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      Can C-SPAN Pull Off ‘Crossfire,’ but With Civility?

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      “Ceasefire” will be the low-key public affairs channel’s first new weekly show in two decades. The question is whether Republicans and Democrats will show up.As a young producer at CNN in the 1990s, Sam Feist spent countless hours working on “Crossfire,” one of the first cable news shows to pit partisan pundits against one another. At lunch one day, the co-host Michael Kinsley mused about an alternative idea: “Ceasefire,” a program where Republicans and Democrats tried to find areas of agreement.“It sat with me for, gosh, 20-something years,” Mr. Feist recalled.Now Mr. Feist is the chief executive of C-SPAN, the low-key public affairs network beloved by political junkies. And “Ceasefire” is about to become a reality.Envisioned as a respectful conversation between lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle, “Ceasefire,” which is expected to debut in the fall, will be C-SPAN’s first new weekly program in two decades. “No shouting, no fighting, no acrimony,” Mr. Feist said in an interview. “Just two American political leaders with a willingness to find common ground.”And where, pray tell, does he expect to find those?Mr. Feist, a fixture of the Washington press corps who led CNN’s elections coverage for many years, acknowledged with a laugh that bipartisan relations in the nation’s capital were at a low ebb. That, he explained, is why a show like “Ceasefire” is sorely needed.“I’m not sure this program would work on CNN or Fox News or MSNBC,” said Sam Feist, the chief executive of C-SPAN since September.Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images“The country rarely sees Republicans and Democrats engaged in a productive conversation,” he said. So for the past year, every time he has met with a member of Congress, Mr. Feist has pitched his idea for the show and asked the lawmaker who his or her best friend from the opposing party is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stephen A. Smith’s Relentless, Preposterous, Probably Inevitable Road to Political Clout

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      Stephen A. Smith has had something on his mind for a while now.“Let me switch to a subject near and dear to my heart,” he said on his podcast recently. “Me.”Mr. Smith, 57, is the terminally expressive face of sports media, ESPN’s $100 million opinion-haver. Each day, and on many nights, he is beamed into living rooms, bars and airport lounges to sling hours of sports-debate chum, whether or not there are hours’ worth of viable material.And for the industry’s most inescapable voice, its high priest of the big fat adjective — ludicrous officiating, preposterous coaching, blasphemous choke-jobs — “Stephen A. Smith” is perhaps the sole matter on which all parties can agree that Stephen A. Smith is an expert.He is a first-person thinker (“When I think about me. …” he said, twice, on the podcast, “The Stephen A. Smith Show”), third-person talker (“Stephen A. Smith is in the news”) and occasional simultaneous first-and-third-person thinker-talker. “Calling things like I see them,” he wrote in his memoir, “is who Stephen A. Smith has been my entire life.”So it has been striking lately, friends allowed, to find Mr. Smith lamenting the chaos of federal tariff policy (“utterly ridiculous!”) and floating a flat-tax plan.He has applied the signature cadence once reserved for segments on LeBron James and the Dallas Cowboys — the hushed windup, the all-caps name-dropping, the yada-yada of certain details — to geopolitical discussions for which he prepares diligently.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      MSNBC Poaches Politico Editor Sudeep Reddy for New Washington Bureau

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      The cable channel, which is set to be spun off from NBC, is starting its first stand-alone D.C. office with Sudeep Reddy at the helm. It also plans to hire 100 new journalists.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 later 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 was set to announce 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. “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.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      V.O.A. Reporters Are Set to Return to Work, but Court Ruling Clouds Next Steps

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      President Trump has accused Voice of America of being biased against him. In March, he issued an executive order to dismantle the agency that finances the international news outlet.Voice of America, which for eight decades brought news to corners of the globe where reliable journalism was scarce, went dark in March after the Trump administration cut its funding and put its workers on leave.But next week, journalists for the organization, a U.S.-funded international news broadcaster, are expected to return to work, its director said, after a decision in federal district court ordering it to resume programming.The director, Mike Abramowitz, said in an email to his staff on Friday that the Justice Department had alerted Voice of America that the broadcaster’s access to its computer systems was being restored. The email was obtained by The New York Times.“I am seeking further details, and I will share them as soon as possible,” Mr. Abramowitz wrote. “But on the face of it, this news is a positive development.”That appeared to be complicated on Saturday, when a federal appeals court paused the parts of the lower court’s order that required the Trump administration to restore funding for the agency that finances Voice of America.The appeals court, in Washington, D.C., wrote that it was leaving in place the portion of the ruling that ordered the government to revive Voice of America’s “statutorily required programming levels.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Canadians Confront News Void on Facebook and Instagram as Election Nears

