| | | | Discovery and Scripps in deal talks | | Animal Planet, HGTV, Food Network, and TLC under one roof? Dana Mattioli and Amol Sharma's WSJ scoop: Discovery Communications "is in talks to combine with" Scripps Networks. The CEOs of the two companies, David Zaslav and Ken Lowe, go way back. They both know their companies would benefit from having muscle in negotiations.
"Terms of the deal talks couldn't be learned," the WSJ says. "Discovery Communications is worth about $15 billion, including its preferred stocks, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Scripps has an $8.8 billion market valuation. There is no guarantee that the two sides will reach a deal. It is also possible that another bidder for Scripps could emerge..."
-- Reuters' Jessica Toonkel says "Viacom also has held talks to acquire Scripps." No-comments all around...
-- History: Discovery and Scripps previously talked about a merger in 2014. And Scripps talked with AT&T in 2016 before AT&T struck the deal to acquire Time Warner... | | Trump PAC promotes "Fight the Fake News" bumper stickers | | Another outrageous example of President Trump's attacks against the media:
"The Fake News Media is the real opposition," claims a new fund-raising email from one of Trump's joint fundraising committees. The pitch letter asks for just $1 and offers donors this bumper sticker as a gift... | | People's cover story about the Trump family | | | The next issue of People promises details about the family's "SECRETS & LIES." The magazine will land on newsstands in NY and LA on Wednesday, but the story has been posted early so readers of this newsletter can check it out... In it, Sandra Sobieraj Westfall quotes a source saying Donald Trump Jr. is "miserable" and "can't wait for these four years to be over..." | | Misdirection about another Trump-Putin meeting? | | Ian Bremmer lobbed a big scoop onto Charlie Rose's table on Monday night: He shared what sources had told him about a second meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20. The previously undisclosed meeting happened during a world leaders dinner. Bremmer's revelation didn't get a lot of pickup until Tuesday afternoon. But it became a big story pretty quickly after reporters started asking the W.H. for comment. Some W.H. sources said the meeting lasted nearly an hour, but the administration's official statement sorta disputed that, saying it was "brief." Details here...
-- More: Trump's two tweets about this, claiming the "fake news" was covering the meeting dishonestly, was "classic Trump misdirection," CNN's Chris Cillizza tweeted. "He's arguing something no one is alleging. Everyone knows meeting happened. No one knew he talked to Putin..."
-- Bremmer, speaking on Rachel Maddow's show Tuesday night, said he was "quite surprised that there was no readout on it, whatsoever, after the meeting happened..." | | Pro-Trump media blames Congress | | | Tom Kludt's take: "Trump could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and pro-Trump media would blame the Congressional GOP." Here's his look at how outlets like Breitbart covered the GOP health care collapse... | | | -- @DylanByers: "It was real close, but @realDonaldTrump made it from 'I alone can fix it' to 'I'm not going to own it' in less than a year…." | | Trouble in Trump paradise? | | 🚨🚨🚨 Oliver Darcy says this deserves some Drudge sirens: The Drudge Report, which has provided Trump with more than favorable coverage since he entered the political arena, featured a story quite critical of the president Tuesday night. The banner story, accompanied with a photo of Obama, read, "LIVING EASY." It linked to an LA Times story headlined, "Trump set out to uproot Obama's legacy. So far, that's failed." The article by David Lauter noted that six months into his presidency, Trump has "little to show" for dismantling Obama's achievements, such as Obamacare...
-- Oliver adds: Why it's important: I've said for a while that it's unlikely Trump will lose his base if his allies in conservative media keep spinning for him. (Traditional media simply isn't effective at penetrating the media universe these voters live in.) But if individuals like Sean Hannity and outlets like the Drudge Report call him out for failure to deliver on key campaign promises, he could be in trouble... | | Murdoch trying to send Trump a message? | | Rupert Murdoch's papers have run a series of critical editorials and stories about Trump lately, spurring speculation among observers that Murdoch is trying to get through to the president. Is he trying to send Trump a message? Here's my story all about it...
