Media

1. WaPo woes
2. Mixed Signals
3. Bored of Davos?
4. CBS’ nightly drama
5. Nonstop slop
6. Melania on the Sphere

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told us on Mixed Signals last year that his primary tactic against the federal agents swarming Chicago was to “video everything.”

“Video everything” has driven the media narrative and defined the situation in Minneapolis, where a second person was shot by immigration officers on Saturday. Almost as soon as the news was announced, high-quality videos of the shooting ricocheted around the internet.

“The city had become a giant eyeball,” The New York Times Magazine’s Charles Homans wrote. And anyone on social media can see what it sees: The engagement-hungry platforms X, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels all revolve around short-form videos, and they’ve been flooded by angles of immigration enforcement actions across the country — and, now, a pair of deadly shootings.

If you can watch what’s happening in Minneapolis for free, from a thousand angles, over and over, what’s left for The Minnesota Star Tribune, the state’s biggest news organization, to do?

“We’re not trying to recreate social media,” editor and senior vice president Kathleen Hennessey told me yesterday during a phone call. “We’re trying to deliver what you’re not getting, which is names, dates, locations, the comment and account from ICE and from DHS, angles that you’re not seeing, what happened before, what happened after. Obviously the power of video in the story is real, but it is also limited, and we’re very aware of that every day.”

“There’s lots of rumor and chatter and confusion, and there’s also just bad and incomplete reporting that’s flying around lots of outlets,” she said. “Not all of it is malicious, and some of it’s just strange. You cannot be an informed person and just sort of scroll through social media. It’s distorting and it doesn’t add clarity, I don’t think. Ultimately, that’s what journalism is in for. You need to shed some light and bring true understanding.”

Also today: Layoff fears at The Washington Post and a dispatch from Davos.

Layoff rumors fly in Post newsroom

The Washington Post abruptly canceled its plans to send its sports staffers to the Winter Olympics in Italy, Semafor first reported on Friday — the first sign, some in the newsroom fear, that management plans to end the paper’s sports coverage entirely, as well as a harbinger of other deep cuts.

With no confirmation from Post leadership, staffers have tried to read the tea leaves in conversations between individual editors and reporters: Some editors have quietly been suggesting to staff across various verticals, including sports, that it may not be a bad idea to begin looking for other jobs, Semafor has learned, and one Post source said editors would not answer questions about whether there would still be a sports section. Some foreign correspondents have been explicitly told by editors that their jobs are likely to be eliminated, prompting them to send a letter to Post owner Jeff Bezos pleading for the billionaire owner to save their jobs. Still, one person familiar with the planned cuts cautioned Semafor against taking all the reporting at face value.

Dubner on podcast-TV

Stephen Dubner has spent 20 years proving that things aren’t what they seem — and now he’s not so sure that’s always true. The co-creator of Freakonomics and host of one of podcasting’s most enduring shows joined Ben and Max to talk about why he never sold to Spotify, how The New York Times shifted from telling readers things to telling them what to think, and how his new self-funded TV experiment is “like laundering podcast money.”

Dubner told Semafor that he and his team have already recorded several live-to-tape episodes of a new Freakonomics television show that the team plans on shopping to streamers. He also explained how he accidentally got sucked into the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni gossip vortex (Candace Owens was involved), made the case for prediction markets over pundits, and revealed why he’s now considering buying a pizza place with a Michelin-starred chef.

Will the populists get bored of Davos?

The people having the most fun in Davos have, for years, been the populists who deliver showy denunciations of globalism in the lion’s den. It’s a strategy familiar to Donald Trump, Javier Milei, and the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, as well as the far-right YouTubers who’ve gleefully chased business leaders and politicians down the ski resort’s claustrophobic Promenade.

But as big business and the World Economic Forum have backed off their commitments to issues like fighting climate change and diversifying their workplaces, this year’s gathering seemed to put even those enterprising creators off their game.

“It was more fun when we were the opposition,” a far-right British YouTuber, Callum Smiles, reflected to Ben Smith as he staked out globalists on the Promenade. Later, Ben asked Avi Yemini, with the right-wing Canadian outlet Rebel News, about the problem. He denied he’d gotten bored, though he did reflect that he’d had to shift his focus from climate change, on which he believes his side has won, to AI. Meanwhile, special envoy Steve Witkoff found himself on the run from an independent journalist asking whether he had any business in Russia.

CBS News’ ratings battle

The newly relaunched CBS Evening News so far hasn’t found its footing with viewers, a fact that some of the network’s rivals have been quick to point out to media reporters behind the scenes. New anchor Tony Dokoupil’s second-week viewership averaged 4.2 million viewers, with 582,000 in the key 25-54 demographic — a drop of 20% in both categories from 2025. The show is headed towards what could be its lowest rated January since 2000, as the show has been eclipsed by its evening news rivals and even a cable news show, Fox’s Special Report with Bret Baier.

