We begin with a clip from the House Oversight Committee’s March 26 2025 hearing, chaired by Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14), in which Greene begins by accusing the now-former CPB President and CEO Katherine Maher of partisanship.
Image credit: beast01/Shutterstock
News of the week:
* On Monday, we learned that a New York Times team has done a forensic examination of the Epstein files, teasing out the relationship between the JP Morgan bank and Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking.. CEO Jamie Dimon claims to have known nothing about one of his more lucrative clients. However, Dimon’s closest assistant was the conduit between Epstein and the bank, and employees flagged Epstein’s large cash withdrawals, something that should trigger a sex trafficking or criminal activity investigation. These warnings were never followed up.
* Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-04) has lost yet another seat from his historically teenie-weenie majority. In a special election in Virginia’s Eleventh, a deep blue district, voters did their duty and elected Democrat James Walkinshaw to replace Gerald Connolly, who died earlier this year.
* On Wednesday, a Manhattan judge threw out federal terrorism charges filed in the Luigi Mangione case. This decision not only has ramifications for Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, but for Donald Trump’s announced determination to use terrorism designations against a range of nonprofits that have historically funded liberal causes.
* On a lighter note, news surfaced last week that there has been a happy ending for the recently widowed 81-year-old right-wing pundit Oliver North. A former Marine and national security aide in the Reagan administration, North’s testimony about the illegal Iran-Contra arms for hostages deal—or cocaine for arms for hostages—electrified the nation in 1987. His bride? Former Secretary and part-time model Fawn Hall, who admitted to Congress that she had destroyed evidence in the case: she is now 65.
Our focus: How Republicans are trying to reshape the media landscape to privilege conservative ideas and voices.
* This week, the Walt Disney Company, under FCC pressure, suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show on ABC for these words in his opening monologue: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
* CBS News reports a “wave of firings” across industries intended to punish people for First Amendment protected wrongspeak about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Neil noted the firing of Washington Post columnist Karen Attia, the last Black journalist working for that section of the paper. (In this section, Claire dropped the ball on remembering Lydia Polgreen’s name as she was discussing hte large number of Black writers who have left top media organizations.)
* The succession drama at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire—which includes valuable conservative outlets like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post, as well as properties in England and Australia—is over. Lachlan Murdoch finally did what his father told him to do in the first place—buy out his three siblings for over $1 billion apiece—securing the company’s right-wing political influence in the English-speaking world.
* President Donald J. Trump has filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times, four reporters, and Penguin Random House of having tried to influence the 2024 election by “spreading false and defamatory content” about him—and for endorsing Kamala Harris. In July, Trump also filed suit against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on the Epstein birthday book.
* During the 2024 campaign, we saw Donald Trump attack Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists Conference: more broadly his attacks on diversity undermine the vitality of the news environment.
* In February, we began to see news organizations bending the knee to Trump: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced a new editorial policy that would prioritize content “defend[ing] personal liberties and free markets,” accelerating departures from the Post that had begun as downsizing through layoffs and buyouts in 2024.
* Republican attacks on fact-based reporting position major media as cynical and readers as the true fact-finders. Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy emphasized this in the Senate hearings on state-funded public media. In his remarks on the recision bill that defunded the CPB, he insisted that public media was no longer necessary because Americans can choose from an array of options available on the internet.
* The Trump administration is using federal agencies to force changes in corporate policy that they would otherwise have no control over. One example was the $8.4 billion merger between Paramount Global and Skydance, which has been hanging fire for over two years before approval from the Trump administration allowed the deal to go through. Coincidentally, this also followed settlement of a 2024 election interference lawsuit between candidate Donald Trump and Paramount’s CBS News division in July. The network committed $16 million to Trump’s future presidential library and made changes in its editorial policy.
* Skydance also promised, prior to the merger’s approval, to install an ombudsman to evaluate charges of bias at the network. That person is Kenneth Weinstein, a Trump donor and former head of the conservative Hudson Institute.
Since the merger, CBS has cancelled Late Night with Stephen Colbert. Paramount has also announced a planned acquisition of Bari Weiss’s Free Press Substack for $200 million, and that Weiss may then be installed in an editorial position at CBS.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
What we want to go viral:
* Neil’s big read is Gil Duran’s “What’s Up With Peter Thiel’s Obsession With the Antichrist?” (The Nation, September 16, 2025) which tells the story of MAGA’s best friends intensifying his focus on Satan’s Little Helper. Thiel has a hunch who it is too—you’ll never guess.
* Claire urges you to click on Ta-Nahesi Coates’s “Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause,” (Vanity Fair, September 16, 2025). Countering the narrative that Kirk “did politics the right way” (Ezra Klein) by engaging in reasonable debates, Coates shows how Kirk wove bigotry and hatred into an existing conservative narrative about faith, family, and White supremacy. Kirk called for hte death penalty to be administered publicly, and even suggested that Joe Biden should die. “What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself?” Coates asks.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Short takes:
* Tyler Robinsin’s mother “mother told investigators that his political views had recently moved to the left,” Jia Lynn Yang writes in the New York Times Magazine. “That doesn’t mean, though, that his act can be mapped cleanly onto the familiar left-right axis of 20th-century politics. He was not registered with any party. He did not bother voting in the 2024 election. He rarely seemed to surface from the deep end of the internet, where he learned a language that included antifascist slogans divorced from coherent ideology. Politics, it seems, existed alongside video games as a source for a strange swirl of signifiers.” (September 19, 2025)
* Reviewing the right-wing media frenzy that attempted to pin assassin Tyler Robinson to so-called “gender ideology,” Lydia Polgreen argues in the New York Times that fact-based journalists were right. “There is no evidence that the markings on the shell casings had any connection to transgender people at all,” Polgreen writes, part of MAGA’s ongoing narrative that blames all unhappiness on stigmatized outsiders. “If you can’t find a job or a house, it is because immigrants took them all and filled your community with crime to boot. If your business is failing, it is because foreign countries are ripping off America by selling us their goods and not buying enough of ours. If your child has health problems, it is because greedy pharmaceutical companies and scheming scientists gave toxic chemicals to your baby in the form of vaccines. And if your child is murdered while cowering in a chapel or at school, the problem is not the surfeit of easily accessible guns in America; it is transgender people.” (September 19, 2025)
Charlie Kirk’s “eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few if any of them have seen fit to mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics,” Jamelle Bouie reminds us at the New York Times. “The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign, and you can draw a line directly from Kirk’s work attacking academics to the Trump administration’s all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent.” (September 13, 2025)
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