Good morning. Big in the Bay, big in the Beltway: The Golden State Warriors paid a visit to Barack Obama ahead of their 126-118 victory over the Wizards last night. Check the photo.

• What's Next: I'm in New York 🗽 & San Francisco 🌁 next week. If you're around, let's grab a drink.

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Mark Zuckerberg on offense

What's Next: Mark Zuckerberg is done apologizing for Facebook's handling of user data.

• After more than two years of scandal, congressional inquiry and increasingly critical press coverage, the Facebook chief is prepared to go on offense and advocate for the company's business model, sources with knowledge of his thinking tell me.

In a new Wall Street Journal editorial, Zuckerberg says Facebook's data collection practices are necessary to its business and hits back at lawmakers and media organizations that have accused the company of selling user data.

• Zuckerberg argues that users have "transparency, choice and control" over how their data is shared with advertisers.

• He also says he endorses "regulation that codifies these principles across the internet."

• Backstory: Facebook sources say the company chose the Journal for its international distribution, and said the op/ed would also be published in other languages in publications around the world.

The Big Picture: The Zuckerberg op/ed is the latest step in Facebook's new campaign to wrest control of the narrative, rebuild trust and chart the course out of its two-year public relations crisis. It is also an effort to boost morale at a company that has grown weary of being the face of Silicon Valley's problems.

• This may be the sign of a larger shift in Silicon Valley, as Twitter chief Jack Dorsey is also busy advocating for Twitter's business model even as he fails to identify prescriptions for many of its problems.

The Big Question: Will it work?

• The Bear Says No: Facebook has betrayed user trust too many times to win its way back into the public's good graces. Moreover, the hardest days may still be ahead: The FTC is planning to impose a record-setting fine against Facebook for violating a privacy agreement, and European regulators are likely to fine Facebook for violating GDPR.

• The Bull Says ... Maybe: For all of Facebook's missteps — and they are myriad — the company has also suffered from its inability to articulate what it does with user data and why. Getting on top of that could help them. At the very least, it would stop media organizations from controlling the narrative and painting their handling of user data in the worst possible light.

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Is Jack Dorsey stalling?

In yesterday's Market, I noted that Jack Dorsey's press tour has shown him wrestling with how to maintain Twitter's "open public square" while still addressing hate speech and misinformation.

The Verge's Casey Newton argues that Dorsey is really just "substituting talking for doing," which belies a greater truth about Twitter: It is "defined by its paralysis."

• "At Twitter, good ideas languish for years. The expansion of a tweet from 140 to 280 characters required such bruising internal battles that the designer responsible quit in exhaustion after shipping it, I’m told."

• "Other proposed features are abandoned when product managers realize that shipping them will need support from different divisions inside the company."

• "Ask anyone whoever left Twitter for another company and they’ll tell you the main thing they notice is how much faster things get done at the new place."

The Big Picture: "Paralysis doesn’t make for a very good story. And so we get the CEO’s performative listening tour, in which he can assure all of us that he takes our concerns very seriously."

Dorsey Listening Tour, Winter 2019:

• HuffPo's Ashley Feinberg.

• The Ringer's Bill Simmons.

• Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt.

What's Next: Sam Harris.

🌟 Rally the Market 🌟

Back in Hollywood: Radhika Jones has just published a refreshingly young and diverse edition of Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood issue. Mariah Smith's take for the Cut is the best.

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Peter Hamby rethinks news

The launch of the 2020 presidential election season has ushered in a new subgenre of handwringing over how the media covers politics — most of it self-serious and bad, but some of it very good.

• If you read one piece, read Snap's Peter Hamby in Vanity Fair.

The Key Point: Most journalists "are still delivering their work in formats that haven’t evolved in decades — the TV talk show, the newspaper text — even as the public’s eyeballs have drifted elsewhere."

• "The highest-rated program on cable news is not even journalism. It’s Hannity on Fox News, a pro-Trump propaganda show that averages about 3 million viewers per night. ... less than 1% of the U.S. population."

What's Next (Hopefully): "Powerful, substantive journalism can be packaged in ways that grab attention and rewards the consumers."

• "The idea of competing for eyeballs against Fortnite and Netflix and Audible probably strikes the Pulitzer crowd as a crass proposition, unfit for the noble journalist. How wrong they are. That competition could not be more essential to the future of journalism."

• "Some days it feels like the news media ... is having an entirely different conversation from the rest of the country ... These days, an amusing political meme can and probably will reach immensely more people than a story in The Wall Street Journal or a cable-news program."

• "Decision-makers at news organizations should do as much as possible to wean their reporters off the axis of Twitter and cable news, to force them into new spaces, both real and online, and help all of us rethink how journalism can look and sound."

The Big Picture: "The crisis of political journalism isn’t about how many policy stories showed up on a front page. It’s a larger crisis of relevance, and it can be fixed if all of us in the political press step outside of our comfort zones and embrace new models of storytelling."

• But do read the whole thing.

Market Links

• Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax worries the C-Suite (WaPo)

• Chan Zuckerberg draws a line with Facebook (Bloomberg)

• Jeff Bewkes may have shortchanged shareholders (Information)

• Sundar Pichai faces Stephen Elliott's subpoena demands (THR)

• Bryan Singer keeps directing gig, despite accusations (Variety)

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Streaming Wars hit Sundance

Talk of Tinseltown: The launch of new streaming services from Disney, AT&T, Comcast and Apple is expected to supercharge the already crazy pace of content creation in Hollywood — which means more potential deals at festivals like Sundance.

What's Next, via THR's Rebecca Keegan:

• "For the past few years, Apple has come to the Sundance Film Festival to wine and dine actors and filmmakers ... This year, the industry is counting on Apple finally coming to Park City ... to buy films."

• "Apple won't be the only streamer on the hunt for content. ... Thanks to the inroads the more established streamers have made, agents say, their clients are heading to Sundance with an entirely new perspective on landing a nontraditional deal."

• "With other, deep-pocketed new players in the marketplace, sellers say they will be asking more from buyers, and not just in a monetary sense. Many are emboldened by Netflix's foray into small theatrical releases, particularly its heavily marketed rollout for Roma."

Meanwhile, Deadline's Peter Bart writes that even with all the green lights flashing in Hollywood, its not entirely clear what kind of content each streamer wants.

Bonus: Robert Redford is taking a backseat role at Sundance after three-and-a-half decades as the master of ceremonies: “I’ve been spending a lot of tine introducing things but I don’t think that the festival needs a lot of introduction any more,” the 82-year-old Redford said yesterday.

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Art in the Age of Scandal

The other thing some of our readers in Tinseltown are talking about: This thoughtful and provocative piece from Adam Kirsch on what society should do with artists who have been tainted by scandal:

• "Is an artist’s work tainted by his personal wrongdoing? Should we give honor and respect to people who excel in their art but are deficient in what we consider ordinary morality? These questions have been at the heart of modern thinking about art since the 19th century; but since the advent of the #MeToo movement, they have begun to receive new kinds of answers."

• "In the 20th century ... to worry about the moral effects of art and music came to be seen as crankish."

• "Now the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. ... When artists are accused of wrongdoing, it is tempting to find their alleged malignity reflected in their art. ... Art is seen as irresponsible and potentially subversive, and therefore in need of social control."

Discuss.

What's Next: The Weekend.

See you Monday, from New York.