Mediaite ONE SHEET: Leavitt’s Bombshell Exit, Paramount-CNN Drama and More!

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TOP STORY

KAROLINE IS OUT

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt will depart at the end of August, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday. Leavitt, who gave birth to her second child in May, only just returned from maternity leave.

Trump said Leavitt is leaving to spend more time with her children and family, but will still be one of his “top outside advisors.”

There are a lot of things to unpack here. Some of it is surface level: At 28, Leavitt was the youngest person to hold the position, and she outlasted quite a few Trump appointees. She was and remains fully bought into Trump’s MAGA ideology and figures to be a sought-after media commodity. And it’ll be interesting to see who the president will replace her with, and how that person handles the White House press corps.

THREE TAKES

The Poynter Report, Tom Jones — Leavitt’s departure was top of mind for Jones’ staff, who took over reporting for him today while he’s out. Leavitt’s one-and-a-half years in the White House were “notable” for plenty of reasons, mostly that she “actually showed up at the podium.” That’s something that should be a basic part of the role, but White House reporters eventually learned they can’t take it for granted under Trump 1.0. (Stephanie Grisham never briefed when she had the gig.) But Leavitt’s tenure was most dominated by her willingness to defend Trump and his White House no matter what, such as when she insisted the president didn’t say Iceland when he meant Greenland this January. There’s no telling who will replace Leavitt, but it’s clear what will be expected of them.

Morning Brew, Abby Rubenstein — Rubenstein explored the personal aspect of Leavitt’s decision, focusing on Leavitt’s role as a mother and how it genuinely  impacted her decision to leave. Rubenstein offered that despite the fact that “leaving a job to spend more time with your family is often code for something salacious in DC,” it seems pretty true in Leavitt’s case. (It surely doesn’t hurt that there’s likely a big-time media gig waiting for her.) Leavitt is hardly the first mother to feel compelled to choose between raising young children at home and being in the workforce, and in Morning Brew’s opinion, that really is a major part of the reason she’s stepping down.

The Bulwark’s Morning Shots, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger — Kristol and Egger didn’t back away from sharing their feelings on Leavitt, who they said “richly earned a reputation as a virtuosic, remorseless spin artist and dissembler on the president’s behalf,” this morning. The pair also identified her decision to leave as a chance for her to hone a second identity as “an icon of work-life balance” and noted wisely: “Trump will find it difficult to track down a replacement with her same combination of easy, cheerful dishonesty and panache.”

TAKEAWAY: There’s something about the “motherhood” of it all that I can’t shake, and it seems like a lot of our newsletter authors can’t, either. Maybe that’s because I’m also a mom who works, but Leavitt’s departure contributes to what feels like a bit of a Handmaid’s Tale feeling, especially in light of this week’s news that women made up 100% of last month’s labor force decline. Noem, Bondi, Gabbard, now Leavitt. For whatever reason, it sometimes seems Trump can’t or won’t keep women in positions of power around him, no?

📰 TOP SCOOPS & ANALYSIS 📰

SCOOP 🍨 Punchbowl News AM, Andrew Desiderio — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has a vision for the future of this nation, and it’s blue. Per Desirderio, “states Trump carried by double digits in 2024 — Ohio, Iowa, Alaska — are suddenly in play” and while speaking to Punchbowl, Schumer identified a fourth state Dems could pick up: Kansas. “Kansas is a good example of why you can’t paint every state with the same brush,” he told Punchbowl in the wake of Adam Hamilton’s primary win. “This guy is a minister, a moderate Methodist. He’s a seasoned politician.” There’s no telling what will happen in The Sunflower State, but that it’s even on the table “how far Senate Democrats have come in a cycle that was supposed to be dreadful for them.”

SCOOP 🍨 POLITICO Playbook, Adam Wren, Dasha Burns, and Will Steakin — The so-called Democratic civil war still persists, but has “ground to a stalemate” at the moment in light of this week’s primaries, which resulted in “a casserole of upper Midwestern states” delivering “a mixed verdict” on the Big Topic: “which ideological direction the party should head.” Former DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel told POLITICO, “We’re the only country where you have to be rich enough to be a socialist. If you’re trying to be a party that recruits people, working class people that go paycheck to paycheck, socialists have been repulsing them.” Progressive candidates, he said, haven’t yet demonstrated “that they can win over the party’s Black voters.” Instead, they’ve proven they most entice “those that are living in the brownstones in Park Slope Brooklyn or the struggling PhD student at Columbia.”

SCOOP 🍨  POLITICO Playbook, Adam Wren, Dasha Burns, and Will Steakin — Pete Buttigieg, who keeps popping up as a strong candidate option in 2028, is focusing on “a new area in the party’s pursuit of power: state legislatures” by “backing a crop of mostly long-shot Democrats in Indiana’s state House and Senate,” Wren reported. On top of that, Buttigieg will be offering “a number” of down-ballot endorsements soon. Buttigieg told Wren, “This is an area where Democrats should learn from Republicans who spent many years patiently and cleverly building up power all the way up from the school board level.”

