| | | | | Today's newsletter starts with a look back in time... | | "WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES JAPANESE HAVE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR." Those eight words on the UPI wire sent American newsrooms scrambling on December 7, 1941. Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, with commemorations at the military base and elsewhere. Here's a live stream.
The closest approximation of a live stream that day was the radio. The UPI alert caused an "uproar," as recounted by a mid-December edition of Movie-Radio Guide magazine, what you might call the "Reliable Sources" newsletter of its time. "Skilled experts went into action with lightning swiftness. Five minutes later Americans had the news — the U.S. was at war. And U.S. radio was at war, too. From that moment radio was on a new footing."
Information was scarce. But radio stations stayed on the air around the clock. The bells on the teletype machines in newsrooms -- signaling bulletins from the wire services -- rang so often that some operators wondered if the machines were broken. But no. Amidst the chaos there was misinformation, of course, and to a much greater degree than there was on 9/11. Some of it is recounted by this radio historian. But the news coverage by and large informed and rallied the nation. | | | During the air raid, reporters from Honolulu stations like KGU and KGMB aired alerts to military personnel, and then provided accounts to listeners back on the mainland. Via The Washington Post, there's this audio clip of a KGU journalist relaying information from the roof of the station: "This battle has been going on for nearly three hours. One of the bombs dropped within 50 feet of KGU tower. This is no joke, this is real war!" | | | The next day's front page | | The enormity of the violence in Hawaii was not publicly known for days. Actually, weeks. The front page of the NYT on December 8, 1941 said the president feared "very heavy losses," but cited an official death toll of "104." On page seven, an analytical story said "the Japanese aggression yesterday did more than start a Pacific war. It broadened the conflicts already raging into a world-wide struggle whose end no man can know."
If you're interested in reading more of the day-after coverage from other papers, check out this Time magazine post... | | | Trump tells his supporters NOT to boo the media | | Is this a head fake, a meaningless moment or something significant? At Tuesday night's rally in NC, Donald Trump mentioned "the folks back there who write the stories," which usually signals an anti-media attack. But when the crowd started to boo, Trump said "No, no," discouraging the venom. "Hopefully," he said, "they're going to write the truth."
That's a manipulative thing to say, but it's a change from his anti-media remarks at last week's rally. Some reporters speculated that it's connected to "Pizzagate" and Tuesday's dismissal of Michael Flynn's son for spreading fake news... | | | Via CNNPolitics' Nightcap newsletter: "Government sources tell CNN's Jake Tapper that the Trump transition team had requested a security clearance for the younger Flynn. Tapper tried eight times to get Mike Pence to answer whether he knew the transition team sought security clearance for the younger Flynn." Pence steadfastly would not answer. If you're a journalist, I highly recommend watching this three-minute video of Tapper repeating the question... | | | "If ever there's a time that journalists are going to be tested in America, it's during a Trump presidency," Trevor Noah said Monday on Comedy Central. "I feel like we have to start handing out awards to journalists for calling out bull----." So that's what he did... Over on TBS, Sam Bee did something similar... And which journalist received an award from both Noah and Bee? The aforementioned Tapper. Bee credited him with "making cable news bearable..." (via Philly.com) | | "We all have a right – and a duty – to call out misinformation and divisive tactics from Trump and his enablers at places like Breitbart. Much is at stake if Trump and his brand of politics is normalized. It's up to all of us to prevent that from happening."
--Jill Abramson's latest column for The Guardian... | | NYTer Lydia Polgreen is the new EIC of The Huffington Post, succeeding the site's founder Arianna Huffington. Polgreen will take over in a few weeks. The choice was widely praised by media types on Tuesday afternoon. It was also described as a big loss for the NYT.
"I feel like we're living in a moment right now where media has to fundamentally rethink its position vis-a-vis power," Polgreen told HuffPost's Michael Calderone. "I think that the election of Donald Trump and the basic difficulty that the media had in anticipating it tells us something really profound about the echo chamber in which we live, the ways in which journalism has failed to reach beyond its own inner limits..." | | | An outsider instead of a HuffPost insider | | | Tom Kludt emails: When I reported on HuffPost's search for Arianna's replacement in the fall, most signs pointed to an internal hire; Ryan Grim and Kate Palmer were said to be the top contenders for the job at the time. HuffPost CEO Jared Grusd told me that outside candidates would be considered, too, but he didn't offer any names. One source I spoke to that week said he thought Polgreen would be a great fit -- but poaching her, he conceded, would probably be a longshot. It seems clear that HuffPost decided that a splashy, inspired hire was in order to replace their namesake founder. Polgreen, one of the most respected journalists in the business, certainly fits the bill... | | | Bullish talk from AT&T and Time Warner CEOs | | Before election day, Trump vowed to block AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner, CNN's parent company. But Trump transition team members have signaled more... shall we say... flexibility. Dylan Byers, filing from BI's Ignition conference, says top execs at both companies remain confident:
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said "the merits of the law suggest it's a deal that gets done..." A few hours earlier, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told the same audience that he wasn't worried: "It will become clear to everyone that it will be pro-competitive, pro-consumer and improve competition in advertising." Read more...
