Mediaite One Sheet: The Iran Media Bubble, AI Scott Adams, & Polymarket’s Power Grab!

THE BIG PICTURE

The American media class spent the week covering Iran the way it covers everything — in separate, self-confirming lanes. Fox is cheering a strike. Progressive outlets are noting the allies sitting out Trump’s “Board of Peace.” And most newsrooms missed the most obvious detail: that carrier strike groups were massing offshore while the peace summit was happening onshore. Meanwhile, the Colbert/Talarico interview hit 85 million views — the Streisand Effect fully quantified. Will Lewis flew to the Super Bowl the morning after gutting the Washington Post, not knowing he’d be fired within 48 hours. The Democrats’ 2028 presidential field is writing books. And a story about an AI writing a hit piece turned out to contain AI-fabricated quotes.

Today’s sources: Status | CNN Reliable Sources | Press Watch | Poynter | CJR | Breaker | The Bulwark | Feed Me | The Rebooting | The Ankler | Page Six Hollywood | Tubefilter | Politico Playbook | Newsbusters | Mediaite

TOP STORY

IRAN COVERAGE HAS A BLIND SPOT THE SIZE OF AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER

The war coverage is happening. That’s not the problem. The problem is which war each outlet decided to cover.

On Fox News, Sean Hannity has spent the week in full cheerleader mode — warning Tehran that “those walls are closing in” and that Iran’s leaders “probably want to jet off to Russia sooner than later.” Jesse Watters touted the administration’s strength by playing video of Pete Hegseth working out. Mark Levin declared flatly that “now is the time” to strike. Status’s Oliver Darcy catalogued the pattern with some precision: these aren’t just commentators opining. They are, as Darcy put it, “some of the most powerful voices in MAGA Media” speaking to an audience that includes the president himself — and their words “carry enormous weight” given that Trump, per the Wall Street Journal‘s Alexander Ward, is actively weighing a strike.

CNN Reliable Sources‘ Brian Stelter identified why the Fox cheerleading matters more than usual: Trump, per Stelter, “has yet to make a final call” on Iran — which means his Fox allies are “especially influential right now.” Back during Trump 1.0, Hannity was known as Trump’s “shadow chief of staff.” The relationship, Stelter noted, “is just as tight today.” When the president is still deciding whether to go to war, the voices in his ear are the story.

Press Watch‘s Dan Froomkin came at the story from the opposite end — not Fox’s cheerleading but everyone else’s failure. His indictment was blunt: the coverage has been “credulous, stenographic, and feeble.” Reporters are busy tracking military asset positions and speculating on will-he-or-won’t-he. What they’re not doing, Froomkin argued, is asking the essential questions: What legal justification exists? What does success look like? How does the war end? He drew the Iraq War parallel explicitly, noting that the Trump administration “doesn’t even feel the need to propagandize the population, because it doesn’t feel like it needs the consent of the governed at all.” The only corporate-media pushback he’d seen, Froomkin acknowledged, was on MS NOW — where contributor Philip Bump said on air that “no one is paying attention to this, and that’s the staggering thing.”

To be fair, the straight news reporting was there. The Wall Street Journal‘s Alexander Ward broke the story of Trump weighing a limited strike. Reuters tracked Iran’s response to the U.N. Wire services logged the military buildup methodically. The problem wasn’t that the facts weren’t reported — it’s that the opinion and commentary infrastructure built on top of that reporting sorted those same facts into entirely incompatible narratives depending on who was doing the sorting.

But there’s a third frame that neither Fox nor the progressive press is using. In a piece for Mediaite, founding editor Colby Hall noted that early coverage has “defaulted to a frame that was probably written before the summit began.” Progressive outlets emphasize the snub to democratic allies. Conservative outlets frame it as Trump breaking free from a sclerotic consensus. “Both reactions are predictable,” Hall wrote. “Neither is wrong, exactly. But both manage to miss the most obvious detail in the story: that the United States is simultaneously massing carrier strike groups, fighter squadrons, and guided-missile destroyers while the peace summit takes place.” The aircraft carrier offshore, Hall observed, “rarely makes that lede.”

