Category: Media

CBS News Chief Ousted Amid Tensions With Trump
The president of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, was forced out of her post on Monday, the latest shock wave to hit the news division amid an ongoing showdown involving President Trump, “60 Minutes” and CBS’s parent company, Paramount.
Ms. McMahon told her staff in a memo that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” Executives at Paramount informed Ms. McMahon on Saturday that they wanted her to step down, according to several people with direct knowledge who requested anonymity to share private discussions.
Paramount is in talks to settle a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that accused “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Many legal experts have called the suit baseless, but Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has said she favors settling the case. She is seeking federal approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to a Hollywood studio, Skydance.
The situation prompted the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, to resign last month. He has told confidants that Paramount executives, cognizant of the settlement talks with Mr. Trump, had pressured him over the program’s coverage of the Trump administration.
A new flashpoint between “60 Minutes” and its corporate bosses flared last week.
For its May 18 season finale, “60 Minutes” had planned to air a segment, reported by Anderson Cooper, about the Trump administration’s order for mass firings at the Internal Revenue Service.
George Cheeks, the chief executive of CBS and a co-chief executive of Paramount, considered an idea to broadcast an unrelated prime-time special on Sunday that would air instead of the network’s evening lineup, including the “60 Minutes” season finale, according to four people briefed on private deliberations.
Leaders at the news division were uncomfortable with that idea. The prime-time special was not pursued. Mr. Cheeks did not ask “60 Minutes” to modify or eliminate the segment, one of the people said.
By the end of the week, “60 Minutes” producers decided to cut the I.R.S. segment from the weekend’s show, but for journalistic reasons. The producers said they had learned of new information from the I.R.S. that required additional reporting. “Our team will continue to report on these new details and will broadcast the story in the future,” the show said in a statement.
Within CBS News, it was widely expected that Ms. McMahon, who took over the news division in August 2023, would not be at the company much longer.
Executives at Paramount had expressed concern about Ms. McMahon’s performance for months. Her detractors pointed to an overhaul of “CBS Evening News” that sent its ratings plummeting, and her handling of an October incident involving the “CBS Mornings” anchor Tony Dokoupil, who in an interview had challenged the author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ms. McMahon’s critics also believed that the reporting at “60 Minutes” had become politically biased, exposing the company to unnecessary criticism. And it was clear that Mr. Trump was paying close attention.
On May 4, “60 Minutes” aired a segment that quoted some prominent lawyers criticizing the president for acting unlawfully when he issued executive orders targeting law firms.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers perceived those quotes, and the segment as a whole, as an attempt by CBS to gain the upper hand in the settlement negotiations, according to a person with knowledge of the internal discussions. They then countered by conveying a threat to Paramount: Mr. Trump might file a new lawsuit, accusing Paramount and CBS of defaming him in the “60 Minutes” episode, according to two people familiar with knowledge of the talks.
“CBS and Paramount’s attempts to subvert the legal process with lies and smears may necessitate additional corrective legal action, which President Trump reserves the right to pursue,” said Ed Paltzik, a lawyer for Mr. Trump.
A mediation session late last month ended with lawyers for Paramount and Mr. Trump still far apart on the terms of a deal.
Mr. Trump has regularly criticized “60 Minutes,” and declined to be interviewed by the program during last year’s presidential campaign. He has also continued to criticize the program’s reporting, which last month he deemed “fraudulent.” Mr. Trump has also urged his government regulators to strip CBS of its broadcast license. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post last month.
CBS executives have added additional layers of oversight on the program in recent months, drawing frustrations from some top producers, including Mr. Owens. “In a million years, the corporation didn’t know what was coming up — they trusted ‘60 Minutes’ to report the stories and program the broadcast the way ‘60 Minutes’ saw fit,” Mr. Owens said during an emotional meeting with his staff in April. Any change to that arrangement, he said, created “a really slippery slope.”
Mr. Cheeks said in a memo on Monday that Ms. McMahon would remain at the network for “a few weeks to support the transition.” She will be succeeded for now by a pair of veteran network executives: Tom Cibrowski, who was recently named president of CBS News, and Jennifer Mitchell, the president of CBS Stations.
May 20, 2025
A $34.5 Billion Merger Will Unite Cable Leaders Charter and Cox
The cable giants Charter Communications and Cox Communications said on Friday that they had agreed to merge, a colossal deal that would create one of the biggest TV and internet providers in the United States.
The deal, which values Cox at roughly $34.5 billion, presents a test for President Trump’s antitrust enforcers. While many deal makers had expected the Trump administration to be more permissive than the Biden administration, many on Wall Street have been surprised by early signs that a tough-on-deals stance may persist.
