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    Jon Stewart on CNN’s Biden book: ‘Selling you a book about news they should have told you’

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    Late-night hosts rip CNN for promoting a book on Joe Biden’s health and weigh in on Donald Trump attacking Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.Jon StewartOn the Daily Show, Jon Stewart tore into CNN anchor Jake Tapper for promoting his book Original Sin, written with Alex Thompson, on his network. The host played several clips of Tapper teasing the book, which reports on Biden’s mental decline while still in the White House. In the final clip, Tapper says: “You will not believe what we found out.”“Don’t news people have to tell you what they know when they find it out?” Stewart wondered on Monday evening. “Isn’t that the difference between news and a secret? ‘You won’t believe what we found out’ – no, that’s why I watch breaking news.”Stewart noted real breaking news on Sunday, which was confirmation from Biden’s personal team that he was diagnosed with “aggressive” prostate cancer and was considering treatment options. “Doing the story seems almost disrespectful,” said Stewart. “Can CNN thread the needle? How do you pivot from excitedly promoting your anchor’s book to somberly and respectfully promoting your anchor’s book?”Well, as one CNN staffer put it: “This was already going to be a tough week, and this makes it much harder. And that is a reference to the fact that our colleagues, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have a book that’s set to be published on Tuesday.”“It’s so hard, it’s such a difficult time, so unfathomable in terms of the pain his family must be feeling,” Stewart mocked. “And yet, if you act now, you use the code ‘backslash tap that book’, it’s 20% off.”Jokes aside, Stewart acknowledged: “How fucking weird it is that the news is selling you a book about news they should have told you was news a year ago, for free.”“I understand the excitement over an insidious Democratic cover-up about Joe Biden’s mental decline,” he added. “The thing is though, it was a terrible cover-up, because we all fucking knew.”“There was no cover-up – poll after poll showed vast majorities of the public thought Biden was too old and too out of it to run again,” he continued. “Dean Phillips mounted an entire primary campaign because of it.”“He along with most of the public knew it was a bad idea for Biden to run. We knew it,” Stewart concluded. “And that’s what’s so hilarious about politicians. The cover-up doesn’t work when everyone knows you’re lying.”Stephen ColbertMeanwhile, Trump spent the weekend “settling back into the White House after his Mideast all-you-can-bribe buffet”, as Stephen Colbert put it on Monday’s Late Show.“He just loved it over there!” he continued. “He was having such a good time with the princes and the palaces and the marble and the gold, and the special souvenir he really wants to bring home: obedience to leaders on punishment of death.”Trump “spent this beautiful weekend viciously attacking anyone who dare defy him”, including Walmart, which recently said his tariffs were “too high” and would force the chain to raise prices. “Which means it’s going to cost you a lot more when you run out for milk, one Goodyear tire and a t-shirt that says ‘Shrek yourself before you wreck yourself,’” Colbert joked.Evidently, Trump did not like Walmart “accurately describing how he has personally affected your pocketbook”, so he posted on Truth Social: “Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain … they should as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS’”Colbert broke out his Trump impression: “As is said, I make a mess, you eat it. That’s how the world works. Which reminds me – JD, there’s some hot dog stuck in my golf cleats. Get over here with your tongue and a positive attitude.”Walmart wasn’t Trump’s only target on social media this weekend. On Friday, out of nowhere, he posted: “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’”“First of all, sir, keep my best friend Taylor Swift’s name out of your filthy nugget hole,” said Colbert. “Second, it’s possible people are talking about her a little less these days because her 149-date Eras Tour ended six months ago.”But attacking Swift was “just a warm-up”, because he also went after Bruce Springsteen, after the musician called him “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” at a concert in Manchester, England.In a rambling Truth Social post, Trump called Springsteen “highly overrated”, said he “never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics” and claimed “he is not a talented guy”.“What are you doing? Attacking Bruce is like attacking America itself!” Colbert marveled.Trump went on: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country.”“Pretty bold to say someone else’s skin is atrophied when your own complexion can best be described as Tandoori Catcher’s Mitt,” Colbert quipped. More

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      The Best of ‘S.N.L.’ Season 50: Trump, Biden and Domingo

