PBS News Hour - Full Show - December 20, 2025 – PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: December 20, 2025

Saturday on PBS News Weekend, the Justice Department’s release of more material on Jeffrey Epstein gets criticism for heavy redactions. How companies may be using artificial intelligence to set individualized prices by sifting through your personal data online. Plus, a conversation with world-renowned animal scientist and autism advocate Temple Grandin. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, as the Justice Department releases more material on Jeffrey Epstein, critics complained about heavy redactions, then how companies may be using AI to sift through your personal data online to set individualized prices, and a conversation with world-renowned animal scientists and autism advocate Temple Grandin, whose portrait is now in the national portrait gallery. Like, you've got to be kidding. I think it's like some of the Nobel Prize winners. When they get the call for Sweden, they just can't believe it. I almost couldn't believe it. offender Jeffrey Epstein. Still, what's been made public so far falls well short of the full disclosure required by the law Congress passed last month. These new releases come in addition to the

thousands of pages of photos, correspondence, and other material released on Friday afternoon. And the Justice Department says there will be much more to come in the coming weeks. Among the latest batch released around midnight is a phone message slip that reads, she has females for Mr. J.E. Jeff Mason is a White House correspondent for Reuters. Jeff, these new files, even though were released yesterday, tell us a lot about, more detail about Jeffrey Epstein. But does it tell us anything about his relationship with Donald Trump,

with President Trump? Very little, and that's one thing that people were maybe anticipating getting more information on. But the files have some mentions of Trump and some conversations, but no photos, one of the pieces of evidence that people were expecting was not in the release. And in general, the files were focused on other people in Jeffrey Epstein's orbit and not the current president of the United States. Even with that, this is now going to be spread out over several weeks. It's not going to be a one-day story, one-day headline.

Does the White House have a strategy to deal with that? Well, their strategy so far has been largely. to say, A, that they are being very transparent by taking, or taking, doing these document release and following the law, a statement from a White House spokeswoman yesterday, pretty much said just that and accused Democrats of not answering questions about their connections with Jeffrey Epstein. I think broadly, the White House would be happy for this whole issue to go away, and that is evidenced by the fact that President Trump spent months trying to prevent these documents from coming out. That led to a lot of discord within his MAGA base and led to some divisions

within Congress amongst Republicans. In the end, they ended up passing this law and the president signed it. But some Democrats and, in fact, at least one Republican are saying that the administration did not follow the law with its limited release on Friday. Well, one of those Republicans is the co-sponsor, Representative Thomas Massey of Kentucky. he tweeted today that the release grossly fails to comply with the law. What can they do? Can they go to court and sue over this? Well, that's a good question.

I don't know if that's something that they're thinking of doing. Certainly I do know because this is what the Justice Department has said, is that they're planning to release more, but they are saying that there are so many things that have to go through that they just couldn't basically do it all in one batch, but that there will be multiple additional batches coming. But as you say, even the co-sponsor of the bill on the Republican side, Congressman Massey is upset about that.

And also these documents are so heavily redacted. There are some pages that are just totally black from being blacked out. Is anybody talking about that or complaining about that? Yes, there are concerns about that. I think in one case there were 100 pages of grand jury testimony that were redacted. Now, the law allows the Justice Department to release some of the files with redactions in specific instances with regard to victims of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes with regard to abuse, but the amount of the redactions surprised people who are expecting to get more information than they felt they received. And the law actually says they can't redact to protect the reputation of anybody, anybody. Do we have any idea when these additional files are going to be released in the future?

All we know is that they'll be coming out in batches in the coming weeks. So I would expect that journalists like ourselves will be watching this story over the holidays and probably well past that. And some of the questions that people were hoping to get answered in this first batch are the ones that will continue to be asked in terms of connections that other people had and knowledge that other people had of Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes. You mentioned this split in the MAGA base and it's spread to the House Republicans. Does any of this threaten support for President Trump?

Well, I mean, Exhibit A of that is the rift now between President Trump and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who threw her support behind this legislation and behind additional transparency for the Epstein files, that led to this major break with the president with whom she had had a close relationship. And the two of them have really been MAGA, you know, very connected in the MAGA base and supported by the MAGA base. So to your question, will there be more? It's hard to say. But certainly Congresswoman Green has suggested that there are more divisions coming or more breakaways coming from within the base and within the Republican Party. over multiple things, but certainly a lot of it seems to have been triggered by this.