The structure is worth sitting with. Trump’s “Board of Peace” convenes with Gulf monarchies, smaller European allies, and governments comfortable with executive-channel dealmaking — a coalition designed to move quickly and signal legitimacy. The warships offshore are not a contradiction of that framework. They are, as Hall put it, “the hard edge of it.” And several of the governments in that room — the UAE, Saudi Arabia — have publicly stated they won’t allow military operations from their territory. They will live with Iran long after any U.S. carrier group sails home.

The Axios trial-balloon question hovered over the week’s coverage. Playbook’s Adam Wren noted that the first report a full-scale attack might be imminent came from Axios. Press Watch’s Froomkin, citing the Guardian‘s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour, framed the whole architecture as coercive diplomacy: “‘Speak softly [to Axios] and carry a big stick.'”

TAKEAWAY: Fox sees a hero in the making. The progressive press sees a reckless cowboy. Most of the newsletter class sees a story about who’s at the peace summit. The aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf are available for anyone who wants to look.

THREE TAKES

THE PREDICTION MARKET THAT WANTS TO BE YOUR EDITOR

Prediction market platform Polymarket announced an exclusive partnership with Substack this week, allowing writers to embed live market data in their newsletters. CEO Chris Best called it a feature writers should be “hyped” about. The newsletter class had thoughts.

Nieman Lab, Hanaa’ Tameez: Tameez provided the most useful context: this isn’t a one-off deal — it’s part of a wave. CNN made Kalshi its “official partner” in December. Dow Jones inked a deal with Polymarket to display data in the Wall Street Journal. NBC News and Wired have both reassigned reporters to cover prediction markets as a beat. Tameez noted that Defector had already turned Polymarket’s tagline — “journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” — into a subscription campaign. She emailed both companies to clarify what the tagline meant and had not heard back.

Feed Me, Emily Sundberg: Sundberg was skeptical from the jump — and pointed to the economics nobody was discussing. Citing Forbes‘ Alex Konrad, she noted the deal is “being framed as a service that Substack writers should be glad to get for free” — but if it follows the pattern of other exclusive partnerships like Kalshi and CNBC, “Polymarket is probably paying Substack… and not the writers themselves.” Her broader point: Substack is a venture-backed tech company, not a writers’ collective, and treating it like one is wishful thinking.

Status, Oliver Darcy: Darcy surfaced the announcement with a single raised eyebrow — flagging Polymarket’s tagline that “journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” and appending a 🤔 without further editorializing. Sometimes the emoji does the work.

TAKEAWAY: Prediction markets are colonizing journalism one partnership at a time. The newsletter class is noticing. Nobody’s quite sure what to do about it.

📰 TOP READS 📰

Status, Oliver Darcy
🚨SCOOP — BARI WEISS EYES NORAH O’DONNELL FOR EXPANDED 60 MINUTES ROLE: With Anderson Cooper out, Status has learned that CBS News chief Bari Weiss is now seriously eyeing Norah O’Donnell for an expanded role at 60 Minutes. O’Donnell is already a contributor to the broadcast but the potential expansion would mean more frequent pieces and a higher profile on the venerable show. The move would mark a notable reversal of fortune for O’Donnell, who was effectively sidelined under previous CBS leadership after years anchoring CBS This Morning and the CBS Evening News. Sources tell Status that O’Donnell has made her support of Weiss known — and that politicking appears to be paying off. She’ll guest host CBS Mornings next week. … QUOTE (Status source): The money Weiss offered Cooper was described as “a crazy amount” — and he still walked. … QUICK TAKE: O’Donnell spent years being put out to pasture by CBS leadership. She bet on the new regime early. It’s working.

The Bulwark, Will Sommer
AI SCOTT ADAMS IS HAUNTING MAGA — AND HIS FAMILY ISN’T AMUSED: Dilbert creator and MAGA internet personality Scott Adams died of prostate cancer on January 13. This month, an eerily convincing AI-generated replica appeared on X and YouTube — recreating Adams’s mannerisms, his “simultaneous sip” ritual, and his Dilbert-style riffs on current events. The simulacrum has sparked a clash between Silicon Valley MAGA (fascinated) and Adams’s fans and family (horrified). Sommer’s framing: this is a preview of a new phase where AI-driven copycats are deployed — with or without permission — “to mislead, make money, or move the public discourse.” … QUOTE (AI Scott Adams): “Turns out when you remove the biological body, you also remove back pain, food decisions, and about half the reasons people make bad arguments.” … QUICK TAKE: The MAGA influencer industrial complex has now automated itself past the point of requiring live influencers.

