Mediaite One Sheet: Brendan Carr’s Victory Lap, Royal Arrest, CBS Chaos and More!

The Big Picture

The FCC’s Brendan Carr held a press conference Wednesday to declare himself the victim — and the media class spent the day arguing about whether he was right. The aftermath of the Colbert/CBS standoff produced more heat than the original incident, with Carr calling the coverage a “hoax” while Poynter, CNN, and Barrett Media all drew wildly different lessons from the same week. Over at CBS, the Norah O’Donnell-back-to-mornings rumor mill started spinning just as the network was still processing Anderson Cooper’s exit. Warner Bros. Discovery gave Paramount until Monday to make its best and final offer. And this morning, British authorities arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly known as Prince) on suspicion of misconduct in public office — on his 66th birthday, no less. Happy Birthday?

Today’s sources: Status | Poynter | CNN’s Reliable Sources | Barrett Media | The Desk | Puck | Page Six Hollywood | The Ankler | Politico Playbook | Yashar Ali | Tubefilter | Simon Owens | Press Watch | Charlie Sykes | Newsbusters | Nieman Lab

Top Story

SHOCKER: BRENDAN CARR CLAIMS VICTORY — DID MEDIA HELP HIM?

By Wednesday morning, the Colbert/CBS/FCC story had entered its messy second act — the part where everyone involved tried to spin what had just happened and the newsletter class sorted itself into predictable camps.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr led off. At a press conference following the agency’s open meeting, he accused the press of running a “hoax” on the American people, said the public had more trust in “gas station sushi” than in national media, and told reporters they “should feel a bit ashamed for having been lied to.” Barrett Media dutifully carried Carr’s argument verbatim: Colbert had lied, CBS’s statement proved it, and the media fell for a Democratic candidate’s manipulation. Carr also confirmed — and The Desk had it first — that the FCC has formally started enforcement proceedings against ABC over The View’s interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico. The Desk separately reported that FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the panel’s lone Democrat, used the same press conference to call for a full commission vote on Nexstar’s proposed $6 billion acquisition of TEGNA, arguing it blows past the agency’s 39% ownership cap. One press conference. Two significant regulatory moves. One very busy FCC news day.

The newsletter class, meanwhile, was sorting the week’s events into competing frames. CNN Reliable Sources‘ Brian Stelter held firm: the FCC’s enforcement powers are “limited,” amounting to “almost all bark, no bite,” and the real story is that Carr is “wielding what power the FCC does have in new and laughable ways,” as First Amendment attorney Bob Corn-Revere put it to Stelter — “making himself the poster boy for big government putting its thumb on the scale of political debate.” Stelter also noted the delicious irony that Sean Hannity, who once railed against the Fairness Doctrine as government speech policing, conspicuously declined to bring up the Colbert/Talarico equal time situation on his show Wednesday night.

Poynter’s Tom Jones offered the sharpest framing of the day, borrowing a line from Don Lemon — currently facing his own legal ordeal after being arrested at a Minnesota church protest — that Stelter had surfaced on CNN: “The process is the punishment.” Jones’s point: it doesn’t matter how the FCC fight ultimately ends. The hassle itself is the weapon. CBS having to spend weeks managing regulatory anxiety, Colbert having to navigate a war with his own network during his final months on air, ABC having to lawyer up over a View segment — that drain is the point. Trump, Jones noted, seems to understand this perfectly. It’s why some networks settle suits they’d likely win. It’s why CBS, according to Colbert, didn’t air the interview in the first place.

Newsbusters, characteristically, arrived from a different direction entirely. The conservative media watchdog has been documenting what it calls a striking partisan imbalance in late-night bookings — finding that recent guest lineups include virtually no Republican candidates, something the newsletter class largely ignored while constructing its censorship narrative. Politico Playbook briefly acknowledged the booking disparity. Most others treated Carr’s equal time argument as facially absurd rather than as a regulatory question with any legitimate dimension. Newsbusters also noted that Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC spent part of Tuesday’s Last Word demanding Trump’s impeachment over the CBS situation — a framing that, whatever one thinks of the underlying facts, probably isn’t helping anyone think clearly about what the FCC can and cannot actually do.

