| | | | | Melania, M.I.A. on the campaign trail, threatens to sue news outlets | | Melania Trump has not been seen on the campaign trail since the GOP convention ended on July 21. That's right -- she hasn't made any public appearances on behalf of her husband for over a month. Donald last mentioned Melania on the trail on August 9, the day he said there would be a news conference about her immigration status. (The presser hasn't happened yet.)
Today, however, Melania was heard loud and clear. Dylan Byers emails:
Melania Trump has threatened to sue The Daily Mail, The Week and other news outlets for defamation, her lawyer tells me. The outlets are "on notice... for making false and defamatory statements about her supposedly having been an 'escort' in the 1990s," lawyer Charles Harder said.
Separately, he has put Politico — and some of the outlets that received notices regarding the escort issue -- on notice for "false and defamatory statements" regarding their reporting on Trump's immigration history.
Harder confirmed that the notices should be interpreted as a threat to sue, but until lawsuits are filed, the notices are really just warnings to issue a correction or retraction (which at least two sites have already done.) Read Dylan's full story here...
-- For the record: Harder also represented Hulk Hogan in the suit against Gawker Media... | | | Gawker's flagship site, Gawker.com, published its last post today. Tom Kludt covered the virtual funeral all day long. He says "the site felt subdued…" Click here to read all about the eulogies... | | — Founding editor Elizabeth Spiers: "I will... miss the wit and intelligence here."
— Choire Sicha, the second person to serve as Gawker's top editor: "Gawker existed for far longer than anyone deserved. It stayed long enough to win. The moment will come soon enough when you need a Gawker, and you'll be furious that you no longer have one."
— If you're going to click just one link in tonight's letter, click this one. Founder Nick Denton's farewell essay: "Gawker's demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story. It shows how things work." | | | Our press-averse candidates | | I led last night's newsletter by pointing out that Hillary Clinton hasn't held a full-fledged press conference since last December. She hasn't given any national TV news interviews since the end of July either. But she IS on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" tonight.
Donald Trump has been similarly press-shy this month -- if you don't count his frequent Fox News interviews. HuffPost's Sam Stein notes: "Since his disastrous Khan interview, Trump has not gone on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC or CBS. But he's done Fox 11 times." Shows like "Hannity" and "Fox & Friends" are Trump's shelter. But he's not going to win over undecided voters by saying yes to Fox and no to every other network... | | | Clinton, on Kimmel, addresses health smears | | Speaking of Clinton on Kimmel -- She used the late-night forum to crack jokes about the conspiracy theories that she's covering up an illness. "Back in October, the National Enquirer said I would be dead in six months. So with every breath I take I feel like I have a new lease on life," she joked, according to Dan Merica, who was at the taping.
Clinton called it a "wacky" right-wing strategy from an "alternative universe" that "absolutely makes no sense." And she opened a can of pickles to prove her strength...
-- Programming note: I'll have more to say about this on "Early Start" and "New Day" Tuesday AM... Tune in starting at 4:30am (!!)... | | | Sara Murray tweets from tonight's Trump rally: "Two women milling around after Trump's Akron event are talking about how they both believe Clinton is suffering from brain damage... That's [what] the fact-free rumor right wing websites, Sean Hannity & Trump surrogates like Rudy Giuliani have been peddling..." | | | Trump calls Mika "neurotic" | | | Trump the presidential nominee took a backseat to Trump the media critic AGAIN today. He trained his Twitter fire at "Morning Joe..." If you want to read all about it, click here... | | -- CNN's original headline on this story: "Trump wants GOP to court black voters — then slams voting rights for felons." Now the revised headline says "Trump slams voting rights for felons, wants GOP to court black voters." Joe Concha says the original headline made "blacks and felons synonymous..." (The Hill)
-- "GMA" co-host Amy Robach apologized today for saying "colored people" when she meant "people of color…" (THR)
-- Chris Hansen's next act: He'll be hosting the syndicated show "Crime Watch Daily..." (TVNewser)
-- "What the hell happened to WikiLeaks?" +1 to this... (Backchannel) | | | Kirsten Powers, who's been a regular on Fox News for the past decade, switched channels tonight. She's now a political analyst for CNN... She is the fourth Fox personality hired by CNN in the past 18 months, joining Alisyn Camerota, Bob Beckel and Mary Katharine Ham. Read more... | | | "Start telling people the truth" | | Dylan and I both noticed that Erick Erickson linked to this piece tonight: "Conservative media needs to do its job and start telling people the truth." It's a column by Steve Deace... Check it out here...
-- Related: This Politico Mag profile of Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes... | | | "Let's ban the word pivot" | | | I'm with S.E. Cupp: "Words matter, and they should stick. Let's ban the word pivot, until it can be used appropriately and responsibly again. Because in the era of Trump, there's no such thing." Here's her CNN.com op-ed... | | | Trump v. Clinton's ad buys | | On the heels of Trump's $5 million ad buy, the Clinton campaign has reserved $80 million worth of ads through Election Day in eight states. This is on top of the $70 million Clinton has already spent on ads. All those poor viewers in FL, OH, PA...
-- On CNN this afternoon, I said Trump has basically bought a house while Clinton has bought the whole subdivision... Watch the hit with David Chalian and Brianna Keilar... | | | Happy pub day to the Post... | | The Washington Post's Trump biography, "Trump Revealed," is out on Tuesday. Remember when some conservative news outlets objected to the claim that "20 reporters" had been tasked with working on the book? Well, the final # ended up being 38. (Most of them contributed work for short stretches of time.)
