The 24 Seven: News you can lose
A continued look at the media siloes which have splintered America
Welcome back, friends. I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. I’ve still got one leftover bird to roast this week (how you gonna say “No” to $.27/lb?) and a fair amount of homemade cranberry sauce reserves. But enough gobbledygook.
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1. ‘News’
I took two screenshots on Thanksgiving of the top apps on the Apple App store, which seemed to capture this moment in American political history.
On the left in the photo above is the top “News” apps and on the right, the top among all apps (this is for free apps.)
It’s remarkable that none of the of the top “News” apps in the store are actual news outlets, at least not in the sense of professional journalism, publication standards and quality of reporting.
X.com (1st) is notoriously anti-news, having promoted disproven conspiracy theories and downplaying reported news it doesn’t like. Reddit (2nd), ironically, has developed broad digital credibility via largely anonymous posters, but is also not a news outlet.
NextDoor according to real humans I talk with in my neighborhood who have used it sounds like a PTA knife-fight in the Thunderdome. (The knives, of course, having been freecycled.)
The closest would probably be NewsBreak, which has worked vigorously to insert itself as a middle-man in the media wars of the past decade, presenting itself as an arbiter of news quality even as NewsBreak itself has a shoddy history of publishing false stories.
As a news professional, this tells me a couple of things: There is incredible value in media presenting itself as news, the country writlarge wants to know what’s happening around it. There’s also an incredible deficit in media understanding — reporters check things before publishing and have editors who read for accuracy and ask questions to ensure a story is correct. And news outlets publish corrections when something is demonstrably wrong, as a historic and professional means of establishing and maintaining credibility. (NewsBreak, to its credit, did remove the AI fabricated piece cited in the link above.)
But equally interesting was the overall App store chart, which despite showing Meta(Facebook)’s Threads, which has downplayed news and politics since launching as an alternative to X.com at the top, charted the continued surge of BlueSky, which has become a destination for reporters and journalists in recent weeks.
2. Losses
The rise of news “influencers” and AI churning news content is built on having reporting to work with, which requires reporters, who are being put out of work by news “influencers” and AI.
3. The Final Hunter Scandal?
President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden
Yes, Biden is held to a different standard than president-elect Donald Trump because Biden has built a career and image of being honest to a fault. Trump lies or misstates (for whatever reason) as a matter of course, and a number of voters seem to accept that as part of his professional brand. (Witness Trump and his team repeatedly threatening reporters who wrote about his ties to Project 2025 a year ago, before Trump revealed his ties to Project 2025 after winning the election.)
Trump earned his first impeachment in September 2019 because of a rogue foreign operation conducted by disbarred former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others to attempt to leverage then-newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian gas company by holding back $xxx million in aid meant to keep Russian troops at bay on the country’s eastern front. (Three years later Russia invaded Ukraine, starting a calamitous European landwar which is now almost three years old.)
4. The shape of deportations
As the logistics of Trump’s planned mass deportation of undocumented immigrants becomes clearer, Hill reporter Pablo Manriquez writes at his Migrant Insider newsletter that if Trump “Border czar” Tom Homan chose to break the law in pursuit of the deportations, up to 200,000 people could be deported in the first 60 days of the second Trump administration, and up to 1 million after 100 days.
Manriquez cites a series of techniques Trump and his team could use, from setting up temporary detention camps and using major cities which already fly out immigrants detained by ICE, to restarting mass worksite raids and publicize deportations in an effort to get immigrants to self-deport.
5. The coming investigations?
In nominating longtime Trumpworld lieutenant and veteran Republican operative Kash Patel to run the FBI, Trump picked an ardent activist and close ally of former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes who has long promised to use the Justice Department to investigate people he didn’t like.
If the threats/promises are real and will be acted on, this makes it sound as though the FBI will be reverted to a Hoover-era enclave of shadow operations inside the U.S. (though with the distinct exception it would likely be the president meting out the requests, not a rogue FBI director.) And there is plenty of evidence this could be one of the most likely actions Trump takes in office, given his own promises that he would use the Justice Department for personal investigations and that they would not require Congressional approval (unlike other campaign promises.)
Veteran Republican operative and 2024 RNC content creator Ivan Raiklin, who helped push the debunked theory that then-vice president Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 election results, published an “enemies list” earlier this year of politicians and staff he wanted arrested by “constitutional” sheriffs, according to this Raw Story investigation.
The counterpoint from some Trump supporters has been that these are just WWE-style threats issued in the heat of a campaign and the threats of imprisonment (and pardons for January 6th rioters) are just bluster.
In a related vein, longtime reporter Jane Mayer is out with a deeply reported investigation of Pentagon nominee Pete Hegseth which is very much worth your time.
The Senate confirmation hearings starting next month look to be interesting viewing.
6. Autopsy?
The Democratic Party soul-searching continues apace after the shock of last month’s election loss (even as polling tallies have shown it was neither as withering as first presented, nor a distinctly partisan sweep with a number of Senate and House Democrats outperforming the Harris ticket.)
Former longtime Republican campaign operative-turned NeverTrump leader
had a good and caustic look at what the Democratic Party brass missed. (As I noted in a Substack note yesterday on the app, I’ve often found Galen’s observations useful as he comes to the Democratic Party not just from the outside, but the from the upper echelons of the former GOP.)You can find the Pod Save America episode here, in case you were enjoying the holiday and checked out from politics, much like I tried to do. I discussed some of the fallout from this last week on CBS News’ America Decides, catch the clip here.
7. Get in front of decision-makers with 24sight News
The fractured media environment has elevated the importance of independent journalism not only as a means of helping the public make informed decisions, but also for top leaders looking to make sense of things in some very tumultuous times.
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Cheers,
Tom LoBianco
National politics reporter and co-founder, 24sight News