| | | | | Inside the Trump "Apprentice" deal | | Dylan Byers' scoop shows how Trump's deal to remain an executive producer and partial owner of "The Celebrity Apprentice" could give companies looking to win the president's favor a way to do so. He emails:
Trump's financial arrangement could provide him with a cut of the money generated by NBC's product integration deals for the show, a Hollywood source with direct knowledge of the arrangement told me Friday. For years, Trump received a portion of the revenue from the show's product integration deals, the source said. If that arrangement is still in place, it is now a potential avenue of influence for companies that want to get the ear of Trump and his administration, and presents a thorny situation for Comcast/NBCU, which controls the deals. "If an advertiser wants to curry favor with Trump, that's the way to do it," the source said.
That could include brands owned by foreign companies; private equity firms, which have done deals with the show before; or defense contractors that also produce consumer goods. Any company like these might have a vested interest in getting in good favor with the 45th President of the United States. MGM declined to comment and NBC did not respond. Read more... | | | Schwarzenegger sticks up for Trump | | Coincidence! NBC had scheduled a promotional event for the new "Apprentice" for Friday afternoon. At the event, new host Arnold Schwarzenegger defended the Trump arrangement, saying "it's no different than when I was running for governor and I was governor. My credit on 'Terminator' stays the same." Per Variety's Daniel Holloway, "he added that he continued to collect royalties from his film work while serving as governor."
-- BTW: Mark Burnett was expected to be at the press event, but he wasn't there on Friday...
-- Kellyanne Conway, on "New Day," suggested Trump's "Apprentice" role would be in his "spare time..."
-- Newt Gingrich, on Fox, called it "weird" and said "he doesn't need his name in print..." | | | Murdochs looking to buy Sky again | | "Rupert Murdoch is making another bid for the one that got away," CNNMoney's Charles Riley writes. "21st Century Fox has struck a deal to take full control of Sky, one of the world's leading pay TV providers. Fox will pay 10.75 pounds ($13.50) per share for the 60% of Sky it doesn't already own. The deal values Sky at 18.5 billion pounds ($23.3 billion)." Let the regulatory battle begin...
-- More: The Guardian's Nils Pratley: "Why is Murdoch taking over Sky now? Blame Brexit and Netflix" | | | Not even The AP is immune from Media Winter: the news organization laid off a couple dozen staffers this week. The cuts were spread out -- with staffers affected in places like Albany, Montpelier, New Orleans, and Charleston. The AP put the # at 25. "Like so many media companies, especially in the news business, AP must reduce expenses in order to continue to provide its objective, indispensable news report around the world..." | | | Facebook cops to measurement error — again | | | Alex Koppelman emails: For the third time in four months, Facebook is admitting to errors in how it measures user engagement -- no small thing for a company that brings in such a large share of the ad revenue available on the Web. "Many publishers may have been misled into thinking their links were getting a lot more engagement than they actually did, depending on how they measured it," Mathew Ingram writes. "In addition to that error, which Facebook says it is investigating, the site admitted that publishers and brands were getting inaccurate counts of how many people reacted to their live video streams..." Here's why it matters... | | | Sunday on "Reliable Sources" | | | My former NYT boss Jill Abramson... plus Sean Spicer, Jeffrey Lord, Carl Bernstein, and Kelly McBride... Join us Sunday at 11am ET! | | -- "A Marine veteran turned journalist has been recalled from Iraq after tweeting a picture showing him shooting at ISIS fighters..." (Military Times)
-- Savannah Guthrie's week started with news about her new long-term "Today" show contract and ended with... baby Charley! (NBC)
-- Ted Olson says "Loving" is "the movie America needs right now." Here's the op-ed for CNN.com... (CNN)
-- HBO is "developing a space series with power-producer J.J. Abrams." The title is "Glare" and Warner Bros. TV is producing... (Variety) | | | No, Fox News is not having its holiday party at a Trump hotel | | TVNewser's A.J. Katz reports: "In a segment focusing on Donald Trump's potential conflicts of interest, MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle misreported some information about Fox News and the president-elect. At 9:36 a.m. this morning, Ruhle said, 'does he (Trump) need to be eating only in Trump restaurants, staying only in Trump hotels? Think about the hotel in Washington now. The RNC is having their Christmas party there. Fox News had their Christmas party there. Doesn't that feel a little hanky?' The problem with that statement is Fox News hasn't even had its Christmas party yet." And it's scheduled to be held at the Liaison Hotel Capitol Hill, not a Trump hotel.
Ruhle apologized on air on Friday afternoon and said "I wish all my friends at Fox a very happy holiday no matter where you have your party..."
