| | | | By this time tomorrow, will professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos still have a job at Breitbart?
Right now it's an open question. A Breitbart rep did not respond to a request for comment. Robert Costa and several other journos said they've heard rumblings that Yiannopoulos may be on the way out. I asked him directly on Monday night, and he said, "No reason to suppose the reports about Breitbart are true. I certainly haven't heard anything like that."
Yiannopoulos says he's holding a press conference on Tuesday, 3pm ET, to address everything that happened on Monday... | | Handing it over to Tom Kludt for the blow-by-blow:
When I spoke with Milo shortly after noon on Monday about the uproar over his scheduled appearance at CPAC, he said he hadn't received any indication that the invitation would be rescinded.
Less than an hour later, the invitation was rescinded.
The swift turnabout from the American Conservative Union was the culmination of a firestorm that erupted on Saturday, almost immediately after Yiannopoulos' appearance was announced. The chorus of opposition grew even louder on Sunday, following the release of two videos in which he spoke sympathetically about sex between "younger boys and older men." The comments were widely condemned. He explained himself in these posts on Facebook... | | Simultaneously, over at Simon & Schuster HQ, the publisher's conservative imprint Threshold had to decide what to do about Milo's forthcoming book "Dangerous." It was scheduled to come out in June. The publisher, a unit of CBS, had previously defended its decision to pay Milo a six-figure advance and print his book. But things changed on Monday. S&S said that it was cancelling the book after "careful consideration." The book listing was quickly removed from Amazon (where it had previously held #1 best selling book status thanks to pre-orders).
What about his advance? Will he try to take the book elsewhere? Can he? Yiannopoulos referred Q's about the book to his agent... | | He's going to hold a press conference on Tuesday | | What establishment conservatives are saying | | Tom Kludt emails: Milo specializes in provoking anger among those on the left. The protest over his CPAC invite, however, came almost entirely from the right. I reached out to a few notable conservative pundits who strongly objected. An example: Rich Lowry said CPAC organizers have egg all over their faces: "It was a colossal misjudgment to invite him... Now having disinvited him, CPAC looks like the censor -- the worst of both worlds." | | Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter after being seen as an instigator for a barrage of hate against "SNL" star Leslie Jones. (Details here.) On Monday, in a tweet, Jones reacted to the news this way: "You guys are giving him too much energy. I was done the day I blocked him & got his ass banned. Been done and moved on. He has no space here!" | | On Monday's "Erin Burnett OutFront," I described how President Trump's cable news habit now has international consequences. CNN's Ivan Watson, reporting from Stockholm all day long, said Swedes were baffled and amused by Trump's Saturday ominous talk about something that happened "last night in Sweden," since nothing of note happened. Here's the full "OutFront" video...
Foreign minister Margot Wallström responded on Monday, saying "we are seeing a general upward trend in inaccurate information," and prime minister Stefan Löfven also weighed in, saying, "We must also all take responsibility for using facts correctly and for verifying any information that we spread." Read more from CNN's team in Stockholm here... | | How this YouTube video reached the president | | As we now know, Trump was talking about a Fox News segment from Friday, a segment on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" about a conservative filmmaker's journey to Sweden. So I took a closer look at the origin story. Filmmaker Ari Horowitz wanted to call attention to what he claimed is a "surge of violence" caused by immigrants in Sweden. He succeeded -- even though some of his claims don't check out.
Horowitz posted his ten-minute film to YouTube back in December. He described it this way: "Rape and violence has exploded across Sweden due [to its] immigration policies. Watch to see what Sweden has done to itself." The video only reached a small audience... until Fox called. Thanks to Carlson's show, it received international attention. Carlson went on "Fox & Friends" Monday morning to emphasize the "massive social cost" associated with the influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East...
-- Actor Andrew Hibbard tweets: "CNN should start airing a show called 'The President's Daily Security Briefing...'" | | Thanks to the world wide web, observers are able to choose from two versions of the "truth" -- a dark view of a crime-ridden Scandinavian country or a brighter view of a society supporting refugees and migrants. There are hundreds of mostly right-wing blogs and web sites pushing exaggerated claims about crime in the country. Reports and statistics don't back up this scary portrayal. But I've been hearing from readers all day long who believe the blogs -- and believe I'm part of a cover-up... | | -- CIA official Edward Price writing in the WashPost: "I didn't think I'd ever leave the CIA. But because of Trump, I quit..." (WashPost)
-- "Has the White House press office's silence become a weapon in its war on the media?" That's what Paul Farhi asks... Sean Spicer denies it... (WashPost)
-- CJR's Lyz Lenz quoted the new editor of Texas Monthly, Tim Taliaferro, as saying "Texans don't care about politics," signaling a shift away from the in-depth political coverage that the magazine has been known for. But Taliaferro says he was quoted out of context... And his point was that "we don't need to be incremental with our politics reporting. Strength is longform and analysis." The proof will be in print and online... (CJR)
-- Have 15 minutes to spare? Watch this presentation about the media biz by Stratechery's Ben Thompson... (Recode) | | Brenda Buttner, 1961-2017 | | Brenda Buttner, a veteran correspondent at Fox News and Fox Business, died Monday "after a fearless battle with cancer," the network said. She was 55.
