| | | | | Melania Trump suing The Daily Mail | | Melania Trump is suing The Daily Mail and Tarpley, a U.S.-based blog, "claiming that the two outlets made false and defamatory statements about her involvement in an escort service," Dylan Byers reports.
The statements were "100% false and tremendously damaging to her personal and professional reputation," attorney Charles Harder said. "Defendants broadcast their lies to millions of people throughout the U.S. and the world—without any justification." He asserts that damages "are estimated at $150 million."
Tonight The Daily Mail posted a "retraction" of the story in question. Nonetheless, Harder says that Trump will proceed with the lawsuit. Read Dylan's full report here... | | | Real talk: What's the goal? | | Dylan emails: What are Melania and Donald trying to achieve here? There's no question Trump loves lawsuits, but this will drag the unproven rumor at issue back into the public discussion for weeks if not months to come. Perhaps that's worth the $150 million Harder says Melania is pursuing...
Whatever the case, Harder has demonstrated he can win: Remember, he was the guy who led Hulk Hogan's suit against Gawker (RIP)... | | Harder is a well-known entertainment lawyer, based in L.A., with clients like George Clooney, Bradley Cooper and Sandra Bullock. When he was retained by Melania Trump late last month, he sent letters to The Daily Mail and other outlets warning of potential legal action.
"The success of Mr. Harder's case against Gawker is no doubt what caught the attention of Donald Trump," the FT's Kara Scannell wrote in a recent profile of Harder... | | | ...And for other journalists: "The State Department will now produce records of Clinton's meetings as secretary of state in mid-October rather than after Election Day," Theodore Schleifer and Tom LoBianco report tonight. The decision was issued "in response to an Associated Press public records request." The AP has been fighting for these records for years... | | | Hurricane Hermine gaining strength | | | Yesterday morning the storm was merely a tropical depression. Now Hermine -- pronounced her-MEEN -- is a hurricane, and it's gaining strength at the time of this writing. By daybreak Hermine will be well ashore -- which means the big story won't be on the beach -- the story will be flooding... And storm preps up and down the Atlantic coast. Hermine is going to be with us for at least another four days... | | "Donald Trump will be fantastic at it. Because you can just keep juicing those people up and saying crazier and crazier things and they'll just keep paying you money..."
--Glenn Beck, talking about the prospect of "Trump TV," in an interview that I taped with him earlier today. It'll air on Sunday's show... | | | Sunday's "Reliable Sources" lineup | | Beck isn't our only A-list guest on Sunday: Soledad O'Brien, Jacob Weisberg, and Mark Leibovich will join me for an in-depth look at media balance, or imbalance, in the hard-to-cover race between Clinton and Trump.
Also: two editors of swing state papers -- Aminda Marques Gonzales of the Miami Herald and Peter Bhatia of the Cincinnati Enquirer -- and an essay about voter fraud falsehoods... So set your DVR... 11am ET Sunday... | | | Check NYMag.com on Friday... | | | Sounds like Gabriel Sherman's latest Ailes/Fox story is likely to come out on Friday morning... Normally this wouldn't merit a heads up, but Ailes' lawyers attacked Sherman this week, raising eyebrows about what he's going to publish... | | -- Lindsey Snell, an American freelance journalist, "has been held by Turkish authorities since August 7," the State Department confirmed yesterday. She was detained "after crossing the border from Syria into Turkey..." (NBC News)
-- Doesn't this make the mayor look worse than the NYPost? "De Blasio Refuses to Answer Question From the 'Propagandistic' New York Post" (Observer)
-- George Stephanopoulos has an exclusive interview with Dwyane Wade about Wade's cousin's death and Trump's reaction to it... Taped today, airing tomorrow morning on "GMA..." (ABC)
-- Philippe Dauman has submitted his proposal to sell a stake in Paramount. "The deal now appears unlikely anytime soon." Joann Lublin and Joe Flint have the latest... (WSJ) | | | HLN regrets blurring of Trump logo | | | Hot Air's headline for this story: "Guess what was so controversial that CNN had to blur it out?" It was a guest who was wearing a Trump for President T-shirt. The incident happened on HLN yesterday... During the live interview with a man who rescued a four-month-old, Steven Eckel's shirt was visible, but during a replay, the Trump logo was blurred. Today an HLN spokeswoman acknowledged that this was a screw up: "We blurred the logo and shouldn't have; it was done in error." | | | Brian Williams' show gets a name | | Brian Williams' 11pm show on MSNBC will be called "The 11th Hour." Today's announcement prompted some snickering on Twitter since the show is only going to be a half hour long... Though I have a feeling it might expand to an hour... Just a hunch. The show starts next Tuesday (after Labor Day) and continues til Election Day...
