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Tom Homan says "you have your First Amendment rights." WBD says CNN is "not for sale." Nielsen says "Bluey" is #1. And there's more. But first...

Appealing to Jeff Bezos

With widespread layoffs expected at The Washington Post in the coming weeks, teams of reporters are sending impassioned letters to Jeff Bezos, urging him not to shrink the newsroom.

This morning, I obtained a letter from the newspaper's White House reporters. The team of eight banded together to defend the desks facing major cutbacks.

"If the plan, to the extent there is one, is to reorient around politics we wanted to emphasize how much we rely on collaboration with foreign, sports, local — the entire paper, really. And if other sections are diminished, we all are," bureau chief Matt Viser wrote in an internal Slack chat as he shared the letter. (You can read it in full here.)

The letter tries to speak Bezos's language, appealing to him with data and a determination to grow the Post. "Our colleagues' work helps lift up our own," the WH team told him. Here's my full story...

Cutting its way to irrelevance? 

The unusual letters to Bezos — first from international correspondents, then the local desk, now the WH team — have followed several private signals about imminent cuts. Reporters fear that the Post is slashing its way to irrelevance; moreover, they wonder whether Bezos, who bought the publication more than a decade ago, cares about it anymore. Thus, the staffers are going over the head of the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, and trying to get Bezos's attention directly.

The great unknown: Is he reading/listening? An old friend, watching the Post's pleas go unanswered, texted me last night and asked a provocative question: "Is Bezos doing a catch and kill with an entire paper?"

An 'existential meltdown'

That's what Charlotte Klein says the Post is going through. In her latest column for NYMag, Klein quotes a former desk head at the paper saying, "When people were deciding which subscriptions they could live without, the Post was an easy cut. And then Jeff made it a lot easier with his decisions. And now you're left with something that's basically on life support. There's no vision for why it should exist or why I need a subscription to the Post versus another organization."

As someone who grew up reading the Post, and happily pays for an account today, I will gently push back and say that I gain value from my subscription virtually every day. For example, I was going to link to this scoop from Travis M. Andrews lower down in this letter: "Kennedy Center's new programming head resigns days after hire was announced."

The Post is showing its worth every day. But the business headwinds are absolutely brutal. This does feel downright "existential."

IN OTHER NEWS

Barry Diller sought to buy CNN...

CNN is "not for sale," Warner Bros. Discovery reiterated last night, after the WSJ's Jeffrey Trachtenberg and Joe Flint reported that media mogul Barry Diller expressed interest in buying the news network. My sources confirmed that 1) Diller made repeated approaches to WBD and that 2) he remains interested in CNN.

And he's not the only one. Other billionaires and media investors have also explored potential paths to acquire CNN in recent years. But the path is blocked, as I explained in this overnight story for CNN.com. Here's the short version:

 >> CNN is essential to the creation of Discovery Global later this year because it's a cornerstone of the company's lucrative carriage deals with cable and satellite distributors, which also cover channels like TNT and the Food Network. Pull out the CNN piece, and the rest might wobble.

 >> Any such sale would also have undesirable tax consequences for WBD.

 >> And there may be practical political considerations, as well. Diller is a longtime critic of Trump and a prominent Democratic donor — exactly the kind of person Trump doesn't want owning CNN. As one media exec told me last night, an attempted Diller-led takeover of CNN would be a non-starter because "everybody understands that M&A goes through the Oval Office right now."

I emailed Diller for comment and haven't heard back. A rep for his company, IAC, declined to comment.

What it means for Discovery Global

Diller's interest in CNN may be relevant to the ongoing Wall Street debate over Discovery Global's future valuation, since that's the "main battleground" for Paramount's hostile takeover bid, as William Cohan wrote for Puck yesterday.

By the way, I dug up Diller's interview with Fareed Zakaria from last year, in which Zakaria bluntly asked him whether CNN would survive in the streaming age. "Unless idiots truly come to operate it, of course, it will exist," Diller quipped in response. He said CNN is "the only institutional news brand worldwide that I think actually has a future because it is video. It just needs now to figure out a digital kind of footprint for the video."

 >> To that end, CNN touted its progress with All Access in a press release yesterday, saying it has exceeded its "subscription goals for 2025 and is off to a strong start in 2026."

Tom Homan's tone shift

CNN's homepage headline right now: Tom Homan "says he ordered plan for eventual reduction of officers in Minnesota." Here's the latest from his top-of-the-morning presser. 

"The President of the United States called me Monday morning and asked me to deploy here," Homan said. That comment lent credence "to the idea that Trump got the idea from Fox and acted on it," CNN's Aaron Blake pointed out on X.

I wrote about that idea back on Monday, when Fox's Brian Kilmeade repeatedly urged Trump to send Homan. It's on Page One of the NYT this morning: "Worried allies and Fox softened Trump's tone after backlash on ICE."

'You have your First Amendment rights'