News

The line between opinion shows and ones rooted in fact can remain blurry at Fox News Channel, the SEC has ruled — or rather, viewers will have to determine where that line falls themselves.

The SEC has said that Fox News does not need to clearly label its commentary shows as “opinion” to differentiate them from their more straightforward news broadcasts. An activist investor named John Chevedden, who’s made a name for himself by routinely submitting petitions to try to affect change in major companies, petitioned Fox News to label its shows accordingly. (Chevedden had made a similar petition in 2023 that he withdrew before the shareholder meeting that year.)

Chevedden believes there is a legally protective reason to do so: Following the $787.5-million settlement the cable channel reached with Dominion about untrue claims regarding its voting machines that Fox News anchors (such as Tucker Carlson) had made on-air, such a...

According to his resignation announcement, Kevin Merida’s abrupt Jan. 9 exit as executive editor of the Los Angeles Times came about through a “mutual agreement” with the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech magnate turned publishing dilettante. This may well be true. From everything that can be gleaned about Merida’s less-than-three-year bumpy tenure as Soon-Shiong’s No. 1 at the 143-year-old publishing institution, there was plenty of mutual dissatisfaction, mutual distrust and maybe even mutual disdain.

Times watchers will recall that Merida’s arrival at the paper in 2021 was greeted with great fanfare. The 66-year-old former Washington Post editor and Pulitzer finalist had been hired after a grueling months-long head-hunting expedition that involved some 30 aspirants, including New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and former Hollywood Reporter editor (and Ankler co-founder) Janice Min, as well as a slew of in-house contenders (deputy managing editor Julia Turner, New York...

Dua Lipa graces the February cover of Rolling Stone, where she discusses kicking off a new era in her life and with her album, and she also opens up about why she is taking a stand politically over the Israel-Hamas war, calling for a “humanitarian cease-fire.”

“My existence is kind of political, the fact that I lived in London because my parents left from the war,” the singer, who was born to Albanian parents in London, said. “I feel for people who have to leave their home. From my experience...

The Brooklyn 99 cast is full of great actors, both established stars and promising up-and-coming talent, playing a wide array of delightfully wacky characters populating the eponymous NYPD precinct. Each episode of Brooklyn 99’s eight seasons is shot and structured like a classical police procedural, with its detectives tackling a different case, but with an absurdist sense of humor. From the deadpan captain to the yogurt-loving sergeant to the immature detective to the pair of wildly incompetent veteran cops, the titular precinct in Brooklyn 99 is full of hilarious comedic personalities.

Throughout its entire run, Brooklyn 99 was a hit with critics and audiences alike. A huge part of the show’s appeal was the palpable on-screen chemistry shared by its cast. The Brooklyn 99 cast was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2014, but lost to the...

(from left) Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan in Maria Schrader’s She Said. Photo: Universal Studios After the story of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s long career of sexual harassment and assault shook Hollywood to its core, it was an inevitability that a film like She Said would come along...

One problem with being The New York Times—big, lumbering, important—is that you sometimes get in your own way. It happens even when you cover the movies. Every now and then, you find yourself looking at a picture that’s looking at you. And that can be awkward.

Just such a moment is pending, as The Times prepares to deal with She Said, Maria Schrader’s film about the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of Harvey Weinstein and sex abuse by two of its reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.

That was a proud enterprise for the paper, the kind of reporting it’s supposed to do. But past triumph won’t make it any easier for the Times‘ critics and cultural reporters to cover the film when Universal unveils it at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 13, at a world premiere that will find their two colleagues on-stage with the actresses who portray them,...

Former President Trump really doesn’t like leakers. He repeatedly deemed Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee throughout Trump’s time in office, the worst of them. “He’s the biggest leaker in Washington,” Trump said of Schiff in 2019. “He’s a leaker like nobody has ever seen before.”

It probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, then, that in 2018 Trump’s Justice Department secretly subpoenaed Apple for Schiff’s data as part of a leak investigation, The New York Times reported Thursday night.

The Department of Justice under former president Trump attempted to seize the email logs from four New York Times reporters in an attempt to identify their sources, the Times reported Friday. On Saturday, the department announced the Biden administration will end the practice of aggressively pursuing leak investigations by trying to uncover the media’s sources through court orders.

