| | | | "Journalists are in for the fight of their lives." | | That's what Margaret Sullivan concludes in her Monday WashPost column. "To those who say let's wait and see, or maybe it won't be as bad as you think, or stay hopeful, I'm having none of it," she says. "Journalists are in for the fight of their lives. And they are going to have to be better than ever before, just to do their jobs. They will need to work together, be prepared for legal persecution, toughen up for punishing attacks and figure out new ways to uncover and present the truth. Even so — if the past really is prologue — that may not be enough."
I share Sullivan's concern. I'm not assuming the worst -- but based on Trump's track record I'm anticipating many attempts to attack truth-telling journalists, bully critics and curb press freedoms. | | Welcome to inauguration week. | | Over the weekend President-elect Donald Trump counter-punched civil rights icon John Lewis, castigated "SNL," and wondered aloud if outgoing CIA director John Brennan was a "leaker of fake news." He gave several interviews and pledged "insurance for everybody."
Two dozen Democrats said they would not attend the inauguration. So did Broadway star Jennifer Holliday. After reading a column on The Daily Beast that said her fans in the gay community were "heartbroken" about her planned performance at a pre-inauguration concert, Holliday backed out.
ABC News cited anonymous Trump sources who said he'd be visiting the African American History Museum in DC on Monday. Then the network said "the visit was removed from his calendar due to scheduling issues and was not fully planned out." | | | Soon: 20 million followers | | | Right now Trump has 19.9 million followers on Twitter. He'll hit 20 million any day now. I bet Dan Scavino has already composed his celebratory tweet. For the record, @BarackObama has 80 million... | | | @realDonaldTrump is not going to be "restrained" | | Shortly after election day, Trump told Lesley Stahl that he was going to be "very restrained" with Twitter. Now he's taking it back. Don't expect any restraint from POTUS.
Quoting what Trump told the Sunday Times: "I thought I'd do less of it, but I'm covered so dishonestly by the press -- so dishonestly -- that I can put out Twitter -- and it's not 140, it's now 280 -- I can go bing bing bing . . . and they put it on and as soon as I tweet it out -- this morning on television, Fox -- 'Donald Trump, we have breaking news...'" | | | W.H. press briefings moving out of the West Wing? | | Veteran journalist Peter Boyer has worked for The New Yorker, Newsweek and Fox News. Now he's writing for Esquire -- and in his first piece on Saturday night -- he sent shock waves across DC.
Boyer cited "three senior officials on the transition team" to report that "a plan to evict the press corps from the White House is under serious consideration by the incoming Trump Administration."
Jim Acosta, Jeremy Diamond (happy birthday!), Sara Murray and I all pursued this on Sunday, and our best sense is that Sean Spicer and co. are talking about moving Spicer's press briefings and Trump's press conferences to a space outside the main White House building, somewhere else on the 16-acre property, most likely the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "The current briefing room only has 49 seats so we have looked at rooms within the White House to conduct briefings that have additional capacity to accommodate members of media including talk radio, bloggers and others," Spicer said in a statement. Read more... | | | Filling the briefing room with pro-Trump voices? | | Reince Priebus talked on ABC about "allowing more press, more press coverage from all over the country." But the reality is that reporters from talk radio outlets, blogs and other nontraditional outfits are already represented. As W.H. Correspondents Association prez Jeff Mason said Sunday evening, the briefing room "is open to all journalists who seek access now." (Hello, Les Kinsolving!) So there's a suspicion that this is really about stacking the deck with conservative columnists and staffers from pro-Trump outlets.
More broadly, this prevailing sense of uncertainty -- "what's Trump going to do to the press?" -- plays right into the president-elect's hands and pleases his voters...
-- Related: NYT's Maggie Haberman: "The WH briefing room issue is a classic Trump maneuver - float an extreme and bargain back from there..." | | | Spicer meets with president of the Correspondents Association | | On Sunday afternoon Mason had a nearly two-hour meeting with incoming press secretary Sean Spicer. "I made clear that the WHCA would view it as unacceptable if the incoming administration sought to move White House reporters out of the press work space behind the press briefing room." (Anonymous transition aides say this is not in the works.)
