Latest from The Atlantic
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Business
- Atlantic
Meta Swears This Time Is Different
Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Eons before ChatGPT and AlphaGo, when OpenAI did not exist and Google had not yet purchased DeepMind, there was FAIR: Facebook AI Research. In 2013, Facebook tapped one of the 'godfathers' of AI, the legendary computer scientist Yann LeCun, to lead its new division. That year, Zuckerberg personally traveled to one of the world's most prestigious AI conferences to announce FAIR and recruit top scientists to the lab. FAIR has since made a number of significant contributions to AI research, including in the field of computer vision. Although the division was not focused on advancing Facebook's social-networking products per se, the premise seemed to be that new AI tools could eventually support the company's core businesses, perhaps by improving content moderation or image captioning. But for years, Facebook didn't develop AI as a stand-alone, consumer-facing product. Now, in the era of ChatGPT, the company lags behind. Facebook, now called Meta, trails not just OpenAI and Google but also newer firms such as Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek—all of which have launched advanced generative-AI models and chatbots over the past few years. In response, Zuckerberg's company quickly launched its own flagship model, Llama, but it has struggled relative to its competitors. In April, Meta proudly rolled out a Llama 4 model that Zuckerberg called a 'beast' —but after an experimental version of the model scored second in the world on a widely used benchmarking test, the version released to the public ranked only 32nd. In the past year, every other top AI lab has released new 'reasoning' models that, thanks to a new training paradigm, are generally much better than previous chatbots at advanced math and coding problems; Meta has yet to deliver its own. So, a dozen years after building FAIR, Meta is effectively starting over. Last month, Zuckerberg went on a new recruiting spree. He hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old ex-head of the start-up Scale, as chief AI officer to lead yet another division—dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL—and has reportedly been personally asking top AI researchers to join. The goal of this redo, Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo to employees, is 'to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone.' Meta is reportedly attempting to lure top researchers by offering upwards of $100 million in compensation. (The company has contested this reporting; for comparison, LeBron James was paid less than $50 million last year.) More than a dozen researchers from rival companies, mainly OpenAI, have joined Meta's new AI lab so far. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build new data centers to support its pursuit of superintelligence. FAIR will still exist but within the new superintelligence team, meaning Meta has both a chief AI 'scientist' (LeCun) and a chief AI 'officer' (Wang). At the same time, MSL is cloistered off from the rest of Meta in an office space near Zuckerberg himself, according to The New York Times. When I reached out to Meta to ask about its 'superintelligence' overhaul, a spokesperson pointed me to Meta's most recent earnings call, in which Zuckerberg described 'how AI is transforming everything we do' and said that he is 'focused on building full general intelligence.' I also asked about comments made by an outgoing AI researcher at Meta: 'You'll be hard pressed to find someone that really believes in our AI mission,' the researcher wrote in an internal memo, reported in The Information, adding that 'to most, it's not even clear what our mission is.' The spokesperson told me, in response to the memo, 'We're excited about our recent changes, new hires in leadership and research, and continued work to create an ideal environment for revolutionary research.' Meta's superintelligence group may well succeed. Small, well-funded teams have done so before: After a group of former OpenAI researchers peeled off to form Anthropic a few years ago, they quickly emerged as a top AI lab. Elon Musk's xAI was even later to the race, but its Grok chatbot is now one of the most technically impressive AI products around (egregious racism and anti-Semitism notwithstanding). And regardless of how far Meta has fallen behind in the AI race, the company has proved its ability to endure: Meta's stock reached an all-time high earlier this year, and it made more than $17 billion in profit from January through the end of March. Billions of people around the world use its social apps. The company's approach is also different from that of its rivals, which frequently describe generative AI in ideological, quasi-religious terms. Executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are all prone to writing long blog posts or giving long interviews about the future they hope to usher in, and they harbor long-standing philosophical disagreements with one another. Zuckerberg, by comparison, does not appear interested in using AI to transform the world. In his most recent earnings call, he focused on five areas AI is influencing at Meta: advertising, social-media content, online commerce, the Meta AI assistant, and devices, notably smart glasses. The grandest future he described to investors was trapped in today's digital services and conventions: 'We're all going to