| | | | | Trump should double check his #'s | | My exchange with Jason Miller about Trump v. Khizr Khan got a lot of attention today. You can watch it for yourself here. Some liberal blogs have posted the transcript and annotations.
From a media POV, what stood out to me the most... Amid Trump's multiple responses to Khan this weekend... Was this line in his Saturday night statement: "Mr. Khan, who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim that I have never read the Constitution."
The First Amendment to the Constitution gives Khan the right to stand on stage and say whatever he wants...
-- Michael Barbaro tweets: "Traditionally, Trump wins by outlasting the people he criticizes, by staying on TV longer and louder. Khans really challenging that model..." | | | Reacting to the NYPost cover | | Betsy Woodruff said it best today: "A NY tabloid ran nudes of the Republican presidential nominee's wife and it's only the third biggest story of the day."
On today's show, I asked Miller about this morning's NYPost cover -- a nude photograph of Melania Trump from the 1990s. "They're a celebration of the human body as art," Miller said, adding, "There's nothing to be embarrassed about. She's a beautiful woman." Jackie Wattles has a full summary...
-- Plot twist: Gawker wonders, "Did Donald Trump Leak Nude Photographs of Melania to Distract from the Khan Story?" | | | Rather calls Clinton an "underdog" | | | This comment on today's show surprised me: Dan Rather's takeaway after attending the Democratic and Republican conventions: "In my book, Hillary Clinton is still an underdog, a slight underdog to win." Trump "still dominates almost every news cycle." He noted that conventions "rarely matter all that much." Watch his remarks here... | | | Clinton press conference watch | | | This afternoon Hillary Clinton held an informal press conference, a "gaggle," with a group of reporters. She hasn't held a full-blown presser since December. Will that change soon? "Well, they keep promising that there will be one. I'm not in their head. I can't tell you whether they're going to oblige with that," the BBC's Kim Ghattas told me on this morning's show. Yes, the campaign grants many one-on-one interviews, but it's "very important" to have pressers as well, Ghattas said... | | Hillary Clinton on "Fox News Sunday:" "We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released…"
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange responded to Clinton on this morning's show: Clinton "is trying to undermine our publication, trying to draw attention away from the fact that she conspired with" the DNC "to subvert an election in the United States..." | | | Trump should double check his #'s | | Trump is a student of Nielsen ratings. But in a tweet this weekend, he misspelled the company's name (Nielson) and misstated the convention ratings.
He correctly said Nielsen estimated an audience of 32.2 million for his acceptance speech, but he cited an out-of-date number for Clinton's speech, 27.8 million. The actual apples-to-apples # is 29.8 million. The more accurate comparison, including PBS, is this: 34.9 million viewers for Trump versus 33.8 million for Clinton. But that negates his other tweet -- that "my speech had millions of more viewers." | | | >> Do you feel this way too? | | | NYT tech columnist Farhad Manjoo writes: "Just the amount of mental space Donald Trump occupies for me, the number of minutes I spend thinking about him daily, is just astonishing." | | | Trump's "magical marketing strategy" | | | David Zurawik blogged about one of the points he made on today's show: "Trump has positioned himself on TV as an agent of transformation selling the same promise that TV ads for everything from Viagra to eHarmony.com do: Buy me and your life will be transformed. That's a powerful message when you have more than two-third of the nation telling pollsters the country is on the wrong track. One tweet reacting to the segment described it as Trump's 'magical marketing strategy.' Good term..." | | Playing to Colbert's strengths
cc: Les Moonves, Chris Licht | | On Friday Bill Carter wrote about the power of Stephen Colbert's live post-convention shows. In Monday's NYT, James Poniewozik has this advice for CBS:
"The convention weeks showed off strengths that 'Late Show' can and should keep playing to. The most important: Don't waste Mr. Colbert's time and ours on topics and guests he's not engaged in. When he's had to host stars plugging movies or read off questions to the 2016 Super Bowl's most valuable player, Von Miller (in his live special after the big game), it felt like the job was defining Mr. Colbert instead of him defining the job. For the last two weeks, Mr. Colbert was focused almost entirely on the most important thing going on in the country and the culture, and his interest and energy showed." Read more... | | -- Liz Meriwether filed this fantastic piece for Vulture: "The Politics of Lena Dunham" (Vulture)
-- Maybe veteran "Sesame Street" cast members like Emilio Delgado will still have a role on the show? Delgado says the "new producers… have reached out to us…" (Fox News Latino)
-- Chloe Melas reports on the magical midnight release of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child..." (CNN) | | | HBO's press tour announcements | | At the TCA press tour on Saturday, HBO made a lot of news. Highlights from Sandra Gonzalez, Frank Pallotta, Brian Lowry:
-- The eighth season of "Game of Thrones" will be its last...
-- "Real Time with Bill Maher" has been renewed through 2018...
-- Past seasons of "The Larry Sanders Show" will be carried by HBO starting September 23...
Lowry also wrote about how HBO president of programming Casey Bloys was pressed on the amount of sexualized violence in the network's shows... Read more... | | | Update on Jon Stewart's "animation studio" | | | Will we see Jon Stewart on HBO before election day? Bloys says "hopefully." He said HBO would like to have Stewart's short-form animated digital program -- a parody of a cable news channel! -- "up and running" by September or October. Bloys said Stewart is "establishing an animation studio..." Get the details here... | | "There are facts, and there is everything else — what we feel, what we believe, what we choose to disregard among what's been proved real, and what we choose to regard as real that is demonstrably untrue. Every day brings a massive information dump impossible for any person to process..."
--LATimes TV critic Robert Lloyd's latest column. My two cents: We can't just cover the "facts" this election year, we have to focus on the "feelings" too... | | | TNT orders "The Race Card" | | | Michael Ausiello reports: TNT has ordered "The Race Card," hosted by Charles Barkley, a "six-episode unscripted series that will find the NBA legend traveling around America in an effort to 'bust up the echo chamber mentality that so often has people retreating to corners of the like-minded, where views are reinforced and ideas are distorted into angry, unexamined groupthink conclusions.'" Coming in early 2017… Setting a season pass on my DVR now… | | | What do you like about today's newsletter -- and what do you think we should improve? Email your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. We'll be back tomorrow... | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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