Meanwhile, CBS chaos continued on a separate track. Poynter’s Jones flagged the ongoing O’Donnell-back-to-mornings chatter, citing the New York Post‘s Alexandra Steigrad: O’Donnell is filling in on CBS Mornings next week as part of a book tour, which the Post promptly parlayed into succession speculation. A source close to CBS threw cold water on the full-time return idea. But the fact that “is Norah coming back?” is a news story at all tells you something about the state of CBS’s bench — and how many moving pieces are now in play simultaneously at a network that, per Puck’s Dylan Byers, just lost the one talent Bari Weiss most wanted to keep.

TAKEAWAY: Carr got exactly what he wanted: a week of earned media, a chilling effect on at least one major network, and a press conference where he got to call the press dishonest. The newsletter class spent Wednesday arguing about whether he was right — which means he won that round too.

Three Takes

NETFLIX VS. PARAMOUNT ENTER THE WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY THUNDERDOME

Warner Bros. Discovery gave Paramount Skydance until Monday, February 23 to submit a best-and-final offer — reopening talks that most of the industry assumed were closed. The question now is whether David Ellison will actually go high enough to matter.

The Ankler, Sean McNulty: McNulty was the most entertainingly blunt about the situation. Paramount has unofficially signaled $31 a share but won’t say so publicly, still publicly maintaining its $30 offer is superior. McNulty’s verdict: “Hey, just an idea — how about you just say what you’re f’ing going to pay for the company already?” But he spent more time on what nobody is discussing — Paramount’s debt load. A $30-a-share deal already puts the combined company at roughly 7x leverage, according to Netflix’s own math. Go higher, McNulty argues, and you’re looking at a financial structure that makes WBD’s post-merger debt crisis look manageable by comparison. “If you thought the 2023 PAR, DISNEY and WBD layoffs were bad, 2027 WARNAMOUNT is gonna make your head spin.”

Puck, Dylan Byers: Byers framed the WBD re-engagement as a tactical move by Zaslav to neutralize accusations that the board wasn’t seeking the best deal for shareholders. By briefly reopening talks, WBD can argue it made good-faith efforts — while still likely ending up with Netflix. Byers also noted that the CNN parent being acquired by whoever wins WBD adds another layer to the CBS/Bari psychodrama: if the Ellisons ultimately get WBD, Bari Weiss could conceivably end up running CNN. “Provided she’s still in the job,” Byers dryly noted.

Status, Natalie Korach: Status focused on the theater community’s anxiety about a Netflix win. Cinemark chief Sean Gamble said on his company’s earnings call that he remains “a bit apprehensive” about Netflix’s promises to maintain theatrical windows at Warners, saying he’d need “more action” and “firmer assurances” before accepting Sarandos’s commitments as more than talk. Meanwhile, Sarandos appeared on Matt Belloni’s podcast — as reported by Status — and said Netflix isn’t buying WBD “to destroy that value.” The theater owners aren’t buying it.

TAKEAWAY: The Monday deadline is either the end of this saga or the beginning of another week of it. Either way, the people most nervous aren’t the bankers — they’re the ones who run movie theaters.

📰 Top Reads 📰

The Reset, Yashar Ali
🚨 PRINCE ANDREW ARRESTED AT SANDRINGHAM ON EPSTEIN-LINKED CHARGES: British authorities arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor — formerly Prince Andrew — on his 66th birthday at the royal family’s Sandringham estate on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The allegation: that he shared confidential UK government material, including sensitive trip reports from official overseas visits, with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a UK trade envoy. Ali noted that a senior royal has not been arrested by British authorities in hundreds of years. Andrew remains eighth in line to the throne. King Charles released a statement saying “the law must take its course” and pledging full cooperation with authorities. … QUOTE (Ali): “That law enforcement officers went onto Sandringham — the royal family’s private estate — on his 66th birthday to carry this out is stunning.” … QUICK TAKE: The Epstein story just became a constitutional crisis in Britain. The American newsletter class, which spent the week arguing about Stephen Colbert, will need to recalibrate.

