Here’s everything you need to know about the world of television for Thursday, April 23rd, 2026:

THIS IS ONE REASON WHY 'OLIGARCH TV' NEVER CAUGHT ON WITH AUDIENCES
No matter how smart you are, no matter how successful you might be, living in a bubble transforms you slowly into someone whose central beliefs become a self-perpetuating confirmation bias. Your values and opinions are so intertwined with the bubble that you select information that supports your views. You interpret ambiguous evidence as hidden truths that support your bias, and you reject contrary information as being not just false, but some sort of organized effort to mislead you.

This is why so many MAGA Republicans believe in the "deep state." After prolonged exposure to the conservative media news bubble, they truly believe most people share their beliefs. And since that's the case, voter fraud must be rampant because otherwise, their opponents would never have wide enough support to win elections. If their children change their political beliefs while at college, it must be because of indoctrination by Socialist professors. Not that their children are simply now living outside that comfortable conservative news bubble and might have discovered a differing set of facts that resonated with them.

In a similar vein, once you obtain a certain level of wealth and/or celebrity, you enter your own special bubble of reality. Everyone around you works for you or needs something from you. So you rarely hear a "no" from anyone. And when you do, the negative is either quickly withdrawn or other paid sycophants will tell you that they are just jealous of your success. And the fact that they are less successful than you are means they are not worthy of your time. They are losers, spreading negatives to distract you from your incredibly flawless decisions.

Social media has broken everyone to an extent, but it has especially had a crippling impact on some of technology's wealthiest investors and founders.

Accustomed to being lauded simply for their gifted existence, they found being challenged by random strangers online unsettling. Twitter was filled with people who didn't genuflect as expected. Imagine the naked audacity of a working-class employee daring to argue their betters were somehow wrong. And they certainly believed they were better than most people, because most wealthy individuals have convinced themselves that they are successful based purely on their talents and drive. Listening to someone who launched their business with their father's money while arguing that a mechanic is lazy because he isn't a multi-millionaire is a world-class example of confirmation bias. But it's a common reaction.

After the initial shock of discovering that in reality, they weren't adored for simply being them, many of Silicon Valley's wealthiest men (and it's almost always men) seemed to have gotten together a few times on each other's super yachts and decided that if the masses don't love them and appreciate how wise they might be, well, it HAS to be a conspiracy. It doesn't occur to them that they have any blind spots. Or that they could possibly be mistaken. It has to all be part of some grand conspiracy designed to punish the rich and turn America into a land where you can't live like a billionaire off the money you borrow against shares of your company in order to reduce your tax burden.

One primary target of these oligarchs wrath has been the press. If you can pick a jumping-off point for this pushback, it probably started in 2016, when Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, funded a lawsuit that ultimately led to the extinction of Gawker. And over the years, he's funded other lawsuits, dumped obscene amounts of money into campaign contributions, and pushed the political rise of J.D. Vance to the office of Vice President. In part because Vance is as uncomfortable around humans as Thiel tends to be.

Thiel's latest effort is Objection, a service founded by Aron D’Souza, a lawyer who worked with Thiel on the Gawker case. Here is how The Daily Beast describes the idea:

The pitch is straightforward. For $2,000, anyone—the subject of a story, a competitor, a political opponent, a total stranger—can file a challenge against a published article. A team of Objection’s freelance investigators, which the company claims includes former FBI, NSA, and CIA personnel, then assembles an evidence file, while the reporter is invited to respond and submit their own documentation. The material is then handed to what Objection calls an AI tribunal: a jury of frontier language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, and Google, supervised by a proprietary system branded a “Judicial-Purpose Transformer.” This body, if you can call it that, then issues a verdict on each ‘factual’ claim in the story.

Every ruling feeds into a public score called the “Honor Index,” a numerical rating attached to a journalist’s name, advertised by the company as a measure of their integrity, accuracy, and track record. In other words, the product is the punishment: an AI-laundered reputational mark that any future subject, PR firm, or political opponent can cite the next time that reporter’s byline appears on a story they’d rather bury. It sounds like accountability. What it actually creates is a punitive, deck-rigging system that operates outside the courts, outside press law, and outside any consensus standard of journalistic conduct. Anyone can trigger it. Nobody has to win anything. The score lingers either way.

