“One man’s misinformation may be somebody else’s Holy Grail, right?”

— Steve Bannon, in an interview with Esquire.

“The most prominent U.S. journalist at Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language network, wrote Saturday that reporters had a moral obligation to ask hard questions of Donald Trump during his campaign to retake the White House,” the Washington Post reports.

Brian Beutler: “It’s arguably a bit early in the current cycle to worry about how faithfully the mainstream press has conveyed the stakes of the 2024 election, and it’s arguably less important overall. Eight years later, the American right is more cocooned in a propaganda bubble than it was, and the American youth gets more of its news (or what it thinks of as news) from the TikTok algorithm.”

“But for at least four reasons, it’s worth applying scrutiny to election coverage much earlier this time, before narratives set in and public opinion hardens. First, we obviously waited too long last time. Second, there’s never a good reason for journalists to be complacent about widespread misperceptions overtaking the public. Third, public perception of the candidates on issues as varied as economic stewardship and basic mental fitness are already badly out of whack with empirical reality. Fourth, this time around, bleak as the polling looks at the moment, nobody in the media is under the mistaken impression that Trump can’t become president, and everyone knows that his presidency poses an existential threat to democracy and rule of law.”

“Lachlan Murdoch, who last week succeeded his father Rupert as chairman of both Fox Corp. and News Corp., over the weekend traveled to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” Axios reports.

“The decline of local newspapers accelerated so rapidly in 2023 that analysts now believe the U.S. will have lost one-third of the newspapers it had as of 2005 by the end of next year — rather than in 2025, as originally predicted,” Axios reports.

Rolling Stone: “The Daily Wire has descended into unrestrained chaos as an ongoing spat between its founder, Ben Shapiro, and one of the right-wing outlet’s biggest names, Candace Owens.”

“The pair’s disagreements over the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas have now spilled into a public fight on social media.”

“Wednesday marks Rupert Murdoch’s last day as chairman of News Corp., the publishing company that formed his initial entry into the U.S. market nearly 50 years ago. His son Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corp., will assume the role of chairman in his place,” the Hollywood Reporter reports.

“But he told shareholders of the company that he does not intend to ride off into the sunset.”

Said Murdoch: “I hope to continue an active role in the company.”

Jason Donner, a former reporter for Fox News, is suing the right-wing network for retaliation and discrimination, alleging the conservative cable giant fired him because he opposed Fox’s “false coverage of the January 6th insurrection,” the Daily Beast reports.

Dylan Byers: “Earlier this week, former president Donald Trump gave an interview to Univision, the Spanish-language broadcaster, during which he threatened to weaponize the F.B.I. and the Justice Department against his political opponents. The statements, which came on the heels of a Washington Post report revealing that Trump and his allies had been drawing up plans to use the federal government to retaliate against adversaries and former cabinet members, were arguably the most brazenly authoritarian remarks the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has made to date in a mainstream media interview. And the interview reasonably unnerved the political pundit class—’dangerous’ and ‘insane’ are among the words that have reverberated across cable news in the last 24 hours.”

“Inside Univision, however, the hour-long sit-down raised alarms for another reason. The interview, which was conducted by a non-Univision journalist who did little to question or push back on Trump’s claims, effectively functioned as a propaganda special, current and former Univision journalists have protested. In it, they saw glaring evidence of a broader effort by their new parent company, which has close ties to Trump and especially to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to curry favor with the former president and push the network further to the right.”

Former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd was interviewed at Harvard’s Kennedy School by Institute of Politics Fellow Betsy Fischer Martin:

MARTIN: What’s the best for political news besides NBC? What’s your go to?

TODD: My go to right now? I probably refresh Political Wire the most.

President Biden raged against The New York Times in a private White House meeting early last week, after the Times amplified a Hamas claim that an Israeli airstrike was behind the Oct. 17 bombing of a Gaza hospital, Semafor reports.

Pew Research: “In 2016, 51% of U.S. adults said they followed the news all or most of the time. But that share fell to 38% in 2022, the most recent time we asked this question.”

“In turn, a rising share of Americans say they follow the news only now and then. While 12% of adults said this in 2016, that figure increased to 19% by 2022. And while 5% of adults said in 2016 that they hardly ever follow the news, 9% said the same last year.”

Tucker Carlson’s new media company has officially signed its first advertising deal, CNBC reports.

“Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them.”

— Eric Levitz, New York Magazine.

Gallup: “The 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016.”