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      After Meta blocked news from its platforms in Canada, hyperpartisan and misleading content from popular right-wing Facebook pages such as Canada Proud has filled the gap.Mark Carney was just days away from announcing his bid to lead Canada’s Liberal Party in January when his face popped up on a viral right-wing Facebook page.Two photographs showed Mr. Carney, who became prime minister last month, at a garden party beside Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and former confidante of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. There was no evidence that Mr. Carney and Ms. Maxwell were close friends, and his team dismissed the pictures as a fleeting social interaction from more than a decade ago.But they were perfect fodder for Canada Proud, a right-wing Facebook page with more than 620,000 followers. For days, Canada Proud posted about the images, including in paid ads that repeatedly said Mr. Carney had been “hanging out with sex traffickers.” More

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      Trump Just Scrapped My Anti-Kremlin Streaming Platform, Votvot

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      The Trump administration’s decision to take a hammer to the funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty might be legally dubious, but politically pretty safe: Its programming wasn’t intended to reach American audiences, so who would miss it, really?In September 2022, I came to Prague, in an unusual role of a volunteer media expert, to observe the operations of the Russian-language TV channel and online news portal, Current Time — one of the many brands under the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty umbrella. An American from Latvia whose native language is Russian, I had spent much of the previous decade trying to build bridges between the U.S. and Russian TV industries, a dream wiped out overnight with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine earlier that year. Current Time had become an indispensable source of news for an audience misled by their own state media. Six months in, war coverage had pushed out almost all other reporting and fatigue was setting in. I wanted to be useful. If my knowledge of the Russian media could somehow help Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, I was happy to share it.Not to mention the fact that, as a lifelong fan of the band R.E.M., I’d never pass up a chance to visit the organization that helped inspire their debut single, “Radio Free Europe.”The organization’s headquarters was an imposing gray cube, just east of the city center. The general aura reminded me of a U.S. Embassy. It might be an editorially independent nongovernment entity, but its cultural and literal footprint was always that of an American values bulwark.I soon found I had landed in the middle of a philosophical debate. Would showing anything other than atrocities constitute catering to Russia? At the time of my arrival, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty staff was considering starting a second channel that would run hard-hitting documentaries about Russian history and cruelties. I wondered who would be the audience for such depressing programming. A better tactic, I thought, would be to try to appeal to the persuadables, an audience many of whom had tuned out watching the news but retained a sense of right and wrong; an audience that Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, had sacrificed his freedom — and, soon, his life — trying to reach.The walls of the headquarters were lined not only with photos of the likes of Henry Kissinger and Hillary Clinton, but also Duke Ellington and Tom Jones. Indeed, the older generation of Soviet citizens retained warm memories of the “enemy voices” (as Radio Liberty, Voice of America, and the BBC’s Russian Service were known) not because they delivered news from the West, but because they’d play jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Pop culture was the draw.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bob McManus, Blunt Editorial Voice of New York Post, Dies at 81

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      As the editor of the tabloid’s editorial page and as a columnist, he skewered those he considered phonies and symbols of failed progressivism.Bob McManus, the trenchant editorial page editor of The New York Post and a columnist for other conservative publications who prided himself on his unambiguous common-sense commentary about public policy and other topics, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 81.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of bile duct cancer, said his wife, Mary McManus.An influential and respected editorialist, Mr. McManus pulled no punches but still managed to be widely liked.He could unleash a fusillade of zingers against public officials and other prominent targets he branded phonies or hypocrites. But he could also leaven his caustic criticism with wit.“His prose style might best be described as a punchy amalgam of Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, and — a particular McManus favorite — Red Smith,” Edmund J. McMahon, a friend who is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and the founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany, N.Y., said in an interview.After a police officer was assaulted in Times Square last year by a group that included some migrants, Mr. McManus contrasted “a time when slugging a cop would get you bumps on your head” with what he described as the current anarchic system of justice.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More