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If you have been a reporter long enough, you find yourself facing the ghosts of previous stories and events.
From Dan Schneider to 9/11 and Phil Donahue, I have been reminded this week of how long I have been doing this. I’m also reminded that (modestly), I have broken some big stories and often punched a bit above my weight.
I hope I continue to do that here. There is nothing I enjoy more than highlighting interesting people, telling compelling stories. I am also competitive enough that breaking a story before anyone else still provides a thrill.
Dan Schneider Loses His Lawsuit Against WBD And The Producers Of ‘Dark Side Of Kids TV’
When famed teen kids show producer Dan Schneider split from Nickelodeon in early 2018, I wrote the first of what turned out to be a series of pieces about the reasons behind the move and some of the rumors that had plaguing him in recent years:
But the biggest issue with Schneider is the one everyone I spoke with is unwilling to discuss - even anonymously. For years, Schneider has been dogged by rumors of inappropriate behavior with some of his teen stars. I won't recount the best-known ones here, because I have no idea whether any of the rumors are even somewhat accurate. But much has been made of his unsettling public fascination with the feet and toes of some of his young female stars.
And several actresses from his shows have commented at least tangentially about the allegations. Amanda Bynes discussed some problems she had with a producer widely believed to be Schneider in a now-deleted Twitter thread, And Jennette McCurdy posted a troubling video she originally recorded on Persicope in 2013, in which she appeared on camera with her face smeared with lipstick, saying "Hey Dan Schneider, I know you’re watching my Vine....Look what you’ve done to me."
That reporting led to my appearance in the 2024 documentary Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV. And while the docuseries included a number of unsettling stories of sexual and mental abuse on several of his shows, producers were careful not to suggest Schneider had any knowledge of the sexual abuse or had done anything sexually inappropriate.
But that was not the way Schneider saw it, and shortly after the docuseries aired, he filed a defamation lawsuit against Warner Bros. Discovery, producers Maxine Productions and Sony Pictures Television. Schneider had sought unspecified damages and a court order forcing producers to remove allegedly defamatory portions of the docuseries or have it completely taken offline.
The case has been winding its way through the courts ahead of a trial and the focus of the battle has been an effort by the defendants to have the case dismissed under California's anti-SLAPP statute.
SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation and refers to lawsuits brought by individuals and entities to dissuade their critics from continuing to produce negative publicity. The defendants in the case argued Schneider's lawsuit fits this description and should be dismissed with prejudice (which means it can't be filed again).
In a hearing in October 2024, the complaint was tentatively stricken by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ashfaq G. Chowdhury, who wrote that the ultimate reason for dismissal centered around the case law for California Civil Code 44, which requires the plaintiff to not only prove libel, but also provide proof that the facts at dispute are not true. And according to the judge, Schneider failed to do the latter.
The judge also expressed concern that most of the proof the average viewer who watched Quiet On Set would think Schneider was guilty of sexually abusing children submitted by Schneider attorney Gerry Silver, a partner at Sullivan and Worcester, cited various social media comments from YouTube videos and tweets on X as indications that confusion by the viewers was likely. Defense counsel Grygiel argued that the comments were indicative of nothing, since it was impossible to know whether the people making the comments were real or truly believed what they had written.
Judge Ashfaq G. Chowdhury seemed increasingly unsure of the answer to this problem, finally saying "Social media, I think we can all agree, is not a wellspring of truth and reasonableness." He also noted that trying to determine social media inferences and implications is a "slippery slope."
In the end, Judge Chowdhury tentatively dismissed the charges pending a further hearing. And at that follow-up hearing, after considering additional arguments, the judge ruled the case could continue, citing his belief that Schneider’s argument might have a chance of winning at trial.
But on Thursday, California’s Second District Court of Appeal reversed the decision allowing Schneider to proceed with his lawsuit, rejecting arguments that the docuseries implied that the producer sexually abused children who worked on the Nickelodeon series he created and ran.
The documentary clearly distinguishes between the lamentable conduct that its participants attribute to Schneider— gender discrimination, harassment, toxic workplace behavior, and inappropriate sexual innuendo—and the child sexual abuse explicitly attributed to three named individuals, two of whom are discussed at length. Quiet on Set also affirmatively states that Schneider’s employer investigated his conduct and, while it confirmed some inappropriate behavior, it found no evidence of child sexual abuse. Schneider’s attempt to find an alternative meaning than what is expressly stated in the documentary is unavailing.
