Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon dispatch of Puck’s best new reporting.

First up today, Dylan Byers drops a microphone into CBS News HQ, where Bari Weiss’s highly anticipated arrival has stirred a lot of passionate reactions—and served as a Rorschach test for the entire media industry. Does Bari represent an existential threat to the storied newsmagazine, or is the real issue the complacency that made her ascent possible in the first place? Well, it depends on whom you ask…

Plus, below the fold: Bill Cohan considers a provocative argument for Zaslav brushing off the Ellisons’ overtures for WBD. Leigh Ann Caldwell spotlights the G.O.P.’s growing unease with Trump’s anti-immigration envoy Stephen Miller. Rachel Strugatz reveals how Sephora edged out Ulta to land an exclusive deal with the industry’s makeup wunderkind. For Inner Circle members, Marion Maneker parses the midseason Hong Kong and New York auction data, revealing two starkly different views of the market. And on The Powers That Be, Peter Hamby rings up Julia Ioffe to discuss how the military’s top brass are contending with Trump’s plan to deploy troops in U.S. cities.

MEDIA

The overwrought media reaction to Weiss’s first days at CBS News would seem to validate the Ellison thesis for putting her in charge. But there’s plenty of cautious optimism inside the newsroom, too. “Having a new force come in isn’t the worst thing,” said one source. “Anyone who is acting like CBS News internally is aghast is not capturing the actual mood.”

WALL STREET

To defend against a Paramount Skydance takeover, David Zaslav will need to prove that splitting up Warner Bros. Discovery will be more valuable for shareholders than selling everything to the Ellisons. According to analysts, he’s got a good case.

WASHINGTON

As Trump’s dictatorial senior advisor gets louder and bolder—describing protesters as terrorists and inconvenient court rulings as “insurrection”—some Republicans are beginning to worry that the administration’s hard-line power grabs will backfire… and maybe even hurt the country, too.

FASHION

Ulta and Sephora have spent months locked in a pitched battle to land an exclusive partnership with Point of View, the D.T.C. skincare brand from self-taught makeup artist Mikayla Nogueira. The war is now over, and there are emerging signs about which direction the brand will go next.

ART

Simultaneous late September auctions in Hong Kong and New York told two very different stories about the art market: Asia is showing signs of life, and rebalancing, while New York is still waiting for direction.

WASHINGTON

Julia Ioffe joins Peter to reveal what military officers are telling her about Donald Trump’s plans to deploy troops to American cities. As Julia explains, many officers feel bound by the chain of command, even as they quietly worry about the precedent a deployment would set—but the real question is how this affects Americans’ faith in their armed forces.

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