have an AI that we talk to throughout the day—while we're browsing content on our phones, and eventually as we're going through our days with glasses—and I think this will be one of the most important and valuable services that has ever been created.' Zuckerberg also said that AI-based updates to content recommendations on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have increased the amount of time that users spend on each platform. In this framework, superintelligence may just be a way to keep people hooked on Meta's legacy social-media apps and devices. Initially, it seemed that Meta would take a different path. When the company first entered the generative-AI race, a few months after the launch of ChatGPT, the firm bet big on 'open source' AI software, making its Llama model free for nearly anyone to access, modify, and use. Meta touted this strategy as a way to turn its AI models into an industry standard that would enable widespread innovation and eventually improve Meta's AI offerings. Because open-source software is popular among developers, Zuckerberg claimed, this strategy would help attract top AI talent. Whatever industry standards Zuckerberg was hoping to set, none have come to fruition. In January, the Chinese company DeepSeek released an AI model that was more capable than Llama despite having been developed with far fewer resources. Catching up to OpenAI may now require Meta to leave behind the company's original, bold, and legitimately distinguishing bet on 'open' AI. According to the Times, Meta has internally discussed the possibility of stopping work on its most powerful open-source model ('Behemoth') in favor of a closed model akin to those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. In his memo to employees, Zuckerberg said that Meta will continue developing Llama while also exploring 'research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so.' The Meta spokesperson pointed me to a 2024 interview in which Zuckerberg explicitly said that although the firm is generally 'pro open source,' he is not committed to releasing all future Meta models in this way. While Zuckerberg figures out the path forward, he will also have to contend with the basic reality that generative AI may alienate some of his users. The company rolled back an early experiment with AI characters after human users found that the bots could easily go off the rails (one such bot, a self-proclaimed 'Black queer momma of 2' that talked about cooking fried chicken and celebrating Kwanzaa, tied itself in knots when a Washington Post columnist asked about its programming); the firm's stand-alone AI app released earlier this year also led many users to unwittingly share ostensibly private conversations to the entire platform. AI-generated media has overwhelmed Facebook and Instagram, turning these platforms into oceans of low-quality, meaningless content known as 'AI slop.' Still, with an estimated 3.4 billion daily users across its platforms, it may be impossible for Meta to fail. Zuckerberg might appear to be burning hundreds of millions of dollars on salaries and much more than that on new hardware, but it's all part of a playbook that has worked before. When Instagram and WhatsApp emerged as potential rivals, he bought them. When TikTok became dominant, Meta added a short-form-video feed to Instagram; when Elon Musk turned Twitter into a white-supremacist hub, Meta launched Threads as an alternative. Quality and innovation have not been the firm's central proposition for many, many years. Before the AI industry obsessed over scaling up its chatbots, scale was Meta's greatest and perhaps only strength: It dominated the market by spending anything to, well, dominate the market.
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
Inside Trump's Unsuccessful Attempt to End the Epstein News
As the questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein's life and death—questions that Donald Trump once helped whip up—tornadoed into their bajillionth news cycle, the president's team began to privately debate ways to calm the furor: appoint a special counsel to investigate. Call on the courts to unseal documents related to the case. Have Attorney General Pam Bondi hold a news conference. Hold daily news conferences on the topic, à la Trump's regular prime-time pandemic appearances. They dismissed every option. Any decision would ultimately come from Bondi and Trump together—or from Trump alone—and for days, the president was adamant about doing nothing. Trump was annoyed by the constant questions from reporters—had Bondi told him that his name, in fact, was in the Epstein files? ('No,' came his response)—and frustrated by his inability to redirect the nation's attention to what he views as his successes, four White House officials and a close outside adviser told us. But more than that, Trump felt deeply betrayed by his MAGA base, the one that had believed him when he'd intimated that something was nefarious about how the Epstein case has been handled and the one that now refused to believe him when he said their suspicions were actually baseless. Jonathan Chait: Why Trump can't make the Epstein story go away He—the president, their leader, the martyr who had endured scandals and prosecution and an assassin's bullet on their behalf—had repeatedly told them it was time to move on, and that alone should suffice. Why, he groused, would the White House add fuel to the fire, would it play into the media's narrative? In particular, Trump has raged against MAGA influencers who, in his estimation, have profited and grown famous off their association with him and his political movement, according to one of the officials and the outside adviser, who is in regular touch with the West Wing. They and others we spoke with did so on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to anger Trump by talking about a subject that has become especially sensitive. Trump told the outside adviser that the 'disloyal' influencers 'have forgotten whose name is above the door.' 