Charter and Cox argued that the deal would help them compete against big rivals, including “larger, national broadband companies” — read: Comcast, Verizon and others — as well as satellite service providers. They are also likely to argue that their cable networks don’t significantly overlap geographically.
Charter and Cox signaled in their news release they were eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval of the deal. The announcement said the merger “puts America first” by returning customer-service jobs from overseas, echoing the president’s campaign language. It also underscored the value of bringing “hyperlocal, unbiased news” produced by Charter’s Spectrum News stations to Cox customers, an apparent gesture toward mollifying the White House, which has been critical of the press.
Unmentioned in the news release was Axios, a scoopy Washington-based media organization owned by Cox Enterprises, the privately held parent of the cable business as well as firms in other industries, like agriculture and cars. The newly formed cable group would not own any national programming, the release said.
Under the terms of the merger, Charter will pay cash and stock, with the combined company set to take on the Cox name and sell consumer services under the Spectrum brand within a year of closing. Cox Enterprises would become the new company’s largest shareholder, with a 23 percent stake. The group expects to cut $500 million in annual costs within a few years of closing the deal, from “typical procurement and overhead savings.”
Charter’s stock rose more than 2 percent in early trading on Friday.
It isn’t the first time the two have discussed a merger: They held talks 12 years ago, and John Malone, a telecom billionaire and major Charter shareholder, had named Cox last fall as one of the company’s potential transaction partners.
Mr. Malone, an influential media mogul, has lately made several moves to reorganize his media holdings. Last year, Charter acquired Liberty Broadband, a telecommunications company partly owned by Mr. Malone. This year, he relinquished his seat on the board of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN and the Warner Bros. movie studio.
The Cox-Charter deal is one of the biggest takeovers announced this year, along with Google’s planned acquisition of the cybersecurity provider Wiz for $32 billion. And it may show that, at least for some corporate leaders, uncertainty over the economy, driven in part by Mr. Trump’s trade policies, isn’t enough to deter them from major investments and acquisitions.
But antitrust approval is needed, and the Trump administration, which moved early to block deals like Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, has warned corporate America not to assume that all deals will pass muster.
“I don’t have an ideological predisposition against M.&A.,” Andrew Ferguson, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said last month. “It doesn’t follow, however, that I think it should just be open season” for deal-making, he added.
Cable executives have tested regulators’ appetite for consolidation before. In 2015, Comcast walked away from an attempt to buy Time Warner Cable amid regulatory pressure from the Obama administration. The next year, the Obama administration approved Charter’s $65.5 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, but imposed restrictions in the process.
One of Charter’s biggest rivals, Comcast, is pursuing a deal of its own. The cable and broadband giant announced late last year that it was spinning off its cable networks, including MSNBC, into a separate company. That firm, which was named Versant this month, is expected to make its debut this year.
May 16, 2025
MSNBC has hired an editor from Politico to head up its new bureau in Washington
As MSNBC prepares to formally break away from its corporate sibling NBC, it’s leaving behind more than just the Art Deco hallways of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Although the 24-hour cable channel is best known for opinionated stars like Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s midday hours and breaking news coverage have long relied on the journalistic muscle of NBC News, with its sprawling bureaus and amply staffed Washington office.
That resource will be cut off this year when Comcast, MSNBC’s owner, spins it out along with a batch of other cable networks into a separate company, unaffiliated with the rest of the NBCUniversal family. The usual NBC correspondents who pop up on MSNBC’s air with updates on, say, the latest fight in Congress will no longer be available.
One option would be to convert MSNBC’s lineup to progressive talk shows, but the channel’s president, Rebecca Kutler, is leaning in a different direction. On Thursday, Ms. Kutler announced the channel’s first-ever Washington bureau chief: not a left-leaning partisan, but a down-the-middle print reporter with long stints at Politico and The Wall Street Journal.
Her choice, Sudeep Reddy, was most recently a senior managing editor at Politico, and his résumé is heavy with economics and Washington policy coverage.
“The MSNBC audience is cerebral and appreciates analytical, contextual reporting,” she said in an interview. She added, “He is going to build and run a significant Washington reporting team, that to me matches with the moment — a serious moment — where real reporting will matter.”
Sudeep Reddy, formerly a managing editor at Politico, at the Brookings Institution in Washington in 2019. (Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket, via Getty Images)
MSNBC has never had a separate Washington bureau. Ms. Kutler has announced plans to hire more than 100 journalists for the new go-it-alone version of the channel, including new on-air correspondents to cover Capitol Hill, the State and Justice Departments and the Supreme Court — roles that NBC News-affiliated reporters previously filled.