Status, Natalie Korach
TODAY SHOW‘S UNCERTAIN TOMORROW: As NBC rallies around Savannah Guthrie during the ongoing disappearance of her mother Nancy, Status spoke with half a dozen television news veterans who say the network will eventually have to confront an uncomfortable question: what happens to the franchise if Guthrie doesn’t come back? Multiple executives told Status there is “not a natural in-house successor” to Guthrie, who has hosted TODAY since 2012. One veteran executive said flatly they couldn’t imagine Guthrie returning to her high-profile anchor role given how publicly the tragedy has unfolded. Hoda Kotb has returned in Guthrie’s absence but is described by multiple sources as a “band-aid” rather than a long-term answer. Other names floated: Craig Melvin, Willie Geist, Laura Jarrett. … QUOTE (Veteran TV executive): “Savannah was always the glue on that show, and without that, this whole paradigm of our morning anchor team as a family, that connective tissue has just been ripped out.” … QUICK TAKE: TODAY generates hundreds of millions in advertising revenue annually. The longer NBC waits to have this conversation, the harder it gets.

The Desk, Matthew Keys
🚨 SCOOP — FCC FORMALLY OPENS ENFORCEMENT ACTION AGAINST ABC’S THE VIEW: FCC Chairman Brendan Carr confirmed Wednesday that the agency has started formal enforcement proceedings against ABC in connection with James Talarico’s appearance on The View last month. CNN Reliable Sources’ Brian Stelter separately confirmed that a letter of inquiry — the FCC’s first step in assessing whether a violation has occurred — was sent to ABC weeks ago. ABC has not commented publicly but a network source told Stelter the program “regularly hosts sitting leaders and political candidates to discuss differing viewpoints.” … QUOTE: Carr said the agency has “started enforcement proceedings” against ABC in connection with the Talarico interview…. QUICK TAKE: ABC has notably not flinched the way CBS did — insulating its talent from the pressure entirely. That contrast is going to become a bigger part of this story.

Poynter, Tom Jones
LEAVITT’S TRUTH SOCIAL CONTRADICTION: During Wednesday’s White House briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Truth Social posts should be taken as official administration policy — “coming straight from the horse’s mouth.” One week earlier, White House officials blamed a Truth Social post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on a staffer, with Trump claiming he hadn’t seen it. Poynter’s Tom Jones flagged the contradiction without much editorializing. He didn’t need to. … QUOTE (Leavitt): “When you see it on Truth Social, you know it’s directly from President Trump.” … QUICK TAKE: Official policy when convenient. A staffer’s mistake when not. The press corps has now been told both things in the same week.

Status, Natalie Korach
🚨 SCOOP — BARI WEISS PULLS OUT OF UCLA LECTURE: Weeks after UCLA announced that Bari Weiss would deliver the prestigious Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture on “the future of journalism,” the university’s event page abruptly listed the lecture as cancelled — fueling speculation that UCLA had reversed course under pressure. Status has learned from two people familiar with the matter that it was Weiss’s team that pulled out, citing a scheduling conflict. A new date will be announced soon. … QUOTE: One person familiar with the matter confirmed Weiss had a scheduling conflict and that a new date will be announced…. QUICK TAKE: The timing — mid-CBS chaos, post-Anderson Cooper exit — ensured this story got a much more loaded reading than a simple scheduling conflict warranted.