This idea manages to present a combo plate of incorrect beliefs that are embedded in the tech bro fact bubble. The ability of artificial intelligence to be more unbiased than any human, and the opportunity to use wealth to punish anyone who reports a story that goes against their confirmation bias. It's a way to create a system that creates doubt about any opponent, without ever having to grow the stones to do it themselves.

This brings us to MTS, an idea of what journalism might look like if Skynet were secretly controlling the press.

Earlier this week, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced it was investing in a new media company called MTS (short for Monitoring the Situation). As the company explains it, "Beginning today, MTS will be monitoring the situation across technology, business, politics, and culture, interviewing the main characters of the moment all day long on X. MTS aims to be the best place in the world to make sense of what’s happening, RIGHT NOW, and it’ll be on X."

Now, the company carefully "monitors the situation" and doesn't claim it's "accurately reporting" anything, which, to be fair, is on-brand for a new media company streaming on X.

So what sort of stories are being covered by MTS? You will not be surprised to learn the folks at Oligarchy News Central just LOVE artificial intelligence:

" This idea that AI just gets rid of jobs... it's ancient." "One of the things people thought was that computers would get rid of accountants. That was like IBM's pitch in like 1965. But what it actually did was like, oh my God, we could do so much more with accounting." " When you look at the notion of like creating information, synthesizing and all that, AI is an accelerant for that for a person who knows what they're doing. And companies are suddenly gonna want more of those people creating more of that information."

Notice the framing here? If you are concerned about the impact of AI, you are just a dumb person who doesn't know what they're doing.

But MTS is also an ideas platform. Like arguing that gamers might be the solution to the air traffic control labor shortage. Because I suppose the assumption is that most good gamers are unemployed?

"If you think of gaming, they're problem-solving. They're looking at multiple screens at one time. They're communicating all the skills. And again, we're safety-driven. This is not a game; it's real life. But the skills you develop as a gamer."

And did you know that Kanye is like a pre-seed/angel investor in memes?"

" I think he's got an attraction to taboo. I think that's a huge motivator, and that's why he was so into the MAGA hat. These taboo ideas, he's got an audience, and that appears to be a loadstar for Kanye West. And that particular loadstar is sometimes an insight into where some of the mainstream culture might head."

Of course, Taylor Lorenz makes an appearance, arguing technologies like self-driving cars could be used for good: "It's crazy that human beings are even allowed to drive."

And let's end this with the stirring thoughts of the notoriously thin-skinned billionaire Marc Andreessen, who throws down some thoughts so weirdly self-referencing and obtuse that you'd require a whiteboard and a handful of colored markers to make sense of this:

"There are a lot of things that I think are happening that are truly organic. And then there are a lot of things that are happening that are ops. Then there's this thing which is like, something could start as an op and then become real, right? The role of the 'availability entrepreneur' is to try to inject into the public consciousness availability bias as a deliberate exercise to basically say, this is the specific thing that you should be focused on right now."

I'm writing about MTS even though it's not strictly television because it is a media story. And it's an example of how the nation's wealthiest people want the future of the media to look like. A bunch of hacky tech journalists and good-looking twentysomethings discussing the underappreciated joys of SpaceX and how AI can do anyone's job. Except theirs.

So this is a reminder to support the independent journalists, artists, and other creatives you love. Because, based on what I've seen of MTS, the oligarchs of the world are looking at the movie Bladerunner for inspiration.

I'M NOT SAYING THE WASHINGTON PRESS ARE COWARDS....
There is a lot of conversation in journalism circles about Saturday's White House CorrespondentS Dinner and how journalists at the dinner should react if President Trump attacks the press, as some of his staff are suggesting he plans to do.

This paragraph in tonight's edition of the Status newsletter is infuriating to read:

"There are lots of discussions about it," one high-profile Washington journalist told me Thursday. "If he starts attacking us, I think it is a fair question as to what the appropriate response is. Obviously some people will want to walk out, but the question about such a thing is: does that not give him exactly what he wants, making us the opposition, not the Fourth Estate? Making us the story instead of the journalists covering the story? And, suggesting that we can dish it out but we can't take it? And so I don't think there is any easy answer."

