TV News LIES

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting agreed Monday to fulfill a $36 million, multi-year contract with NPR that it had yanked after pressure from the Trump White House.

The arrangement resolves litigation filed by NPR accusing the corporation of illegally yielding to Trump's demands that the network be financially punished for its news coverage. The argument, part of a broader lawsuit by NPR and several stations against the Trump administration, focused on CPB funding for NPR's operation of a satellite distribution system for local public radio stations. NPR announced Monday it would waive all fees for the stations associated with the satellite service for two years.

The judge in the case had explicitly told CPB's legal team he did not find its defense credible. CPB lawyers had argued that the decision to award a contract instead to Public Media Infrastructure, a new consortium of public media institutions, was driven by a desire to foster digital innovations more swiftly.

"The settlement is a victory for editorial independence and a step toward upholding the First Amendment rights of NPR and the public media system in our legal challenge to [Trump's] Executive Order," Katherine Maher, President and CEO of NPR, said in a statement.

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TikTok announced on Thursday that it had closed a deal to establish a new US entity, allowing it to sidestep a ban and ending a long legal battle.

The deal finalized by ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, sets up a majority American-owned venture, with investors including Larry Ellison’s Oracle, the private-equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX owning 80.1% of the new entity, while ByteDance will own 19.9%.

In September, Trump signed another executive order, which outlined a plan for US investors to take over the majority of the company’s operations and for the new version of TikTok to be controlled by a seven-member, majority-American board of directors of cybersecurity and national security experts.

Adam Presser, who previously served as TikTok’s general manager and global head of operations and trust and safety, would serve as CEO of the new venture, the company said on Thursday. The board will include Shou Chew, TikTok’s CEO.

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Former CNN host Don Lemon reacted to criticism Tuesday after being put “on notice” by the Department of Justice civil rights chief over his coverage of an anti-ICE protest at a church in Minnesota.

“Whatever they do, let them do it, but in the end, I’m telling you, I don’t think that they’ve realized that people are fed up with this,” Lemon, now an independent journalist, said in an interview with podcaster Jennifer Welch. ”That’s why you see so many people out in the streets. That’s why those protesters went into the church.”

Protesters disrupted a Sunday morning service at Cities Church in St. Paul, and alleged the church’s pastor, David Easterwood, was the same David Easterwood who is a top ICE official in the state, CNN reported. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CNN that it “will never confirm or deny attempts to dox our law enforcement officers,” pressed about the pastor’s connection with ICE. It was not immediately clear if Easterwood was at the service when the protest took place.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced Sunday night that the DOJ will pursue charges against the protesters. She also called Lemon’s coverage of the protest “pseudo journalism” and said he was “on notice.”

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On Thursday evening, as rumors about the Brown University gunman swirled, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.

CNN is certainly not a flawless news source, but her words rang true to me. The network is one of the outlets where you can find reality-based and largely dependable reporting – especially in breaking news situations like the one that was developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.

But CNN, now 45 years old, is in a precarious situation as two huge media conglomerates vie for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.

Whatever the outcome, the fate of CNN has become part of a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, not as a question of what benefits the information-seeking public.

America’s media system isn’t set up for that lofty goal. It’s set up for corporate profitability, for shareholder gain, for ever-increasing size and ever-decreasing competition.

“This is yet another example of the deep structural problems with roots in decades of policy decisions,” said Victor Pickard, author of Democracy Without Journalism? and a University of Pennsylvania media policy professor.

The speculation about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a larger point.

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TikTok has signed a deal to spin-off its U.S. operations to a group controlled by mostly American investors, including software giant Oracle, a company run by billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison.

TikTok's hyper-engaging algorithm and the massive amount of data the app has collected on millions of Americans is set to be overseen by the new U.S. firm. According to the agreement, TikTok's U.S. algorithm will be retrained with only Americans' data. Content moderation rules around what is permitted and what is not will be set by the new investor-controlled entity.

Yet the underlying algorithm will still be owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, with the blessing of American auditors, according to an internal TikTok memo reviewed by NPR and two sources familiar with the deal who were not authorized to speak publicly.

"With an American majority running the content moderation, concerns about foreign propaganda seem to have been alleviated," said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University who studies the regulation of new technology. "But it is possible that the American TikTok might end up censoring or hiding speech that is permissible on the global TikTok platform. I would hope that the U.S. content moderation team would allow speech that the American owners might dislike."

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