Jeff Mason of Reuters, thank you very much. My pleasure. In the day's other headlines, Russia struck Odessa's port facilities in southern Ukraine overnight. Eight people were killed and 27 injured. It comes after Moscow threatened to cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea. Russia also says it's taken control of two more Ukrainian villages in the Donetsk and Sumi regions. Despite U.S. efforts to get a ceasefire agreement, the Ukrainian soldier fighting a Dinesk said it would be meaningless. I don't believe in a ceasefire. It's all just empty talk. Why? Because Putin will gather more forces, regroup and move on.

A Russian envoy arrived in Miami today for talks on a U.S. plan to end the war. Yesterday, Ukrainian negotiators began separate talks with U.S. officials in Miami. The Israeli army struck a school in Gaza city that was sheltering, displaced people. The dead and wounded were taken to al-Shifa hospital. Among the seven killed were six members of Nafez al-Nathar's family who were asleep. He said he was celebrating a wedding in a nearby classroom. We dispersed in panic, looking for our loved ones, and we saw body parts everywhere. The children, the elderly, the young, women, body parts everywhere.

The joy stopped immediately. The Israeli military told PBS news that had been targeting a number of suspicious individuals, but is aware of a claim of civilian casualties and that the details are under review. Hamas called it a brutal crime and yet another violation of the ceasefire agreement. U.S. Central Command has released video with Friday's U.S. strikes on more than 70 targets in Syria, said to be Islamic state fighters and weapons. It was the retaliation that President Trump had promised after an end of the U.S. ambush attack last week killed two U.S. troops and a civilian American interpreter.

The Jordanian Air Force confirmed that it joined the U.S. operation to prevent extremist groups from threatening regional security. And a paraplegic engineer from Germany has become the first person who uses a wheelchair to go to space. It was a dream come true for Michaela Benthouse. She blasted off aboard a blue origin capsule along with five other space tourists. the 10-minute suborbital spaceflight was intended to let the passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness in outer space. Still to come on PBS News Weekend, how online retailers use AI to adjust prices based on what they think you're willing to pay.

And celebrating the life of Temple Grandin, the renowned animal scientist and advocate for people with autism. From the David M. Rubinstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Hour, weeknights on PBS. Today is Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas. It's predicted to be the second busiest shopping day of the year. If you're going online to buy some last-minute gifts, there's a chance the price you'll pay will be influenced by what's known as surveillance pricing. That's the practice of some retail. to use the power of AI to sift all sorts of personal data to set individualized prices online. Things like your age, gender, geographic location, and even browsing history could change the price you pay.

Ali Rogan spoke with Jay Stanley, senior policy analysts for the speech, privacy, and technology project at the ACLU. Thank you so much for joining us. So what is surveillance pricing and how does it work? Surveillance pricing is basically when companies get. a huge amount of data about their individual customers, and we're living in an era where more data is being collected about us than ever before. Companies take that data and they use it to try to figure out basically how to ring more money out of you when you buy things from them. What is your pain point? What are you willing to pay? Questions like that. And there's

a widespread experimentation happening with that kind of pricing in a number of business sectors today. So what are some examples of that? How are these companies? using the massive amounts of data that exists about all of us online to give us these. I've heard it described as like personalized pricing. I mean, right off the bat, there's a lot we don't know because, number one, they're going to claim trade secrets. Number two, they're using AI, which is very opaque in the first place. Even the businesses may not understand what the logic of the AI they're using is.

But this first came into public attention when the president of Delta Airlines, speaking to investors said that they were planning on using AI to set an increasing proportion of their prices, airline prices, and that they would use personal information about people to do so. That created a bit of an uproar in Congress and elsewhere, and Delta backed off and said, no, no, no, we're not going to do this, but it really put the issue, which has been out there for, you know, 10, 15 years on a low-key level, really put into the headlines recently. And so we're seeing attention by Congress, by state legislatures, by the Federal Trade Commission, and others. There was a recent report that Instacart has been doing differential pricing.

A consumer group did a test, and they found that 75% of the products in Instacart were getting set with different prices with different people, with some of the prices 23% higher than for some people than for others. The Wall Street Journal has reported that retailers like Home Depot were setting different prices for different customers, with customers in affluent areas actually getting charged less. I think that there's a lot we don't know about what's happening, but it's definitely going on. What is the difference between this type of surveillance pricing and some other examples and types of differential pricing that we've seen out there already, like dynamic pricing? I think that the core element of surveillance pricing or personalized pricing is that it's based

on data they have about you. It's different from, you know, charging more for an umbrella when it's raining. It's different from Uber charging different prices at different times of day, depending on the amount of demand for their cars. Although there have been allegations that Uber, for example, charges more to people whose batteries are about to die and things like that, that would be personalized pricing. Uber has denied that. There can be very complex and sometimes subtle differences among the different types of pricing, and that can make it complicated. But at the end of the day, they have a lot more of information about the way the world works, about how different people react to different pricing than any individual does.

