The saying goes something like this: Mess around and find out. OK, so that’s the PG version, but you get the drift.

The Trump administration messed around this week. And now it is finding out.

After embarrassingly including journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in a text chain about plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen, members of the Trump administration twisted themselves into human pretzels trying to discredit Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called him names. Others said he was lying about the texts. Perhaps worst of all, many in the Trump universe (both inside the administration and in the pro-Trump, conservative media) essentially settled on this defense: that what Goldberg saw really wasn’t sensitive information that could be considered classified.

In fact, when asked on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

So, after releasing just a small portion of the communications in Goldberg’s original story, The Atlantic released the transcript of the conversation on Wednesday.

And guess what? It sure looks like classified information.

As Goldberg and Shane Harris wrote in their Atlantic story, “Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information — particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen — had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face.”

Mick Mulroy, a former CIA paramilitary officer and Marine Corps veteran who served as a senior Pentagon official during Trump’s first term in office, told The Washington Post’s Alex Horton and Missy Ryan, “This information was clearly taken from the real-time order of battle sequence of an ongoing operation. It is highly classified and protected. Next to nuclear and covert operations, this information is the most protected.”

Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot, told Politico’s Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch, “The information that you have fighter aircraft launching off of an aircraft carrier, flying over enemy territory and impending combat operation is the most sensitive information we have at the federal government. (National Security Advisor) Mike Waltz did a boneheaded thing; it was careless. What Pete Hegseth did was reckless and dangerous.”

Hegseth, it would appear, was trying to use semantics to mount his defense. He told reporters right after the original story broke, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

The key words: “war plans.”

The New York Times’ David E. Sanger wrote, “Technically, they may be right. What The Atlantic published, from the chain in which its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently included, is more like a timeline of a pending attack. But it is so detailed — with the time that F/A-18F Super Hornet jets were supposed to launch and the time that MQ-9 Reaper drones would fly in from land bases in the Middle East — that the answer may prove a distinction without a difference. A full ‘war plan’ would undoubtedly be more specific, with the routings of weaponry and coordinates for targets. But that is not likely to help the defense secretary as he tries to explain away why he put these details on an unclassified commercial app that, while encrypted, was far from the heavily protected, classified internal systems used by the Pentagon.”

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake broke it down like this: “It’s difficult to see how the details discussed in the chat don’t constitute war plans. And even if you very narrowly construe that phrase, these were obviously highly sensitive operational details of a military action.”

So sensitive, in fact, that Goldberg and The Atlantic held back much of the conversation in their first story. And then, note this: They didn’t publish the transcript until after checking in with the Trump administration.

In the Atlantic story Wednesday, they wrote, “Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: ‘In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”

This was Tuesday. Then, Tuesday evening, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote back to The Atlantic, saying, “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an (sic) internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason (sic) — yes, we object to the release.”

Leavitt and the administration wanted it both ways: No, it wasn’t classified, but we also don’t want you to publish it. Leavitt couldn’t say this, but you can’t help but believe the real reason the White House didn’t want it published was that it would be exposed for wrongfully downplaying the sensitivity and seriousness of the text chain.

For more, check out these stories:

• The New York Times with “The Leaked Signal Chat, Annotated.”
• Also from The Times, Devlin Barrett with “Here’s What Determines Whether Information Is Classified.”
• The Washington Post’s Natalie Allison and Michael Birnbaum with “JD Vance, in Signal chat, cements his role as skeptic of foreign intervention.”
• Politico’s Dasha Burns with “‘Own it, fire Waltz, move on’: White House allies fume as group chat scandal grows.”
• Goldberg was the guest on Wednesday’s edition of The New York Times’ podcast “The Daily”: “The Editor Who Was Accidently Texted War Plans.”
• I linked to this earlier this week, but in case you missed it, my colleague Kelly McBride, Poynter’s senior vice president and chair of Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership, with “You’re a journalist added to a classified group chat. Here’s what you need to consider.”
• Don’t dismiss this. Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy, who has generally been a Trump supporter and has influence among the young male podcast crowd, called Signalgate a screw-up of “epic proportions” and said people need to be fired in a six-minute video. Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner has more.
• And Portnoy’s rant was brought up in Wednesday’s White House press conference. Mediaite’s Ahmad Austin Jr. with “Karoline Leavitt Confronted in Briefing About Dave Portnoy’s Call for Firings at the White House Over Signalgate.”

Meeting on the hill

NPR chief executive Katherine Maher and PBS chief executive Paula Kerger faced members of Congress, many of them hostile Republicans, during a hearing Wednesday ominously called “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”

Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the chair of the DOGE subcommittee, said at the end, “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is using taxpayer dollars to actively suppress the truth, suppress diverse viewpoints and produce some of the most outlandish, ludicrous content. After listening to what we heard today, we will be calling for the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

My guess is she wrote and practiced that statement well before Wednesday’s hearing.

My Poynter colleague, Angela Fu, has the lowdown on the hearing: “Republicans grill NPR and PBS executives about ‘biased’ coverage in DOGE subcommittee hearing.”

