| | | | | Trump meets and berates the press | | An email from a reliable newsletter reader: "Why doesn't the media join together to combat it when he singles out reporters?"
Another reader email: "If you all don't stand together for the First Amendment, he will pick you off individually."
So... that happened. The NYT's Thursday headline about the press conference is "Donald Trump's News Session Starts War With and Within Media." Bingo.
Before diving into all that, I'd like to highlight what conservative columnist and CNNer S.E. Cupp wrote for the New York Daily News on Wednesday. "If Trump bans a news organization from a press conference or refuses to take questions from an outlet that has accurately covered him, every other outlet should walk out or refuse to give him airtime or print space," she wrote. "If he thinks he can silence the press, strong-arm journalists into printing only favorable reports or replace the press with tweets, every outlet should protest, not only the ones he is punishing."
Cupp: "We are at a crossroads in our country, and what we do in response to Donald Trump's unprecedented antipathy toward one of our most cherished and important institutions — a free press — will define who we are as a democracy. At a time of division and rancor, the press must come together around this common cause: saving itself." | | Dylan Byers emails: Trump used BuzzFeed's controversial publication of unverified memos to try to discredit the press and fault CNN for the network's substantiated report revealing that a two-page synopsis of those memos had been presented last week to Trump and to President Obama.
"That fake news was written about primarily by one group and one television station," Trump said. Refusing to take a question from CNN's Jim Acosta, he said "your network is terrible" and called it "fake news."
Incoming press secretary Sean Spicer was even more outspoken in his criticism of the BuzzFeed report, and also claimed that CNN had picked up the unsubstantiated claims against Trump, which is not true. "Trump's game is to use BuzzFeed memo to ignore blockbuster CNN report," NYMag's Jonathan Chait rightly tweeted... | | | Now here's the key question | | | What Anderson Cooper asked Kellyanne Conway on "AC360:" "What you still haven't answered, though, is what is inaccurate in our reporting?" | | Conway also falsely said that CNN "linked to the BuzzFeed story." She brought up this imagined "link" a dozen times during a long conversation with Cooper. "Why are you linking to fake news?" Cooper said "we did not link to it." A thorough search of CNN.com confirms this. The only links involving BuzzFeed were links to Dylan's story about the ethical debate... which did not link to BuzzFeed directly. CNN PR says Conway's "claims are false."
This may seem like a minor detail, but Conway kept coming back to it on "AC360," sowing confusion and conflating what CNN and BuzzFeed did... | | So let's talk about that. I was on a panel in London on Wednesday morning with BuzzFeed UK political editor Jim Waterston, who justified the decision to post the memo by saying "it was being discussed across media circles and across security circles."
Erik Wemple called BF's see-for-yourself, make-up-your-own-mind rationale "ridiculous." Other media critics were also quite critical. But there's been support as well, from writers like CJR's Vanessa M. Gezari, who says "the media's full-throated condemnation of BuzzFeed is both self-righteous and self-serving."
Back in New York, I saw BuzzFeed EIC Ben Smith late Wednesday, and he has no regrets about the decision... | | Dylan Byers emails: Smith appeared on MSNBC's "Meet The Press Daily" with Chuck Todd. The most powerful parts of the interview came when Todd told Smith he had published "fake news," and suggested that BuzzFeed's claims about "transparency" were actually "a crutch for laziness." Smith pushed back and asserted that in the digital age, the media are no longer the gatekeepers of information...
-- Dylan adds: Maybe someone should remind Ben... A lot of news organizations had these memos and kept them behind the gate. These documents didn't surface by themselves. They surfaced because he published them. | | | Tapper: Irresponsible journalism "hurts us all" | | | Right after the press conference, Jake Tapper cleared up the facts that Team Trump conflated: "Sean Spicer... suggested that both BuzzFeed and CNN published this dossier full of uncorroborated rumors. That's not true. That's false. CNN never did that," he said. "When Mr. Trump went after our own Jim Acosta saying he's fake news and he isn't going to call on him, what I suspect we are seeing here is an attempt to discredit legitimate, responsible attempts to report on this incoming administration with irresponsible journalism. That hurts us all. And the media going forward should keep that in mind." | | I was on "CNN Tonight" with Acosta on Wednesday night, when he recounted that Spicer "came over to me during the middle of that and said 'If you do that one more time, you're out of here.'"
