which feels a little crazy. There have been few moments when race was more central to the national conversation, to national politics.”
This issue is by James Salanga and Marlee Baldridge. Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.
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