Jon Passantino
@passantino
Executive editor at @status.news. Email: jon at status dot news. Subscribe to the essential newsletter examining the media and power: status.news/subscribe 📬
Will David Ellison's Paramount still complete its merger with Warner Bros. after states forced it to pause the deal? @status.news asked 8 antitrust experts for their take. The answers are fascinating. www.status.news/p/paramount-...
And here's how it ended, with new WHCA president Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News clapping, smiling, and embracing Trump after an hour of insults.
NEW: Inside the cuts at ESPN where management scrambled to deliver the news to talent and staffers alike as reports leaked out, leaving stunned employees questioning the network's direction. Details from @nataliekorach.bsky.social in @status.news www.status.news/p/espn-layof...
And lets not forget Murdoch's newest paper— based in LA—gave Pratt its inaugural endorsement on the cover, cartoonishly claiming "Pragmatic Pratt is certainly the best candidate" and "Socialist candidate Nithya Raman represents a far-left agenda that is already destroying New York"
Bari Weiss' Free Press built an entire fantasy around the idea that Pratt was actually a serious candidate, promoting a bogus narrative that Republicans were ascendent in an "angry" California revolting against the left leaving the "far-left" Raman in ruins. NOPE
More news: After all three ousted “60 Minutes” correspondents accused CBS News leadership under Bari Weiss of political interference and attempts to insert bias in their reporting, the network is responding on the record with a denial. www.status.news/p/60-minutes...
CBS shopped this ratings narrative to outlets, who published it without the actual numbers. So how did they get to 4 million? By dropping the worst performing day of the week with a little-known coding maneuver to sneak around the Nielsen average www.status.news/p/60-minutes...
In another instance today, CBS News posts a video released by the Israeli military showing a series of airstrikes in Lebanon without any additional reporting or context
This is what qualifies as news now at Bari Weiss’ CBS. No accompanying link or article elaborating further on how this is of any significance. Just boosting Trump’s deranged AI posts
Exclusive: We obtained a copy of the invitation David Ellison sent for an evening of dinner and cocktails "honoring the Trump White House and CBS White House Correspondents" ahead of the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The full story in @status.news www.status.news/p/david-elli...
U.S. Sen @chrismurphyct.bsky.social on Paramount winning control of Warner Bros. Discovery and CNN
With today's forecast update, the weather service is now predicting "extreme" winter storm impacts in parts of NYC with near-impossible driving conditions and "extensive and widespread closures and disruptions to infrastructure" www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/wwd/wssi/wss...
The NWS has increased its snowfall forecast once again for NYC, now predicting 17-19 inches in the city through Monday evening with blizzard conditions. Keep an eye on this page for official info: www.weather.gov/okx/winter
Whoa. The first blizzard warning issued for NYC since 2017. This could be a big one www.cnn.com/2026/02/21/w...
! ABC has broken into primetime to report a person of interest is in custody in the Nancy Guthrie case
🚨 Will Lewis has stepped down as publisher of The Post in a Saturday memo to staff:
The Washington Post ran a full-page letter to subscribers in today's print edition from exec editor Matt Murray stating that it is committed to sports and local coverage after laying off the vast majority of the staff on those desks
As Washington Post leadership prepares to cut hundreds of staffers, many on the foreign and sports desks, Post reporters are publicly pleading with Jeff Bezos to save the paper and their jobs
Did you hear about that horrific deadly shooting in Minneapolis? Don't worry, Bari Weiss' The Free Press is all over it today.
In just the second day of its existence, Mediaite's "One Sheet" newsletter which rips off the work of independent journalists and resells it, has already misstated our reporting at @status.news. Sloppy
Grok producing vile sexualized deepfakes of women and children isn’t an accident www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/t...
Elon Musk's Grok AI is making thousands of deepfaked sexual images of women and children with an app freely distributed by Apple and Google. Why are they sitting silent? From @status.news www.status.news/p/tony-dokou...
A reminder that just a few days ago Dokoupil wrote: “I can promise you we’ll be more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or any one else of his era." Is this what more transparent looks like?
Just yesterday, CBS News posted its new "5 simple values," which included #3 "to present you with the fullest picture—and the strongest voices on all sides of an issue." If that is the standard, tonight's first episode of Evening News under Dokoupil was a collosal failure.
Despite what Axios is claiming to be a “scoop” today, @status.news first reported last week that Bari Weiss was developing a masthead at CBS News and yes, we have the names www.status.news/p/bari-weiss...