At a time of contraction in the news business, it is an unusual expansion and something of a gamble. Straight-ahead TV reporting rarely attracts bigger ratings than the partisan commentary that has come to dominate much of 24-hour cable news. Ms. Maddow, for instance, remains MSNBC’s highest-rated host. Many liberal viewers also abandoned MSNBC in the aftermath of President Trump’s re-election, although its ratings have crept back up since the inauguration.
MSNBC and NBC News have long had an awkward relationship, dating back to the cable channel’s origins in 1996. The staff at NBC News often looked down on its upstart sibling. After MSNBC underwent a ratings boom in the Trump era, some NBC News journalists worried how the profitable partisanship on cable was coloring their efforts to present neutral reporting to a mass audience.
Mr. Reddy, 45, is expected to start his role in June. He will report to Scott Matthews, a former executive at CNBC and WABC-TV in New York whom Ms. Kutler selected to oversee her channel’s news-gathering operations.
Ms. Kutler, who was named the channel’s president in February, has made other programming changes. Joy Reid’s 7 p.m. weeknight show was canceled. Jen Psaki, who served as press secretary to former President Biden, took on a 9 p.m. show that airs Tuesdays to Fridays.
May 15, 2025
The Princess of Wales is back in the fashion spotlight
The fashion crowd in London is generally known for keeping cool. But on Tuesday, the editors and designers at a ceremony for one of the industry’s most prestigious local awards became palpably excited when Catherine, Princess of Wales, emerged to present this year’s Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design to Patrick McDowell, 29, a Liverpool-born designer.
Dressed in an olive Victoria Beckham suit and a white silk pussy-bow blouse, Catherine walked with Mr. McDowell among mannequins and models wearing the designer’s looks inside 180 the Strand, the Central London building where the event took place. It was the second time the princess had presented the award, which was created by the British Fashion Council and the British royal family in 2018 to recognize the role London’s fashion industry “plays in society and diplomacy.”
The princess did not give public comments at the ceremony, but Mr. McDowell said that their private conversation touched on topics including a shared appreciation for craftsmanship and the designer’s efforts to make collections in Britain and offer customers the option to repair or rework old garments.
Mr. McDowell added that, as Catherine toured the clothes on display, she took interest in a tailored sleeveless jacket called “the Wales jacket.”
“She said, ‘Why would you call it that?’ with a big smile,” Mr. McDowell said. “What a moment, to be sharing jokes with our future queen.”
Patrick McDowell, left, a Liverpool-born designer and the winner of this year’s Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design. (Shaun James Cox/BFC)
Catherine’s appearance at the event came as she has been stepping up the pace and profile of her public engagements after her cancer diagnosis and treatment last year. In January, she said her cancer was in remission; about a month later, the Sunday Times of London published an article that suggested that Kensington Palace would no longer be disclosing any details of her outfits to the news media.
During the awards ceremony, the princess also met with other young designers who were on hand to showcase their wares, including Conner Ives, an American working in London whose “Protect the Dolls’ T-shirt have spread widely on social media in recent weeks. On Tuesday, Mr. Ives was announced as the 2025 winner of the British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund award, which came with a grant and an industry mentorship.
In past years, the Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design went to designers including Richard Quinn, S.S. Daley and Priya Ahluwalia. It has been presented in the past by other senior royals, including Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles III and Princess Anne.
Mr. McDowell, whose namesake brand was introduced in 2018, is known for offering made-to-order evening and occasion wear designed in London using recycled textiles and new sustainable materials like sequins made of cellulose. Lady Gaga, Sarah Jessica Parker and Keira Knightley are among the label’s notable fans.
Winning the Queen Elizabeth II Award was “a wonderful pat on the back that provides a game-changing stamp of approval,” Mr. McDowell said, as well as an “acknowledgment that working in a circular way is a way forward.”
“I’d love to make a piece for her,” Mr. McDowell added, referring to Catherine. “It would be a dream come true.”
May 15, 2025
It seems the streaming service Max, which was previously known as HBO Max, will be going back to the name HBO Max. It’s a bit confusing, right?
HBO, a trailblazer of the cable era, has been on a very bumpy ride finding an identity in the streaming era. (Warner Bros. Discovery)
It’s not Max. It’s HBO Max — again.
In a surprise pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery executives announced Wednesday morning that the streaming service Max would be renamed HBO Max, reinstating the app’s old name and abandoning a contentious change that the company introduced two years ago.
The reason for the change, executives explained, is straightforward.