'These people cash their paychecks and get their clicks all thanks to him,' the adviser told us. 'The president has bigger fish to fry, and he's said what he wants: Move on. People need to open their ears and listen to him.' But Trump's haphazard efforts at containment—specifically, his effort to simply bulldoze through this very real scandal—came to an end last night, when The Wall Street Journal published an explosive story about a bawdy 50th-birthday letter that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein, which alluded to a shared 'secret' and was framed by a drawing of a naked woman's outline. (Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture, and has threatened to sue the paper.) Shortly after the article posted online, Trump wrote on TruthSocial that because of 'the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,' he had asked Bondi to produce all relevant grand-jury testimony related to the Epstein case. Bondi immediately responded, writing, 'President Trump—we are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts.' The Journal story underscored, yet again, the part of the Epstein saga that Trump and his allies most wish would go away: that Trump was one of Epstein's many famous pals and had a long—and public—friendship with the hard-partying, sex-obsessed financier who pleaded guilty in 2008 to two prostitution-related crimes and became a registered sex offender. Chummy photos of the two men, including at Trump's private Mar-a-Lago Club, abound; from 1993 to 1997, Trump flew on Epstein's private jets seven times, according to flight logs that emerged at an Epstein-related trial; and in a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he'd known him for 15 years and praised him as a 'terrific guy.' 'He's a lot of fun to be with,' Trump enthused to the magazine. 'It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.' The two reportedly had a falling out in 2004 when Epstein bought an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion that Trump wanted. On Wednesday—after the White House had been alerted that the Journal was working on a big story, but at a moment when they still thought they might be able to kill it—Trump took to social media to blast Republicans still discussing the Epstein matter as 'past supporters.' He also tore into them during an Oval Office appearance with the crown prince of Bahrain. The president declared that 'some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans' had fallen for a hoax he said was created by Democrats. The president also privately fumed at House Speaker Mike Johnson's call for 'transparency'—and for Trump's Justice Department to release more files related to the Epstein case—while White House aides wondered if the apparent split could lead to further Republican defiance on other issues. Helen Lewis: 'Just asking questions' got no answers about Epstein Still, before the Journal story changed the stakes yet again, Trump did not have plans to make additional calls to MAGA media allies or Republican lawmakers, one of the officials told us, instead believing that his public comments and Truth Social posts were sufficient. (Despite his ire, he did not, for instance, reach out to Johnson or his team.) 'He's being tested and doesn't like it,' the official told us. 'He doesn't want to talk about it.' Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once observed, 'You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.' And although the country does sometimes accept politicians who campaign in poetry and govern in prose, it is less willing to countenance those who campaign in conspiracy theory and then govern in a nothing-to-see-here-folks reality. Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida state court in 2008 and was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He received a generous (and controversial) plea deal and served a short prison sentence before being released. He was arrested again in August 2019 and accused of sex-trafficking minors, leading some to wonder who else in Epstein's powerful orbit might have been involved and also face charges. He died a month later. Getting to the bottom of the details surrounding Epstein's death in jail while awaiting trial—which has been ruled a suicide—and releasing additional information about Epstein's sexual abuse of young women, and whether other well-known figures were involved, was never a top Trump campaign promise. He answered when asked, but it was not a mainstay of his stump speech, something he regularly read from the teleprompter or riffed about at rallies. Nonetheless, when Trump retook office, his supporters were eager for a big reveal. The wave began to crest when Bondi, asked in a February Fox News interview if she would release a list of Epstein's clients, replied, 'It's sitting on my desk right now to review.' Less than a week later, she did herself no favors when, with much fanfare, she invited MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what she claimed were binders full of the declassified Epstein files, only for the beaming, gleeful sleuths to realize that the most scandalous thing about the binders was just how little information they contained. But a two-page memo that the Department of Justice released last Monday—which, in bureaucratese, offered a version of Trump's current time-to-move-on mantra—is what finally sent the MAGA wave crashing down upon Bondi and the president. Laura Loomer, a Trump ally and far-right provocateur who called for Bondi to be fired over the memo, told us Wednesday that she is sensitive to the challenges of separating fact from fiction—but that although not everyone in Epstein's orbit is inherently guilty, those who are guilty should be revealed. 