And they are seeking to use that advantage in information against individuals. But all of this is legal, right? And the corollary question to that is what regulations exist or should exist to put some guardrails around this practice? It's not totally clear that it's legal. It's a bit of a legal gray area. There are, for example, privacy laws, state privacy laws, that's just Californians, that may have things to say about this and the way data is used. There are civil rights laws that have to do with discrimination based on anything based

on ethnicity, religion, age, gender, disability status, could get a company in hot water if what they're doing starts to implicate those things. There are state consumer laws, and then there's the Federal Trade Commission, which has a charge to go after deceptive and unfair trade practices, and there could be claims that some of these fall under that. And in fact, the FTC has been investigating this. They did investigation a report last January. And there's a Reuters report that they're looking at it again under the current administration. So if you're a business that are doing this, you are not necessarily on solid legal ground. Is there anything that consumers can do to protect themselves

from the possibility of being targeted with surveillance pricing? It's difficult. I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of these are bigger than any one of us. They're social questions. For example, I mean, one of the big problems here is that so much data about us is being collected and flowing to the companies that give them advantages over us. And that's because Congress has failed to pass an overarching privacy law as almost all the other sort of advanced industrial countries have done. That would cut off the flow of data at the source that is fueling this kind of strategy. But certainly you can do your best to hide your identity when you're searching for prices. You can do your best to protect your privacy and be aware of it and, you know, check and see whether people you know are getting charged the same price. Jay Stanley with the ACLU. Thank you so much. Thank you. Earlier this month, four new portraits went on view at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. They're this year's recipients of the Portrait of America. Award for their transformative contributions

to American history and culture. One of them is Temple Grandin. She's not only transformed animal welfare around the world. She's also changing the public reception of people with autism. This weekend spotlight is part of our ongoing coverage of the intersection of arts and health, part of our Canvas series.

She's a giant. I mean, she is a legend. Artist David Lenz painted the portrait of Temple Grandin. I wanted people to come into the museum and see a beautiful portrait of a person who's done amazing work, who also happens to have autism. It depicts Grandin wearing her trademark outfit, an embroidered shirt and bolot tie. And, of course, she's on a cattle farm surrounded by livestock. They have very beautiful eyes.

It's easy to see that these are warm-blooded, feeling animals that are worthy of our humane treatment. The humane treatment of livestock has been Grandin's life's work. As a child, she didn't speak until she was nearly four. The doctors who diagnosed her with autism recommended putting her in an institution. Her mother refused. Now, Grandin considers her unique mind her greatest strength. Her perspective was key to her groundbreaking redesign of cattle handling facilities to eliminate things that could frighten or unnerve livestock.

Today, her principles guide the way nearly half of time. cattle in North America are handled. She's also helped ease anxiety for people with autism. As a teenager, she designed a squeeze machine to gently apply a calming pressure, like a giant hug. She based it on a device she saw on a cattle farm to hold livestock in place for vaccinations, health checks, and the like. When you walk back by him, you got to do kind of a quick motion. Grandin has a Ph.D. in animal science and is a professor at Colorado State University. And who wants to let this one out?

She was the subject of an award-winning HBO movie. I could see the world in a new way. I could see details that other people were blind to. And was on Times list of the 100 people who most affect our world, and she's written more than a dozen books. Her talks and book signings draw big crowds. She says her story demonstrates the importance of having different kinds of thinkers. A message highlighted by the presence of her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.

It will be on view there until next November. Earlier, I sat down with Temple Grandin. I asked her what she thought of her portrait. I think it's absolutely gorgeous. I was so happy when I first saw it. This beautiful, I kind of liked the kind of misty rainbow, and I really liked that. Our experiment station cattle looked just great in that. How did it feel when they told you you were going to go into the...

National Portrait Gallery. Like, you've got to be kidding. I think it's like some of the Nobel Prize winners, when they get the call up to Sweden, they just can't believe it. I almost couldn't believe it. I'm going, you've got to be kidding. Now explain why there are cattle in this portrait. Well, cattle's what I have worked with.

I've worked on designing facilities for cattle. I've worked on developing animal welfare guidelines, teaching people in the industry how to use them. I started out in the feed yards in Arizona back in the early 70s, handling of cattle was. dreadful. And I worked on designing better at facilities. I also wrote a lot of articles just on how to, on cattle behavior, how to design things. I saw the cattle handling is something you could fix. Now today, cattle handling is greatly, greatly, greatly improved. The livestock associations

have training materials. You have to have both good equipment and the management. You know, good equipment makes good handling easier. And you have to have top management in a place that insists on handling cattle and other animals right. Large customers like McDonald's and other large customers are auditing animal welfare. Handling has really improved, and that's something I'm very proud of the improvements I've seen in that.