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      The just-completed 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” was dominated by anniversary hype, but the new episodes managed to create some memorable moments, too.In a season so heavily focused on celebrating the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” it was easy to forget that there were also 21 regular episodes of the show this year.While not every sketch from this run will go down in history, this year “S.N.L.” did cover a contentious presidential election and reckon with the re-election of Donald Trump; create an unexpected online trend by ruining a couple’s impending marriage; and allow Timothée Chalamet to appear as both a host and a musical guest.Will we someday talk about these segments with the same reverence we reserve for the Coneheads or “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood”? That will be the job of some future recapper to decide. (Hopefully.) For now, join us as we look back at the most memorable moments of the past season of “S.NL.”Political impressions of the seasonAfter abundant speculation about who would play the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees, the results — with Maya Rudolph as former Vice President Harris and Jim Gaffigan as Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — were mostly lackluster. The performances were too amiable and not particularly satirical (much like the real-life Harris’s own appearance on the show).James Austin Johnson has remained a dependable President Trump. But we’ll give the edge this season to the “S.N.L.” alums Dana Carvey, who finally found a funny way to play President Biden, and Mike Myers, who seemed to be having the time of his life skewering Elon Musk. Two ’90s-era “S.N.L.” stalwarts remaining relevant? No way! Way.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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      ‘Sesame Street’ Signs New Streaming Deals With Netflix and PBS

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      The deal is a much-needed shot in the arm for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces “Sesame Street” and has been struggling financially.After many difficult months, “Sesame Street” has a moment to celebrate.“Sesame Street,” the 56-year-old institution of children’s television, has signed a new distribution deal with Netflix, as well as a separate deal with PBS, the show announced on Monday.That means new episodes of “Sesame Street” will now be available to the more than 300 million subscribers of Netflix, giving it significantly more reach than in the past. New episodes will also be available on PBS the day they are released on Netflix, the first time in roughly a decade that the public broadcaster will have access to brand-new “Sesame Street” content. The new agreements will go into effect later this year.The deal is a much-needed shot in the arm for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces “Sesame Street” and has been in the throes of a financial crisis. Sesame Workshop laid off about 20 percent of its staff this year after several grants dried up, and, more significantly, it confronted a significant loss in revenue with the expiration of its current distribution deal, a lucrative contract with HBO.Since 2015, HBO has paid Sesame Workshop $30 million to $35 million a year for new episodes of “Sesame Street,” The New York Times reported. But Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent company, is letting that deal expire as it turns away from children’s content and faces financial challenges of its own.It was not immediately clear how much Netflix paid to distribute the show. But Sesame Workshop executives have warned employees for months that any new distribution agreements would bring in significantly less revenue than the old HBO deal.In a note to staff, Sherrie Westin, the chief executive of Sesame Workshop, said that it was “certainly worth celebrating” that the show will be available in many more households going forward.But, she added, “we will also have to find additional new ways to sustain our work, as the economics of these agreements are vastly different than those of the past, given the drastic market and media landscape shifts in recent years.” More

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      ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 6: Like Father

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      A series of flashbacks traced the evolution of Joel and Ellie’s relationship in Jackson, Wyo., filling in some blanks about her current state of mind.Season 2, Episode 6What is the opposite of a love story? A disenchantment story, perhaps?That may be the best way to describe this week’s haunting and heartbreaking “The Last of Us,” which features a years-spanning flashback. The episode functions a lot like the award-winning episode “Long, Long Time,” from Season 1, except in reverse. We follow Joel and Ellie from their early days living in Jackson, closely bonded; and then, over time, we see how that bond weakened and broke.This episode begins with a prologue, set in 1983 in Austin. We learn that Joel and his younger brother, Tommy, were the sons of a cop (played by the great Tony Dalton of “Better Call Saul”) who was quick to smack them around whenever they stepped out of line. One night — after Tommy was caught buying pot — Joel tried to shoulder the punishment, telling his dad to leave Tommy alone. In a moment of bracing self-awareness, Officer Miller admits that he may be following in the footsteps of his own father, who once beat him so hard he had to be hospitalized.“But I’m doing a little better than my father did,” he says to Joel. “When it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.”Post-prologue, the episode cycles through five vignettes — four set on Ellie’s birthdays, and one on the New Year’s Eve night we saw in the Season 2 premiere.The first vignette catches Joel and Ellie at a somewhat awkward place in their relationship: still recovering from the trauma of Salt Lake City, and in the first few months of living in a normal domestic situation, as a surrogate father and a daughter. Nevertheless, Joel makes what might be his first grand parental gesture (besides saving her life) as he rebuilds a guitar for her for her 15th birthday, using real bone for the saddle and carving a moth design from one of her notebooks into the neck.But these two have not really found a relaxed family groove yet. Joel can’t figure out how hard to play “dad” when Ellie intentionally burns her arm, trying to hide a bite mark. And when he describes how he fixed up the guitar, he becomes adorably awkward, going deep into the weeds on the machinery. (“Used a Dremel. That’s a rotary drill. Or it could be a saw, depending on the tip. Actually it’s a pretty versatile tool.”)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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      On ‘S.N.L.’, Bad Bunny and Scarlett Johansson Have a Couples’ Feud

