“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles—it’s big fat bribe,” he said. - The New Yorker
“A report by Ofcom warns that UK-focused programming made by the British public service broadcasters (PSBs) – the BBC, ITV and Channels 4 and 5 – is under threat and there is a ‘strong case’ for legislation to make sure it is easy to find on third-party platforms,” notably YouTube. - The Guardian
“Donald Trump sued Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters on Friday over an explosive report that the president wrote a 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein that contained suggestive language. Trump claims the Wall Street Journal and its journalists defamed him.” - Variety
Resistance from Murkowski and other lawmakers from rural states exposed an uncomfortable truth about federal funding for public media stations: Rural stations — often in red states — depend heavily on federal funding to survive, unlike stations in larger markets that can better tap donations from listeners with money to spare. - Washington Post
Neil Postman, who died in 2003, predicted that America wasn’t trending toward existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s “1984,” but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that instead resembled Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Postman was right. - Washington Post
When AI is generating all the scripts, performances, music and visual design, and there are no more creative humans whose work the machines can ingest and regurgitate, we may start to wonder why cinema is so homogenous and cold. - Unherd
The studio is now among the most popular A.I.-powered artists on the internet for its roster of subversive videos released on YouTube and then circulated rapidly across social media, which are made entirely by A.I. tools. It said its revenue crossed $1 million last year for its commercial projects. - The New York Times
Money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting accounts for about 5% of KUOW’s revenue — $1 million — and funds infrastructure like satellite interconnection and emergency alert systems. The additional $400,000-plus raised on Friday will be used to maintain the station’s satellite distribution system. - Seattle Times
People now watch YouTube on TV sets more than on their phones or any other device—an average of more than one billion hours each day. That is more viewing than Disney gets from its broadcast network, dozen-plus cable channels and three streaming services combined. - The Wall Street Journal
Trump had campaigned on retribution and made the news media a core element of his grievance. Public broadcasting has offered a ready target, given the government funding, and he has repeatedly claimed NPR and PBS demonstrate ideological bias. - NPR
Film director Joe Dante had owned the piece since 1984, when a person was clearing out a section of the Paramount Pictures film lot that had once been owned by RKO, the defunct studio which produced "Citizen Kane." - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
In gaps between jobs, an assortment of artists, coders and labourers played policemen, caterers and journalists. As one of the extras playing a journalist, I could draw on personal experience. - The Observer (UK)
The bill reclaims the entire $1.1 billion previously appropriated for the next two years for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB distributes two-thirds of its funding to over 1,500 local public radio and TV stations, with most of the rest going to NPR and PBS to support national programming. - AP
The cancellation, effective next May, of US late-night TV’s highest-rated program comes as CBS’s corporate parent, Paramount Global, seeks FCC approval of an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media. Colbert has long been a strong and high-profile critic of Donald Trump, including in his monologues on The Late Show. - CNN