Acosta to Don Lemon: "I've never had a press secretary come up to me and threaten to throw me out of a news conference. Now, heat of the moment, maybe he regrets that. If that's the case, then that's fine. But listen -- we're not going anywhere, Don. We're going to do our job."
Spicer, via Twitter, is saying Acosta should apologize for being "rude, inappropriate and disrespectful." Rude? Acosta says "persistent" is the right word. "I was doing my job..." | | | -- More: David Gregory tweets: "I stand w @Acosta - media stands its ground in the face of WH efforts to intimidate. Period." | | PEOTUS ended the day the way he began, by tweeting about what he calls "fake news." Let's be clear -- Trump is being misleading every time he labels legit reporting as "fake."
At 11:01 p.m. he wrote: "We had a great News Conference at Trump Tower today. A couple of FAKE NEWS organizations were there but the people truly get what's going on." | | | Fox expressing support for CNN | | Dylan Byers notes: Wednesday afternoon on Fox News, Shep Smith rallied behind CNN: "CNN's exclusive reporting on the Russian matter was separate and distinctly different from the document dump executed by an online news property," Smith said at the end of his show. "Though we at Fox News cannot confirm CNN's report, it is our observation that its correspondents followed journalistic standards and that neither they nor any other journalists should be subjected to belittling and delegitimizing by the president-elect of the United States."
Brian's two cents: This was not an off-the-cuff statement... Notice Shep's use of "we" and "our..." This was prepared by Fox. | | | A press conference six months in the making... | | | | Maggie Haberman tweets: "One takeaway from the presser -- Trump aides tried to wedge the public away from the media." Trump also tried to distinguish between "good" and "bad" media. Gabriel Sherman used the same word, "wedge," in his analysis... | | | -- Related: Via Mediaite's Josh Feldman: Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity on the radio that "Trump is deliberately trying to shrink and isolate CNN, and CNN is working hard to be worthy of that." | | | Front-row seat for Breitbart | | | The AP's Jonathan Lemire reports: "Only one seat was saved by a Republican National Committee aide, a front-row spot for a reporter from Breitbart, the conservative news outlet until recently run by Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon. Other reporters scrambled to save their seats." Breitbart's Matt Boyle ended up asking a question about "all the problems" in the media, and asked Trump for recommended reforms. | | | Behind the scenes at Trump Tower | | Tom Kludt filed this story from the event: With more than 200 correspondents, reporters and technical personnel on hand, space was scarce. Trump's handlers designated a sliver of space on the main floor of his Manhattan skyscraper, forcing those gathered to stand or sit shoulder to shoulder in the hour-and-a-half or so before the presser.
The drama ratcheted up around 11 a.m., when six aides emerged from an elevator bank carrying cartoonishly large stacks of papers inside manilla envelopes. They arrived, conveniently enough, just as a number of networks were going live on the scene. TV correspondents, some of whom were in the middle of their live shots, tried to describe what transpired. (Trump later explained that the papers detailed how he would put his businesses in a trust, though his aides shielded reporters from looking at the documents after the press conference was over.)
After the stacks of of paper were delivered, a radio host seated at a table near the back of the room likened it to a move straight out of professional wrestling. "This is a circus-like atmosphere," the host shouted into his microphone. And this was all before Trump even took the stage. Read more from Tom here... | | | First question went to... | | | Fox's John Roberts, who asked Trump if he accepted the opinion of the intelligence community that Putin ordered the hack. Trump said he thinks it was Russia that was behind the hacking of top Democrats...but not before he strongly denounced the intelligence leaks that have surfaced in several news reports this past week... | | | Via Tom: Mike Allen, Gabriel Sherman, Maggie Haberman, Hunter Walker, Olivia Nuzzi, Mike Grynbaum, Molly Ball, Philip Rucker, McKay Coppins, Zeke Miller, Thomas Roberts, Julie Pace, Major Garrett, Jon Karl, John Harwood, and many many more... | | | NYT's Michael Grynbaum explains where all that applause came from: "A Greek chorus of sorts — mostly Trump supporters and aides, including Omarosa Manigault — watched from the side, applauding Mr. Trump and jeering questions from reporters they deemed unpleasant..." | | | How long til Trump holds another presser? | | | What's your guess? Email reliablesources@cnn.com... | | | Hannity snipes at Scarborough again | | Remember how Sean Hannity claimed last week that Joe Scarborough has been seeking a job at Fox? He tweeted again Wednesday night... Here's what happened...