'They're trying to say there's no list,' she said. 'There's a difference between people who were caught on video engaged in foul pornography and people who were caught in Jeffery Epstein's contact list.' Demonizing everyone in Epstein's purported black book would be like tying her to the misdeeds of everyone saved in her cellphone—'I have 7,000 contacts,' she said—'but they should release the names of the people involved in the child pornography.' Although Loomer and others have raised questions about video recordings of child sexual abuse collected by investigators, Bondi has said that Epstein downloaded those videos and that they were not records of crimes committed by him or his friends. Loomer has also publicly called for a special counsel to investigate the Epstein case and release the files. In our conversation, she reiterated that appeal and suggested that having 'Pam Blondi'—her derisive nickname for the flaxen-haired attorney general—'apologize for either deliberately lying or overexaggerating' her claim that the key files sitting on her desk in February would help to mitigate the base's angst. Still, Loomer acknowledged that a Bondi apology would at this point be but 'one step.' 'Obviously, now this has taken on a life of its own,' she observed. The Epstein news cycle has also distracted from the accomplishments Trump has hoped to showcase—his trade deals, the massive legislative package he just muscled through—and has embroiled his West Wing in a familiar cycle of drama. As the MAGA movement turned not just on Bondi but also on FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, over their handling of the Epstein files, tensions between the three became public. Bongino and Patel seemed to blame Bondi for their reputational hit, and last Friday, Axios reported that Bongino had simply refused to show up for work. Trump was upset with Bongino and Patel, and Vice President J. D. Vance was dispatched as a behind-the-scenes peacemaker. (A White House official told us that the president has no plans to fire Bondi, Bongino, or Patel, but noted pointedly that Trump was very supportive of Bondi, and merely supportive of the other two.) What additional information could, and should, be revealed remains genuinely unclear. Questions worthy of further scrutiny were raised by Wired's recent reporting on the footage that the Justice Department released from the lone security camera near Epstein's jail cell the night before he was found dead; the video's metadata was shown to have likely been modified, and nearly three full minutes were cut out. But it is also possible that Epstein kept no written log of his crimes, and that whatever has not yet been released is simply to protect Epstein's victims. (There is also, of course, the competing theory that information is being withheld to protect Trump, or others close to him.) Listen: The razor-thin line between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy The White House official told us that the Justice Department did a thorough investigation and that much of what remains unreleased falls into one of these categories: documents that are sealed by courts (though Trump and Bondi's Thursday appeal may change that); child pornography; and material that could expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing. This, perhaps, has been the most confusing and upsetting part for Trump: his inability to manage his uber-loyallists and regular allies. In June, during an unrelated fight with Elon Musk—Trump's on-again, off-again benefactor and buddy —Elon posted on X, 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.' He later deleted the post, but more recently, as the Epstein controversies resurfaced, he again posted an appeal for further disclosure. 'How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won't release the Epstein files?' Musk wrote. In the run-up to the Journal story, Trump personally appealed to Rupert Murdoch, his longtime friend and the paper's owner, not to run the article he also appealed to Emma Tucker, the editor of the paper whose editorial page has long been conservative and generally friendly to Trump (except on the matter of his tariff policy). But again, the limits of his power over normal allies became evident; the president was unsuccessful, and the story ran. But even if he lost the skirmish with the Journal, he may have at least briefly regained his purchase in the broader battle. This morning, Trump posted a long, angry screed attacking the paper and promising to sue the Journal, its parent corporation, and Murdoch himself. His base likely still has questions surrounding Epstein, but for now, at least, Trump has redirected them back to the more familiar and comfortable territory of fighting with the media.
Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
A Congress That Votes Yes and Hopes No
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In fall 1963, as President Lyndon B. Johnson struggled to pass the Civil Rights Act, some allies warned him that the success wouldn't be worth the electoral hit he'd take. Johnson was insistent that the point of winning elections was to push the policies he wanted. 'Well, what the hell's the presidency for?' he said. No one would have to ask President Donald Trump that question. His vision of power is dangerous but clear, and he's wasted little time in implementing it. One reason he's been so successful is that members of the House and Senate seem to have no idea what the hell the Congress is for. The past few weeks have seen Republican members of Congress wringing their hands furiously over bills under consideration, criticizing the White House's legislative priorities … and then voting for them. The most torturous, and tortuous, example is Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a prominent member of the supposedly populist wing of MAGA Republicans. On June 28, Hawley criticized Medicaid cuts included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the form of work requirements. 'If you want to be a working-class party, you've got to deliver for working-class people,' he said. 'You cannot take away health care from working people.' Three days later, on July 1, he voted for a bill that did exactly that. It also cut funding to rural hospitals, and yet, a few days later, he told NBC News, 'I think that if Republicans don't come out strong and say we're going to protect rural hospitals, then, yeah, I think voters aren't going to like that.' This week, he introduced a bill to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts he'd voted for two weeks earlier. If Hawley didn't like the cuts, he could have voted to stop them. I don't mean that symbolically: The bill passed 51–50, with Vice President J. D. Vance breaking the tie. By withholding his vote, Hawley could have killed the bill or forced changes. This is how legislating is supposed to work. But in his defense, Hawley has terrible role models: He's a relatively young senator surrounded by elders who seem just as confused about their role. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted for the OBBBA too, and then told reporters that she hoped that the bill she had just voted for would not be enacted as written, pleading with the House to do her job for her by altering it. (The House didn't.) Years ago, my colleague Ashley Parker, then at The New York Times, identified the existence of a Republican ' Vote No/Hope Yes Caucus.' Murkowski is perhaps the spiritual founder of a Vote Yes/Hope No Caucus. She has plenty of company. Her comrades were out in force for this week's vote on rescissions, retroactive budget cuts requested by the White House and approved by Congress. Some members worry that acceding to the rescissions is effectively surrendering the power of the purse to the executive branch. 'I don't have any problem with reducing spending. We're talking about not knowing,' complained Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, the former Senate majority leader. 'They would like a blank check, is what they would like. And I don't think that's appropriate. I think they ought to make the case.' McConnell voted for the bill. 'I suspect we're going to find out there are some things that we're going to regret,' North Carolina's Thom Tillis, ostensibly freed up by his decision not to run for reelection, said on Wednesday. If only there were some way to avoid that! But Tillis voted yes, because he said he'd been assured by the White House that certain programs wouldn't be cut. It should be clear by now that the administration's promises to senators aren't worth the red cent that Trump is eliminating; regardless, the way to ensure that something happens is to write it into law. Isn't that what we send legislators to Washington to do? Apparently not. Also this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune paused a bill to levy sanctions against Russia, deferring to Trump, who has threatened to impose tariffs on Moscow. 'It sounds like right now the president is going to attempt to do some of this on his own,' he said. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise concurred: 'If anybody's going to be able to get Putin to the table to finally agree to peace, it's President Trump.' Never mind that the Constitution places the tariff power primarily with Congress. Trump's executive-power grab, I've argued here and in my recent book, is the product of careful planning laid out in Project 2025, whose authors make a case for how and why the president should seize new authorities. In Project 2025's main document, Kevin D. Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, attacks 'Congress's preening cowardice' in refusing to exercise its duties and leaving them to the presidency. Project 2025's paradoxical response is for the executive to seize even more power. That has worked because members of Congress are—unlike LBJ—afraid to take votes that might create some sort of political backlash. They might pay the price anyway. 'In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsibility for its actions,' Roberts writes. That trick works for only so long. Trump never has to face voters again, but having passed up the chance to set their own agenda, many members of Congress will have to answer for his decisions in next year's midterms. After the longest vote in House history this week, Speaker Mike Johnson—no relation genealogically, ideologically, or stylistically to Lyndon—lamented the state of affairs in the legislature. 