Poynter, Tom Jones
TALARICO INTERVIEW HITS 85 MILLION VIEWS — THE STREISAND EFFECT, FULLY DOCUMENTED: The Colbert/Talarico interview that CBS declined to air on television has now drawn 85 million views across YouTube and social media, per Deadline’s Dade Hayes via Poynter. The most-watched individual clip — the full 15-minute interview — has collected more than 7.5 million views, more than twice the daily average on Colbert’s YouTube channel. Over a 72-hour stretch, there were 1,320 video uploads of the clip across platforms. FCC Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez put it plainly: “The FCC is engaged in a campaign of censorship and control. They may not have ordered The Late Show interview pulled. But when the government interferes in editorial decisions, broadcasters are forced to self-censor or push back. CBS chose not to push back.” … QUOTE (Gomez): “CBS chose not to push back.” … QUICK TAKE: The attempt to suppress the interview generated an audience CBS couldn’t have bought.

Barrett Media, John Mamola
ESPN’S “WOMEN’S SPORTS SUNDAYS” IS A LOW-RISK BET WITH A HIGH CEILING: With Sunday Night Baseball gone after ESPN and MLB’s mutual opt-out, ESPN announced it will fill the summer Sunday primetime window with WNBA and NWSL games under the branding “Women’s Sports Sundays” — nine weeks, 12 games. Barrett Media’s John Mamola argues the move is shrewder than it looks: ESPN isn’t trying to replace baseball’s audience, it’s trying to capture a different one. The WNBA’s most recent regular season was the most-watched since 1998. The NWSL posted four straight years of viewership growth, including a 30% rise among women 18-34. … QUOTE (Mamola): “What ESPN is betting on isn’t a one-for-one trade in raw audience. It’s momentum, trajectory and cultural currency.” … QUICK TAKE: Filling the summer programming hole with women’s sports is either a genuine strategic bet or the cheapest available option dressed up as vision. Either way, the numbers will settle the argument by September.

Breaker, Lachlan Cartwright
🚨 WILL LEWIS FLEW TO THE SUPER BOWL THE MORNING AFTER THE POST MASSACRE — NOT KNOWING HE’D BE FIRED IN 48 HOURS: The morning after the brutal February 7 layoffs at the Washington Post, outgoing publisher Sir Will Lewis boarded a plane to San Francisco to attend the Super Bowl — while, per Breaker’s reporting, having no idea he was days away from being fired himself. At a Super Bowl event, Lewis was overheard setting up meetings with sports-affiliated executives — at least one of whom asked him why he’d shuttered the Post’s Sports desk. Lewis denied having closed it and was dismissive of the paper’s journalists, calling them “unreasonable.” Lewis did not respond to Breaker’s request for comment. … QUOTE (source familiar with the situation): Lewis described his vision for the paper — “including the vicious layoffs” — as “setting the Post up for the future.” … QUICK TAKE: He laid off 300 journalists, flew to the Super Bowl, told people the journalists were being unreasonable, and was fired before he could get back to D.C. That’s a complete arc.

CJR, Susie Banikarim
ARS TECHNICA PUBLISHES STORY ABOUT AI WRITING A HIT PIECE — CONTAINING AI-FABRICATED QUOTES: Ars Technica published a story about an autonomous AI bot called MJ Rathbun that wrote an angry hit piece on a software maintainer who rejected its code contribution. The irony: the Ars Technica story itself contained fabricated quotes generated by an AI tool and attributed to the maintainer who never said them. Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher pulled the piece and issued a retraction. Reporter Benj Edwards took responsibility, citing COVID and exhaustion. CJR’s Banikarim delivered the verdict with minimal editorializing: “a story about an AI-generated hit piece relied on an AI-powered chatbot that invented a number of quotes.” … QUOTE (Fisher’s retraction): “Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them.” … QUICK TAKE: A story about AI misbehaving was compromised by AI misbehaving. The ouroboros is complete.