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      This weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Scarlett Johansson and featuring the musical guest Bad Bunny, began with a sendup of President Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.There was only one way for the final episode of the milestone 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” to begin: with Lorne Michaels announcing that his chosen successor will be — nah, come on, it was another sketch with James Austin Johnson playing President Trump.This weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Scarlett Johansson and featuring the musical guest Bad Bunny, began with a sendup of President Trump’s recent visit to the Middle East.Sharing the stage with Emil Wakim (who was playing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia), Johnson said that he’d been enjoying their meals together, “sitting on the floor, dipping our fingers straight into various goops and spreads that I politely scrape under the rug and go eat at a mobile McDonald’s that you built for me.”He added that he was a “big fan of everything that Saudi Arabia has to offer, from the oil to the money to end of list.”Johnson vowed that he didn’t make this trip for his own benefit. “I want to make that clear,” he said. “I did this for the American people and, in many ways, myself. My personal enrichment. I did that too.”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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      What Desi Arnaz Could Teach Hollywood Today

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      Seventy-five years ago, a fading redheaded movie star and her itinerant bandleader husband were searching desperately for a way to save their careers — and their marriage. She was starring in a network radio show in Hollywood and he was a musician on the road all the time, so they rarely saw each other. In their 10 years together, she’d already filed for divorce once, and was nearing her wits’ end.The movie star was Lucille Ball and the bandleader, of course, was Desi Arnaz. In 1950, a glimmer of hope appeared for the couple: CBS intended to transfer Ball’s radio show, “My Favorite Husband,” to the untested new medium of television. But there was a problem: Ball wanted to make the move only if Arnaz — who’d helped start the conga dance craze in nightclubs in the 1930s and fueled America’s demand for Latin music after World War II — could play that husband on TV. The network and prospective sponsors believed the public would never accept a thick-accented Latino as the spouse of an all-American girl. “I was always the guy that didn’t fit,” Arnaz would later tell Ed Sullivan.Arnaz, a Cuban immigrant and self-taught showman, had an idea: The couple would undertake an old-fashioned vaudeville tour of major cities around the country. He and Ball would demonstrate the real-life chemistry that he knew would click with Americans if they only had a chance to see the act.Racism was a fact of daily life even in Arnaz’s adopted hometown, Los Angeles, where some restaurants still refused service to Latinos. The term D.E.I. did not yet exist, but Arnaz’s gambit amounted to a bold push for diversity, equity and inclusion in the white-bread monoculture of a dawning mass medium that was sponsor-driven and cautious to a fault.Miracle of miracles, it worked. Critics and audiences from coast to coast raved at the couple’s onstage antics, as Lucy clowned with a battered cello while Desi sang and drummed his heart out. A.H. Weiler of The Times pronounced the pair “a couple who bid fair to become the busiest husband-and- wife team extant.” Soon enough, they were.Based on the success of Ball and Arnaz’s tour, CBS executives agreed to film a test episode. The network had trouble finding a sponsor until a leading ad man, Milton Biow (as it happens, the grandfather of the actor Matthew Broderick) persuaded his client Philip Morris cigarettes to take a chance on the new show. “I Love Lucy” was born, the rest is history, and it was Desi Arnaz who made much of that history possible.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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      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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      In Menendez Brothers Case, a Reckoning With the 1990s

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      As a court reviewed the Menendez murder case, the culture and politics of the 1990s were scrutinized almost as much as the horrific crime.After Lyle and Erik Menendez were resentenced on Tuesday, paving the way for their possible release after more than three decades in prison, one of the first things their lawyer, Mark J. Geragos, did was make a phone call.Leslie Abramson, the brothers’ defense attorney at their trials in the 1990s who found herself parodied on “Saturday Night Live,” had in recent years warned Mr. Geragos that his efforts to free the brothers were doomed, in spite of the groundswell of support on social media.“No amount of TikTokers,” he recalled Ms. Abramson telling him, “was ever going to change anything.”Facing the bank of television cameras staking out the courthouse, Mr. Geragos told reporters he had just left a message for his old friend.“And so, Leslie, I will tell you it’s a whole different world we live in now,” he said. He continued, “We have evolved. This is not the ’90s anymore.”Indeed, over the last many months, the culture and politics of 1990s America seemed as much under the legal microscope as the horrific details of the Menendez brothers’ crimes and what witnesses described as the exemplary lives they led in prison ever since.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