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Some stories are most powerful visually. Just hours after Renee Good, a thirty-seven year-old mother, was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minnesota, Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, called her a domestic terrorist. But video from a witness quickly undercut that characterization and other official accounts of the shooting.

Without that widely shared footage, Good’s killing may have been overlooked, her death covered as just another grim statistic of the immigration crackdown. Instead, the moment has proved pivotal, changing the national conversation about ICE and immigration. The video was first published by the Minnesota Reformer, a small nonprofit newsroom launched in 2020. The Reformer has five full-time staffers.

Max Nesterak, the deputy editor,** told me that the witness, Caitlin Callenson**, sent him the video just as he was leaving to go to the scene. While Nesterak interviewed Callenson, his colleague Madison McVan corroborated facts on the ground, and Nesterak posted the video on X at exactly 1pm. “If we didn’t see what happened with our own eyes,” Nesterak said, “it’s hard to imagine that there would have been such a swift condemnation from Minnesota leaders.”

The administration has portrayed community monitors in Minneapolis as agitators, and critics have suggested that legal observers like Good contribute to the tensions that led to her death. But their work is vital. When Darnella Frazier received the Pulitzer Prize, in 2021, the committee highlighted “the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.” Recent events have underscored just how crucial that role continues to be.

“There’s not enough journalists to be documenting everything that’s going on right now,” Nesterak told me. “Everything is happening all at once. And so the fact that people are taking video, that they’re documenting what they’re seeing, is so useful.”

When Bari Weiss introduced herself to CBS News staffers on her first morning call, she ended her comments with “Let’s do the fucking news.” Three months in, she’s definitely trying to do something—but it’s not entirely clear that it’s the news.

By now you’ve likely read about Weiss’s various missteps in her new role: spiking a 60 Minutes story unfavorable to the Trump administration, sending scolding missives to the newsroom on journalism ethics, declaring “We love America” as a new guiding principle for the relaunch of the CBS Evening News. (If you’ve managed to miss all this somehow, this piece from my colleague Jem Bartholomew is a good place to start.)

It’s that reimagining of the CBS Evening News that’s gotten the most attention in recent weeks, thanks to a series of confusing MAGA-friendly editorial decisions, cringe-inducing social media posts, and insipid both-sidesing show closers that are beginning to feel like a humiliation ritual for Tony Dokoupil, Weiss’s newly minted anchor.

But all the valid criticism and online snark has obscured a more fundamental problem for Weiss and Dokoupil’s reshaping of CBS’s storied evening broadcast: nothing they’ve tried so far is all that interesting or new.

David Muir, the anchor of World News, debuted ABC’s ongoing “Made in America” series with Sharyn Alfonsi in 2011, when they were both correspondents there. When he helmed the NBC Nightly News, Lester Holt regularly took trips across the country for a series called “Across America” in 2017. When Katie Couric took over the CBS Evening News, in 2006, she introduced a regular commentary segment called “Free Speech” and also brought a more casual, friendly vibe to the show (which you would never know if you heard Dokoupil’s assertion this week that “I don’t think evening has to be, like, you know, Batman delivering the news; I think you can be a human being still”). Even the test for “Whiskey Fridays,” a theoretical new segment that’s been widely mocked on social media, is derivative of NBC News’s The Drink with Kate Snow, which debuted in 2017. “They’re acting like the first people on earth that have had any of these ideas,” someone who has worked in TV for decades said to me. “It’s insane.”

Weiss is the “attention economy” network news president. “We need to *be the news*,” she wrote in a note to her team, according to the New York Times. That likely makes sense when you run an opinion site such as The Free Press, where attention drives audience, but, as the abysmal ratings indicate, that’s not likely to move the needle at the Evening News, where the average viewer is in their late sixties. Pulling CBS News out of its perennial third-place position is going to take more than online noise; it’s going to take flawless execution and real creativity. It’s hard to see how anything Weiss has done so far has meaningfully improved the business.

One final note: I worked closely with Muir as a *World News *producer years ago and from my experience, I can say he loves America, too—he just hasn’t felt the need to shout it from the mountaintops because he understands that the way you communicate your love for America, as a journalist, is by holding its leaders to account.

When Tupe Smith was elected to her local school board, in 2023, she had no idea that running for the position could be considered a crime. But just weeks later, state troopers arrived at her home without warning to arrest her for violating election law, placing her in handcuffs in front of her young children.

In a fascinating and troubling piece for Bolts, Alex Burness spent months investigating what happened to Smith and how she and her family were caught in the Trump administration’s hunt for noncitizen voter fraud. It’s a complex story about citizenship, power, belonging, and what it fundamentally means to be American.

Smith is American Samoan and lives with her family in Whittier, Alaska, a tiny town originally constructed by the US military during World War II. Nearly all of its residents—roughly three hundred—live in a fourteen-story former military complex.

American Samoans are US nationals but not citizens—a distinction that allows them to hold US passports, pay taxes, and serve in the military and yet bars them from holding public office or voting in federal, state, and most local elections outside the territory. As Burness puts it: “As non-citizen nationals, they exist in a formal underclass of democracy that precludes them from, for one, running for a local school board.”

State prosecutors would eventually charge eleven residents of Whittier with election-related crimes, almost all of them members of Smith’s extended family, including her mother-in-law. Many of those charged say they believed they were eligible to vote in local elections because they had been told by government officials that they could register. They are all facing significant prison time.

In 2022, a veterinarian from Florida named Seth Fishman was convicted in the US Southern District of New York for his role in the largest doping scandal in horse racing history. Fishman sold illegal performance-enhancing drugs to hundreds of owners and trainers, claiming they would boost a horse’s speed while masking injuries. According to prosecutors, the operation ended up killing at least twenty horses.

In a report for New York Focus, Sam Mellins goes inside the case, exploring the often sordid worlds of horse racing and New York State politics. Mellins learns that after Fishman was sentenced to eleven years in prison, federal investigators passed on key evidence to state regulators that implicated horse owners and trainers in New York. According to an analysis by Mellins, at least 280 people or stables purchased illegal drugs from Fishman, and those involved have won over forty million dollars in taxpayer-subsidized prize money since the veterinarian’s conviction. Yet regulators in New York largely took no action, failing to punish anyone.

After New York Focus asked the New York State Gaming Commission about the information it received from the feds, the commission reopened an investigation, and an investigator has been placed on leave.

CJR will be off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We’ll see you again on Tuesday.

Hat tip to the Local Matters newsletter for highlighting the New York Focus piece. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please clickhere. To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please clickhere.

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**Susie Banikarim is an Emmy-winning journalist and recovering media executive. She is the director of the 2020 documentary Enemies of the People: Trump and the Political Press and cohosted the podcast In Retrospect. **