On Wednesday the two men will testify in DC... | | | "I've heard rumors he's not happy with CNN..." | | | Maybe CNN will come up on Capitol Hill? Dylan Byers writes: At the BI conference, Stephenson said, "Look, anytime the president of the U.S. comes out and says they're not in favor of what you're trying to do, you have to pay attention. But I don't know what part of the deal he's referring to. I've heard rumors he's not happy with CNN, so that might have come into it." | | -- More from Ignition: James Murdoch told Henry Blodget that the right-wing opinion shows on Fox News obviously aren't going away, but "there's a desire to break news, and focus on the news side of it..." (TVNewser)
-- Angelo Carusone is replacing Bradley Beychok as the president of Media Matters. Carusone tells Hadas Gold that the liberal media monitoring group will place a new emphasis on challenging fake news and propaganda, not just Fox News... (Politico)
-- More: David Brock is seeking funding for a "Breitbart of the left..." (The Hill)
-- Julia Ioffe joining The Atlantic! She'll be a contributing writer... (FishbowlNY)
-- Former HuffPost managing editor David Freeman is joining NBC News as the lead editor of MACH, a new "tech, science and innovation vertical…" (Talking Biz News) | | | Future "Reliable Sources" writer... still in the womb! | | Maybe Baby Stelter will be running this show in a few decades. That's right, Baby Stelter. On Tuesday morning my much better half told her NY1 audience that they haven't been imagining a baby bump... it's really there... Jamie is 16 weeks pregnant. "I knew it!" viewer emails and tweets poured in. Page Six summed up the news here.
In all candor, we've been waiting a long time to share this. (After all, we met on Twitter! Sharing via social media comes naturally to us.) But this year has been incredibly hard. As Jamie wrote on Instagram: "I wasn't sure it would ever be this day... Two miscarriages and two D+Cs really crushed me. I lost a lot of hope. And THEN came IVF." Now comes #IVFBaby. CNN Careers cracked us up with this message: "OPERATION RECRUIT Baby Stelter underway in approx 22 years!!" 🍼 🍼 🍼 | | | One of my favorite features of the year... | | | Bloomberg's annual JEALOUSY LIST is out. Check out the list of 40-odd stories the editors WISH they had published... | | | NYT's Sabrina Tavernise with the graf of the day: "Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion, punching holes in what is true, causing a kind of fun-house effect that leaves the reader doubting everything, including real news. That has pushed up the political temperature and increased polarization... In interviews, people said they felt more empowered, more attached to their own side and less inclined to listen to the other. Polarization is fun, like cheering a goal for the home team..." | | | -- Programming notes: I'll be talking more about this on NPR's "On Point" Wednesday at 10am, and at BI's Ignition conference at 4:50pm... | | | Laura Ingraham's sit-down with Trump | | Dylan Byers emails: Trump met with Laura Ingraham at Trump Tower on Tuesday, stoking speculation that he may soon tap her to serve as WH press secretary. There's little doubt the Fox News pundit and talk radio host is on the top of Trump's shortlist: She has supported his candidacy from the beginning, vouched for him throughout the campaign, and delivered a rousing GOP convention speech. She would also satisfy Trump's conservative base, in large part because she'd likely make a mockery of the press corps. It was Ingraham who once said the mainstream media "are worse than irrelevant. We now must make fun of them."
But the big question, as I see it, is what role a Press Secretary Ingraham would play in trying to shape Trump's policies, particularly on immigration (she's aggressively anti-amnesty.) Politico, which has a new write-up on Ingraham here, has previously reported that she is only willing to serve as press secretary if she has a role in policy-making... | | | Why "Trump says up, critics say down" isn't sufficient | | Alex Koppelman emails: Trump's tweet attacking Boeing and the plan to build a new edition of Air Force One was, as Jake Tapper noted, sent just after the publication of an article critical of Trump's trade stance that included quotes from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg.
This may have been a coincidence -- though it fits a pattern Tom Kludt has reported on of Trump's tweets coming very shortly after related segments on TV -- but the actual cause doesn't really matter because we already know the effect: a growing perception that Trump and his administration will punish those corporations which do business with the government that don't play ball, and reward the ones that do.