People who subscribe and pay $17 a month for the streaming service wind up watching HBO content like “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us,” as well as new movies, documentaries and not a whole lot more.
“It really is a reaction to being in the marketplace for two years, evaluating what’s working and really leaning into that,” Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO content, said in an interview.
HBO, a trailblazer of the cable era, has been on a very bumpy ride to finding an identity in the streaming era. There was HBO Go (2008), HBO Now (2015), HBO Max (2020), Max (2023) and now, once again, HBO Max (2025).
Two years ago, Warner Bros. Discovery executives said that they meant well by changing the name to Max. Their overwhelming concern, the executives said, was that Discovery’s suite of reality shows — “Sister Wives,” “My Feet Are Killing Me” — risked watering down the HBO brand, which continued to produce award-winning series like “Succession.”
Further, they said, HBO spent decades branding itself as a premium adult service. That was not exactly an ideal anchor for a streaming service that they envisioned would compete head to head with a general entertainment app like Netflix.
Instead, the name change to Max mostly seemed to cause widespread confusion, both within the entertainment industry and generally among consumers. Was HBO dead? Was it being marginalized? What gives?
In the last few years in the so-called streaming wars, Netflix has taken a runaway lead over old-guard entertainment brands, drawing roughly 8 percent of all television time in March, according to Nielsen. Warner Bros. Discovery drew 1.5 percent, a little more than Peacock but below Disney’s streaming services, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount, Roku and Tubi, Nielsen said.
Executives have conceded in recent months that competing with an everything-for-everybody app like Netflix, which has more than 300 million subscribers, was not realistic. Instead, they would be perfectly happy to be a complementary service.
“We started listening to consumers saying, ‘Hey, we don’t really want more content, we want something that is different, we want to end the death scroll with something that is better,’” JB Perrette, the president of streaming for Warner Bros. Discovery, said in an interview.
Warner Bros. Discovery executives also discovered over the last two years that much of Discovery’s content was not being watched. Original programs tended to do the best on the service, as did new Warner Bros. movies, licensed A24 films and documentaries. Some Discovery content, particularly from its ID cable network, did well, but everything else — food, lifestyle and other reality series from Discovery — went relatively untouched. (Discovery+ remains available as a stand-alone streaming option.)
Max has seen encouraging results in recent months. The streaming division at Warner Bros. Discovery is now profitable, and its subscriber count jumped another five million in the first three months of the year, bringing its total number of subscribers to over 122 million. The app recently rolled out to Australia and France, and next year it will be introduced to Britain, Germany and Italy.
There have also been hints of a bigger change. Just a few weeks ago, Max changed its color scheme back to the old-school HBO’s black and white, leaving behind the blue palette that the company introduced in 2023 with the brand pivot.
Mr. Bloys said that the transition to streaming has been tricky for many cable companies. HBO “and a bunch of other companies are trying to navigate that,” he said.
“That said,” he continued, “I do hope this is the last time we have a conversation about the naming of the service.”
May 14, 2025
Who’s Winning the Podcast Game on YouTube? A New List Offers Some Surprises
You may remember Tony Hinchcliffe as the stand-up comedian who, last fall, maligned the island of Puerto Rico in an inflammatory set during a rally in New York for the Trump presidential campaign.
Despite the criticism for those comments, Mr. Hinchcliffe landed a Netflix deal in March for three specials based on his long-running live comedy podcast, “Kill Tony.” That show is ranked modestly at No. 51 on Spotify and No. 178 on Apple Podcasts’ top charts, which track the most popular podcasts in the United States based on a combination of various factors: streams, downloads, subscribers and other mystery metrics.
Yet a new chart, released Thursday, offers new hints about Mr. Hinchcliffe’s mass appeal. For the first time, YouTube has published its ranking of top podcasts in the United States, offering a fresh perspective on a sprawling landscape.
There, “Kill Tony” is ranked No. 2, just below the reigning king of podcasts, Joe Rogan.
Top Podcasts by Platform
Top Podcasts by Platform
Data as of May 15 · Source: Platform listings · By The New York Times

Another major difference from the Spotify and Apple charts: Many popular and well-established podcasts did not make YouTube’s top 100 ranking, which is based on overall watch time. Among the missing: “Call Her Daddy,” “Crime Junkie,” “SmartLess,” “The Daily” and “New Heights,” all frequently in the top 10 of various quarterly or annual lists.
There were familiar names on YouTube’s list, including MeidasTouch, Shannon Sharpe and Theo Von in the top 10. But when compared with the existing charts, YouTube’s version sometimes seems like a fun house mirror. While the hit podcast “Dateline NBC,” for example, was absent — it does not regularly upload episodes to YouTube — the CBS true-crime newsmagazine “48 Hours” appeared at No. 4.