Republicans pounded coverage of Hunter Biden and COVID-19, while Democrats mocked the hearings by using references to Sesame Street characters such as Elmo and Big Bird.

The hearing comes in the midst of this whole Signalgate drama, prompting Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Stephen Lynch to say some Republicans would rather go after Big Bird than Trump, adding, “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful.”

Coming and going

NFL star-turned-broadcaster for CBS JJ Watt, shown here in 2023. (AP Photo/Maria Lysaker)

Plenty of big news coming out of CBS Sports on Wednesday.

First off, lead college football game analyst Gary Danielson announced he will retire following the 2025 college football season. Danielson, a former NFL quarterback, has been calling college football on TV for 36 years, including the past 20 at CBS — making him, according to the network, the longest-tenured college football game analyst on any network. These days, he works with play-by-play partner Brad Nessler, but for years sat alongside Verne Lundquist as the two called mostly SEC games on Saturday afternoons. The duo made up one of the best college football announcing teams in TV history.

CBS Sports already has his replacement. It will be Charles Davis, who has been calling NFL games at CBS since 2020. Before that, he called college games at Fox Sports.

And, CBS already has a plan to replace Davis on NFL games. NFL great JJ Watt will take Davis’ spot on the network’s No. 2 NFL announcing team next to play-by-play man Ian Eagle. That change will happen immediately. CBS says Davis will remain an NFL analyst for the upcoming season but didn’t give specifics on who he will work alongside.

Watt, a three-time Defensive Player of the Year in the NFL, retired from playing two years ago and joined the NFL on CBS team as a studio analyst.

This is all a mixed bag for me. I hate to see Danielson retire. He remains a very good announcer, although CBS no longer has the best SEC game of the week (which is often the best college football game of the week), so some of the shine has come off that broadcast already. Lots of fans seem to really like Davis. To me, he’s fine. I know this is a lukewarm response, but CBS could do a lot worse.

And as far as Watt, he hasn’t really done games, but his studio work has been good. Let’s see if he can make the adjustment to the booth. He has a big personality (he has hosted “Saturday Night Live”), so I think he will be a good fit in the booth.

That’s not all when it comes to CBS Sports …

Sticking around

CBS Sports announcer Jim Nantz is still one of the best in the business. He is the network’s lead NFL play-by-play voice, as well as CBS’s host of The Masters golf tournament. Last year, he stepped down as the lead announcer for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Now he has announced, sort of, thoughts for when he would retire from calling The Masters.

But it won’t be for a while.

In an interview with Bunkered’s Michael McEwan, Nantz said he’s looking at 2036. That would mark the 50th anniversary of his first time broadcasting The Masters, and the 100th overall anniversary of the tournament. Nantz would be 76, and, you would think, still be very much on top of his game as an announcer. In fact, Nantz added, “I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to get to that year, and I’m going to say, ‘You know, maybe I could do this for a while longer.’ We have broadcasters over here that have gone on well into their 80s, so that’s one of those ‘wait and sees’, I guess.”

Before then, CBS has two more Super Bowls — in 2028 and 2032 — so it appears that Nantz has no plans to go anywhere. Then again, as Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder points out, The Masters is on a year-to-year deal with CBS. That relationship goes back to 1956. It’s hard to imagine The Masters on any other network.

Yoder writes, “The Masters is famously on a year-to-year deal with CBS, so maybe Apple will make a trillion dollar offer beginning in 2037 for global rights and insists that Jim Nantz comes along for the ride.”

That’s because it’s hard to imagine The Masters without Jim Nantz.

Media tidbits

• NPR’s David Folkenflik with “Judge freezes Trump plan to dismantle Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.”
• For Poynter, Liam Scott with “What the attempted dismantling of Voice of America means for press freedom in the US and the world.”
• The Los Angeles Times’ Meg James with “Inside Paramount’s bumpy sale: the president, a scion and a possible sheikh.”
• “CBS News Sunday Morning” national correspondent Rita Braver has announced she is retiring at the end of the month. Braver, who reports on everything from arts and culture to politics and foreign policy, has been at the network since 1972, starting in the Washington bureau as a news desk editor. Here’s a clip from 2022 when “CBS News Sunday Morning” commemorated her 50th anniversary at CBS.
• The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Weprin with “Amid Political Creator Boom, Megyn Kelly Launches Podcast Network.”
• For Nieman Lab, Sarah Scire and Sophie Culpepper with “‘Some hard and important lessons’: One of the most promising local news nonprofits looks back — and ahead.”

Hot type

Baseball’s real Opening Day begins today. (The Dodgers and Cubs played two regular-season games in Japan last week.) So, to get you ready for baseball:

• ESPN with “2025 MLB predictions: Playoffs, World Series, MVPs and more.”
• The Ringer’s Anthony Dabbundo with “The 2025 MLB Preseason Power Rankings.”
• And, finally, this is fun. The Athletic’s Levi Weaver with “MLB’s best, weirdest and most unique promotional giveaways in ballparks this year.”

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