Buttner worked at CNBC before joining Fox in 2000. She was beloved by colleagues at both networks. "She took stock of life much more than any stock in life," Neil Cavuto said in an on-air tribute on Monday afternoon. "It's what's separated her from everyone else in this business, not just dollars, you see, Brenda had depth. It seems fitting that Brenda was among the very first to put a kind female face to this once staid old male bastion of business..."
-- Eric Bolling tweets: "She fought cancer heroically. RIP Brenda. We will miss you."
-- Julie Roginsky tweets: "Goodbye to Brenda Buttner, one of the sweetest and smartest people I had the pleasure to know at Fox..." | | Steve Buttry, a journalism advocate who was most recently the director of student media at LSU's Manship School of Mass Communication, died Sunday. He was 62. His family shared an obit on his personal blog: "Buttry spent most of his career as a reporter and editor, but achieved prominence late in his career as a newsroom trainer, then as an advocate for and teacher of digital journalism and media innovation and finally for blogging openly about his cancer treatment..." | | "I try to be even-handed with it. I think there's a lot of reporters out there today who wake up every morning hoping this president will fail. I am not one of those. I am not cheering him on, nor am I hoping he will fail."
--Fox's Martha MacCallum in this interview with Hal Boedeker, previewing her Tuesday night town hall show in Jacksonville, FL... | | Charlie Rose has been recuperating from heart surgery for the past ten days... On Monday, Gayle King shared this picture on Instagram and wrote, "How good does @CharlieRose look! What heart surgery? Met for breakfast @Cipriani aka Charlie's kitchen...coinky-dink we both had on red..." | | About Trump's "enemy" attack | | In the segment, we played this clip of Fox's Chris Wallace challenging Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus: "You don't get to tell us what to do any more than Barack Obama did... Barack Obama whined about Fox News all the time, but I got to say, he never said that we were an enemy of the people..." | | Kirsten Powers says it best... | | Kirsten Powers has a unique vantage point on all of this, since she's been both a Fox commentator and a CNN commentator. In her latest column for USA Today, she writes, "However terrible the Obama administration's behavior was, it looks positively quaint compared with the Trump administration employing the kind of rhetoric one normally associates with Chairman Mao or Joseph Stalin..." | | Pence says Trump will "continue to call out the media..." | | Quoting VP Mike Pence in Brussels on Monday: Both he and Trump "support a free and independent press," but "you can anticipate that the President and all of us will continue to call out the media when they play fast and loose with the facts..." | | Spicer briefing on Tuesday | | 1:30pm ET in the briefing room... | | | Glasser describes "striking" similarities between Trump and Putin | | I missed this Susan Glasser piece in the NYT over the weekend. She says "Mr. Trump's rhetoric and actions as president bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Mr. Putin during his first years consolidating power."
Examples: "The media-bashing and outrageous statements. The attacks on rival power centers, whether stubborn federal judges or corporations refusing to get in line. The warnings, some of them downright panic-inducing, that the country is not safe — and we must go to war with Islamic extremists because they are threatening our way of life. These are the techniques that Mr. Putin used to great effect in his first years in power, and they are very much the same tactics and clash-of-civilizations ideology being deployed by Mr. Trump today..." | | What the Academy is doing... | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: I really enjoyed this story from Michael Shulman about the Academy's efforts to solve its diversity problem. It's a must-read for Oscar nerds... | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: A few of the honorees at Sunday's Writers Guild of America Awards had strong words for Trump. The awards show gave out honors to "Moonlight," "Arrival," "The Americans" and "Atlanta." But it was also notable for the defiant speeches from honorees, including Oliver Stone and Aaron Sorkin... Read more here... | | Check out the Creators series | | Watch/listen to Sunday's show | | Democracy demands media literacy | | On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," I said that democracy demands media literacy. News literacy. And this particular moment in time demands serious investments by newsrooms and by tech giants. Groups like the News Literacy Project and universities like Stony Brook are trying to tackle this problem. Execs at Facebook and Google are thinking a lot about it too. So it's an opportune moment to brainstorm new ways to help our customers... And try to regain trust... | | Quoting Salena Zito from "Reliable Sources:" "People believe we spend too much time focusing on what he says about us. And they would like to see us spend more time on what he's doing. Does that make sense?" Definitely -- and RedState's Jay Caruso made a similar point in the "B block."
But I argued that attacking the media IS what Trump is doing -- between press conferences, Saturday's rally, and carefully crafted tweets, he has spent quite a bit of time tearing down news outlets he detests... | | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Send your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. We appreciate every email. 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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