☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Major shakeup at 60 Minutes
- In other news: Pentagon bars reporters from its press office
- Looking ahead: Maine Monitor introduces hyperlocal political coverage
- Chart of the week: Federal agencies’ X accounts are getting more engagement under Trump
🔥 Featured story
Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley was fired on Tuesday, a day after a heated meeting in which Pelley criticized CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, accused her of “murdering” the program, and questioned the qualifications of newly installed executive producer Nick Bilton. Weiss last week replaced 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon and dismissed correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
Weiss has reportedly expressed the view that 60 Minutes (which has been on the air since 1968) needs an overhaul for the digital era. Americans who get news from CBS News tend to be older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center study. The average age of Americans who get news from CBS is 58. And while almost half of U.S. adults ages 65 and older (46%) say they regularly get news from CBS, only 19% of those under 30 do the same.
📌 In other news
- Pentagon designates press office as off-limits to journalists, calling it “classified space”
- Lawsuit alleges Pentagon is censoring military newspaper Stars and Stripes
- NPR to change its dues model for member stations, basing them on broadcast reach as opposed to donor revenue
- Journalists detained at New Jersey immigration detention center protests
- Minnesota Star Tribune to cut staff and explore nonprofit ownership model
- Federal judge rules that political news site NOTUS cannot rebrand as The Star
- Interrupted White House Correspondents’ Association dinner rescheduled for July 24
- An interview with Ameer Al-Khatahtbeh, who shares Muslim news content with millions of followers
- Regulator says U.K. publishers can choose not to appear in Google AI Overviews
- The challenges journalists face covering the war in Sudan
📅 Looking ahead
The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit newsroom founded in 2020, is expanding to include hyperlocal political reporting, looking to cover local government in rural areas where there is “little to no journalism.” This growth will involve training community members as Monitor Local correspondents.
About two-thirds of Americans (68%) say they often or sometimes get news about local government and politics. But just a quarter of those who get news about this topic are extremely or very satisfied with its quality, according to a 2024 Center survey. Additionally, fewer than half of U.S. adults say it is very easy (17%) or somewhat easy (28%) to find the information they need to make voting decisions in local elections.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes from our recent analysis of X accounts operated by federal agencies, which are getting far more audience engagement in the second Trump administration than they did during the final year of the Biden administration. For example, the median number of total likes and reposts per @WhiteHouse post more than quadrupled from the last year of Biden’s term to the first year of Trump’s second.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Christopher St. Aubin, Emily Tomasik, Joanne Haner, and Sawyer Reed. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by Anna Jackson.
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