CBS has scrambled to find any positive viewership metrics to point out, and last week, the network got a few: 6.4 million viewers tuned in for Monday night’s broadcast of CBS Evening News, a jump from an average of 4.2 million last week, representing the newscast’s highest-rated day since 2021. (Some of those viewers may have been habitual NBC-watchers, given that NBC did not air its nightly news that day.) The network also noted the show had slightly improved over its first week, and other observers noted that NBC Nightly News, too, is on pace for its lowest-rated January since at least 2000.

Spinning Dokoupil’s lackluster ratings has been one of just several public relations fights CBS News editor Bari Weiss and her new leadership team have been waging in recent days. There’s also the ongoing rebellion within 60 Minutes over Weiss’ editorial decisions and presence. Allies of the editor have leaked to the New York Post suggestions that some notable 60 Minutes journalists, including Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley, are on thin ice and may not see their contracts renewed.

Still, Weiss and her team are hoping to define at least some of the media narrative on her own terms: Weiss’ long-awaited vision for CBS News has been finalized and is expected to be introduced to staff in the coming days, potentially as soon as this week.

How to stop the slop?

AI slop — the low-quality, occasionally nonsensical content mass-produced and posted to farm engagement — is creating headaches for some of the leaders of the most popular media platforms. In a note this week, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said the rise of AI has “raised concerns about low-quality content, aka ‘AI slop,’” that the platform was aggressively trying to keep from overwhelming its platform.

“As an open platform, we allow for a broad range of free expression while ensuring YouTube remains a place where people feel good spending their time… But with this openness comes a responsibility to maintain the high quality viewing experience that people want. To reduce the spread of low quality AI content, we’re actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combatting spam and clickbait, and reducing the spread of low quality, repetitive content.”

The question of what to do about AI-generated content has also proved tricky for Instagram. Speaking with Semafor last year, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company was working hard to identify AI-generated content at scale, but the company’s systems were not “as good at ranking it as we should be.” He said Instagram was caught in an “arms race” with AI that is harder to detect. Still, he said that Instagram’s problem was with low-quality content in general, whether human-made or AI-generated.

“I think there’s going to be more content that is hybrid, [where] AI is used to augment or enhance in some way,” he said. “There’s tons of ways that AI can help creators make more content or make better content… In any kind of content, AI or not, there’s going to be slop and non-slop. There’s an important question, which is: Are [we] doing a good job connecting you to the content that you would find valuable or interesting?”

Marketing ‘Melania’

The marketing blitz for Brett Ratner’s Melania Trump documentary is underway. The White House screened the film privately on Saturday for a scattershot assemblage of VIPs, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, boxer Mike Tyson, and the queen of Jordan, The Hollywood Reporter scooped. Included with admission: “glossy, commemorative black and white popcorn boxes for guests, served by gloved waiters so they won’t get fingerprints on them.”

Amazon, which is behind the film, apparently shelled out for an ad on the 366-foot-tall Vegas Sphere, along with billboards and posters around the world — part of a marketing budget totaling $35 million, per Puck’s Matt Belloni. There will be 21 invite-only screenings ahead of the film’s theatrical release on Friday, per CNN; unclear how long Ratner will need to wait before he can pivot to his next project.

• Fox Business has been whittling down its independent digital staff and tweaking its website to include more on general stories from Fox News staffers. The business brand, which as of three years ago had its own team of six reporters, four editors, and a production assistant, now operates largely with reporters shared with Fox News’ breaking news team. In recent months, Fox Business has begun to populate the site with business-focused stories written mostly by Fox News’ digital breaking news staff.
• As the winter storm approached Saturday night, the Weather Channel ran taped segments starting around 6 pm ET. Other cable news channels and Fox Weather stayed live on the storm.
• Last week, a lot of people on X learned who Clavicular was, after the looksmaxxing content creator went viral for dancing on camera while the Ye song Heil Hitler played at a Miami nightclub and in a prom-style party bus. (Clavicular was joined by Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and some other lesser-known content creators who traffic in slurs, stereotypes, and other content largely designed to shock normal people.) The 20-year-old streamer, who recently engaged a communications firm to handle PR, has quickly become the subject of mainstream media fascination; journalists at The New York Times and several other outlets are working on profiles of him.
• Late last year, we wrote about how ICE and the Department of Homeland Security were taking their cues from right-wing YouTubers — including Nick Shirley, who we noted was, until recently, an amateur vlogger making elaborate prank videos with high school buddies. Now Shirley is at the center of the unfolding immigration story in Minnesota, having posted a widely-seen YouTube video depicting supposed fraud at daycares (he’s also feuding with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan).
• Late night television ratings are dwindling, but clips from the shows and original web-only content are finding huge audiences on TikTok and YouTube.