CNN's Andrew Kaczynski reacted to Trump's presser with this tweet: "The last two jobs on my resume are 'failing pile of garbage' and 'fake news.'"
Joe Scarborough responded: "That's quite a trajectory. I can't wait to see where your professional path takes you next" plus a flushed face emoji.
That's when Sean Hannity chimed in, seemingly out of nowhere, to criticize Scarborough's "repulsive fawning bromance comments about OBAMA." Then he said: "Hey Joe do u really want to focus on my twitter error that I apologized for? You have many skeletons in your closet (&office) wanna go there?" | | | This is the "Facebook Journalism Project" | | Facebook is trying to improve relations with skeptical newsrooms by making several investments in journalism tools, training, and news literacy. On Wednesday the company made a series of announcements and created a new umbrella for its initiatives, called the "Facebook Journalism Project," with three different parts. Here's my full story...
-- Details: One effort involves linking Facebook engineers with their counterparts in newsrooms. The idea is that "we can build together from the early stages of the product development process," Fidji Simo, Facebook's director of product for media, said in a blog post...
-- Also: The announcement emphasized media literacy as an implicit response to the issue of "fake news." Facebook is working with the News Literacy Project to produce PSAs... | | | Steve Kroft sits down with President Obama one last time | | | President Obama's farewell television tour is wrapping up. CBS announced this on Wednesday: "Obama will appear in his last presidential interview on network television on 60 Minutes Presents 'Barack Obama: Eight Years in the White House,' an hour-long special to be broadcast Sunday, Jan. 15..." | | | Appreciating Kellyanne Conway's "festival of distractions" | | Following up on the earlier references to Kellyanne Conway in this newsletter: An interview with Conway "is a circus of euphemisms, a festival of distractions and a testament to the stamina of a willed smile," the NYT's Frank Bruni wrote in Wednesday's paper.
He said many journalists "assign her more power in Trump World than she has," calculating that "when you're doing that much TV, you can be in only so many meetings." Instead "what she possesses is a showmanship that Trump can't help appreciating… the gold-haired standard for a rising generation of unflappable partisans…" | | "The rise of naked partisanship, and increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste -- all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there. And this trend represents a third threat to our democracy..."
--President Obama in Tuesday's farewell address | | | "White House politics fatigue" hurting "Designated Survivor?" | | Interesting story by EW's James Hibberd, looking at the reasons for the "Designated Survivor" ratings slump. The show (starring Kiefer Sutherland as president after a crippling terror attack) "debuted strong back in the fall," Hibberd writes, so why has it fallen off so sharply? ABC entertainment president Channing Dungey told him "I think some of that has to do with White House politics fatigue… It's challenging right now in terms of making political shows just in general, because there are big changes afoot in the world we live it."
ABC is going to adjust the show — "making Designated Survivor a bit less like 'Homeland' Lite, and more in line with ABC's sweet spot of sudsy relationship-driven shows," Hibberd writes… | | | Previewing the next season of "Homeland" | | | Brian Lowry emails his latest: "Homeland" has been prescient about real-world events in the past, but even with a bit of a cheat, the new season -- which kicks off Sunday ‹--offers one almost eerie parallel to current events: A President-elect (played, notably, by a woman) who is at odds with the CIA... Read more... | | -- Sandra Gonzalez emails from the TCA Press Tour: I'm excited for "When We Rise," a miniseries from "Milk" writer Dustin Lance Black about the LGBTQ civil rights movement...
-- More from Sandra: "Empire" has been renewed for Season 4. And Fox is rebooting the dating show "Love Connection," with Andy Cohen as host. It premieres this summer...
-- Chloe Melas emails: Snooki was kicked off "Celebrity Apprentice" Monday night... And she sat down with me afterward and slammed Trump for tweeting about the show's ratings. She said he should be focusing on the country and not reality TV. You can check out the interview here...
-- By Lisa France: "'This is Us' star on Toby's fate." I can't click on this link since I haven't watched this week's episode yet... | | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Send your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. See you tomorrow! | |  | | We'd love to share our other newsletters with you. Check out Five Things for Your New Day, CNN's morning newsletter. Give us five minutes, and we'll brief you on all the news and buzz people will be talking about. | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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