The co-authors are Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher. On "Face the Nation," Fisher had this to say about Trump: "He's an improviser... It's all about him. It's all about getting to the goal. And he is quite willing to run roughshod over people to get there." Political analysis of Trump needs to work in that word "improviser" more often... | | Coulter has a new pro-Trump tome, "In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome," out on Tuesday. Naturally Breitbart published an excerpt today.
Which book will sell more copies? | | "Drop out. Simply drop out, and tell America this entire candidacy was a stunt. A satire designed to expose the flaws in the system."
--John Oliver's proposal to Donald Trump last night. Watch it here... Or read this recap by Chloe Melas... | | | Sean Hannity, the non-journalist | | Brian Lowry emails: In Jim Rutenberg's piece today on Sean Hannity's relationship with the Trump campaign, the Fox News host repeated his familiar stance that he "never claimed to be a journalist." But this seems like a fundamental misreading of what the term "journalist" means. Expressing an opinion doesn't mean that you're not a journalist. Political columnists, critics and presumably Hannity's Fox News colleague Bill O'Reilly would consider themselves to be "journalists." And the mere fact that Hannity acknowledges the potential for contractual conflicts of interest in relationship to the campaign would seem to undermine his assertion. (Incidentally, there's nothing that says he couldn't leave Fox to join a Trump administration, which renders his response to the question a non-answer.) Being a partisan, in other words, shouldn't let Hannity off the hook... | | Hannity has called himself a "journalist" in the past. Dana Milbank makes that point in his latest WashPost column.
Milbank says Hannity's overt campaigning for Trump "does no favors for conservatism. And Hannity's collusion with the candidate and his peddling of conspiracy theories in support of Trump undermine the many serious journalists at Fox News..." | | | "With a 4.0/14 rating among adults 18-49 and 16.85 million viewers for the Closing Ceremony of the Rio Games, NBC is looking at the worst Summer Olympics results in decades," Deadline's Dominic Patten reports. The #'s were way down from London in 2012. As I said last night, NBC must be re-evaluating its expectations for 2018 and beyond, given the relatively weak ratings this month… | | | "Does NBC's Olympics coverage really deserve the criticism it's gotten?" That's the question Bill Carter sets out to answer with his latest piece for CNNMoney... | | | Now on to Pyeongchang! 547 days til the winter games start... | | | Weinstein comments on Parker | | Chloe Melas reports from the red carpet premiere of "Hands of Stone" tonight:
Harvey Weinstein is standing by "Birth of a Nation" director Nate Parker as the filmmaker continues to deal with fallout from a years-old rape allegation that threatens to derail his movie's Oscar hopes. "I don't know how [Fox Searchlight should] handle it, you know, I just wish everybody the best. Nate Parker as I know him is a very good person..." Chloe and Sandra Gonzalez have details here... | | -- Via Oliver Darcy: James Rosen, the Fox News reporter at the center of mysteriously edited State Dept video, says the saga is still "not over..." (Business Insider)
-- Sumner Redstone's daughter Keryn Redstone "is asking to review a recent settlement agreement" that resulted in Philippe Dauman's ouster... (Variety)
-- A followup to Friday's item about NY1 chief Steve Paulus leaving the channel: Colin Miner shares this reflection about NY1 and the importance of truly local news coverage... (Patch)
-- Michelle Obama graces the cover of this week's Variety -- here's a preview via Claudia Eller... (Variety) | | | "Obama's Katrina" and the triumph of optics over substance | | Media editor Alex Koppelman emails: George W. Bush flew over Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; now, flooding has again ravaged the state, and President Obama hasn't yet visited. (He will be there on Tuesday afternoon.) So does that mean this is Obama's Katrina? Only if you make the mistake too common to both politics and political reporting of confusing optics for substance.
You may disagree with his political perspective, but Brian Beutler makes a good case on that point in a piece for The New Republic that's worth reading:
"Because world events are complex, the historically important ones are often memorialized by their most potent symbols. For George W. Bush, these moments include being informed about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, while reading The Pet Goat to schoolchildren, standing atop a pile of rubble at Ground Zero in New York City later that week, declaring an end to hostilities in Iraq on an aircraft carrier with a 'Mission Accomplished' banner slung high in the background, and, crucially for this story, flying over the wreckage of New Orleans in Air Force One, two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. These totems serve useful purposes, but they do not convey anything literal about 9/11, the Iraq war, Katrina, or anything else." Read more... | | CNN meteorologist Jennifer Gray penned this compelling essay about what it's like to cover a flood that hits so close to home:
"I stood for several days in the middle of different flooded neighborhoods while worried to death about childhood friends, college friends and my family members who live in South Louisiana. In between talking to producers about what they wanted for my next hit, I was trying to contact people I cared about to see if they were OK." Read the rest here... | | | ICYMI from "Reliable Sources" | | On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," I spoke with Eric Holthaus about some of the reasons why there wasn't more immediate national media coverage of the flood. Among the answers: Floods are uniquely difficult to cover; the storm had no name; and the election has squeezed out other stories... | | | For the record, part three | | | By Lisa France:
-- Tracee Ellis Ross is the first African American woman nominated for an Emmy in the lead actress in a comedy category since 1986. To say she and her hit ABC comedy "Black-ish" are having a moment is an understatement...
-- Barbra Streisand has fought for years to get her name pronounced correctly. So when Siri got it wrong, she naturally called Tim Cook...
-- Kanye West wrote an ode to McDonald's for Frank Ocean's magazine. No, seriously. He really did...
-- Goodbye "Iron Man," hello "Ironheart..."
-- Tyra Banks is going to teach at Stanford University. But no smizing! | | | And finally today... Tristan Hopper of the National Post produced this fantastic "journalist hate mail bingo" card. Can you fill every space? | | Catch up on Sunday's show | | | 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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