Cultural giant gone. Updating coverage: Director-actor Rob Reiner and his wife Michele are dead—apparently stabbed in their Los Angeles home.
■ Columnist Charlotte Clymer: “He created some of the greatest films across numerous genres.”
■ Here’s Reiner in September, interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.
■ Variety revisits his life and work in photos.
■ Without evidence—and in contradiction of early reports—President Trump attributed the deaths to Reiner’s “massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
‘The horrors continue.’ Media writer Tom Jones reviews how reporters covered a weekend of mass shootings across two continents …
■ … including what appeared to have been a father-son attack on a Hanukkah celebration along Australia’s Bondi Beach—killing at least 15, including a 10-year-old girl, a rabbi and a Holocaust survivor and hurting dozens of others.
■ Time: Australians’ assumption “that their schools and malls and beaches were almost assuredly gun-free … has now been shattered.”
■ Julie Roginsky at Salty Politics: The Bondi attack exposed “not a new virus but an old one that has learned how to survive in modern conditions.”
■ Chicago radio, NBC and NPR veteran Jeff Kamen—who’s reported from Australia: “There was a terrible failure of the Australian government to provide any real security at the Hanukkah celebration … which should have been regarded by the authorities as a very likely target for attack.”
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: “Jews carry the stain of recent Israeli policy in Gaza, and no joyous gathering anywhere on earth can be free from the risk of blame showing up, uninvited.”
■ One of the heroes in this case—a Muslim father of two who wrested a gun from one of the attackers—may lose an arm.
‘No, Mr. President, that is not all you can do.’ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist—and Brown University alumnus—Will Bunch (gift link) says Trump blew it in his response to a Brown assault that left two dead and nine wounded …
■ A Brown student survived being wounded in Florida’s Parkland a high school shooting.
■ Lawyer and columnist Robert Hubbell: That “an assault rifle ban is not a complete answer to mass shootings … does not mean it should not be enacted.”
■ Your Local Epidemiologist: Mass shootings outnumber days in the U.S.
‘Serious questions … cry out for an independent investigation.’ A Tribune editorial (gift link) demands Chicago take seriously a complaint that a Chicago cop’s shooting and killing of his partner—and estranged romantic partner—wasn’t an accident (Dec. 10 Sun-Times link).
■ Separately, the Trib reports, “the process for meting out discipline in the most serious cases of misconduct by Chicago police officers has been largely at a standstill for more than two years.”
‘Illinois is back.’ Politico’s Shia Kapos says this is again “a hub of national political activity. … Suddenly, the state’s tourism slogan—‘Middle of Everything’—feels less like branding and more like political reality.”
■ MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow celebrated Chicago’s ICE resistance in a special recorded here and broadcast Friday: “Honestly, Chicago, you won.”
■ Mother Jones: “ICE and Border Patrol agents terrorized the city, and locals fought back.”
■ The New Republic: Chicago’s “making a genuine difference.”
■ The Media and Democracy Project’s Hero of the Month: The Chicago Headline Club, for its “bold fight against the Trump regime’s recent assault on the people and the press of Chicago.”
■ WBEZ: A group of Chicago teens is raising money to help classmates whose parents are stuck in immigration detention.
Face it. Reveal and 404 Media detail a Chicago case illustrating how the feds are “scanning people’s faces with a facial recognition app that brings up their name, date of birth, ‘alien number’ if they’re an immigrant, and whether they have an order of deportation.”
■ Columnist Steven Beschloss on state and federal lawmakers’ pushback against federal agents concealing their identities: “Enough with the masked men.”
‘Trump officials celebrated with cake. … Then people died of cholera.’ ProPublica tracks the consequences of cuts in U.S. aid to South Sudan.
■ Popular Information: “As measles ravages South Carolina, RFK Jr. undermines the vaccine.”
■ The American Prospect: “The man in charge of American public health is making everything worse.”
But … but … the year’s not done yet! Nevertheless, fact-checker Glenn Kessler has curated a list of the top 10 lies of 2025 from Donald Trump—“a president who produces falsehoods faster than fact-checkers can catalog them.”
■ Contrarian columnist Jennifer Rubin warns that the president’s “losing it”—and a wounded, humiliated Trump may be the most dangerous of all.
■ Journalism watchdog Margaret Sullivan: As the U.S. has slid into authoritarianism, news media are still stuck in old ways.
Photos of the year. The Trib’s assembled its photographers’ 100 best in 2025 (gift link).
■ Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: Slop.
SNL’s AI backlash. Viewers have been dinging Saturday Night Live over its apparent use of AI-generated imagery.
■ Columnist Matthew Yglesias has talked himself into accepting a Netflix-Warner merger—with a few concerns.
■ Economist Paul Krugman: Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner “is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires.”
Thanks. Mike Braden made this edition better.
A Square public service announcement
Add some journalism sparkle to your holiday season. The Chicago Headline Club Foundation will host a screening of All the President’s Men, 5:15 p.m., Thursday at the Siskel Film Center—a fundraising event to support the foundation’s scholarship and internship programs. Tickets available here.