"Sean agreed to discuss any additional changes that the incoming administration considers with the WHCA ahead of time," Mason said. "Sean expressed concern that journalists adhere to a high level of decorum at press briefings and press conferences. I made clear that the WHCA would object, always, to a reporter being thrown out of a briefing or press conference..."
Bottom line: W.H. correspondents are concerned about a slippery slope... First, a new location for briefings... Then an effort to eject reporters from workspaces... | | Arguably the most important part of Boyer's piece was this quote from a senior Trump official about the news media: "They are the opposition party. I want 'em out of the building. We are taking back the press room." Boyer did not identity the official.
I asked Spicer: Does he agree with that unnamed official? His reply: "I respect the role of the press in our democracy." | | | Boyer sure got a lot of people talking this weekend... So I asked Esquire about his new role... The word from Hearst is that "the scoop shook out of a larger piece Peter is working on for the print magazine. So there's more to come from him..." | | | "Deep cultural symbolism" | | | "The optic" of moving the press corps "to some other, more distant part of the White House complex is just terrible," The Atlantic EIC Jeffrey Goldberg said on Sunday's "Reliable Sources." The Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik agreed and said "it's beyond optics, it's deep cultural symbolism, the representatives to the people moved literally off..." | | | If so, you missed an in-depth interview with BuzzFeed EIC Ben Smith. Scroll down for details... Check out the podcast here... Or the video clips on CNN.com... | | | First, America. Now Facebook is tackling "fake news" in Germany | | Germany is bracing for a federal election. There's a growing concern in the country about the influence of "fake news," some of it promoted by foreign actors. Do you think it's a coincidence that Germany is the second country where Facebook is testing "fake news" warning labels?
Facebook's test has been going on in the U.S. for a month. On Sunday the company announced that Germany is up next -- starting in a few weeks -- once fact-checking partners come on board. "We expect to announce efforts in additional countries soon," Facebook PR told me. Full story here... | | | Packers, Cowboys: possible ratings record? | | Frank Pallotta emails: I kid you not, my hands are shaking as I write this. Why? Because I, your resident CNN Media Packers fan, just got done watching the Green Bay Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys in an instant, and nerve wracking, classic.
This game had everything an NFL fan would want: Two of the best QBs in the league with Dak Prescott and apparent football wizard Aaron Rodgers, lots of scoring, a last second winning field goal, and heart palpitations for yours truly. It was perfect. It also most likely had a TON of viewers tuning in. The record for most-watched NFL Divisional Playoff game is roughly 45 million, set in 2012, and I'd bet this game got near 50 million. It was that good. Go Pack Go! | | | Brian Lowry flagged this smart scheduling move: The NFL Network says "the thrilling 34-31 Green Bay win over Dallas will be replayed Monday night at 8pm ET..." | | | Media week ahead calendar | | | -- Monday, 7pm: Martha MacCallum starts hosting "The First 100 Days" on Fox News...
-- Wednesday morning: Civic Hall and the Knight Foundation hold a symposium on tech, politics and the media... I'll be speaking around 10:45am...
-- Wednesday afternoon: President Obama holds his final news conference...
-- Thursday: The Sundance Film Festival begins...
-- Friday: Inauguration Day | | | Liberal media outlets mobilize for Trump presidency | | Tom Kludt emails his latest: The last time a Republican was in the White House coincided with a flowering of left-of-center news outlets that made their bones with aggressive coverage of George W. Bush. Trump has already proven to be even more of a galvanizing force and economic boon for many of those shops.
-- HuffPost poached Lydia Polgreen, who said she was drawn to the left-leaning newsroom in part because of Trump's election.
-- Talking Points Memo, another Bush-era site (and my old employer), intends to return to its muckraking roots by hiring an investigative reporter. The site is staffing up thanks in part to a surge of new members following Trump's win in November.