Theo Von and Donald J. Trump last year on an episode of Mr. Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast show. (Theo Von/YouTube)
Ben Meiselas, co-founder of MeidasTouch. (Michael Lewis/Variety)
Shannon Sharpe, a former N.F.L. player, is among podcast hosts with spots in the top 10 on YouTube. (Sean Gardner/Getty Images)
Despite its roots in video, YouTube has come to dominate podcasting. It is the preferred service for one-third of weekly podcast listeners in the United States, capturing more users than Spotify or Apple Podcasts, according to Edison Research. But that happened only in recent years, in conjunction with the growing popularity of video podcasts.
“They saw something other people didn’t in video,” said Brett Meiselas, a founder of MeidasTouch, comparing YouTube against the other platforms, which are now trying to attract more video creators and viewers. Mr. Meiselas, who said the chart was “a long time coming,” was pleased but not entirely surprised by his show’s No. 5 spot: “It means our work is getting out there.”
As podcasts broadly continue to rise in influence — helping to sell products, find voters and spread hot-button ideas — YouTube’s chart represents another tool for understanding who holds sway with American consumers.
It is a way to “help audiences and podcasters alike understand who is shaping that conversation,” said Brandon Feldman, the director of news, civics and podcast partnerships at YouTube. The chart can also serve as “inspiration,” or “a guide” to success for other podcasters looking to increase their audience size, he added. The ranking will be updated every Wednesday.
Mr. Hinchcliffe’s success, for example, embodies the “cultural zeitgeist,” Mr. Feldman said: “The audience is showing us what they’re looking for.” (Anti-woke comedy is Mr. Hinchcliffe’s specialty.)
The chart also comes as podcast platforms inch toward some more transparency in their metrics.
Spotify recently announced a feature that reveals how many times a podcast episode has been played. But historically, podcast platforms and producers have closely guarded their streaming and download numbers. YouTube is an exception, having published view counts long before it became a podcast destination. (It now claims to reach one billion podcast users per month.)
The big shows missing from YouTube’s chart could still join in the coming weeks. But for some podcasts, this may require a deeper investment in video — or, at the very least, ensuring their videos are correctly organized into YouTube playlists, which is critical to the ranking, Mr. Feldman said.
Joe Rogan at President Trump’s inauguration in January. (Pool photo/Saul Loeb)
Charts are imperfect measuring sticks, susceptible to manipulation, lacking in transparency and calibrated more as snapshots of current popularity rather than overall popularity.
Mr. Rogan, for example, moves up and down the rankings, but no show has ever come close to drawing his total audience. (Hosts who have managed to unseat his position on the charts include Kylie Kelce, who does not appear on YouTube’s top 100 list, and Mel Robbins, who is ranked at No. 76.)
Kylie Kelce attends an Eagles Autism Foundation event in Philadelphia, on June 13, 2024. (Michael Simon / Getty Images for HP Inc. file)
The millionaire TV personality pointed out that 20-year-olds are living through a recession, workforce changes, and unfair scrutiny from leaders. (Heidi Gutman / Getty Images)
But platforms benefit when new names rise to the top, said Melissa Kiesche, senior vice president of Edison Research, which has built its own list of podcast rankings based on surveys. “They don’t want to see Joe Rogan at No. 1 every single week forever,” she said. Discovery drives more listening hours.
Sometimes that discovery applies to household names, too. YouTube’s top 50 included podcasts from legacy television brands such as “NBC Nightly News,” “60 Minutes” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”
Mr. Feldman characterized the chart, where Gen Z social media stars sit alongside cable figures who rose to prominence in the 1990s, like Nancy Grace or Tucker Carlson, as a “good testament to how those worlds can coexist and hopefully thrive together.”
May 14, 2025
Fox will launch its new streaming service, Fox One, this fall, before the start of the NFL season
Fox Corp. revealed new details about its streaming service on Monday, including that it would debut this fall and would be called Fox One.
The announcement came ahead of the company’s upfront, an annual pitch to entice advertisers with a slate of upcoming shows. Lachlan Murdoch, the company’s chief executive and son of the Fox Corp. founder, Rupert Murdoch, previewed the service on a quarterly earnings call. The name Fox One, he said, was a reference to the combined heft of the company’s TV shows, cable channels and broadcast network, including National Football League games.
“Whether it’s the Super Bowl, the election cycle or the upfront, our company is at its best when we work together as one,” Mr. Murdoch said.