Nieman Lab, Marina Adami
AI GHOST BYLINES ARE NOW A DOCUMENTED PROBLEM: A Reuters Institute report surfaced two cases of fully fabricated AI-generated freelance identities — “Margaux Blanchard” and “Victoria Goldiee” — whose work was published in major outlets including Business Insider and Wired before editors grew suspicious. The Local‘s executive editor Nicholas Hune-Brown, who uncovered the Goldiee fraud, found that quoted experts either didn’t remember speaking with her or didn’t exist at all. His publication now requires annotated drafts as proof of original work. One legitimate freelancer told Nieman Lab he offers editors access to his Google Docs version histories for the same reason. … QUOTE (Chris Sutcliffe, freelance journalist): “Just offering proof of original work appears to be a selling point for freelance journalism.” … QUICK TAKE: When demonstrating that you wrote something becomes a competitive advantage, the industry has a trust problem that no individual byline policy can fix.

Media Newsletter, Simon Owens
MS NOW INKS CROOKED MEDIA DEAL — THE PAT McAFEE EFFECT IN ACTION: MS NOW and Crooked Media have struck a deal to bring Pod Save America and other Crooked shows to linear television in a Saturday 9 p.m. compilation format, as reported by the Hollywood Reporter and flagged by Simon Owens. Owens’s framing: this is the Pat McAfee model spreading. Legacy broadcast companies are recruiting from the podcast space because video podcasts arrive with proven audiences already attached. … QUOTE (Owens): “We’re going to see legacy broadcast companies recruit more and more from the podcast space.” … QUICK TAKE: The newsletter class spent the week eulogizing Anderson Cooper’s exit from CBS while the next generation of CBS talent is currently recording into a camera in their bedroom.

CNN Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter
BERKSHIRE TAKES A $350M POSITION IN THE NEW YORK TIMES:  Citing The Hollywood Reporter and The Wall Street Journal, Stelter amplified Berkshire Hathaway taking a substantial position in the New York Times Company, valued at more than $350 million, according to THR. The Wall Street Journal’s Krystal Hur reported the move, which represents a significant vote of confidence in the Times’ subscription-driven business model from Warren Buffett’s firm. … QUOTE: Berkshire has taken “a substantial position in The New York Times, valued at more than $350 million,” per THR … QUICK TAKE: Buffett has spent decades saying he’d never buy a newspaper. Apparently he’ll buy the company that owns one.

Politico Playbook, Jack Blanchard
POLK AWARDS HONOR 60 MINUTES AMID CBS CHAOS: The George Polk Awards were announced Wednesday, with the NYT taking three and ProPublica picking up two. Notably, a 60 Minutes team — Cecilia Vega, Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Andy Court and Annabelle Hanflig — won the national television reporting award for their segment covering the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador. The award lands as the show is losing correspondents and fighting for its editorial identity. … QUOTE: Other Polk winners included reporting from ProPublica/The New Yorker on OMB Director Russ Vought, The Atlantic on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the Boston Globe on Rumeysa Öztürk’s detention … QUICK TAKE: 60 Minutes wins a Polk while its staff wonders who’s leaving next. The journalism is still there. Whether the institution protecting it will be is the open question.

🎬 SHOWBIZ 🎬

Page Six Hollywood, Tatiana Siegel & Peter Kiefer
KATZENBERG IS THE NEW VILLAIN IN THE WASSERMAN SAGA: As Casey Wasserman remains dug in despite LA Mayor Karen Bass calling for him to step down from his LA28 Olympic role, Page Six Hollywood reports that several board members have turned their frustration on Jeffrey Katzenberg — who rallied the board to protect Wasserman after the Epstein Files dropped, then watched the board get blindsided when Wasserman announced he was selling his agency two days later. “He was the one who rallied everybody to protect Casey,” one insider told the outlet. Sources describe this as “strike three” for Katzenberg, following his Biden campaign co-chair tenure and his backing of Bass over Rick Caruso in the mayoral race. Potential Wasserman replacements now being discussed include Bob Iger, Eric Garcetti, Kevin McCarthy and — in what sources describe as a “wild rumor” — Donald Trump Jr. … QUOTE (source familiar with board machinations): “How could you possibly say that you’re a distraction to music people but not to the Olympics?” … QUICK TAKE: Katzenberg has now attached himself to three high-profile situations that went sideways in succession. In Hollywood, that’s not bad luck. That’s a pattern.