-- Similarly, The Young Turks raised $500,000 from its audience last month, which will be used to support a growing investigative reporting unit. Read more from Tom here... | | | BuzzFeed's argument for publishing | | Ben Smith has no regrets about publishing those unverified memos alleging that Russian operatives have compromising personal and financial information about Trump. "When you have a document in that kind of circulation among the country's elites at the center of an incredibly heated political battle, the argument for keeping it away from the American people has to be really, really strong," he said on Sunday's show. "Our job is not primarily to be gatekeepers, to decide what to suppress and keep from our audience. It's primarily to share with our audience what we've got."
I objected to the word "suppress" and said I'm trying to figure out if he wants BuzzFeed to be like the WashPost/NYT/CNN... or like WikiLeaks. You can catch the entire back-and-forth on CNN.com and on Twitter.
Jill Disis recapped the interview for CNN... And Tasneem Nashrulla recapped it for BuzzFeed News... | | | "An attempt to divide the press" | | When I brought up Spicer's criticism of BuzzFeed and CNN, Smith said, "There's obviously an attempt to divide the press, to turn us on each other and to turn reasonable differences about editorial decisions into screaming matches between us on this show. I think that's a trap that the media has obviously repeatedly fallen into over the last couple of years, but I think it's better not to right now..."
Speaking of Trump and the media... | | Words to live by...
Words to report by | | I began Sunday's "Reliable Sources" with a 99-year-old quote from a former president:
"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."
Who said it? Theodore Roosevelt. He wrote this in a letter to the Kansas City Star in 1918, prompted by what he felt was his successor Woodrow Wilson's efforts to tamp down on dissent. His overarching message was that free speech is a necessity.
Of course, both "SNL" and the president-elect have a right to free speech... | | | Trump says "SNL" is "really bad television" | | Jill Disis with the lede of the day:
Tina Fey called it.
On "SNL," the former cast member predicted that Trump would bash the show. "No matter how it goes, the President of the United States will say that it's sad and overrated," Fey told Felicity Jones.
And Fey was right: Trump weighed in on Sunday evening via Twitter, saying, "@NBCNews is bad but Saturday Night Live is the worst of NBC. Not funny, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job. Really bad television!" More context from Jill here...
-- On Poppy Harlow's show Sunday night, we dusted off the old video of Trump dancing along to "Hotline Bling" while hosting "SNL" in 2015. Feels like a long, long time ago... | | | Important reminder about how Trump's media feuds are perceived | | | On "Reliable Sources," MZ Hemingway channeled the POV of Trump voters who "are complaining that the media are unnecessarily hostile to them, their way of life, their views, the things they care about and value. And this is something that has been going on for decades. When they see Donald Trump fight back against the media, it makes them feel like he's fighting back for them. And that's why this whole conversation is happening in the context of a larger media environment that has been very unfair..." | | Megan Thomas forwards Sandra Gonzalez's story from the TCA press tour about "Big, Little Lies:"
There's a growing chorus of women in Hollywood speaking up about pay equity and more realistic roles for women -- expect to see more women like Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman producing their own projects to change the status quo. "Things have to change," Witherspoon said during the panel discussion. Read more... | | | Holiday weekend box office report | | "In what's shaping up to be a highly competitive holiday weekend at the box office, 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment's 'Hidden Figures' has the No. 1 spot, just three days in. If it holds, it will be the reigning film for the second week in a row," the LATimes' Tre'vell Anderson writes.
"La La Land" is #2 for the long weekend... "Sing" is #3... "Rogue One" is #4... and "The Bye Bye Man" is #5.
"Patriots Day" is #6 for the weekend... Anderson notes that the Peter Berg film "seems to be an audience and critics favorite. It received a rare A-plus CinemaScore rating and has a 79% Rotten Tomatoes score." It gets an A+ from me... | | "No one knows what this man is capable of. I never, ever, ever felt worried — it never crossed my mind — that George Bush would do something crazy, even though I knew he hated me. He never sued me for a joke."
--Bill Maher talking Trump with Jim Rutenberg in Monday's NYT... | | | 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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