Mr. Murdoch did not say how much Fox would charge viewers, only that it would not be less than what its cable subscribers pay.
Unlike Disney or Warner Bros. Discovery, which have put paid streaming services at the center of their businesses, Fox Corp. has until now adopted a more piecemeal approach. The company, which owns the Fox News cable channel and the Fox broadcasting network, operates the Fox Nation streaming service and Tubi, a free ad-supported service with TV shows and movies.
The Fox Nation streaming service will continue to exist as a stand-alone product within Fox Corporation, but Fox One subscribers will be able to bundle their subscriptions with Fox Nation. Mr. Murdoch also said that Fox had been approached by operators of other streaming services about offering a bundled subscription, though he did not identify them.
Fox recently announced plans to team up with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery on a sports-focused streaming service called Venu. That service was canceled before it got off the ground amid legal challenges.
Like Venu, Fox One is meant to coexist with the company’s lucrative traditional TV business. In his remarks, Mr. Murdoch said that the service was aimed at the “cordless” market, referring to viewers who do not have a pay-TV subscription. Traditional cable customers who already have access to Fox channels will be able to get Fox One free of charge.
“It would be a failure if we attract more connected subscribers,” Mr. Murdoch said, adding, “We do not want to lose a traditional cable subscriber to Fox One.”
May 13, 2025
CNN is launching a new streaming service in the fall of this year
CNN is getting ready to launch a streaming service. Again.
Three years after CNN’s parent company killed the hotly anticipated (and very expensive) CNN+ service shortly after it was released, the news network will introduce a new streaming product this fall that packages live and on-demand programming.
Mark Thompson, the company’s chief executive, told employees about the service in a meeting on Tuesday afternoon. Some of the details about the service remain unclear, including pricing and an exact release date. But Mr. Thompson said the new service would be tied to the company’s recently introduced subscription product, which gives paying members unlimited access to articles posted on CNN.com.
CNN is also taking pains to avoid alienating its most valuable customers: traditional cable distributors. Those customers will have free access to CNN’s streaming service.
Alex MacCallum, CNN’s executive vice president of digital products and services, said in a statement that bundling the video service with CNN’s existing digital subscription product would allow “audiences to get the most out of CNN in one seamless and simple way.”
Like most other news organizations, CNN is trying to find new sources of revenue as its traditional business declines. Mr. Thompson said in an interview this year that the company’s “future prospects will not be good,” if CNN does not follow its audiences to new platforms “with real conviction and scale.”
Mr. Thompson, who previously led a digital turnaround at The New York Times, has focused his attention on CNN’s digital business since he joined the company in 2023. Investments in the digital efforts are fueled, in part, by a $70 million investment from Warner Bros. Discovery, its parent company.
Mr. Thompson hired Ms. MacCallum, a former executive at The Times, to lead the network’s digital push, and is planning to add 200 digital-focused employees this year. The network laid off roughly 200 employees focused on its traditional TV operations this year.
CNN’s new service won’t look like CNN+, its failed $300 million splashy foray into streaming that was stuffed with well-known news and entertainment personalities. The new service will be more stripped down, resembling the network’s traditional cable experience, although not an exact replica. Subscribers will also have access to a library of original shows and documentaries.
May 13, 2025
Changes to the dress code at the Cannes Film Festival are creating controversy
The Cannes Film Festival is getting more covered-up — and just in time for the opening ceremony honoring the octogenarian Robert De Niro. Bella Hadid, newly blonde, is already in town, and stars expected include Halle Berry, Scarlett Johansson and Emma Stone. But anyone expecting one of the most reliable moves on the red carpet might be disappointed. The new dress code for gala screenings includes the admonition, “for decency reasons, nudity is prohibited on the red carpet, as well as in any other area of the festival.”
Cue a crisis in the fashion-film industrial complex.
After all, nowhere has the naked dress been more of a presence than at Cannes, where the combination of Mediterranean, sun and a certain Gallic disdain for prudishness (or at least perceived disdain for prudishness) have conspired to create its own tradition of sartorial liberation.
And “nudity,” when it comes to celebrity dressing, is a relative term. The idea that it may no longer be a shortcut to the spotlight is even more shocking than the clothing it may be proscribing.
“Naked dressing,” or that mode of dress in which large swaths of the normally private body are aired for public viewing, has been a tent pole of the publicity machine since long before Marilyn Monroe cooed “Happy birthday, Mr. President” into a microphone in a flesh-colored sheath so tight it left little to the imagination.