There probably hasn't been any administration that didn't have at least some tendency to reward its friends and leave its opponents in the cold. But the extent of behavior like this during the transition, and Trump's willingness to use his social media bully pulpit on the subject, suggest the possibility of a chilling effect for which the media will need to account in at least two different ways. First, when executives come out to praise or support Trump and his policies, there needs to be skepticism -- not an immediate assumption that such praise is suspect, but a pause to consider what other factors might have gone into the decision. And second, we'll have to work to get past the crutch of relying on conflict -- "Trump says up; critics say down" as a guide to what is news and a way to frame it. There may not be public dissent about a Trump administration economic policy, but that might not mean that there is truly consensus that it is a good idea... | | | Time's Person of the Year will be... | | | "The Trump Voter?" "The Nationalists?" The president-elect himself? Nancy Gibbs will make the announcement on "Today" Wednesday morning. You may recall that in December 2015, when Angela Merkel was the Person, Trump tweeted, "I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite They picked person who is ruining Germany..." | | -- "Bloomberg Pursuits is folding its print product" after its current December issue... "The digital edition will live on..." (Min)
-- YouTube wants you to know that it has "paid out over $1 billion to the music industry from advertising alone." Per Peter Kafka, the intended message is, "labels should stop complaining and sign new YouTube deals..." (BI)
-- What about the rumors that Sirius XM might want to buy Pandora? Here's Paul R. La Monica's column all about it... (CNNMoney)
-- UTA PR boss Chris Day is leaving the agency after 17 years. "Day is considering a few possible next moves but has not yet made a decision. UTA will mount a search for his successor…" (Variety) | | | Reuters and International Center of Photography held a half-day conference about the state of photojournalism on Monday -- spotted: Sir Harold Evans, Steve Adler, Kyle Pope, Lucy Gilmour, David Thomson, Yannis Behrakis, Goran Tomasevic, Jonathan Bachman, Adrees Latif, David Furst, Kira Pollack, Alan Taylor, Wajmah Yaqubi, Olivier Laurent, Stephen Mayes, Stephanie Heimann, Noah Rabinowitz... | | | Tuesday's Grammy news: Both Adele and Beyoncé are nominated in the big categories, but with her nine nominations, Queen Bey is poised to potentially make Grammys history, Lisa France writes. Read her full recap here... | | | Award shows as late-night promos | | Brian Lowry emails: It occurs to me there's been a bit of a shift in network philosophy about awards shows, and basically just using them to showcase late-night talent. That's already been true of the Emmys for some time, but now Jimmy Kimmel is hosting the Oscars on ABC, which will follow Jimmy Fallon emceeing NBC's Golden Globes telecast, James Corden handling the Grammys (after doing the Tonys) and Stephen Colbert again hosting the Kennedy Center Honors.
The hosts of these shows were once a marketing tool to help attract viewers — especially those outside the demographic wheelhouse, who might tune in to see Jon Stewart or Chris Rock. Now, it's as if the networks have realized the benefits of that are so marginal they might as well just leverage these events to promote themselves... | | | The docu shortlist is out | | These 15 films are on the Oscar documentary category shortlist:
"Cameraperson"
"Command and Control"
"The Eagle Huntress"
"Fire at Sea"
"Gleason"
"Hooligan Sparrow"
"I Am Not Your Negro"
"The Ivory Game"
"Life, Animated"
"O.J.: Made in America"
"13th"
"Tower"
"Weiner"
"The Witness"
"Zero Days" | | | For the record, part three | | | -- Sandra Gonzalez emails: ABC has kicked off pilot season with an order for "Libby & Malcolm," a show from "black-ish" creator Kenya Barris about two polar-opposite political pundits who fall in love. It stars Felicity Huffman and Courtney B. Vance. As you know, while it's just a pilot order, Barris has a lot of momentum right now. Lots of early buzz and perfect timing will no doubt work in its favor...
-- Brian Lowry notes some Super Synergy: Per the CW, its four-night crossover event — linking "Supergirl," "The Flash," "Arrow" and "Legends of Tomorrow" — yielded its highest-rated week in six years, averaging 2.13 million viewers. Tune-in jumped 20% over the same period last year...
-- Via Lisa France: With its themes about race, fame and the struggle of the underdog, NBC's "Hairspray Live!" feels very current. Creator John Waters says Wednesday night's production will be continuing a tradition...
-- More from Lisa: Chris Rock is going on tour for the first time in nine years... | | | 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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