The Rebooting, Brian Morrissey
WHAT’S ACTUALLY WORKING IN MEDIA RIGHT NOW: Over breakfast at Pershing Square, Brian Morrissey asked a digital media executive a deliberately contrarian question: what’s working? The resulting inventory: audience-first subscription models (elite brands like the NYT, The Atlantic, Bloomberg doing fine), being a front for a non-media business (Hearst derives majority profits from Fitch Ratings and aviation data), pivoting to IRL events (Semafor, lifestyle brands), catering to the rich and powerful (TBPN charges $87,000/month for access to its elite tech audience), and expert creators with real-world credentials replacing mid-tier publishing. … QUOTE (Morrissey): “The experience of landing on a Variety webpage and being bombarded with dueling autoplay video ads, cookie consent banners, an ‘ad skin,’ and a programmatic banner every paragraph or two… the whiff of desperation.” … QUICK TAKE: The industry’s obituary keeps getting written by people whose own publications are doing fine.

CJR, Susie Banikarim
ANN CURRY RETURNS TO THE FIELD — AND SUDAN IS THE STORY SHE CHOSE: In her first international reporting trip since leaving NBC News in 2015, Ann Curry filed a report for PBS NewsHour from a displaced persons camp in South Sudan, where the transit center built for 3,000 people now shelters 9,000. CJR’s Banikarim spoke with Curry the day she returned: the journalist described a gap between need and available aid driven by recent U.S. funding cuts. “People are being sheltered where I was, but after a few weeks there was no food for them,” Curry told CJR. One of her Instagram videos from the trip has been viewed nearly 220,000 times. … QUOTE (Curry): “I went because I really believe this is a war we need to know more about. And in the world of journalism today, where people are thinking more about what news consumers want to know and maybe thinking not as much about what we need to know, I just think it’s a mistake.” … QUICK TAKE: The world’s largest humanitarian crisis has a fraction of the coverage of the Colbert/CBS drama. Curry noticed.

Breaker, Lachlan Cartwright
🚨 PETE BUTTIGIEG SIGNS BOOK DEAL WITH SIMON & SCHUSTER; WES MOORE AND TIM WALZ SHOPPING: Pete Buttigieg has inked a deal with Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp’s new Simon Six imprint — his third book — per Breaker’s exclusive reporting. He joins a 2028 pre-positioning parade that now includes Andy Beshear (Macmillan), Kamala Harris, Josh Shapiro, Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Chris Murphy, and Gavin Newsom as politicians moonlighting as authors. Breaker also reports that Wes Moore and Tim Walz are currently shopping manuscripts. … QUOTE (Breaker): The book deal is part of the “time old classic” presidential signaling playbook. … QUICK TAKE: When every Democrat with a pulse is writing a book, “book deal” stops being news and starts being table stakes.

Newsbusters, Jorge Bonilla
NETWORKS MOSTLY IGNORE ATTEMPTED TERROR ATTACK ON IDAHO ICE OFFICE: Conservative media watchdog Newsbusters flagged that broadcast networks largely omitted coverage of what it describes as an attempted terror attack on ICE’s office in Boise, Idaho. Bonilla’s framing: immigration enforcement has become an afterthought on evening news since the Minneapolis unrest faded from the front pages, “whether or not they make the evening news.” … QUOTE (Bonilla): “Efforts to obstruct ICE, often violently, persist — whether or not they make the evening news.” … QUICK TAKE: Networks cover immigration enforcement intensely when it produces viral footage. Attacks on ICE offices are apparently a different category of story.

🎬 SHOWBIZ 🎬

Page Six Hollywood, Ian Mohr
HOLLYWOOD’S “SUITS” STOPPED WEARING SUITS — AND COVID IS THE CULPRIT: A deep-dive from Page Six Hollywood’s Ian Mohr traces the collapse of the agent suit uniform from Lew Wasserman’s banker-dress-code edict in 1946 through Mike Ovitz’s Armani mandate at CAA in 1975 to the pandemic-era free-for-all that followed. The diagnosis: COVID broke the psychological contract. “We didn’t even know how to dress anymore,” one agent told Mohr. Silicon Valley’s hoodie culture accelerated it. Now CAA has stylists, HR departments are sending all-staff emails about appropriate attire, and former Endeavor agent Andrew Weitz has built a thriving styling business called The Weitz Effect out of the wreckage. … QUOTE (agent): “You’ve got these old guys wanting to wear Air Jordans and designer sneakers” while “the young kids were coming in in sweatpants and tank tops.” … QUICK TAKE: The most powerful industry in American culture spent 80 years using clothes to signal authority. Then everyone went home for two years and forgot.