And so it appears that this case is over and for better or worse, Schneider’s reputation is what it is and that isn’t going to change.
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The 39th Annual Hispanic Heritage Awards
On Thursday evening, my wife and I attended the taping of the 39th Annual Hispanic Heritage Awards at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.
The show will air Friday, October 2nd on PBS and I’ll have a more complete review closer to the airdate.
What struck me about the evening was the joy and celebration that was woven into every performance. On a night when the second night of Trumpolooza was diving deeply into its message that America should be scared of immigrants and upset about their unwillingness to embrace the values of America, this awards show presented a very different message.
This was a hall full of people who embraced their heritage and were proud to be immigrants to this country. But there was also a deep love of America and frequent reminders that we are more alike than some critics want to acknowledge.
It was a beautiful, uplifting experience. And walking out of the building after the show, I felt a lot more positive about our future than I had in quite awhile.
A Couple Of Thoughts About 9/11
Speaking of ghosts, I wanted to pass along a couple of pieces that are worth reading as the deluge of 9/11 think pieces slows down until next year.
I spent some years in the late 1990s and early aughts working at a financial news start-up and by the time September 11th, 2001 rolled around, I had been laid off (along with much of the rest of the staff). But I still spoke with a number of Wall Street analysts at various firms, including at Cantor Fitzgerald.
I was closest to Cantor Fitzgerald Chief Market Strategist Bill Meehan, who was one of the 658 out of the company’s 960 New York-based workers who were at the office that morning. The company occupied floors 101-105 in the North Tower and when the plane slammed into the building, it hit directly below their offices.
I posted this piece for the first time in 2002 and have reposted every year since. It’s not the most artful writing I’ve ever published, but even after a year my emotions about Bill were still pretty raw:
But I think my strongest memory of Bill Meehan was a conversation I had with him the Friday before I was leaving to get married. He usually talked to me from his home first thing in the morning, and as you can imagine, the conversation sometimes strayed far from the topic of Wall Street.
I was taking ten days off work, and I joked that being gone that long was going to "make my boss crazy." Bill paused, and told me that I had to remember that everything we talked about was just numbers. What really mattered, he told me, was friends and family. "Getting married was the best decision I ever made," he said. "And having some good friends and family you love....don't ever let work distract you from what's important."
And I’ve thought a lot about the consequences of 9/11 a great deal. We have become the country the terrorists hoped we would become after such a body blow: more scared, more afraid of anyone who is different. Every time I hear some public figure ranting about how dangerous Muslims are and how no Muslim should hold public office, all I can think is that the terrorists won.
9/11 also had a huge impact on television and Eric Deggans takes a good look at some of things you might not have noticed at the time for his Switching Codes newsletter. For instance, I had forgotten that Glenn Beck got his big national radio break when he was tapped to host a national roundtable on 9/11 for Clear Channel’s radio network after Dr. Laura Schlesinger backed out.
Eric also connects things that happened in TV as the result of the Iraq War, which arguably is directly linked to the events of 9/11. Including Phil Donahue removal by MSNBC because the network felt he wasn’t patriotic enough.
This is a story that is very personal for me because I was the reporter who broke the story at the time about why Donahue had been let go:
Although Donahue didn't know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel.
That report--shared with me by an NBC News insider--gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. Some of recommendations, such as dropping the "America's News Channel," have already been implemented. But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace."
The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war......He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
That report was followed by several detailed updates and I’m proud of the fact that while I was the target of a lot of crap from fellow journalists, who dismissed the reporting and scornfully referred to as “only a blogger,” every detail of my reporting turned out to be accurate:
There were also the odd bits of feedback from the parent network NBC. While the broadcast news division made a point of keeping a hands-off stance with MSNBC, that didn't prevent the cable network from getting feedback from its sister network. One MSNBC executive recalled hearing complaints from Jack Welch, who said he had friends asking him "what's going on at that network?"
But many of the show's biggest boosters felt that the guidelines hamstrung a format that was being challenged by critics from the right. Rather than "letting Phil be Phil," imposing a "quota system on guests" resulted in shows that often degenerated into shouting matches between liberal and conservatives. A person hired by the network approved the booking decisions and often insisted that there be two conservative guests for every one that was perceived to be liberal. "Sometimes the show ended up being some warped version of 'Crossfire,' which wasn't what we (the network) wanted," explained one high-placed NBC News official. "And it wasn't doing Donahue any favors, either."