'I am tired of making history; I just want normal Congress,' he said. 'But some people have forgotten what that looks like.' It's a shame that Johnson doesn't know anyone who has the power to change the way things work at the Capitol. Today's News President Donald Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to unseal grand-jury testimony from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking crimes. An explosion at a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department training facility killed at least three deputies, according to department officials. The House gave final approval to Trump's request to cut $9 billion from public-broadcasting funding and foreign aid. Trump is expected to sign the bill into law. Dispatches The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo on what Andrea Gibson understood about very simple poetry. Evening Read What to Do With the Most Dangerous Book in America By James Shapiro The novel had once served as a deadly template for domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who drew from its pages when he planned the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, and Robert Jay Mathews, whose white-supremacist gang took its name, the Order, from the novel; a member of the Order killed the Jewish radio host Alan Berg. I also knew that it had inspired John William King, part of a group that dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, to death behind a pickup truck. As King shackled Byrd to the vehicle, he was reported to have said, 'We're going to start The Turner Diaries early.' The book is a vile, racist fantasy culminating in genocide, but it isn't just a how-to manual for homegrown terrorists. What has been labeled the 'bible of the racist right' has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Watch. Eddington (out now in theaters) is a nasty, cynical, and eerily accurate look at all-too-recent history, Shirley Li writes. 'The summer I was twelve I don't remember / Thirteen we drive the Continent, hit Chamonix / The summer I'm fourteen go back alone to Čechy'
Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
What the End of The Late Show Really Means
When CBS embarked on the project of replacing David Letterman as the host of The Late Show, in 2014, the network spared no expense. It hired Stephen Colbert, who had collected Emmys and acclaim while hosting his Comedy Central talk show, The Colbert Report; gave him total creative control; and fully revamped Manhattan's Ed Sullivan Theater so Colbert could make the show's longtime venue his own. After a shaky first year, Colbert found his footing in the lead-up to the 2016 election by focusing his opening monologues more pointedly on politics. The Late Show soon became the highest-rated talk show in America— a crown it has not relinquished since. Ten years on, CBS has snatched the crown off its head. The network appears to have grown so dismayed with the state of late-night television that it has unceremoniously canceled one of the genre's most successful stalwarts: In a statement Thursday night, CBS announced that not only will this season of The Late Show —set to air through May 2026—be the program's last, but the franchise will also be retired entirely. ('We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable,' the statement offers as explanation.) The decision quickly prompted plenty of speculation among industry observers, given Colbert's recent, unvarnished scorn for CBS's parent company, Paramount, after it settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump; the president had accused 60 Minutes, the network's venerated TV news magazine, of deceptively editing an election-season interview with Kamala Harris. (CBS News, which produces 60 Minutes, denied the claim.) But whether or not there was some political motivation behind the cancellation (the network called the reason purely financial), the underlying point is clear: The Late Show is no longer valuable enough for CBS to bother protecting it. As the business of television changes, late-night talk shows have found themselves in a particularly awkward spot. For one, people have stopped flocking to linear television as their evenings wind down. If they do turn the TV on, it's often to check out what's new to stream rather than to put up with a somewhat staid format interrupted by many commercial breaks. The customary celebrity chats and musical performances typically appear online not long after they air, and said celebrities now have many other outlets for plugging their projects: video podcasts, YouTube shows. The cost of producing one of those alternatives is also far smaller than the budget for a glitzy affair like The Late Show. These arguments always get trotted out as nightly programs drop off the map—like when The Late Show 's lead-out, The Late Late Show, didn't survive its host James Corden's departure; and when its follow-up, the Taylor Tomlinson–hosted variety show At Midnight, lasted just over a year before the comedian decided to return to performing stand-up full time. Questions about the genre's relevance are also why Late Night With Seth Meyers had to get rid of its house band to survive, and why Comedy Central chose not to replace The Daily Show 's former host Trevor Noah. Instead, the cable channel was satisfied with bringing back Noah's predecessor Jon Stewart for one night a week, rotating the other episodes amongst the