Is a Thirst for Violence the Point Behind Pete Hegseth’s Public Execution Plan?

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TOP STORY

IS VIOLENCE THE POINT?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth intends to make the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of premeditated murder in 2013 after he opened fire at Fort Hood and killed 13 service members (and wounded another 32), a public affair. No one disputes Hasan’s crime was heinous, but Hegseth’s decision to apparently livestream Hasan’s Dec. 3 death by firing squad caught the attention of the stack today.

Responses largely fall on partisan lines, an interesting tell. Whereas the president’s media ban seemed to unite networks and writers across the spectrum, the prospect of a public unaliving has cast a harsh light on their differences.

THREE TAKES

Townhall, Amy Curtis — Hegseth’s plan is an example of “the warrior ethos” he has “brought back to the military,” Curtis wrote. The Defense Secretary has banished “the ‘workplace violence’ worldview” and “the rules of engagement that hamper our troops and bolster our enemies.” She added, “This is what we need: the mentality that when you fight a war, you win. When your enemies move, you stand up to them.” But Curtis didn’t stop there, saying such a spectacle is “needed,” and “This is patriotism and leadership in action.” Townhall also included an editor’s note that read, “Thanks to President Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership, the warrior ethos is coming back to America’s military.”

CNN’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter — Violence is the “throughline,” Stelter wrote today. He offered plenty of examples: the president has urged Minnesotans to “fight back” against “Somali Immigrants” who have “taken over.” ICE is defending the decision to shoot a man while his 5-year-old son was in the car. And Hegseth, who “initially teased this public execution plan during an appearance with Jack Posobiec on the far-right Real America’s Voice,” is now mirroring “the U.S. military’s traditional description of ISIS propaganda: broadcast killings designed to send a message, strike fear and create a social media spectacle,” as The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell noted. “Violence is the throughline of those three stories, and so is fear,” Stelter concluded.

The Bulwark’s Morning Shots, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger — A “familiar feature of fascism is the transformation of politics into spectacle,” wrote Kristol today. “Fascism wants to reduce active citizens to passive observers, indeed into voyeurs — especially voyeurs of cruelty and death. Such degradation of a democratic public is key to fascism’s project and to its success.” And Hegseth’s rationale that, “People need to understand there are serious consequences for these type of things” is “ludicrous,” he added. “Would the American people fail to understand that the death penalty has been carried out if the execution of the criminal weren’t live-streamed?” The answer is no: “The reason this is happening is that the Trump administration wants to join regimes like Iran and Afghanistan in making public executions spectacles.”

TAKEAWAY: The last known public execution in the United States was the 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea, a 26-year-old Black man who allegedly confessed to raping and killing Lischia Edwards, a 70-year-old white woman who had hired Bethea to work in her home. Twenty thousand people showed up to watch Bethea’s execution at a time when such an event offered the kind of spectacle we can now experience by simply opening up TikTok or Instagram on our phones. The question remains: Is the Trump administration running out of ways to shock and awe the rest of us because their old methods aren’t working, or is this really how Hegseth thinks the United States should operate?

📰 TOP SCOOPS & ANALYSIS 📰

SCOOP Page Six, Lucas Widman — Dianna Russini will return to reporting on the NFL, Widman wrote. She has also hired “veteran crisis publicist” Melissa Nathan to help her make that happen. Russini lost her job at The Athletic after she became embroiled in an alleged cheating scandal with New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel (who still has his job).

SCOOP Punchbowl News AM, Max Cohen — The race for Iowa’s 2nd district is shaping up to be a feisty one, Cohen wrote, but the region may not experience a blue tsunami like other parts of the state are cautiously expected to. But the threat to Joe Mitchell is strong enough that Speaker Mike Johnson is headed to the state to campaign. “Compared to the state’s swingier 1st and 3rd Districts — represented by [Rep. Marianette] Miller-Meeks and Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa) — the 2nd is more of a reach opportunity for Democrats,” wrote Cohen. “But given how bullish Democrats are about statewide candidates Rob Sand and Josh Turek, many in the party believe Democrat Lindsay James has a shot to defeat Mitchell.”