In recent years it has become practically a category unto itself, especially at events like the Met Gala. That’s where Beyoncé played Venus on the half shell in 2015 in sheer Givenchy with strategically placed floral embroidery. Where, in 2024, Rita Ora wore a nude Marni bodysuit covered in what looked like strings, and Kylie Minogue modeled a Diesel dress with a naked torso superimposed on her actual torso. It has been framed as a post-Covid libidinal celebration and a post-#MeToo reclamation of the body. Either way, it is pretty much always a talking point.
La Cicciolina at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988. (Garcia/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)
Cameron Diaz at a “Gangs of New York” party in Cannes in 2002. (J. Vespa/WireImage)
All the way back in 1985, Ilona Staller, or La Cicciolina, the porn star, politician and former wife of Jeff Koons, walked the Cannes red carpet in a white satin … well, what would you call it? An evening version of Rudi Gernreich’s monokini, with breast-baring straps and a long white satin skirt. Madonna dropped her opera cape to reveal her Jean Paul Gaultier bullet bra and undies on the carpet in 1991, and in 2002 Cameron Diaz wore a sheer beaded gown and panties, starting a peekaboo trend that is still going strong.
Indeed, the dress as scrim, a transparent piece of nothing draped over bare skin or lingerie to suggest clothing without actually covering much of anything, is perhaps the most popular current form of naked dressing. It is more omnipresent than, say, the skirt slit up to here and the top cut down to there that has also been modeled by many on the red carpet. It provides the illusion of clothes while also teasing what is underneath.
It’s unclear from the wording of the Cannes dress code if the new policy applies only to literal nudity or to clothing that exposes body parts that might reasonably be termed “indecent.” According to Agnès Leroy, the head of press for the festival, the new rules were established to codify certain practices that have been long in effect. The aim, she said, “is not to regulate attire per se, but to prohibit full nudity — meaning the absence of clothing — on the red carpet, in accordance with the institutional framework of the event and French law.” (Even if French law allows toplessness on some beaches, a reality that may add to the confusion around the Cannes rules.)
Still, that leaves the dictum somewhat open to interpretation, given the general absence of fabric in many evening looks. One person’s vulgarity can be another person’s celebration, and who is to say who gets to police whose body?
Leila Depina at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. (Yara Nardi/Reuters)
Natasha Poly at the premiere of “Emilia Perez” at Cannes last year. (Vianney Le Caer/Invision/Associated Press)
(This is reminiscent of the time Melania Trump addressed critics of her naked photo shoots in her memoir, situating them in an artistic tradition that includes John Collier’s “Lady Godiva” and Michelangelo’s “David,” and noting that “we should honor our bodies and embrace the timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self-expression.”)
Perhaps the new code is simply calculated to prevent the sort of attention-grabbing stunt that occurred at the Grammys in February, when Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, crashed the red carpet with his wife, Bianca Censori, only to have her take off her fur coat to reveal her fully naked body “covered” by an entirely transparent nylon slip that provided no coverage at all. That seemed to have taken the trend to its ultimate, disturbing extreme by breaking the last barrier in naked dressing: genitalia.
Even though Ye had not actually been invited to the event, he and his wife dominated the headlines the next day more than the actual award ceremony.
The fact that the Cannes dress code also prohibits “voluminous outfits, in particular those with a large train, that hinder the proper flow of traffic of guests and complicate seating in the theater” suggests that what the organizers were really forestalling was the appearance of dresses that act as their own sort of performance art, grabbing eyeballs and dominating conversations that might otherwise be focused on the films that are the nominal point of the festival.
Bella Hadid at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. (Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
If that was the aim, however, it has somewhat backfired. By officially banning nudity on the carpet, the Cannes organizers simply sparked a raft of pieces (like this one) discussing nudity on the carpet. Most of them focus less on the actual meaning of the term in all its thorny nuance than the opportunity to revisit notorious nude-adjacent moments past.
You could have seen that one coming.
May 13, 2025
Come what may in his federal trial, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs deserves to remain the outcast he has become
The federal trial against Sean Combs that begins Monday in the Southern District of New York follows an indictment that accuses the entertainment mogul of human trafficking and drug trafficking, and of using his considerable wealth and power and brute force to keep his alleged victims silent. Combs has denied all the charges the government has brought against him and rejected a plea deal. The founder of Bad Boy Records is no stranger to the courts or to having trouble swirling around him. But this is the first time he stands accused by the U.S. Department of Justice; he’s never faced charges as serious as those he faces now.
The founder of Bad Boy Records is no stranger to the courts or to having trouble swirling around him.