The DOJ attempted to seize email records from Google, which hosts the paper’s email system, but Google resisted the efforts. This news comes on the heels of recent revelations that...

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Saturday that the Justice Department would no longer subpoena the phone and email records of reporters during leak investigations, after recent revelations that prosecutors secretly sought such information from journalists at The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN.

In a statement, Psaki said, “As appropriate given the independence of the Justice Department in specific criminal cases, no one at the White House was aware of the gag order until Friday night. While the White House does not intervene in criminal investigations, the issuing of subpoenas for the records of reporters in leak investigations is not consistent with the President’s policy direction to the Department, and the Department of Justice has reconfirmed it will not be used moving forward.”

On Friday, the Times reported on a legal battle that played out in the final weeks of the Trump administration and...

Update: A chilly January morning in downtown Washington D.C. was made warmer when copies of a fantasy Washington Post hit the street, carrying the banner headline “Unpresidented.”

Underneath was printed: “Trump Hastily Departs White House, Ending Crisis.”

Actual Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has reacted:

There are fake print editions of The Washington Post being distributed around downtown DC, and we are aware of a website attempting to mimic The Post’s. They are not Post products, and we are looking into this.

— Washington Post PR (@WashPostPR) January 16, 2019

This thread. Someone spent *a lot* of money creating a fake Washington Post and fake website. https://t.co/g6xvZnVBog

— Sean Kennedy (@SeanDKennedy) January 16, 2019

MoveOn.org denied suggestions it was behind the stunt, a report that had gained traction due to this tweet:

We just saw a staffer take one of these into the White House pic.twitter.

The Los Angeles Times on Monday officially returned to local ownership as billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong completed his $500-million purchase of the publication, as well as the San Diego-Union Tribune and other smaller newspapers.

In a letter to readers, Soon-Shiong offered a full-throated defense of newspapers and criticized the era of “fake news,” calling it “the cancer of our times.”

“Institutions like The Times and the Union-Tribune are more vital than ever,” Soon-Shiong said in his note. “They must be bastions of editorial integrity and independence if they are to protect our democracy and provide an antidote to disinformation. We will continue our papers’ dedication to truth, integrity, journalistic independence, and storytelling that engages, informs, educates and inspires with care and compassion.”

In his first act as owner, Soon-Shiong named veteran journalist Norman Pearlstine executive editor of the L.A. Times. Pearlstine, 75, has spent 50 years in journalism at top publications like Time Inc. magazines,...

The New York Times is heading to the UK after BBC Two picked up the rights to Showtime documentary series The Fourth Estate.

The British public broadcaster will air Liz Garbus’ four-part series later this month after its launch on the premium U.S. cable network last month.

The Fourth Estate looks at the inner workings of the gray lady during the first 12 months of Donald Trump’s presidency. It follows journalists including Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush as well as editor Dean Baquet covering Trump’s inauguration, accusations of fake news as well as major stories about the Russia investigation. The doc also looks at how the New York Times is changing, launching the Daily podcast, and responding to the challenges of being a digital publication.

The series was produced and directed by Garbus and Jenny Carchman and is a Radical Media and Moxie Firecracker Films Production in association...

The challenge of understanding Donald Trump’s effect on America at large goes hand-in-hand with covering the 45th president of the United States. From big picture questions like, “What’s the story?” to more detailed queries like, “What’s the angle on the story?” and even “What are the appropriate adjectives to frame that angle within the story?” there’s no set handbook for reporters who are constantly being undermined by the authority figures they cover.

How do you convey facts in an era of fake news? “The Fourth Estate” aims to illustrate exactly that, as Liz Garbus’ four-part docuseries delves into the exhausting lives of New York Times’ reporters delivering exhaustive coverage of all things Trump. Starting with the newsroom watching his inauguration and running through April 2018, the engrossing series moves at the pace of its subjects: fast and efficient. Yet much like some of the inevitable mistakes of the paper of record,...

A veil is lifted in the final episode of The Fourth Estate, Liz Garbus' new Showtime docu-series about the New York Times' coverage of the Donald Trump presidency. (It premieres on May 27th.) The Washington bureau's conservative politics correspondent, Jeremy Peters, is reporting on Roy Moore's failed bid for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. He links up with Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the Southern politician's most vocal national surrogate. It's clear the pair – a leader of the alt-right and a gay beat reporter with a book deal,...