Cockburn

After what could only be described as a dizzying month in news media, Fox is on the hunt for a Tucker Carlson replacement. Cockburn has some thoughts — and suggestions — on who might be a good fit for the network’s coveted 8 p.m. slot. First, there are obvious candidates within Fox already. Jesse Watters currently hosts Jesse Watters Primetime in the 7 p.m. time slot. Bumping Watters up an hour is thought to be the preferred and likeliest solution within the network. Greg Gutfeld is a close second, having hosted late-night shows from 2007 to the present, with the current Gutfeld! earning impressive viewership numbers. On the more conventional side, there is Brian Kilmeade, who hosts both the weekday Fox & Friends and Saturday’s One Nation with Brian Kilmeade.

Cockburn’s soul surged with admiration earlier as he witnessed the brave employees of the Washington Post do something truly heroic. Risk life and limb to report from the front lines? Well, no. Attend a White House press briefing and grill Karine Jean-Pierre? Nay, something far more daring still: more than 450 members of the Washington Post Guild, the publication’s union — brace yourself — stepped away from work on their lunch break to demand “Washington Post management gets serious about management and bring [them] a wage proposal.” It looked to be a beautiful sunny day outside the Post offices in Franklin Square, where employees mingled in t-shirts and helped themselves to — are those boxes of pizza?! — and what appears to be a variety of flavored bubbly water.

Fox News stunned its viewers — and, according to sources within the company, its own staff — when it let go of primetime host Tucker Carlson on Monday. Fox News employees were said to be "shocked" and "upset" when they read the public press release announcing Tucker's departure from the network. "FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," read the muted release. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor." Speculation as to the reasons behind Tucker's abrupt exit has run rampant. The initial online consensus was that Tucker was out due to his being named prominently in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox — but that doesn't explain why Maria Bartiromo and Judge Jeanine Pirro are still on the air.

Don Lemon announced that he had been officially squeezed out of CNN earlier today. “I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN. I am stunned,” the former anchor and morning show host tweeted. “After seventeen years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have the decency to tell me directly. At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network. It is clear that there are some larger issues at play. With that said, I want to thank my colleagues and the many teams I have worked with for an incredible run. They are the most talented journalists in the business, and I wish them all the best.” CNN's PR wing later disputed Lemon’s claims.

A British sex doll manufacturer is claiming that the top celebrities his customers request likenesses of include Princess Diana, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle. However Ben Stroud, CEO of Inferno Official, says that his company wouldn't fulfill such orders because he is a "royalist" at heart and "taste" and "decency" wouldn't allow it. Add "legal action" to that list. "We get requests for Princess Diana regularly, especially after the latest series of The Crown, but we would never open ourselves up to accusations of cheapening her memory," Stroud told the SWNS newswire. Instead, Stroud and his company profit in the much more dignified work of selling sex-doll lookalikes of minor adult film stars, listed on their website for $10,000 a piece.

What do Tom Brady and Taylor Swift have in common? Both blonde, both wealthy, both recently single. As for their differences: Brady is one of a group of celebrities being slapped with a multi-billion-dollar class action lawsuit and Tay-Tay is touring around singing songs about her exes unscathed, after bothering to do her due diligence on FTX. A lawyer suing celebrities for promoting FTX, Adam Moskowitz, appeared on The Scoop podcast to discuss the lawsuit, claiming that the plaintiffs are seeking over $5 billion from FTX's celebrity endorsers Brady, Shaquille O'Neal and Larry David. Cockburn can't wait to see this plotline on the next season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. “I mean, why would you possibly promote cryptocurrency if it may be an unregistered security?

Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC has a plagiarism problem. It appears that, as with the cases of John Oliver and James Corden, Britain is not sending its best. The pundit also seems to be as much of a chameleon as Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, taking whatever position gets him ahead. Lee Fang, a reporter formerly at the Intercept, published an investigative piece on his Substack looking at Hasan’s journalistic (or, maybe, not-so-journalistic) history. "Writing" an article in 2000 taking up the cause of spanking disobedient kids, he took — almost to the letter — the text from a 1998 article in US News and World Report. A few alterations here and there to account for the difference in date, and voila!

TikTok’s time with the uber-connected Democratic PR firm SKDK is up. According to the Washington Post’s Technology 202 newsletter, SKDK "wrapped up its work for TikTok in recent weeks after assisting with its campaign to bring digital influencers to Capitol Hill." Politico reported that TikTok retained the services of the firm co-founded by Joe Biden’s current senior advisor Anita Dunn on March 9. To Cockburn, it seems like SKDK’s mission is complete. During its time representing the controversial Chinese app, the odds of a full TikTok ban — which seemed all but inevitable following CEO Shou Zi Chew’s disastrous congressional testimony later in March — have dwindled by the day.