-- 🔌: I'll be talking about all this on "CNN Tonight" at 11pm ET... | | | Move over, CNN and MSNBC's fact-checking chyrons. This Fox News banner got a lot of Twitter tongues wagging on Tuesday: "TRUMP: EVENTUALLY WE WILL GET SOMETHING DONE." | | | Mediaite and Bustle wrote up some of the reactions... | | Congrats, Brooke and Chris! | | CNN afternoon anchor Brooke Baldwin went away to Hawaii with her boyfriend James Fletcher last week... and came home with an engagement ring. She Instagrammed: "Turns out we went to Hawaii to celebrate more than just my birthday... @jamesfletchernyc asked me to marry him! And I said YES! ❤️🥂🌺🌸"
Fletcher popped the question on Baldwin's birthday while they were watching the sun set at Hanalei Bay on the island of Kauai. Well done, sir... | | Coming out from OUT Magazine on Wednesday... | | | Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Shepard Smith, Lydia Polgreen, Don Lemon, and Robin Roberts are on OUT Magazine's Power 50 list... coming online Wednesday morning... the annual list "recognizes those individuals who are working to make a positive impact on LGBTQ culture, beyond simply being at the pinnacle of their field/professions..." | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Recommended: this explainer by Perry Bacon Jr. about when to trust news reports using unnamed sources... (FiveThirtyEight)
-- Looking ahead to Thursday: Brian Steinberg has a preview of how the TV networks are planning to cover O.J. Simpson's parole hearing. Two words: special reports... (Variety)
-- Mike Allen hears that Bob Woodward and Robert Redford are teaming up to make a movie (or documentary?) about Watergate... (Axios)
-- The Bloomberg News style guide, aka "The Bloomberg Way," has been refreshed... this update focuses on data and multi-platform journalism... (Poynter)
-- Applications are open for the Knight Visiting Nieman Fellowship! | | Happy pub day to Joshua Green... | | The Bloomberg Businessweek reporter's book about Steve Bannon and Donald Trump -- "Devil's Bargain" -- hit stores on Tuesday. And it also hit #1 on Amazon's best selling books list.
He'll be on "New Day" Wednesday AM. Speaking of "New Day" and speaking of new books... | | CNN and Fox mingling at Alisyn Camerota's book party | | "New Day" co-anchor Alisyn Camerota's debut novel, "Amanda Wakes Up," will come out this time next week. CNN president Jeff Zucker feted her at a NYC book party Tuesday night. Some of her former Fox colleagues were there, along with many CNNers: Chris Cuomo, Shep Smith, Poppy Harlow, Brian Kilmeade, Christine Romans, Dave Briggs, Janice Dean, Margaret Hoover, John Avlon, Kate Bolduan, Dan Abrams, Rick Leventhal, Rick Davis, Javi Morgado, Izzy Povich, Andrew Morse, Michael Bass, Joy Behar, Camerota's husband Tim Lewis, and many more...
Plug: Camerota will join me on this Sunday's "Reliable Sources..." | | Vanity Fair has new scuttlebutt about Trump, AT&T and CNN | | Was there a connection between President Trump's June 22 economic council meeting, attended by AT&T C.E.O. Randall Stephenson, and Trump's subsequent remarks about CNN? That's what Sarah Ellison implies -- but doesn't say explicitly -- in this new Vanity Fair story about CNN.
Context: The Trump administration is reviewing AT&T's proposed takeover of Time Warner, including CNN, right now. So any conversations between Stephenson and Trump are newsworthy.
Ellison's story notes that Trump tweeted about unspecified "management changes" at CNN a few days after Stephenson visited the White House. Trump also said at a private fundraiser that he heard CNN president Jeff Zucker is "going to resign at some point pretty soon."
Ellison quotes an anonymous CNN employee saying "I think there's a real chance that Zucker is being forced out," the implication being that it would be done to appease Trump and ensure the deal gets approved... | | | So have Trump and Stephenson talked? Here's what Ellison reported: "Trump has complained about Zucker and CNN in front of Stephenson, but the two have never had a conversation about the Time Warner deal, Zucker, or CNN, according to a person familiar with the interactions between Stephenson and Trump. This person also added that most anyone who has been in a room with the president has heard him complain about CNN and Zucker, and Stephenson is no exception. An AT&T spokesman told me that 'Randall Stephenson and President Trump have never discussed our acquisition of Time Warner, CNN, or Jeff Zucker.'" | | "David — please stop reaching out to me. Thank you" | | David Fahrenthold and Rob Kuznia's latest story is about how Trump National Golf Course Los Angeles has fallen on hard times. The story includes this instant-classic graf:
"The Washington Post reached out to four officials at the Trump Organization with questions about the California course. Just one responded. 'David — please stop reaching out to me. Thank you,' Eric Trump, the president's son, wrote in an email message." | | Twenty straight days of off-camera briefings | | | Another afternoon, another W.H. briefing where television cameras were forbidden. The last ON-camera briefing was on June 29, per CNN's Kaitlan Collins... | | Hannity calls Shep Smith "so anti-Trump" | | Oliver Darcy emails: On his radio show Monday, Fox News opinion host Sean Hannity said Fox News anchor Shepard Smith is "so anti-Trump." Hannity referenced what he characterized as Smith's "rant" last week in which the news anchor said the Trump White House has put out "lie after lie after lie." On Tuesday afternoon, Smith responded, telling Mediaite, "Sometimes facts are displeasing. Journalists report them without fear or favor."