SCOOP POLITICO Playbook, Dasha Burns, Will Steakin, and Adam Wren — Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) is experiencing the tug-of-war between Democrats, Republicans, and Black voters in Florida firsthand, Playbook wrote today. His race is “tougher than expected,” and that’s “why Donalds is making a direct appeal to Black Floridians in a new 30-second ad, shared exclusively with POLITICO, touting Donalds’ roots as a child of a single mother and his support for HBCU Florida A&M University.” Donalds also told Playbook, “I think their votes have been taken for granted by the Democrat Party for a long, long time.”

SCOOP Status, Oliver Darcy — David Ellison spent Thursday on a tour of the “sprawling Hudson Yards offices they had just inherited from Warner Bros. Discovery.” But, Darcy added, “the visit was about far more than surveying the shiny new real estate now under their control after Skydance’s blockbuster acquisition of the media conglomerate.” A person with knowledge of the visit more directly told Darcy, “This was about seeing CNN.” Ellison and his leadership team visited at the behest of Mark Thompson for a meeting that “centered on CNN’s nascent digital subscription business, with Thompson and his team walking Ellison and his executives through the recently launched streaming service, online paywall, and broader strategy.”

SCOOP Status, Oliver Darcy — Darcy gets back-to-back features today for his reporting on another curious story: ABC News has “remained conspicuously silent Thursday, more than 24 hours after making the stunning decision to outright delete a story from its website linking federal contracts awarded to companies with investments made by Donald Trump’s children.” (Brian Stelter also tweeted today he’s been told “the article was ‘published prematurely.’”) Removing the story is a “terrible look” for the network, especially since it had already been widely shared. Darcy added, “Regardless of what prompted the deletion, I’m told the debacle has ignited a firestorm behind the scenes at ABC News, where significant hand-wringing is underway over how the story made it onto the website in the first place — and who should ultimately shoulder the blame.”

ANALYSIS The Poynter Report, Tom Jones — Trump’s battle with the press will continue now that Judge Timothy J. Kelly has extended his original restraining order that required the president to allow CNN, MS NOW, and Politico back into the White House. Kelly “remains focused on if the media’s Fifth Amendment rights of due process were violated” and told the government, “That’s probably the biggest hurdle you all have.” But he also “appears to be skeptical of the administration’s claims that the outlets’ coverage posed a threat to national security.”

ANALYSIS The Washington Sun, Evan McMorris-Santoro, Jasmine Wright, and Manuela Silva — A “truly astounding debate” was held in Michigan on Thursday night between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who each “landed hits” and “struggled a bit.” El-Sayed “refused to answer” when asked if Iran or Israel is the biggest threat to the United States, and Rogers “tried to create distance with the president on tariffs and the Iran war but ended up saying a lot of supportive things about both.”

ANALYSIS Morning Brew, Brendan Cosgrove, Matty Merritt, Molly Liebergall, Dave Lozo, Adam Epstein, Neal Freyman, Holly Van Leuven — Hollywood is taking on Big Tech, wrote Cosgrove. The Social Reckoning is one such offering. The movie spans 2019-2021, “which, if you’re keeping track, takes place before Zuck cosplayed as Benson Boone. During that time, the company was riding high atop the algorithmic tiger of engagement and extremism, until a whistleblower helped land Zuck in front of Congress.” The new CBS drama Cupertino is also “meeting fans where they are: According to a recent CNBC/Generation Labs poll, Americans aged 18 to 34 overwhelmingly distrust some of Big Tech’s biggest names to act responsibly on AI.”

📈BUSINESS OF MEDIA 🎥

Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter, Simon Owens — ABC News is the latest to join the likes of ESPN, Netflix, and The New York Times in adding a TikTok-style vertical video feed to its mobile app. The obvious goal here is to to capture mobile user engagement and squeeze more value out of social video content. QUOTE  “I had assumed that these vertical feeds were simply the latest shiny object that media companies were chasing — they tend to move in packs — but this provides at least some evidence that the habits mobile users have formed by scrolling through TikTok and Instagram Reels transfer to other non-social apps as well.”