I think the easy answer is that if the President attacks the press in an unfair fashion, then journalists should walk out. And then someone from the White House Correspondents' Association should go the microphone after the president finishes his remarks and remind everyone the purpose of the dinner is to celebrate the press and the first amendment. And that is too bad the president is unwilling to accept a press which functions as an independent voice and not a group of cowardly stenographers. But maybe that's just me.

We are living in volatile times. While you cannot control the state of international affairs, you can position your portfolio accordingly.

Liquid is one of the fastest growing trading platforms, allowing users to trade stocks, commodities, FX, and more 24/7/365 from their phone and computer.

Trade 24/7 on Liquid

I AM PRETTY SURE THIS IS NOT HOW A SPOILER ALERT WORKS

ODDS AND SODS
*Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s compensation tied to the company’s pending merger with Paramount was rejected in an overwhelming vote by shareholders early Thursday. While the vote to approve the merger with Paramount Skydance was easily approved, an impressive 82% of WBD shareholders approved the compensation plan. Although overwhelming, the shareholder vote is also non-binding.

*The Wrap is looking for a media editorto "own and anchor one of the most vital beats in entertainment. This is a high-impact role for a journalist who lives at the intersection of Media, Politics and Business — someone who can edit with authority, report with urgency and write with voice."

*Charli xcx’s tour mockumentary The Moment, in which she plays a fictionalized version of herself, will premiere Friday, May 29th on HBO Max.

*Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders on Thursday "overwhelmingly" approved the deal to sell the company to David Ellison's Paramount.But despite that news, a coalition of First Amendment advocates, unions, democracy defenders and Hollywood actors and directors havevowed to continue fightingfinal approval of the merger.

NETFLIX BOARD RECOMMENDS 'NO' VOTE ON TWO 'ANTI-WOKE' PROPOSALS
Netflix shareholders are set to vote on a number of proposals during the upcoming annual meeting of the Netflix Board of Directors. Including two that focus on subjects that are of great interest topolitically conservative groups and critics of the company:

The first proposal (proposal #5 on the agenda) asks for the issuance of an ESG ROI report. The proposal requests that the Board of Directors publish a report disclosing the extent to which the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investments identified in the 2024 ESG Report were authorized and are maintained based on Net Present Value (NPV) and Return on Investment (ROI) calculations.

A second proposal (proposal #6 on the agenda) asks for Netflix to issue a report on “Politicized Brand Misalignment.” That proposal argues the company has been damaged financially by its alleged focus on various “woke” ideas and character portrayals.

As I wrote in that piece, it's worth noting who put up these proposals:

The first proposal comes from the National Center for Public Policy Research, a self-described conservative think tank. The firm has launched a number of similar proposals at other companies, including a 2014 proposal to force Apple to “disclose the costs of its sustainability programs.” That proposal argued Apple’s decision to have all of its power come from green sources would lower shareholders' profits.

The second proposal is being introduced by Bower Research, a small company that advises many millions of dollars, including the $57 billion Texas Permanent School Fund. In recent years, Bower has filed a number of similar proposals at other companies, including a recent one at John Deere, which argued the company should conduct an evaluation and issue a report within the next year evaluating the risks of failing to allow faith-based business resource groups (BRGs)

The Netflix Board of Directors will hold its annual meeting on Thursday, June 4th.

TWEET OF THE DAY

WHAT'S COMING TONIGHT AND TOMORROW

THURSDAY, APRIL 23RD, 2026:
* After The Flood Season Two Premiere (BritBox)
* Flunked Series Premiere (Netflix)
* Half Man Series Premiere (HBO)
* Last One Laughing: Italy Season Premiere (Prime Video)
* Running Point (Netflix)
* Stranger Things: Tales From '85 Series Premiere (Netflix)
* Sugarcreek Amish Mysteries Series Premiere (Up tv)
* Yiya Murano: Death At Tea Time (Netflix)

FRIDAY, APRIL 24TH, 2026:
Apex (Netflix) 
A House Built On Lies (LMN)
If Wishes Could Kill Series Premiere (Netflix)
International Jazz Day From Abu Dhabi (PBS)
My Brother The Minotaur Series Premiere (Apple TV
New Bandits (Prime Video)
Nikki Glaser: Good Girl (Hulu)

SEE YOU FRIDAY!