current cast. And yet: Even though Puck reported that Colbert's program was losing more than $40 million a year for CBS, there's something quite shocking about a network simply giving up a foothold as established as The Late Show. Brand names are hard to come by in television, and The Late Show was a big one: Letterman built it up over the course of the 1990s, after NBC passed him over as Johnny Carson's successor to The Tonight Show. Colbert then inherited a program defined by its past host's curmudgeonly brand of snark and fundamentally remade it into a much more thoughtful and authentic show. He's proved capable of deep, empathetic interviews with guests and spiky, aggressive political joke-making (by broadcast TV's rigid standards). Still, Colbert would never be able to achieve the ubiquity that Carson and Letterman enjoyed before the advent of streaming. The occasional clip might go viral, and entertainment sites will write up the best parts of the monologue; the talk-show desk, however, no longer comes with a seat of cultural power. Colbert was once the most irreverent member of his late-night brethren (people forget what a bomb-thrower his satirical The Colbert Report character could be), but he has since become more of a fatherly figure—one I value as part of the TV firmament but who doesn't exactly scream 'cutting edge.' Then again, 'cutting edge' is not something CBS has sought in a long time. It's hard to know what could possibly take over for The Late Show when it vanishes in mid-2026. Sitcom reruns? Movies you could just as easily catch on Netflix? The point of network television is to offer something that has a live jolt to it—sports, stand-up, the occasional drama or comedy shows that become appointment viewing. As the medium dissolves from relevance, its owners instead seem content not to create anything of cultural importance. The Late Show is not the juggernaut it once was, sure. But what's most tragic is to think of it being replaced by nothing at all.
Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
‘Just Asking Questions' Got No Answers About Epstein
Defending mainstream journalism these days is about as appealing as doing PR for syphilis. Nonetheless, here I am. Back in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited a group of MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what was billed as 'Phase 1' of the government's files on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who died in jail in 2019. The 15 handpicked newshounds included Jack Posobiec, promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory; Chaya Raichik, whose Libs of TikTok social-media account itemizes every single American schoolteacher with blue hair and wacky pronouns; and the comedian Chad Prather, performer of the parody song ' Beat That Ass,' about the secret to good parenting. Also present was DC_Draino, whose name is a promise to unclog the sewers of the nation's capital. The chosen ones duly emerged bearing ring binders and smug expressions—only to discover that most of the information that the government had fed them had already been made public. Several of the influencers have since complained that the Trump administration had given them recycled information. They couldn't seem to understand why White House officials treated them like idiots. I can help with this one. That's because they think you are idiots. The harsh but simple truth is that powerful people, including President Donald Trump, do not freely hand out information that will make them look bad. If a politician, PR flak, or government official is telling you something, assume that they're lying to you or spinning or—at best—coincidentally telling you the truth because it will damage their enemies. 'We were told that more was coming,' Posobiec complained, but professional commentators should be embarrassed about waiting for the authorities to bless them with scoops. That's not how things work. You have to go and find things out. Reporters do not content themselves with 'just asking questions'—the internet conspiracist's favored formulation. They gather evidence, check facts, and then decide what they are confident is true. They don't just blast out everything that lands on their desk, in a 'kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out' kind of way. That's because some conspiracy theories turn out to involve actual conspiracies, and the skill is separating the imagined schemes from the real ones. Cover-ups do happen. In Britain, where I live, the public has recently learned for certain that a military source accidentally leaked an email list of hundreds of Afghans who cooperated with Western forces, possibly exposing them to blackmail or reprisals. The leak prompted our government to start spending billions secretly relocating some of the affected Afghans and their families. All the while, British media outlets—which are subject to far greater legal restrictions on publication than their American counterparts—were barred from reporting not only the contents of the leaked list, but its very existence. Several news organizations expended significant time and money getting that judgment overturned in court. Earlier this month, the government released a memo declaring that the Department of Justice and the FBI had determined that 'no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted' in the Epstein case. Since then, Trump-friendly influencers have struggled to supply their audience's demands for more Epstein content while preserving their continued access to the White House, which wants them to stop talking about the story altogether. Because these commentators define themselves through skepticism of 'approved narratives' and decry their enemies as 'regime mouthpieces,' their newfound trust in the establishment has been heartwarming to see. Some of the same people who used to cast doubts about the government's handling of the Epstein case are now running that government. 