The back-and-forth highlights the deepening divide at Fox between the network's news operation and its opinion hosts. Read Oliver's full story here...
-- Brian Lowry adds: The real issue is that Roger Ailes is no longer around to police those schisms and if not keep the peace, ensure everyone maintains the appearance of comity. Ailes prided himself on a lot of things, but one was an ability to prevent his big names from publicly sniping at each other... | | -- CNNTech's Kaya Yurieff reports: Snapchat's latest update "makes it easier to record consecutive videos... up to six consecutive, 10-second video Snaps at once... previously, users were limited to recording one 10-second video at a time..."
-- Matt Thompson, deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com, is becoming exec editor "overseeing all cross-platform projects..." and staff writer Adrienne LaFrance is the new editor of TheAtlantic.com... (Atlantic)
-- World Policy Journal editor Christopher Shay is hopping to The Nation... he'll be a senior editor there... (Twitter)
-- Correction: Last night I misspelled Karenna Gore's first name. D'oh! Thanks to the eagle-eyed newsletter readers who caught this and emailed me... | | Hadas Gold's scoop: "An executive at local broadcast TV giant Sinclair defended the company and lashed out against what he called 'biased' news organizations that have 'an agenda to destroy our reputation' in an internal memo obtained by Politico." Here's a PDF of the entire five-page memo...
-- Spotted at the W.H. on Tuesday: White House operative turned Sinclair analyst Boris Ephsteyn...
-- On last Sunday's "Reliable Sources," David Zurawik criticized Sinclair's conservative bent and said Ephsteyn's Trump booster segments are "close to classic propaganda..."
-- FYI: Five days in advance of the segment, we reached out to Sinclair and asked for an executive or spokesperson to come on the show. Sinclair declined... | | "One of the things that concerns me is that while we are focused appropriately on the Russia investigation -- what are we not seeing?"
--NBC's Andrea Mitchell in this engrossing interview with WWD's Alexandra Steigrad... | | Howard Cohen emails: Netflix stock hit another record high on Tuesday, post-Q2 earnings, as investors welcomed its strategy of spending cash and raising debt to focus on content acquisition and international growth.
-- Quoting Variety's Todd Spangler: "Netflix stock closed at a record high of $183.60 per share, up 13.5%, having jumped 44% since the beginning of 2017. That gives it a market capitalization of $79.4 billion, making Netflix now more valuable than Time Warner (which has a market cap of about $76.4 billion)..." | | Overwhelmingly positive reviews for "Dunkirk" | | Brian Lowry emails: "Dunkirk" hasn't even premiered yet, but its extremely positive reviews (including mine, still to come) are already prompting awards chatter. What's interesting about that -- and could bolster the case for director Christopher Nolan -- is that this really is one of those movies where from a marketing standpoint the director is really the "star" and primary draw, with very little being said about the cast...
-- Right now on Rotten Tomatoes: 95% positive reviews... | | Parents of alleged R. Kelly "victim" speak out | | | Lisa Respers France emails: The parents of a young woman they allege has fallen under the influence of Grammy-award winning singer R. Kelly are speaking out. Timothy and Jonjelyn Savage told me they believe their 21-year-old daughter Joycelyn was "coached" during a video interview with TMZ in which she said she's happy and not being held against her will. This all comes on the heels of an explosive BuzzFeed story claiming Kelly has six women under his control in a "cult," accusations he denies. Read more... | | | More from Lisa: Ed Sheeran temporarily quit Twitter after his "Game of Thrones" cameo was scorned... | | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Email us... we're at reliablesources@cnn.com... we appreciate every email. | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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