| | | | This is Tom Kludt in for Brian Stelter... | | A familiar face returned to Fox News this morning. Dylan Byers reports:
"Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano is standing by his claim, still without evidence, that former President Obama worked with British intelligence officials to spy on Donald Trump.
Napolitano returned to Fox News airwaves on Wednesday morning after a week-long absence and said he stood by his claim that Obama 'went outside the chain of command' and used the UK's GCHQ service to surveil then-President-elect Trump...Fox had pulled Napolitano off the air on March 21 after Trump and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer cited Napolitano's report in an effort to bolster the president's claim that Obama had spied on him."
Fox isn't commenting for now... | | Asked by Fox anchor Bill Hemmer if he still stands by his story, Napolitano didn't flinch. "Yes, I do," he said. "And the sources stand by it."
He continued:
"The American public needs to know more about this rather than less because a lot of the government surveillance authorities will expire in the fall and there'll be a great debate on how much authority we want the government to have to surveil us."
Which leads to this key observation from Dylan:
"Given that Napolitano is still making his claim on Fox programming, it is unclear why he was benched from the airwaves in the first place."
Read more, via Dylan... | | Fresh off their clash in the briefing room, April Ryan and Sean Spicer continued to generate plenty of chatter and debate last night and today:
-- A CNN panel on Tuesday got awfully heated when discussion turned to the racial dynamics of the exchange, notable for Spicer's demand that Ryan stop shaking her head. CNN contributor Symone Sanders said Ryan's only crime was "being a black woman at work and Sean Spicer could not handle that." Ben Ferguson, a CNN political commentator, called that "stupid." It's worth a watch.
--Also here at CNN, our own Nia-Malika Henderson wrote that Ryan's question to Spicer, which asked how the administration could revamp its image, "goes to the heart of where President Donald Trump finds himself -- the Gallup daily tracking poll has Trump at 35%, a new low." | | | 'We are under attack by this administration' | | Of course, the news cycle wouldn't have been complete if we hadn't heard from Ryan, who showed up on "New Day" this morning. She didn't hold back.
"We are -- the press is -- under attack. We are under attack by this administration," Ryan said. "It's about discrediting credible media."
Ryan declined to say whether she thought Spicer treated female reporters differently -- though she did make a point of mentioning that Spicer called Politico reporter Tara Palmeri "an idiot with no real sources" over the weekend.
"I happen to be a black woman, but I'm part of the press," she said. "But this is part of a series of two women this week who have been in the news over something with the press secretary."
"I just see from the weekend that reporter from Politico who he called an idiot and then this situation, it's showing a pattern," Ryan added.
Read Eugene Scott's recap here.
| | Lisa Respers France reports:
"President Donald Trump is getting a 'presidential library' courtesy of 'The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.'
'The Daily Show Presents: The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library' is being billed by Comedy Central as 'the first of its kind, showcasing our Commander in Chief's preferred vessel for communicating with the public, his Twitter feed.'
Comedy Central insists this is not a joke and the library will be located in New York City where it will be free and open to the public."
--Shameless plug: Lisa's story gives me another opportunity to share our own repository of Trump's tweets. Since Trump's election in November, we've rounded up his tweets that appear to have been sparked by television news segments he was watching. The database had a fresh entry yesterday, courtesy of the program that Trump calls "the most honest morning show."
Speaking of Trump's tweets... | | Charlie Warzel flags this headline from Politico that ran almost a year ago: | | Via Politico: "Two pool reporters are traveling with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson during his current trip to Turkey and Belgium after blocking pool reporters from his first trip to Asia earlier this month. The two reporters, one representing the wire services (Reuters) and one representing television (Fox), were determined by the State Department Correspondents Association pool rotation."
The move is no doubt a welcome change following the uproar over his previous trip, but make no mistake: this is only a marginal improvement and still amounts to a decidedly smaller pool than what traveled with previous secretaries of state.
As Matt Viser tweeted earlier, "no one should be satisfied with this." | | | The 'failing' New York Times doing OK on Wall Street | | Trump went after the New York Times on Twitter again today, repeating the false claim that the "failing" paper issued an apology to readers after last year's election.
That wasn't all that he got wrong though, as Paul La Monica reports:
"Trump loves to claim that the publisher is 'failing,' but that idea needs to be fact checked, because shares of New York Times Co. are up 30% since he was elected president. If that's a failure, what's his definition of success?
"The company's stock is also up nearly 9% so far this year. That's better than the overall market and much better than many of its dead tree and ink rivals.
"Gannett's stock has plunged nearly 15% this year. McClatchy is down almost 30%. And the awfully-named tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing) is up just 1%."
Read the rest of Paul's breakdown.
--And as for the other thing that Trump got wrong in the tweet, the Times fired back accordingly: | | The media world awoke to what, at first blush, appeared to be a banger of scoop over at Axios. Mike Allen, citing "industry sources," reported that BuzzFeed is "quietly making preparations to go public in 2018."
"OMG!" trumpeted the former Politico man, aping the BuzzFeed parlance.
But this item, fittingly enough, turned out to be clickbait. Multiple BuzzFeed sources pointed out to Dylan and me both that BuzzFeed's potential IPO had been the subject of previous news reports.
Recode had it in November of last year. And here's the Wall Street Journal reporting the same later that month. | | | Bipartisan outrage over Congress' Internet privacy vote | | A day after Republicans voted to repeal Internet privacy protections that had been approved by the FCC in the waning days of the Obama administration, Seth Fiegerman reports that the "online hornet's nest" was still abuzz.
As Seth points out, the vote drew harsh objections all over the ideological map -- from the liberal editorial board of the New York Times to the ardently right-wing commenters on Breitbart News.
Read his rundown here.
| | -- CNNMoney's own Tanzina Vega announced today that she's working on a book: "Uppity: Women, Race and Class in America" will be released by Nation Books later this year. (Twitter)
-- More news from the homefront: CNN will air a special televised version of David Axelrod's podcast, "The Axe Files," on April 1, when the former Obama adviser interviews Sen. John McCain. (CNN)
-- Veteran Timesman Nick Confessore has a new role at the paper: he'll work jointly for the magazine and investigations unit, "covering a range of topics, including but not limited to wealth, power, and influence in Trump's Washington and beyond." (NYT)
--So who's pumped for International Fact-Checking Day? (Poynter) | | | Department of Corrections | | Dylan Byers emails this:
"In last night's newsletter I reported that MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had beaten Fox's Tucker Carlson in the 25-54 demo in the first quarter of 2017. In fact, she only beat him in the month of March. I also reported that her win was due to the 3/14 episode in which she claimed to have a scoop on Trump's tax returns. Maddow would still have beaten Carlson in March without that boost." | |
--Lamar Odom says he's sober and full of regret for wrecking his marriage with Khloe Kardashian.
--Netflix might have another "Stranger Things"-like addiction on its hands with "13 Reasons Why."
--The Academy Awards is sticking with its accounting firm -- despite that whole snafu over the best picture winner.
--John Legend surprised some London commuters with a mini-concert today. | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Send your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. We appreciate every email. | |  | | 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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