'If you're a journalist and you're not asking questions about this case you should be ashamed of yourself,' J. D. Vance tweeted in December 2021. 'What purpose do you even serve?' I would be intrigued to hear a response to that challenge from Dinesh D'Souza, who said on July 15 that 'even though there are unanswered questions about Epstein, it is in fact time to move on.' Or from Charlie Kirk, who said a day earlier: 'I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being. I'm gonna trust my friends in the administration. I'm gonna trust my friends in the government.' Or from Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, who wrote: 'Must be some juicy and dangerous stuff in those files. But I don't feel the need to be a backseat driver on this topic. Four leaders I trust said it's time to let it go.' (For what it's worth, some influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, have refused to accept the Trump administration's official line that there's nothing to see here. I'm not alone in thinking this reflects a desire to outflank anyone tainted by, you know, actual government experience when competing for the affections of the MAGA base in 2028.) For all right-wing influencers' claims of an establishment cover-up, most of the publicly known facts about the Epstein case come from major news outlets. In the late 2000s, when few people were paying attention, The New York Times faithfully chronicled Epstein's suspiciously lenient plea deal—in which multiple accusations of sexual assault on teenage girls were reduced to lesser prostitution charges—under classically dull headlines such as 'Questions of Preferential Treatment Are Raised in Florida Sex Case' and 'Amid Lurid Accusations, Fund Manager Is Unruffled.' After Epstein's second arrest, the paper reported on how successfully he had been able to rehabilitate himself from his first brush with the law, prompting awkward questions for Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, and other famous faces. Epstein's second arrest might not have happened at all without the work of Julie Brown of the Miami Herald. She doggedly reported on how Trump's first-term labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, had overseen the plea deal when he was a U.S. attorney in Florida. She found 80 alleged victims—she now thinks there might have been 200—and persuaded four to speak on the record. Around the time that Epstein was wrapping up a light prison sentence in 2009, newsroom cuts at the Herald had forced Brown to take a 15 percent pay reduction. Sometimes she paid her own reporting expenses. Listen: The razor-thin line between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy Over the past two decades, the decline of classified advertising, along with the rise of social media, has left America with far fewer Julie Browns and far more DC_Drainos. This does not feel like progress. The shoe-leather reporters of traditional newspapers and broadcasters have largely given way to a class of influencers who are about as useful as a marzipan hammer in the boring job of establishing facts. In May, Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, scheduled a series of special influencers-only briefings, and I watched them all—surely reducing my future time in purgatory. None of the questions generated a single interesting news story. In recent days, while MAGA influencers have muttered online about the release of camera footage from outside Epstein's cell on the night of his death, Wired magazine found experts to review the video's metadata, establishing that it had been edited, and a section had been removed. Today, The Wall Street Journal —whose conservative opinion pages make its news reporting harder for the right to dismiss— published details of a 50th-birthday message to Epstein allegedly signed by Trump in 2003. The future president reportedly included a hand-drawn picture of a naked woman and told the financier, 'May every day be another wonderful secret.' (Trump has described this as a 'fake story,' adding: 'I never wrote a picture in my life.' In fact, Trump has donated a number of his drawings to charity auctions.) Legacy news outlets sometimes report things that turn out not to be true: Saddam Hussein's imaginary WMDs, the University of Virginia rape story. But that's because they do reporting. It's easier not to fail when you don't even try. We now have a ridiculous situation where influencers who bang on about the mainstream media are reduced to relying on these outlets for things to talk about. Worse, because no issue can ever be settled as a factual matter, the alternative media is a perpetual-motion machine of speculation. MAGA influencers want the truth, but ignore the means of discovering it. At the heart of the Epstein story is a real conspiracy, as squalid and mundane as real life usually is. The staff members who enabled Epstein; the powerful friends who ignored his crimes; and the prosecutors who downgraded the charges back in the late '00s. If the Epstein scandal teaches us anything, it is that America needs a dedicated and decently funded group of people whose job is not just to ask questions, but to find answers. Let's call them journalists.