Media Newsletter, Simon Owens
APPLE’S VIDEO PODCAST PUSH IS TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: Apple is launching a beta feature allowing users to toggle between audio and video versions of podcasts, partnering with Acast and SiriusXM and encouraging independent creators to produce video alongside audio. Owens’s verdict: it won’t be enough. Both Spotify and YouTube benefit from deep user lock-in because billions already open those apps for non-podcast content. Apple Podcasts is largely confined to Apple devices and offers nothing else. Owens argues that Apple has spent at least a decade failing to prioritize podcasts while taking its early lead for granted — and now risks falling even further behind. … QUOTE (Owens): “Apple appears poised to fall even further behind.” … QUICK TAKE: Being first to invent the format and last to take it seriously is a remarkable thing to pull off.

CNN Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter, citing Variety
SPRINGSTEEN ANNOUNCES “NO KINGS” ARENA TOUR: Bruce Springsteen announced a politically themed spring arena tour called “No Kings” — described in the announcement, per Variety via CNN Reliable Sources, as being “in celebration and in defense of America.” The tour starts in Minneapolis and ends in Washington, D.C. … QUOTE: The tour is “in celebration and in defense of America,” per the announcement via Variety … QUICK TAKE: When the tour routing is the message, you don’t need to say anything else.

👀 What Got Missed? 👀

Two newsletters hammered it all week. Almost nobody else touched it.

The newsletter class built a clean, censorship narrative around the Colbert/CBS/FCC story — and, in doing so, largely ignored the data point that complicates it most. Newsbusters has documented that late-night shows have not booked a Republican candidate since 2016. Politico Playbook nodded at the booking disparity. Everyone else treated Carr’s equal-time argument as too absurd to take seriously.

That’s not a defense of Carr’s tactics, which are transparently political and selectively applied. But a media class that waves away the underlying regulatory question without examining it is doing the same thing it accuses Carr of doing — starting with a conclusion and working backward. The censorship narrative is mostly right. It’s also conveniently incomplete. And the chattering class, which prides itself on nuance, didn’t seem particularly interested in the parts that didn’t fit.

 

🏆 Newsletter of the Day 🏆

The Desk, Matthew Keys — On a day when most of the newsletter class was content to react to the Colbert/CBS drama, Keys showed up with two original scoops from the same FCC press conference: the formal confirmation of enforcement proceedings against ABC over The View, and the lone Democratic commissioner’s call for a full panel vote on Nexstar’s $6 billion TEGNA acquisition. Neither story was on anyone else’s radar. Both moved the regulatory story forward in concrete, newsworthy ways. That’s the job — and Keys did it twice before lunch.

The Bottom Line

The former Prince Andrew was arrested this morning. Not for the things most people assumed would eventually land him in legal jeopardy — but for sharing confidential government documents with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a UK trade envoy. British authorities went onto Sandringham on his birthday to do it.

Here is what’s worth sitting with: the Epstein story has been in the American media bloodstream for months. Status documented this week, citing Media Matters research, that Fox News mentioned “Epstein” only 239 times in the two weeks since the files dropped, while MSNBC mentioned him 3,321 times. The coverage has been asymmetric, tribal, and in many corners shallow — more interested in which political figures the files implicated than in what the files revealed about how powerful men protect each other across institutions.

Andrew’s arrest is a reminder that the story has always been about institutions. Not just Epstein’s island or his client list — but the palace, the agency, the board, the campaign. The people who knew, vouched, and looked away. The newsletter class spent this week on CBS’s institutional failures, on WBD’s institutional maneuvering, on the FCC as an instrument of institutional pressure. The Epstein story is all of those things, scaled up, with a member of the British royal family now in custody.

The question isn’t whether American media will cover Andrew’s arrest. It will, voluminously. The question is whether it will cover what the arrest represents — or just the arrest.