One of the high-ranking production people on the show recounted the number of times potential show ideas were shot down, or watered down to the point where the original pitch didn't make any sense. "We wanted to do more stories about Iraq and other foreign policy issues and at one point I was told that we needed to limit those segments to no more than one every few days," he described. "I was never told not to book someone, but at some point you find yourself falling back to the position of picking your battles. Unfortunately that means a lot of good people didn't get heard on our show."
Ironically, these big scoops nearly ruined me financially. This was a time before Google Adsense and if you ran your own domain, you had to pay for bandwidth each money. So, it was a win/lose piece of reporting. Although it did make me realize that I could break stories whether or not a major news affiliation.
Odds & Sods
You might think that The Simpsons has no internal rules. But this fascinating discussion between Conan O’Brien and Matt Groening lays out some of what has always guided the show’s writers. Although the rules have been stretched to the breaking point at some points.
Netflix has canceled Ransom County, the Texas romantic drama starring Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly, after two seasons.
If you’re looking for a little bit of a musical distraction this weekend, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band have released the first 37 minutes from their recent Philadelphia stint on YouTube. It includes “War,” “Born In The USA,” “Death To My Hometown,” “No Surrender,” “Darkness On The Edge Of Town,” and a cover of The Clash’s “Clampdown.” The film was directed by longtime Springsteen collaborator Thom Zimny. I interviewed Zimny for the release of the 2024 Hulu/Disney+ special Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band.
The vertical drama company Love-Hit is producing a series of hot rom-com versions of classic books such as Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights.
The documentary Capturing Bigfoot premieres Tuesday, October 20th in theaters and on Prime Video. Here is a first look at the trailer. Here is the official trailer: “The documentary follows the story of Roger Patterson’s pursuit of Bigfoot, who on October 20, 1967, captured 59 seconds of film showing a creature (dubbed “Patty”) walking through the woods of Northern California—footage that became the most analyzed and debated in history. When a reel of 16mm film discovered in a safe five decades later blows the legend wide open, the people who were there come together to give the full picture.”
The Jonathan Majors-led film Run Hide Fight: Infidels premieres next Wednesday on The Daily Wire and while my review is still under embargo, this new trailer provides a pretty good hint about what to expect.
What I Apparently Missed At The Status Summit
I was slightly bummed that I wasn’t able to attend this week’s Status Summit, because it did include a lot of high-profile media types. But based on this account in the newsletter Embedded, maybe I didn’t miss out on all that much:
I attended (part of) the inaugural Status Summit on Wednesday, sneaking in as Don Lemon and Mehdi Hasan were talking with Oliver Darcy about independent media. The parts I saw were somewhat cable news-heavy, with a lot of hand-wringing about how kids these days would rather flip a grunt than watch longform news. It was physically painful to watch Brian Williams and Jonathan Wald position themselves as authorities in this space, while boldly claiming young people don’t care about coming together to watch big news moments simply because they’re not watching them on TV. As I was internally screaming—and as Ryan Broderick at one point outwardly scoffed—they absolutely do still come together to watch big news moments, but they’re doing it on livestreams with modern-day anchors like Hasan Piker. That’s how I watched Zohran Mamdani win the NYC mayoral election, and I’m famously very young!
I will say that there is this bifurcation of the newsletter industry between the high-profile, fully funded newsletters who attend these events and the ordinary journalists like myself who don’t have the time or the resources to spend $1,000 on a pass to a festival where people talk about the challenges of running a multi-million dollar newsletter business.
What’s Coming Tonight And Tomorrow
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH, 2026:
Creative Arts Emmys 2026 (FXX)
Falling Into Place (Hallmark)
Have I Got News For You Season Five Premiere (CNN)
Robin Roberts Presents Angel in the Rubble: The Genelle Guzman Story (Lifetime)
Love & Marriage: Huntsville Season Twelve Premiere (OWN)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13TH, 2026:
American Horror Story Season Thirteen (FX)
Best Of VMAs: Iconic Vanguard Performances (CBS)
Brothers Series Premiere (Apple TV)
Family Through Fire (Lifetime)
Halloween Wars Season Sixteen Premiere (Food)
High Value Target: The Hunt For Saddam (TNT)
60 Minutes Season Premiere (CBS)
The Floor Season Premiere (Fox)
The Terrors Of Jordan Mendoza Series Premiere (Adult Swim)