ADWEEK Daily, Ryan Joe — Following the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery into Skydance (did you hear, by chance?), Roku ad sales veteran Jay Askinasi was named chief revenue officer of advertising for the combined company. QUOTE  “Just two years ago, he stepped into the ad sales role at Roku vacated by Alison Levin when she left for NBCU…”

Awful Announcing’s The A Block, Drew Lerner — Colin Cowherd’s podcast network The Volume expanded its audio portfolio by acquiring the ad sales, production, and distribution rights for Erin Andrews and Charissa Thompson’s Calm Down podcast. QUOTE  “[T]he company hopes [this] will further their outreach to female listeners.”

Status, Oliver Darcy — The Washington Post named former NBC News and Yahoo executive Alex Wallace as its new chief operating officer, filling a key executive post under owner Jeff Bezos and chief executive Jeff D’Onofrio.

Breaker, Lachlan Cartwright — An editor exodus is hitting The Wall Street Journal‘s Business, Finance, and Economics desk, with five senior editors departing in recent months for new roles across CNBC, Financial Times, Axios, Apollo, and private investment firms. QUOTE  “A Dow Jones spokesperson declined to comment.”

Barrett Media’s Morning Edition, John Lund — Disney announced that Super Bowl LXI in February 2027 will stream live on Disney+ alongside its broadcast coverage on ABC and ESPN. This is fueling industry discussion over major sports properties expanding onto subscription streaming platforms. QUOTE  “Mickey Mouse is getting the Super Bowl this season, and somewhere NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is probably wondering how much he can charge Goofy for a sideline pass.”

OTHER COOL STUFF

ADWEEK Daily — Bacardí and AMC Global Media resurrected the iconic Crypt Keeper, going as far as to bring back original voice actor John Kassir, reimagining the 1990s horror legend as a cocktail-loving DJ for a new Halloween campaign.

CNN’s Reliable Sources — Fox Nation is launching a three-part docuseries that relies entirely on AI-generated imagery and 400 licensed archival photos to reanimate legendary illusionist Harry Houdini.

Breaker — BBC Director-General Matt Brittin urged network staff to “be more Elvis” — specifically “A little less conversation, a little more action” — when laying out his master plan for the broadcaster’s future. Leave it to a British company to show reverence to The King.

👀 WHAT GOT MISSED? 👀

The Washington Sun, Evan McMorris-Santoro, Jasmine Wright, and Manuela Silva — After assurances that the president’s Freedom 250 events this summer were being paid for by private donors, “Documents released by a watchdog group yesterday suggest that despite Trump’s promise to fund the nation’s semiquincentennial events through private donations, taxpayers largely footed the bill for the White House’s celebrations.” Now there are plenty of “open questions about where tens of millions in private donations ended up.”

🏆 NEWSLETTER OF THE DAY 🏆

Noahpinion, Noah Smith — Smith mourned the “culture of my youth” today, and since 2010, he continued, “mass culture was replaced by meme culture.” He continued: “Social media feeds — Twitter and the Facebook wall — turned American society into a sort of digital hive mind. Feeling yourself being absorbed into that great unified consciousness could be an agonizing experience — mobs constantly punished any deviation from conformity, quirky unique subcultures were devoured and metabolized, everyone was forced into a cell with people they had spent their lives trying to escape.”

Smith’s entire newsletter is devoted to exploring the question of what culture is now, and if it matters that everything has changed. “The next time you look at the night sky, you should wonder if instead of star empires and unearthly paradises, it’s simply a vast graveyard of short-form video fans,” he concluded. “Such an outcome would be much gentler, but hardly less cataclysmic, than the end of Revelation.”

This newsletter was produced by Lindsey Ellefson.