-- Related: Erik Wemple notes that Williams "hasn't done any interviews" since returning to work last September. Wemple wonders how much longer this can last. "The trouble is the hypocrisy: Here's the TV interviewer who does no interviews..." | | | Scarborough talks cryptically about his anti-Trump music video | | | Joe Scarborough's "Amnesty Don" music video is racking up views on his personal Facebook page, but it's still "nowhere to be seen" on MSNBC's sites, AP's David Bauder notes. He says the video was "mentioned cryptically" on "Morning Joe" this morning, when Mika Brzezinski said "You got a great song out of it. Good job." Scarborough answered slyly, "What are you talking about? That wasn't me..." | | | Fareed Zakaria taped an interview with President Obama on the eve of Obama's final trip to Asia as president. It'll air on "GPS" Sunday at 10am and 1pm ET... | | -- A followup to yesterday's item about Vice's treatment of freelancers: Today the company responded to CJR's story with this memo... (CJR)
-- This week the NYT "quietly ended its coverage of restaurants, art galleries, theaters and other commercial and nonprofit businesses in the tri-state region, laying off dozens of longtime contributors and prompting protests from many of the institutions that will be affected..." (Deadline)
-- ICYMI: The University of Kentucky is suing its independently run student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, to keep documents about a sexual assault investigation involving a professor under wraps... (CNN)
-- Matt Lauer will moderate next week's Trump/Clinton forum on NBC/MSNBC... The fact that it's Lauer, not Lester Holt, has some people thinking that Holt is going to get one of the debate moderating spots... | | | "Taco trucks every corner" | | | This is how a meme is born | | It happened on MSNBC's "All In." Joy Reid was filling in for Chris Hayes when Latinos for Trump founder Marco Gutierrez said: "My culture is a very dominant culture. And it's imposing, and it's causing problems. If you don't do something about it, you're going to have taco trucks every corner."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute," Reid responded. Gutierrez tried to elaborate... And lots of snarky commenters said his prediction sounded delicious... Watch the video here...
-- Reid tweeted afterward: "Sometimes things happen on the air that are just inexplicable..." | | | What a scoop: NYT gets ahold of Trump's script | | | Dylan Byers emails: Now that's a get.... NYT's Yamiche Alcindor obtained an eight-page draft script of what Trump plans to say when he visits a black church in Detroit on Saturday. The document "shows 12 questions that Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, the church's pastor, intends to ask Mr. Trump during the taped Q&A session, as well as the responses Mr. Trump is being advised to give." So much for Trump speaking from the gut and calling it as he sees it. Lots of detail in Alcindor's story... | | | Hannity's best ratings ever | | "Sean Hannity scored his best ratings ever last night immediately following Donald Trump's massive immigration speech," Mediaite's Josh Feldman reports.
Trump was a ratings draw for all three cablers, especially Fox News. During the 10pm hour, Fox averaged 5.2 million viewers... Almost a million more than it had during the 9pm hour. CNN had 2.2 million and MSNBC had 1.9 million. "When Hannity popped on right afterwards, he received a whopping 5.24 million total viewers––a record high for him..." | | | Clinton camp: No pressers? No problem | | Today Tim Kaine deflected the ongoing calls for Hillary Clinton to hold a press conference by claiming that the nominee speaks to reporters "every day." Dylan Byers calls this a "misleading assertion that is drawing increasing ire from the reporters who cover her." Details...
-- More from Dylan: "On CBS, Kaine said, 'I don't see what the massive difference is between a press conference and talking to the press everywhere you go.' The difference, in short, is that candidates have a harder time evading questions in a room full of reporters than they do when talking one-on-one on camera, or fielding questions on the way to their campaign bus..." | | | A souvenir front page in Mexico City | | | Thursday's front page of the Mexican paper Vanguardia: | | | Labor Day box office forecast | | Brian Lowry emails: Look for plenty of summer box-office roundups heading into and out of Labor Day. But as Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock noted to me, most coverage that cites the overall figure as having topped last year will require at least one asterisk. As Bock noted, there were a lot of big-budget disappointments.
At the same time, the means of keeping score on how movies perform has become more complicated. A case in point would be "Warcraft," which flopped in the U.S. but made so much in China as to likely yield a sequel. "The North American box office is not the end of the story anymore," he told me.
But the one seemingly clear lesson of this summer is that if sequels are designed to help studio execs sleep easier, that's no longer necessarily the case. Here's Brian's full story... | | | Gene Wilder films back in theaters this weekend | | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: As with Prince and "Purple Rain," movie theaters are holding screenings of a couple Gene Wilder films this weekend. These films are available for streaming. But as analyst Paul Dergarabedian said to me for this story, moviegoers sometimes seek out the "communal environment" of a theater while mourning famous figures... And that makes these showings more valuable to the theater than the one-time revenue they bring in. "This is a great opportunity for theaters to connect with their patrons in a very tangible way..." | | | For the record, part three | | | -- This news will warm your print-loving heart: "Adult readers in the U.S. still strongly favor paper over e-books, according to a new study" by Pew... (AP)
-- Garrison Keillor writes a scathing column about Trump: "When this is over, you will have nothing that you want." (Chicago Tribune)
-- Lisa France reports: Amid all of his legal troubles, Chris Brown is still on his grind. He has released a new song... (CNN)
-- More from Lisa: A few years ago Rob Kardashian gained weight, became a recluse and eventually ended up hospitalized with diabetes. Now he's in love, expecting a baby and on the cover of People mag... (CNN) | | Dylan emails this kicker: It is the penultimate weekday of the last week of summer and the news well is near empty, as evidenced by this headline:
>> German village relieved as unruly stork heads south | | | Now we're heading south. Or east. Or west. Any direction really. Barring any huge breaking news, we're taking a few days off... Tune into Sunday's show and we'll see you back here next week... | | | What do you like about today's newsletter -- and what do you think we should improve? Email your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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