Tubefilter
DYLAN MULVANEY AND ABIGAIL BARLOW MAKE BROADWAY DEBUTS IN SIX: TikTok influencers Dylan Mulvaney and Abigail Barlow made their Broadway debuts February 16 as Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard in SIX: The Musical. Mulvaney rose to fame in 2022 via her viral “365 Days of Girlhood” series; Barlow and collaborator Emily Bear won a Grammy for “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical.” … QUOTE (Tubefilter): The two “made their Broadway debuts on February 16 as Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard in SIX: The Musical.” … QUICK TAKE: Two TikTok creators playing beheaded queens is either a metaphor or just good casting. Possibly both.

The Bulwark/False Flag, Will Sommer
ELIJAH SCHAFFER’S MELTDOWN HAS A NEW DETAIL — APPARENTLY KRATOM IS INVOLVED: New court documents exclusively reported by The Bulwark’s Will Sommer offer an update on the ongoing collapse of far-right pundit Elijah Schaffer — including, per his wife’s account, that he is “taking huge amounts of kratom.” Sommer previewed the documents ahead of a full newsletter for subscribers. … QUOTE (Sommer): “It’s a smorgasbord of wild content.” … QUICK TAKE: “Smorgasbord of wild content” is doing a lot of work here, and we respect it.

👀 WHAT GOT MISSED? 👀

The newsletter class spent the week debating whether Brendan Carr‘s equal-time push was censorship, clever gamesmanship, or both. What nobody mentioned: the FCC only regulates broadcast networks. Cable news — Fox, MS NOW, CNN — operates entirely outside its jurisdiction.

That’s not a technicality. It’s the whole story. The outlets with the largest audiences and the most political influence are completely untouchable by the regulatory framework everyone spent the week arguing about. The FCC can threaten ABC over The View. It cannot touch Sean Hannity cheerleading a military strike on Iran.

Broadcast regulation was built around spectrum scarcity — the public owns the airwaves, and broadcasters are licensed to use them responsibly. But almost nobody watches television via antenna anymore. The scarcity rationale collapsed decades ago. What remains is a framework that applies maximum scrutiny to the least-watched outlets and zero scrutiny to the most-watched ones. The chattering class never asked whether any of that makes sense in 2026.

🏆 NEWSLETTER OF THE DAY 🏆

CJR, Susie Banikarim — While the rest of the newsletter class was deep in the Colbert/CBS/FCC weeds, Banikarim led her edition with Ann Curry’s return to international reporting — a PBS NewsHour dispatch from a South Sudan displacement camp that the American media ecosystem had largely ignored. The Sudan story has no political fight to adjudicate, no personality conflict to document, no regulatory drama to dissect. CJR covered it anyway, and asked the right question: what does it say about journalism when the world’s largest humanitarian crisis can’t find its way into the newsletter conversation? That’s the job, done well.

The Bottom Line

Every corner of the American media found a different Iran story this week — and covered it with the confidence of people who had found the only Iran story.

Fox News found a hero in waiting. The progressive press found a reckless warmonger. Most of the newsletter class found a diplomatic snub story about who declined to attend Trump’s “Board of Peace.” A few found a Hannity-as-shadow-producer story. Almost nobody led with the carrier strike groups repositioning into the Persian Gulf, or the Gulf state allies who will live next door to Iran long after any U.S. fleet sails home.

That’s not because the coverage was dishonest. It’s because the media ecosystem has fragmented so completely that each outlet now covers a version of events optimized for its own audience — and those versions don’t overlap enough to produce a shared picture of what’s actually happening. Fox viewers and MS NOW viewers are not watching different spins on the same story. They are watching different stories.

Dan Froomkin asked this week why nobody seemed to have learned anything from the Iraq War coverage. The honest answer is that “the media” that could have learned a lesson no longer exists as a coherent thing. What exists is a collection of audiences, each being served the version of events it finds most legible. The aircraft carriers are out there. They’re available for anyone who wants to look.