| | | | | Choking on the pollution of the social web | | Normally I would start this newsletter with huge debate ratings or highlights from the Al Smith dinner. But instead I'd like to highlight a story I wish I'd written -- by a team of BuzzFeed News reporters led by Craig Silverman -- who documented how "hyperpartisan political Facebook pages and websites are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information."
This may be one of the most important media stories of the year. It's a big deal because Facebook is a big deal. The analysis by Silverman and co. shows how the scourge of hoax sites and highly misleading "news" sources are polluting the social web and pushing us further and further apart. I experienced it firsthand in Las Vegas on Wednesday night, when a couple of post-debate focus group members confronted me with false right-wing memes, and again on Thursday, during a panel discussion at my alma mater Towson U, when an audience member insisted that Gary Johnson was polling at 15% in time for the debates. Quick Google searches turned up the terrible sources for their claims and more reliable sources to refute them... | | | Driving "division and polarization" | | So here's what BuzzFeed did. It fact-checked more than 1,800 FB posts from six big hyperpartisan sites and found that "the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook — far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison."
Posts from the right-wing sites were twice as likely (38% overall) to have false info as left-wing pages (19%). BF says "the right-wing pages are among the forces... that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump." Silverman has some great examples here. The fibs and outright lies "drive division and polarization." Meanwhile, the owners of these low-rent sites make $$$$ because the stories "generate massive Facebook engagement." Read the full analysis here...
-- Q: What more can real news outlets do to rebut the lies on these sites? And to help guide users toward the truth? | | Per Cristina Alesci, this is one of those weeks when a rumor has been making the rounds among M&A reporters that a big media deal is brewing.
Is this it? Bloomberg's Thursday afternoon scoop: "Senior executives at AT&T and Time Warner have met in recent weeks to discuss various business strategies including a possible merger." The story cites "people familiar with the matter" to say that the informal talks "have focused on building relations between the companies rather than establishing the terms of a specific transaction."
Key graf: "Jeff Bewkes is a willing seller, said one of the people, if he gets an offer he thinks is fair." Time Warner (parent of CNN, thus parent of this newsletter) closed at $79.24 on Wednesday. After Bloomberg's report, shares closed at $82.99 on Thursday. Rupert Murdoch's failed 2014 bid was $85-a-share...
-- AT&T bought DirecTV last year... This deal would be bigger... Neither side is commenting...
-- Big Q's: If not AT&T, then what? Conversely, if not Time Warner, then what? | | | Final debate viewership surpasses 2008 and 2012 | | | The #'s are in: About 71.6 million people tuned in for the third and final presidential debate of the year. (My guess of 72 million was just a hair too high!) While it was lower rated than debate #1, it was higher rated than #2. And it was way higher-rated than the final debate back in 2008 (56 million) and 2012 (59 million). Here's my full story... And scroll down for much more about the debate... | | | NBC looking to put another $200 million into BuzzFeed | | Dylan Byers reports: NBCUniversal is planning to double its investment in BuzzFeed, discussing a deal that would put another $200 million into the news and entertainment site, per a source. The investment, first reported by Recode, would value the company at around $1.7 billion -- 13% higher than the $1.5 billion valuation it was given after NBCUniversal made its first $200 million investment last year...
BuzzFeed says "we're always talking about broadening the relationship as part of our plan to grow as an independent company..."
-- FYI: NBCU has also invested $200 million in Vox. It could not be immediately confirmed whether they were eyeing an additional investment in that company... | | | Bill Bratton, who was an NBC and MSNBC analyst before returning to the NYPD in 2014, is now returning to NBC. He'll be NBC/MSNBC's senior law enforcement and national security analyst, "starting this week," per an internal memo. He "brings a very relevant voice of authority... as we continue to cover counterterrorism and national security..." | | -- "An appeals court in Manhattan ruled on Thursday that a reporter for the NYT could not be subpoenaed to testify at a coming trial about her jailhouse interview..." (NYT)
-- This Erik Wemple piece says that Bill O'Reilly appears to have fabricated a confrontation between Ronald Reagan and Sam Donaldson... (WashPost)
-- "PBS documentary series POV has produced two short interactive films for distribution on Snapchat — marking the first documentaries created specifically for the platform…" (Variety)
-- "Will Donald Trump Stain Jared Kushner Forever?" That's the title of Ross Barkan's latest piece for the Village Voice. It's notable because Barkan used to work for Kushner's NY Observer... (Village Voice) | | Trump has denied any interest in launching a TV network. But that's not stopping his campaign from experimenting with something that looks like a prototype. On Wednesday night the campaign worked with a conservative live-streaming site called Right Side Broadcasting to produce pre-game and post-game shows for the debate. It was the most popular debate-related Facebook Live programming of the night. Here's my full story...
-- Keep this in mind: Something resembling "Trump TV" could happen even without Trump's direct involvement. Bannon has been interested in expanding Breitbart's video footprint for years. A Breitbart network could appeal to many of Trump's biggest fans...