-- Another one: "Newsweek Writer Kurt Eichenwald Falsely Reports That Trump Supporters Booed John Glenn" | | | "First, there was a miniseries in the works about Roger Ailes' alleged sexual misconduct. Now, there's a film on the fast track at Annapurna Pictures as well," THR's Tatiana Siegel reports. "Megan Ellison's studio has scooped up a pitch from The Big Short's Charles Randolph about the former Fox News chairman. Randolph... is writing the project that will focus on Megyn Kelly and the women who brought down" Ailes "as well as the wife, Elizabeth Tilson, who propped him up..." | | | NPR reporter Asma Khalid's column about her time covering Trump as a headscarf-wearing Muslim is getting a lot of attention. On Friday morning she talked with Carol Costello about how many, but not all, of her experiences were negative. "I think that I saw things in this election cycle about who we are as Americans that really saddened me." But she befriended people along the way. Alexandra King sums up the interview here... | | | Brian Lowry emails: Vice's Shane Smith probably didn't foresee Trump's victory as the capper to his "Special Report" for HBO, "A House Divided." But the 70-minute documentary -- which includes interviews with a who's who of newsmakers, including President Obama and John Boehner -- is a pretty good primer on how the toxic political environment of the last eight years laid the groundwork for his election. Read more... | | | Here's a conversation starter for the weekend | | CNN's new book about the election, "UNPRECEDENTED," includes an essay about Trump by CNN prez Jeff Zucker, with his conversation-starter of a paragraph:
"I don't think Donald Trump ever thought he was going to be the Republican nominee for president. I think he got into this race to burnish his brand and finish second or third. So, he was happy to get all this publicity, and I think that's what it was about. Until he realized he could actually win. And now he is the president." Politico's Hadas Gold highlighted the quote in this story.
During a panel discussion for "UNPRECEDENTED" in D.C. Thursday, I asked Dana Bash about the quote -- and she said she fully agreed... | | | A product of the "commercial world we all grew up in?" | | | I haven't seen/heard Trump framed quite this way before. Leslie Savan writing for The Nation: "He is the culmination of everything that commercial television produces and depends upon: celebrity, a short attention span, enough dramatic conflict to reliably 'deliver eyeballs' (yours) to advertisers, and the ad language of puffery. It's understandable that some Trump voters weren't bothered by the wild exaggerations and lies; that's the commercial world we all grew up in. There's a pleasure in buying—and buying into—things, even hollow crap, even fake news…" | | | About Trump's cable news consumption | | Fox's "Special Report" anchor Bret Baier talking with Seth Meyers on "Late Night:"
"We had a segment called Candidate Casino because I wanted to pull our panelists out to really find out who they thought of the 17 GOP candidates and the Democratic candidates were really going to get the nomination, so I gave them $100 dollars in chips and they all had to bet every show, every Friday. In between there I interviewed Donald Trump numerous times, and one time after the segment had been going for a while I interviewed him before we started the interview and he said, 'Can you please tell me why Charles Krauthammer is only giving me $25 dollars in chips.' And later he said, 'Steve Hayes is a loser because he's only given me $10 dollars in chips.' And at the end when he got the nomination I saw him later and he said, 'I got all the black chips.'" | | | Palm Beach Post shutting down its Tallahassee bureau | | | Alex Koppelman emails: Via Adam C. Smith, sad news out of Florida, where the Palm Beach Post is closing its bureau in the state capital. There appears, as always, to be a decision about the paper's bigger economic picture and future at play, which is understandable to a point. But moves like these also raise larger questions about what the real purpose of a newspaper is, and what value it offers to its readers — as Politico Florida's Matt Dixon noted on Twitter, this decision "leaves the state's third largest county without any full time reporters covering state government." Fortunately, outlets like Politico and now ProPublica have been moving to fill at least some of the void left in all too many places around they country, but it's a big job, and they can't do it on their own... | | | Brian Lowry's rave review for "La La Land" | | -- More from Brian: ESPN's latest "30 for 30," "Catholics vs. Convicts," isn't just about the classic 1988 Notre Dame-Miami football game, but how we talk about athletes. The network is giving the documentary a prime showcase behind the Heisman Trophy presentation...
-- Chloe Melas emails: I had a chance to sit down with Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman, who talked about their new film "Office Christmas Party," and the secret to not laughing and breaking character…
-- Lisa France notes: From Beyonce to Tina Fey, it was a pretty amazing week for women in Hollywood…
-- More from Lisa: Kanye West has tiptoed back into the limelight after his very public hospitalization for exhaustion. And he's blonde now… | | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Send 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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