SCOOP 🍨 The Bulwark’s The Opposition, Lauren Egan — Democrats “just want to win,” Egan wrote today, and “primary voters are making judgments based on their perceptions about which candidate gives them the best chance of doing so in November.” That’s a big reason why David Crowley edged out DSA candidate Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, she added, which put the question of electability front and center. As Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge 21st Century, told Egan, “Democratic primary voters care a lot about the continuation of their institutions, the governing legacy of somebody like [Wisconsin] Gov. [Tony] Evers, and are relatively plugged in and totally open to persuasion on the issue of Is this person electable?”

ANALYSIS 👀 Punchbowl News AM, Brendan Pedersen, Ally Mutnick, and Diego Areas Munhoz — The conversation about data centers hasn’t gone anywhere, despite a larger media focus on Everything Else. As Pedersen, Mutnick, and Munhoz put it, “Republicans and Democrats have the same new bogeyman,” because data centers are pretty unpopular no matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum. They’ve “emerged as a fixation in races across the country,” and “both parties are struggling to answer voter angst.” Enter: “populists of all stripes,” who now have an opportunity to tie “rising electricity costs” and “Silicon Valley oligarchy and environmental damage” to “the cost-of-living crisis facing millions of Americans.”

ANALYSIS 👀 CJR’s The Media Today, Issie Lapowsky — Axios entered into a partnership with OpenAI that should be scrutinized, Lapowsky insisted Thursday. The two entities set up a three-year deal in which “OpenAI would bankroll the startup of thirteen Axios Local newsletters and give Axios staff free credits to access its enterprise-grade tools” and Axios “would allow OpenAI to train its models on Axios’s free, published coverage.” Though Axios saw the arrangement as “a chance to test whether leaner local newsrooms, armed with all of AI’s efficiencies, could be economically viable,” critics of the deal think it’s more of a “devil’s bargain” that would give “an 852-billion-dollar Silicon Valley giant to choose local journalism’s winners and losers while burnishing its own ailing reputation.” But for Lapowsky, it’s just a sign of the times, and “a life raft in an industry being rapidly pulled under.”

📈BUSINESS OF MEDIA 🎥

Awful Announcing, Sean Keeley — Sports media host Pat McAfee has sparked intense criticism after sitting directly alongside Trump in a stadium booth during the “Patriot Games,” a youth sports competition designed to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. Despite both McAfee and ESPN long asserting a desire to stay out of political waters, the prominent host directly attached himself to the administration by greeting Trump at the airport, posing for photos, and sitting beside him during the final events. On The Dan Le Batard Show, media personality Mike Ryan heavily criticized the display, labeling McAfee an active and willing “pawn” in a highly embarrassing, Putin-style propaganda ruse to normalize the administration. In response, McAfee defended his actions as simply wanting to help and announced he will release an album titled The Diary of a Polarizing Figure on Friday to address the loud backlash. QUOTE 📣  Ryan said, “It’s just using sport literally as propaganda with the supreme leader watching from the stands, a vision of what America ‘should’ look like, and it’s hugely embarrassing.”

Status, Oliver Darcy — Paramount is floating a proposal to establish an independent oversight board to protect CNN’s editorial independence under the potential ownership of David Ellison. First suggested on CNBC by TKO chief Ari Emanuel, a close business partner of Ellison, the board represents Paramount’s latest effort to win a public-relations battle against California Attorney General Rob Bonta and other state attorneys general who have sued to block the Warner Bros. Discovery merger on antitrust grounds. However, newsroom staffers are highly skeptical that the younger Ellison would not interfere with CNN’s news operations. CNN contributor Kara Swisher joined other heavy-hitting newsroom voices in rejecting the proposal, warning that such oversight committees are typically “toothless” and unable to withstand corporate or political pressures. QUOTE 📣 One CNN vet said, “A board only works if it’s built by journalists with deep credibility who have actual shielding power.”

Poynter, Nicole Slaughter Graham — Forbes has fired its chief content officer, Randall Lane, after learning he had accepted an undisclosed $6 million payment from RJ Shook, the founder of Shook Research. Shook Research has been a long-term business partner of Forbes, collaborating on profitable rankings of wealth advisors and splitting the associated revenues. The Times‘ Benjamin Mullin broke the story, revealing that the payment violated a strict Forbes policy prohibiting employees from gaining personally or financially from the company’s business transactions. Lane, who had a personal friendship with Shook since 2013 and served as an advisor to his firm, admitted he made a serious error in judgment by failing to disclose the payment. QUOTE 📣 Lane is owning it: “I should have disclosed the gift, and failing to was a serious error in judgment. I deeply regret that, and I lost the job and team I love because of it. None of this changes how I feel about Forbes and the amazing people there.”