I know you don't want to be known specifically or mostly for being someone with autism, but I've also heard you say that it helped you in your work with cattle and livestock. Well, I'm an extreme object to visualizer. Everything I think about is a

So the very first work I did with cattle was I got down in a shoot to see what cattle were seeing. They'd stop at a shadow. They'd stop at a reflection. They'd stop at a pickup park next to the facility. And visual distractions affected their behavior. Now, at the time that I did this in my 20s, I thought everybody was a visual thinker. And it was kind of shocked to me when I found out that they weren't. And in my latest book, Visual Thinking, I discussed the research on object visualizers like me.

Then you have more mathematical pattern thinkers. Then you have word thinkers. Well, the problem with us object visualizers is, is we can't do higher math. But I worked with people that were undiagnosed autistic. They had big machine and welding shops, and they were inventing and patenting mechanical devices. And I'm very concerned that these people are getting screened out of our educational system. In this case, different is a strength. Yes.

How does that play into how you talk to young people with autism, how you talk to families who may have children with autism? Well, autism goes all the way from Einstein and Bill Gates to somebody that never learns to speak. I learned to speak by age four. I was good at art. My ability in art was always encouraged. Object visualizers are good at art,

mechanical, animals, and photography. So things that object visualizers are good at. Terrible at abstract math. Can't remember it. But I worked with all these shop people that built and installed equipment for me, they couldn't do algebra. And they're not getting replaced.

Who do you want fixing the hydraulics that steers your airplane or my airplane? I want that object visualizer. I don't care about the algebra, but I want the steering to work on that plane. Do you think the fact that there is so much discussion about autism, is that a good thing? Well, there's a lot of things that are good.

I'm a big proponent of developing strengths because you can get an autistic object visualizer like me, non-mathetician, Or you can get a mathematician, an extreme mathematician. And those kids are not being developed. I've been getting feedback from teachers that they make them just do the same boring little math in fourth grade. They get bored and then they turn into behavior problems when they need to be challenged with more advanced math. And you want to take the strength and build on it.

You know, if the autistic person is an extreme mathematician, let's develop that. They're an extreme object visualizer. I'm going to really push towards the mechanical. Families with children who are diagnosed with autism, they may think it's a horrible thing. But what do you tell them? Well, when a child is like under age five, I looked very severe when I was two and a half. I was very lucky to get into very good early education. This is essential.

I was taught language. I was taught the ability to wait and take turns at games and taught basic skills, like getting dressed, brushing my teeth, basic skills. And this early education is really, really important. I'm seeing too many kids put on two-year wait lists when they're three years old. That is really bad. And the other thing, Mother had high expectations with some accommodations. When I was five, I remember going on a ferry boat, flinging myself on the floor, screaming when the horn blew.

Well, we're going to go on that ferry, but you can ride in the cabin underneath away from the horn. The accommodation was made. But we are going to go on that ferry. That's the high expectation. Have you thought about how you like to be remembered, what you want your legacy to be? Right now, one of the big things I've been working on is recognizing the importance of object visualizers and I'm worried about them getting screened out.

Okay, I went up to community college and they're doing a two-year factory maintenance degree and requiring calculus and algebra. Well, you're going to screen out the very best mechanic for keeping a factory running. So is being a visual thinker your superpower? Yes, being a visual thinker. You see, the extreme visual thinkers,

and I've talked to a lot of photographers too, Very good photographers, can't do higher math, drawn to photography. They can excel in that. Very good with animals. Because animals are sensory-based thinkers, but also very good with mechanical things. I tell business people, plain and simple, we need the skills. And the one thing where AI is not going to replace, who's going to fix an elevator? Or make sure the water works work.

Or make sure the hydraulics works on a plane. I just talked to a science teacher, and her dad couldn't airplane, couldn't do any, any higher math. He fixed some hydraulic problem on a Boeing airplane, and Boeing put it in every one of their airplanes. Because he could just see how the hydraulics works. We need

these thinkers. Now, where we need are mathematical engineers. Let's take something like a spaceship. The mathematician tells the thruster when to thrust, but the visual thinker has to make sure it's put together properly. You see, there's two parts of engineering here. The mathematical part and what I call

the clever engineers that often don't get enough credit. Temple Grandin, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday. I'm John Yang for all of my colleagues. Thanks for joining us. See you tomorrow.