A weekly newsletter on power and the press Welcome to The Media Front! Vice President JD Vance’s accusation that journalists lied about the fatal Minneapolis shooting of Renee Nicole Good was a vivid reminder of today’s media battlefield. At a White House press briefing, Vance portrayed the 37-year-old mother of three as a radical leftist who rammed her vehicle into ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who proceeded to shoot and kill her in self-defense. The vice president coldly framed Good’s death as a “tragedy of her own making.” “What you see is what you get in this case,” Vance said. What I — and many others — saw, from various angles, was Good trying to drive away from armed, masked men before one of them shot her at point-blank range. The agent did not appear to be in any immediate danger. But in today’s fractured media environment, what we see isn't the end of the story. As with just about every contentious moment in American life, even those captured on cellphone video, reality gets litigated in public. Footage that should clarify events can instead be used to distort them. Sides are taken and narratives pushed for political ends. One of the most surreal scenes was when New York Times reporters walked President Donald Trump through the shooting video during an Oval Office interview, and pushed back on his claim that the driver “viciously ran over” an agent. Meanwhile, the Trump White House has been trying to rewrite the events of January 6 — a deadly attack that played out live on television — by casting blame on Democrats. Some media figures helped boost Trump’s spin. Debates over truth and accuracy aren’t only playing out in mainstream newsrooms. A 23-year-old self-described “independent journalist” posted a video of alleged fraud in Minnesota last month that galvanized the right, driving calls for a federal crackdown and becoming part of the political backdrop as a sitting governor chose not to seek reelection. But is YouTube star Nick Shirley truly “independent?” Were his claims backed up? Was he practicing sound journalism? Or is it the political impact that matters most? At TheWrap, we’re obsessed with how the media — old, new, mainstream, partisan – shapes our understanding of the world, and the people reshaping the media. We're living through an information environment in constant flux, as once-niche podcasters compete with TV news anchors for attention and influence. And all of this is unfolding as news organizations increasingly embrace AI, even as misuse of the technology further erodes any shared sense of reality. In this brave new world, seeing is only the beginning. My goal is to cut through the outrage and spin, and interrogate how power, politics and technology converge to redefine our media landscape. Michael Calderone 
Tony Dokoupil Takes OverIt’s been a rocky rollout for Tony Dokoupil as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” marked by an on-air flub, a high-level departure and criticism of his approach to covering Donald Trump and his administration. In one instance... 
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