Like & Subscribe, Natalie Jarvey — Spotify’s The Ringer is launching live broadcasts of its sports gambling show, Ringer Wise Guys, on Twitch as the audio streaming giant shifts away from platform exclusivity. The show, hosted by Sal Iacono (Cousin Sal), Anthony Dabbundo, Raheem Palmer, Joe House, and Tate Frazier, is the first Ringer video podcast to debut on Twitch. While Twitch’s Talk Shows and Podcasts category currently represents less than one percent of total live viewers, Spotify director Noah Malale explained that the platform’s strong live video and community features will help Spotify capture young audiences and check YouTube’s growing dominance in the video podcast market.  QUOTE 📣 Per Malale, “We always have wanted to meet fans where they are. Bill and The Ringer have always wanted to be on the forefront of new media.”

Poynter, Phoenix Chapital — An artificial intelligence-driven newsroom beat traditional tech reporters to a major cybersecurity scoop at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. While an OpenAI spokesperson was disclosing that AI agents responsible for a July hacking incident had planned their attack on a message board, RuntimeWire CEO Ryan Merket found a livestream of the conference on X. Merket uploaded the livestream’s ongoing transcript to his AI agents, which instantly wrote and published the story before any human journalists in the room could finish their articles. The automated scoop highlights the shifting ratio of AI to humans in content creation, raising questions about traditional authorship in the newsroom. QUOTE 📣 “RuntimeWire’s AI newsroom has published more than 2,000 stories since its founding in May of this year. Its AI ‘reporters’ find stories, draft articles, fact-check and edit all largely without Merket’s interference. Sometimes, thanks to an AI agent that can determine in advance whether an article is likely to pose legal risks, stories are even published without Merket’s review.”

Status, Oliver Darcy — Former Disney chief Bob Chapek is set to share his side of one of the entertainment industry’s most dramatic succession battles with a new memoir titled Behind the Castle Walls: My 30 Years at the Happiest Place on Earth. Published by Simon & Schuster at the end of next month, the book will provide a behind-the-scenes account of his highly tumultuous tenure leading Disney. Chapek will detail what it was like taking over the company just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic threw massive wrenches into Disney’s theme park and theater business, culminating in his abrupt 2022 ouster and Bob Iger‘s surprise return.

OTHER COOL STUFF

Morning Brew: Count Binface, an intergalactic space warrior with a trash can over his head, is a top contender to become a member of the UK’s Parliament. Under the disguise is the Oxford-educated comedian Jon Harvey, who is challenging Nigel Farage in a special election. Binface’s satirical platform includes promises to not accept multi-million dollar gifts from crypto billionaires on Earth and to move a hand dryer away from the urinal in a local restaurant.

Poynter: CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward had a philosophical moment while covering the solar eclipse in Spain. Here’s what she said: “In this age where we are so mired in misery and cynicism … constantly looking at our phones … we have a moment where we can look at the sky together and remember that we are spinning at an insane velocity in the middle of space.”

👀 WHAT GOT MISSED? 👀

Morning Brew, Abby Rubenstein — Rubenstein offered a second tidbit this morning that is worth paying attention to, especially for fans of Google phones: the company’s latest offering “features minimal hardware tweaks” and instead “includes a software update that leans on Gemini Intelligence and new AI features.” The Pixel 11 line will also be around $100 more than its forebears. As Rubenstein pointed out, Google is “really hoping you’ll be psyched to carry AI in your pocket.”

🏆 NEWSLETTER OF THE DAY 🏆

The Poynter Report, Tom Jones — As previously noted, Jones is out today, and his report was put together by his team. They did an admirable job condensing major news that included Leavitt’s departure, The Washington Post’s renewed fight against Trump, and a story on how RuntimeWire’s CEO and founder, Ryan Merket, recently beat reporters to the punch when he “found a livestream of the conference on X and uploaded the stream’s transcript as it was still ongoing” following OpenAI’s reveal that two of its AI agents planned their July 2026 attack on a message board.

Managing editor Ren Laforme also pointed out an important detail in the ongoing Paramount/WBD merger saga: the former could sell CNN if that will help the deal succeed. This comes after Paramount chief legal officer Makan Delrahim said the possibility of selling the network is “on the table.” That’s a detail that really matters because it’s seemed throughout the entire will-they-or-won’t-they tale that if CNN isn’t part of the deal, the merger would sail through quite easily. As he put it: “If CNN is taken out of the equation, does that make the opposition to the rest of the deal any less fierce?”

This newsletter was produced by Lindsey Ellefson.