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NBCUniversal says that the Beijing Winter Olympics racked up the smallest prime-time audience ever recorded for the games. This year’s average of 11.4 million viewers was down 42 percent from the 19.8 million average number of viewers brought in during the 2018 Pyeongchang games. Those figures follow a similarly disappointing perfomance for the 2020 Tokyo games, which only managed to pull in an average of 15.5 million viewers—down more than 43 percent from the 27.5 million recorded for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro games. NBC is in the middle of a $75.5 billion that gives it the US right to air the Olympics through 2032.
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Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social-networking platform, is up and running—sort of. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, some potential users say they were unable to create an account or got error messages when they tried setting up an account. But snafus do not seem to be dimming the platform’s prospects. Truth Social currently sits at #1 on the App Store’s ranking of free apps, and Digital World Acquisition Corp., the blank-check company that is merging with Trump Media & Technology, saw its shares jump by 19 percent in premarket trading on Feb. 22. “I’m sure this isn’t the company’s fault,” one App Store commenter said. “I’m sure it’s the corrupt liberals at Apple.”
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Tegna, which owns 64 television stations in 51 US markets, is acquired via a partnership deal between private equity firms Standard General and Apollo Global Management. Standard General founding partner Soo Kim will become Tegna's chairman, and its CEO, Deb McDermott, will serve as Tegna’s chief executive officer. The partners beat out a rival offer from Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group. Apollo acquired a controlling interest in the TV stations that had been operated by Cox Media Group in 2019, and the Hollywood Reporter says that Tegna stations in Austin, Dallas and Houston are expected to be acquired by Cox in the wake of the deal. Tegna was spun off from Gannett in 2015 as a separate, publicly traded company.
The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach an agreement that will make a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars available for use by Sora, OpenAI’s short-form generative AI video platform... CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has moved Tony Dokoupil, a co-host at “CBS Mornings” since 2019, into the anchor’s chair for the “CBS Evening News,” following the departure of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois... USA Today editor-in-chief Caren Bohan has left the paper.
Michael Kaminer, who was responsible for the Observer’s “Power List” for the past 13 years, has cut ties with the publication... The New York Times Company continues the march toward its goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027... The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is providing more than $6 million in funding to eight organizations working to address the challenges local news and information environments face along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Conservative outlets Fox News, Newsmax and the Daily Caller are holding back from signing Pete Hegseth’s edict restricting press access in the Pentagon... CBS News sees the first executive departure of the Bari Weiss era as head of standards and practices Claudia Milne exits... Indiana University shuts down the print version of The Indiana Daily Student.
Rothschild family plans to unload 26.7 percent stake in The Economist... STAT, a digital media company that focuses the life sciences, brings back Damian Garde, who anchored its biotech newsletter and podcast from 2016 to 2024... High Times officially resumes print publication (following its 2024 shutdown) with the release of a limited-edition, collectible 50th anniversary issue. 
CBS News is set to hand over its reins to The Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss as Paramount acquires her site for $155M... C-SPAN comes on board as an official media partner of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which is charged by Congress to lead the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence... A new Gallup survey says that the level of trust that US audiences have in the media has hit a new low.