In November 2023, R&B singer Cassie, whose legal name is Casandra Ventura and who had an on-again, off-again relationship with Combs, filed a lawsuit accusing Combs of beating, kicking, stomping and raping her and forcing her into sex with male prostitutes. Combs, who denied the claims the artist made against him, settled with her the next day. A statement from Combs’ attorney Ben Brafman said, “Mr. Combs’ decision to settle the lawsuit does not in any way undermine his flat-out denial of the claims.”
Then, in May 2024, CNN released a 2016 security video from a hotel hallway showing Combs physically assaulting Cassie, including kicking and dragging her. Combs responded in an Instagram post that what he did happened during a dark time in his life. “I was f—-d up. I hit rock bottom. But I make no excuses. My behavior on that video is inexcusable. I take full responsibility for my actions in that video.”
Combs was arrested in September and accused of hosting what he reportedly called “freak offs,” which the government describes as coerced sexual acts that Combs organized and recorded.
Since November 2023, according to The Washington Post, there have been well over 70 lawsuits accusing Combs of sexual assault. He has denied all such allegations. And those cases against him haven’t been proved. But it’s hard not to put him in the same category as celebrities such as R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein, powerful men accused of sexual abuse going back decades. We should ask ourselves why our society seems so willing to ignore the whispers and rumors and bits of evidence that link powerful men to violence against women.
The violence Combs inflicts on Ventura in that unearthed hotel surveillance video is so awful it’s nearly unwatchable. It’s bad news for Combs, then, that U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian has ruled that it’s admissible evidence the jury will get to see. Prosecutors say the hotel surveillance video shows Combs, wearing only a white towel around his waist, trying to drag Ventura back to a room where a “freak off” was happening.
Since November 2023, according to The Washington Post, there have been well over 70 lawsuits accusing Combs of sexual assault.
To be sure, that video does not automatically make Combs guilty of the charges the federal government has brought against him. But it’s clear why his team fought so hard to keep it out of evidence.
Combs’ team has argued that CNN sped up the hotel surveillance video and ran it out of sequence. CNN has said it did not alter the video its source presented to the network.
Combs has spent a career being a “shiny suit man” who nonetheless has been accused of disturbing flashes of violence. He was found guilty of criminal mischief in 1996 for threatening a New York Post photographer with a gun, and he paid a $1,000 fine. In April 1999, he was booked and charged with two felonies against rival record executive Steve Stoute, who says Combs and his bodyguards beat him with their fists and with a Champagne bottle and a chair. Combs publicly apologized and Stoute asked for a dismissal of the charges. Combs, whose childhood nickname “Puffy” was a description of the way he’d huff and puff when he lost his temper, pleaded guilty to harassment and was sentenced to a day of anger management classes.
Combs was acquitted, though, after being criminally charged after a December 1999 shootout in a club in New York that left three people injured. A jury decided that the state didn’t prove Combs to be in possession of a gun or that he’d bribed witnesses in that case, but jurors convicted Bad Boy artist Shyne (real name Moses Barrow) and he was sent to prison.
Combs’ history of brushes with the law may have added to his allure. But the fact that he’d never been convicted of a felony seemed to make him edgy and cool enough for Hollywood A-listers and the country’s movers and shakers to keep him as an associate. At the height of his popularity, there didn’t appear to be any celebrity who was too big (or considered him too toxic) to appear at a Combs party.
There didn’t appear to be any celebrity who was too big (or considered him too toxic) to appear at a Combs party.
Too many people reflexively assume that when word gets out that a celebrity is abusive to women that it’s nothing but a smear campaign meant to tarnish that person’s legacy. The race factor also has a peculiar impact. Some people might not always love the person who’s being accused but don’t trust that they’re being treated fairly. And the accused should be treated fairly. No matter how awful the charges against Combs, he has the right to a fair trial.
That said, many might still be denying that Combs has been violent and characterizing him as some kind of victim, but for the hotel surveillance video that captures him attacking Ventura in the exact manner she had described in her November 2023 lawsuit. Ventura is likely to be a prominent witness as the Department of Justice attempts to prove to jurors that Combs has a penchant for abusive behavior and violent tactics.
One of the messages of the #MeToo movement was that for too long, we, the public, have helped enable men, especially powerful men, to routinely hurt women. And as Combs goes on trial, we should be asking ourselves how much has changed since the start of #MeToo.
In trying to keep the hotel surveillance footage out of the trial, Combs’ lawyers said the video “immediately and dramatically turned the tide of public opinion” against their client. They’re right. No matter what happens at the trial, for what he did to Cassie, the bad boy can expect to be a permanent pariah — as he should be.
May 11, 2025