-- ICYMI: When Brooke Baldwin and I talked with Steve Bannon on Tuesday night, he responded to the "Trump TV" rumors with a smile and said, "Trump is an entrepreneur." Read more... | | | Clinton campaign promoting "Trump TV" theory | | | Asked about Trump's appealing-to-the-base strategy, Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon said in the spin room Wednesday night, "Maybe it's a strategy for creating a nice base of customers to monetize a television network..." | | | Debate winner: Chris Wallace | | | Dylan Byers emails: No debate: Chris Wallace killed it on Wednesday night. He delivered a sterling performance, maintaining order and focusing on substantive issues that matter to American voters. In an otherwise nasty and vitriolic campaign season, the "Fox News Sunday" host pressed both candidates and impressed viewers. Here's Dylan's full recap... | | Stephen Battaglio of the LATimes scored Wallace's first post-debate interview. A couple of the highlights:
-- "I had to do the job that I do and that a lot of my colleagues do everyday, to show people who take the easy way out and just dismiss Fox News and that they don't understand what we do everyday and the kind of journalism we practice."
-- Rupert Murdoch sent him a congratulatory email. "He's really a newsman at heart. More than any other owners of these conglomerates that I've ever met, he really breathes the news." Wallace says Murdoch (who has an apartment on 23rd Street) heard the Chelsea explosion in September, called it in right away, and guided the night's coverage... | | -- Fox's extensive promotion paid off: The channel averaged 11.3 million viewers during the debate, out-rating the broadcasters...
-- CNN was close behind Fox in the key demographic of 25- to 54-year-olds, and topped Fox in that demo after the debate.
-- Nielsen metrics showed relatively steady viewership throughout the 90-minute debate, with just a small drop-off in the 10pm hour... | | | Subtext of Fox's debate success: Ailes was not involved, he was not needed... | | | Scarborough rewriting history | | Dylan Byers writes: Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski argued Thursday that they had not been accommodating to Trump during the 2016 campaign -- an attempt at revisionist history contradicted by hours of footage from their own show.
Scarborough and Brzezinksi were defending themselves against Bill Kristol, who said: "This show was really tough on Trump in late 2015 and early 2016 -- are you going to pretend that?" "We were," Scarborough replied. "We were."
"If that's your way of rewriting history, that's fine with you guys," Kristol said. "A lot of people accommodated Trump at different times, but I'm not going to get into it."
Read Dylan's full story here... | | | 37 false claims vs. 4 false claims | | | The Toronto Star's Daniel Dale counted 37 false claims by Trump during the debate versus 4 false claims by Clinton... Here are his lists... | | Dale's work has been garnering more and more attention -- deservedly so. "What we're experiencing from Trump is a daily avalanche of wrongness," the Toronto Star newspaper's DC correspondent wrote in this essay for Politico. A month ago Dale decided to keep count of Trump's daily falsehoods. Why? "Because I think the count is a story in itself..."
-- More: He says the overall story "is the massive accumulation of nonsense, big stuff and little stuff alike, day after day..." | | | Frank Pallotta writes: Alec Baldwin's "SNL" impersonation of Trump "is so spot-on that at times during Wednesday night's debate, some people felt that it seemed Trump was impersonating Baldwin rather than the other way around." Read Frank's full story here... | | "I don't recognize my country anymore. This is so terrifying. I think this is an existential moment for the United States of America."
--Ken Burns to Christiane Amanpour, talking about this election, in an interview that aired on Thursday... | | | "Newspapers are suffering an accelerating drop in print advertising..." | | In the wake of the WSJ's print "revamp" and Dow Jones' corporate review, with job cuts looming, the WSJ has this sobering big-picture story: "Newspapers are suffering an accelerating drop in print advertising, a market that already was under stress, forcing some publishers to consider significant cost cuts and dramatic changes to their print and digital products..."
-- A WSJer emails: "You have to look at management's moves in the context of contract negotiations" between the paper and the union... | | -- Chloe Melas emails: Hollywood stars lined the block of 44th Street outside the Broadhurst Theater Thursday night for the premiere of the Broadway musical "The Front Page." Based on the 1928 comedy, it's directed by Jack O'Brien and the star studded cast includes Nathan Lane, John Slattery and John Goodman. Producer Scott Rudin had the show starting at 5:30pm so critics could get the reviews out tonight like in the good ole days...
-- Lisa France emails: Some celebs got into the fact checking game after Trump insisted the Emmys are rigged. Not so, the stars said...
-- More from Lisa: The good news is that Kanye West is back, ranting about what ever comes to his mind. The bad thing is he says we won't ever get a "Watch the Throne 2" because of the beef between Apple Music and Tidal...
-- Tom Cruise re-enacted his movie roles while on "The Late Late Show" with James Corden. And it was glorious...
-- "Manchester By The Sea" leads nominations for the 2016 Gotham Awards — see the full list of nominations here... | | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Send your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. We appreciate every email... And we'll be back tomorrow... | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
Post a Comment