■ How did President Donald Trump go from condemning TikTok to becoming its savior?
■ Mark Zuckerberg is ready to remake Meta for the new Trump era by going “back to” the future.
■ In a parting shot, the outgoing chair of the Federal Communications Commission said her agency must “take a stand on behalf of the First Amendment.”
■ CNN’s defamation trial has come at a rough time for the struggling network.
Smut scrutiny. As U.S. Supreme Court justices consider tightening obscenity laws, their forebears offer reasons why they should not.
■ As a Texas porn site age-verification law goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, a similar Tennessee law is allowed to take effect.
■ The Supreme Court allowed a Hawaii lawsuit over a decades-long misinformation campaign by the fossil-fuel industry to proceed to trial.
■ Justices are set to hear a Maryland religious-freedom case over whether parents of elementary schoolchildren can opt out of instruction on gender and sexuality.
Prep steps. News outlets are making preparations to shield themselves against an anticipated political and legal onslaught from the new Trump administration.
■ The Nation’s Elie Mystal asserted in a commentary that the media is giving away its rights even before Trump tries to take them.
■ Trump believers put faith in Trump Media too, buying shares of the social media and streaming company.
■ The Texas Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving the state attorney general’s attempt to close a Catholic-run migrant shelter in El Paso.
■ Authors compellingly dissect the roots of Christian nationalism in a new book, asserted John R. Vile, dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.
Follow the data. News organizations have taken OpenAI to court, arguing that the tech company’s ChatGPT platform uses copyrighted works without consent or payment.
■ Free-speech organization FIRE vowed to find options to block DEI initiatives that West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey banned shortly after being sworn in.
■ Instead of taking them down, one Tennessee woman is taking her defense of her supersized decorated holiday skeletons to court.
Hard-pressed. Joe Biden warned Americans in his farewell address about the “crumbling” free press, but freelancer Jon Allsop in the Columbia Journalism Review asks why he did not do something about it as president.
■ More than 400 journalists at The Washington Post sent a petition asking the news outlet’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, to make changes.
■ Meteorologists at local TV news stations face uncertain futures if a new initiative by The Weather Channel is launched.
■ Veteran journalist Elizabeth Nissen, co-founder of NBC Learn, has died.
