Morning Brief: Dem Shutdown Drags On, Legacy Media Targets DEI, & Conservative Journos Snubbed

D.C. braces for “No Kings” protests as Democrats refuse to budge on the shutdown, two legacy media outlets face dramatic overhauls, and the largest media convention in the country uninvites two prominent conservative journalists — including one from The Daily Wire.
It’s Friday, October 17, 2025, and this is the news you need to know to start your day.
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Democrat Shutdown Enters Day 17
Topline: On Thursday, the 16th day of the current government shutdown drew comparisons to the 2013 Obamacare standoff and is fast approaching the record 35-day shutdown of 2018 over the southern border wall. With lawmakers flying home on Friday, the shutdown is guaranteed to last at least until next week.
Both parties are standing firm. Democrats are doubling down, demanding negotiations with Republicans over healthcare, and Republicans say they want the government opened first before they’ll talk. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wants to negotiate on healthcare, specifically focusing on extending the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) tax credits, which expire at the end of the year.
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The conventional wisdom in Washington is that the shutdown will drag on until President Donald Trump does something to stop it, or if rank-and-file Democrats revolt against their leadership.
Democrats in trouble: No one ever comes off good in a shutdown fight, but Republicans have managed to stay on top of this one. They’ve stuck to their messaging, and they’re making it clear that they’re going to find ways for soldiers and other essential workers to get paid even though funding has technically dried up.
Democrats seem excited about keeping things closed. Schumer caught backlash last week for saying the shutdown gets better every day.
People are starting to notice that Democrats are programming events in a way that seems to suggest they know the shutdown isn’t ending any time soon. Wednesday night’s town hall with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was scheduled days in advance, and Democrats are using this weekend’s “No Kings” protests to push their shutdown messaging.
DEI Targeted In NBC Layoffs
Topline: Amid major shakeups across the broadcast media landscape, NBC announces it’s laying off 7% of its news staff. According to reports, diversity, equity, and inclusion roles are especially on the chopping block.
The layoffs are affecting about 150 journalists and producers out of a 2,000-person workforce. The main reason is that the company is spinning off its cable networks, such as MSNBC and CNBC, into a new entity called Versant.
NBC management says the cuts reflect redundancies tied to the reorganization. They say that many of the roles eliminated were simply shared support across NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.
According to a report from The Wrap, DEI departments and positions are being especially targeted. The terminations are hitting the dedicated teams “covering issues affecting black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ groups” hardest.
DEI is DIEing: public opinion has shifted dramatically on DEI in the last few years.
Prior to the layoffs, NBC had teams specifically dedicated to those DEI categories, each with specialized websites called “verticals” devoted to covering topics and news relevant to them – NBC BLK for Black audiences, NBC Latino for Hispanic stories, NBC Asian America, and NBC OUT for LGBTQ+ coverage. The staff members for these verticals are almost all getting cut. Just two senior editors will remain to oversee content.
NBC says that doesn’t mean that coverage of those groups will disappear. They say the verticals, those specialized sites, will continue to publish content, but the content will be written by general reporters rather than those specialized teams.
On DEI specifically, it’s been a bloodbath throughout the news business.
During a major round of layoffs at the Los Angeles Times in January 2024, the newspaper cut the team for “De Los,” a vertical launched in 2023 to cover the Latino community, and a reporter hired specifically to cover Asian American communities.
In July 2024, CNN dismantled its “Race and Equality” team as part of a restructuring strategy. Just like with NBC, CNN said that the team would be integrated into the larger newsroom to “infuse” diversity coverage across all departments, but confirmed that the team as a distinct unit no longer existed.
DEI’s demise: The Trump administration set the tone. The president has signed multiple executive orders dismantling DEI programs throughout the federal government.
While NBC says this restructuring is to make a strategic shift to focus on streaming, it also provides the network with some distance from its cable channels, which have been roundly criticized for being overtly left-wing.
Conservative Journalists Uninvited From MediaFest
Topline: The Columbia Journalism Review published a report revealing that a supposedly non-partisan conference, MediaFest, that’s taking place this week, pulled both Daily Wire White House Correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan and The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen from the event. The reason: a student media advisor said the two women espouse anti-LGBT views.
Morning Wire spoke with Olohan and Allen about their experience being blocked from MediaFest. (The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Morning Wire: You were abruptly uninvited to this MediaFest event – and we’re just now learning the real reason why. First, what were you there to participate in?
Olohan: I had been asked to be on a faith panel at this event. … As a Catholic, as a reporter, someone who has covered the culture issues, I would have been talking about these issues that I’ve covered so closely, abortion, marriage, gender, family, all these different life issues. … Let’s face it, a lot of the reporters who are giving us our news right now are not currently people of faith and they’re very religiously illiterate. We could have been offering a really interesting perspective here and unfortunately we won’t be.
Morning Wire: Instead you were disinvited. Did the organizers give you a journalistic rationale for pulling you out of the event?
Olohan: At first, they said that they had objections to our reporting and they tried to say we had accuracy issues and the articles that they had particularly objected to. … The story that they were really upset about that I wrote was an exclusive from Congressman Brandon Gill, and we wrote about legislation that he was trying to pass that would say that you could not flush aborted baby body parts into our water systems. … But at the end of the day, what we now know is that they appear to have a problem with the fact that we’re conservative journalists. We would not be pushing the ideology that they would prefer we would be pushing. At the end of the day, that seems pretty biased to me to get rid of a different perspective.
Morning Wire: As The Daily Wire noted in an editorial, while you two were excluded, the organizers had no problem inviting Nikole Hannah Jones, the radical far-Left author of The 1619 Project. The double standard is impossible to miss. Thanks, Mary Margaret. Joining us now is Virginia Allen. Now, as I understand it, you were told that you were being removed due to a report you wrote on the 13,000 missing migrant children that the Trump administration had found. What exactly was the organizers’ complaint there?
Allen: I wish I knew exactly. … I think they took issue with the fact that I had cited individuals in the Trump administration who have been very critical of the Biden administration for literally losing thousands of kids. I assume that they wanted me to also include someone from the Biden administration claiming, no, we didn’t, in fact, lose thousands of children. But by their own admission, by their own documents that came out from the Biden administration, they did in fact lose the location of unaccompanied alien children. … I think at the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that they didn’t like individuals speaking at their conference who are openly pro-life, who openly believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and who quite frankly are bold enough to sometimes report some of the good things that the Trump administration is doing for our country.
Morning Wire: The Trump administration is taking a very proactive, aggressive approach to shifting the landscape in terms of new media. Are you seeing in DC the effects of those shifts? Are there some positive signs for conservative journalists?
Allen: Oh, absolutely. … Under the Biden administration, we’re asking questions. We were sending those emails to the White House asking for comment and it was, you know, nine times out of 10 radio silence. Now, all of a sudden, we have an administration that’s willing to engage and speak to all media regardless of how big or small, leftist or conservative … and I think it’s a tone change that started in Washington, D.C., and now has rippled out across the rest of the country as more and more Americans are waking up to great news outlets like The Daily Wire, like The Daily Signal, who report fair and balanced, but are also very open about, hey, we are conservatives and we’re going to bring you the straight news and we’re not gonna put any leftist spin on it.
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