| | | | | Good evening, folks. Tom Kludt here, in for Brian Stelter. Let's get to it. | | To our subscribers who are in Sun Valley this week: how's the conference going? High of 88 and tons of sun on Thursday.
For our subscribers who are not there, Dylan Byers emails:
The annual Allen & Co. conference is the week when media execs, tech entrepreneurs, hedge fund billionaires, sports owners and all their kids convene in Idaho to relax and converse (in private) about big ideas -- and maybe strike a merger or acquisition on the side.
The big talk this week is the presence of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on the guest list. With kids in tow, the pair left DC amid the email scandal and arrived in Sun Valley on Wednesday afternoon.
This has annoyed at least a few folks back at the White House, who chafe at the way Jared and Ivanka leave town in times of crisis. Last April, the pair were spotted in ski gear in Whistler while the president and his aides were embroiled in leaks and infighting.
Their trip this week has also raised eyebrows in Sun Valley, where some of the discussions on the first day had a distinctly anti-Trump tone... | | | Tim Cook, Eddy Cue, Jeff Bewkes, Lachlan Murdoch, Sheryl Sandberg, Richard Plepler, Lowell McAdam, Ben Sherwood, David Zaslav, Barry Diller, Mark Pincus, Bryan Lourd, Shari Redstone, Robert Kraft, Michael Eisner, Ron Meyer, Stacey Bendet, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Tsujihara, Robert Thomson, Tim Armstrong, Michael Lynton, Satya Nadella, Evan Spiegel, JD Vance... | | | Dylan adds: The big absence this year is Disney chief Bob Iger, who is usually in attendance. Why the no show? He had the ESPYs on Wednesday night -- he personally invited Michelle Obama to present an award -- and the D23 Convention at Disneyland later this week... | | Emmy noms on Thursday morning! | | Brian Lowry emails: Primetime Emmy nominations will be announced Thursday at 11:30am ET, and "This is Us" could become the first broadcast drama to earn a best-series nomination since "The Good Wife" did it in 2011. But the NBC show would also offer some good news to the Television Academy and this year's host network, CBS, given the abundance of low-rated contenders.
Read Lowry's full preview here. You can watch the nominations announcement event on Emmys.com... | | Cooper to Gorka: "I'm just going to ignore the insults..." | | Brian Stelter emails from his mini-vacation: Anderson Cooper's handling of Trump W.H. deputy assistant Seb Gorka was really remarkable. Gorka repeatedly got combative during Wednesday night's interview... as The Daily Beast's Matt Wilstein recapped here... Gorka rejected the very idea that the White House is in the midst of a "crisis" and said it's "just fake news," even though his colleagues have used words like "paralyzed" to describe the state of dysfunction.
"I'm just going to ignore the insults, because I don't think it gets us anywhere," Cooper calmly said...
Later on, Gorka brought up a popular right-wing talking point about CNN's ratings, and even brought up time slot competitor Tucker Carlson. Cooper responded thusly: "I think it's funny that you have enough time at the White House, in which you are apparently so busy, that you sit around and read Nielsen numbers." Mediaite's Joseph A. Wulfsohn has the back-and-forth here... | | TRUMP SITS DOWN WITH PAT ROBERTSON... | | On May 11, two days after his shock firing of James Comey, President Trump entered the lion's den. That night, America watched Trump take a grilling from Lester Holt, who won praise for the interview. It was Holt's line of questioning, you'll recall, that prompted the president to admit that he was prepared to sack Comey regardless of recommendations from the attorney general and deputy attorney general -- contradicting White House surrogates.
Then, for two months, Trump didn't give any interviews outside the friendly confines of Fox News.
But that changed on Wednesday. He gave an interview to Steve Holland of Reuters and sat down with televangelist Pat Robertson, who recently called Trump "God's man for this job."
The Robertson interview came first. It will air on Thursday. Here's my full story...
-- In a preview clip, Robertson asked Trump about his recent meeting with Vladimir Putin. Other excerpts included more questions about the G20 and the GOP effort to overhaul healthcare... | | Trump tells Reuters: "I think many people would have held that meeting" | | | There are lots and lots of newsy quotes from the Reuters interview. In one of the excerpts, Trump said that he had no idea about the meeting between his son and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Nor did the president fault the younger Trump for taking the meeting: "I think many people would have held that meeting..." | | Some #RealTalk from Stelter | | On Wednesday morning President Trump "twice retweeted Fox News; denied reporting from other outlets about White House dysfunction; and falsely claimed that journalists routinely make up sources out of thin air." Brian Stelter's story provides some necessary, sober analysis:
"Trump's assertion that anonymous sources are 'often' times 'made up' is false -- part of his ongoing effort to demean and undermine the national news media. Newsrooms have rigorous editorial policies governing the use of anonymous sources in stories. Reporters have to disclose information about their sources to their editors. On the rare occasions when the sourcing of a story is called into question, news outlets conduct investigations...
Trump has a questionable track record when it comes to this subject. He reportedly pretended to be someone else, a publicist named John Barron, to feed favorable stories about himself to the New York tabloids in the 1980s. In the early 2010s, he claimed to have an 'extremely credible source' providing him damaging information about President Obama. At the time, Trump was championing the 'birther' movement, sowing doubt about Obama's citizenship. He never provided any proof of the source's claims, or of the source's existence or credibility." Read Brian's whole piece here... | | Of all weeks for the cameras to be off... | | The W.H. press briefing, meanwhile, was off camera again on Wednesday, for the third day in a row. More than a few critics have suggested that the press restrictions are a form of retaliation against journalists. But in a week when the press briefing would have drawn a rapt audience, it's hard not to see the decision as strategic.
Rather than see clips of Sarah Huckabee Sanders parrying questions on Donald Jr.'s emails, networks were left with nothing but bland audio. The absence of cameras unquestionably limited the public's exposure to the briefing and that was, hands down, to the White House's benefit... | | Brian Stelter adds: The president said on Twitter that he has "very little time for watching T.V." Was he reacting to a segment on TV? Both CNN and MSNBC talked about Trump's TV news affinity in the minutes before the tweet popped up. CNN anchor John Berman pointed out that "we were talking about this subject (ON TV) just before the tweet."
Tip of the hat to Politico's Tara Palmeri and Josh Dawsey -- they reported on Tuesday night that "the president is using his relatively light schedule to watch TV and fume about the latest scandal." The report was picked up by some of the morning shows on Wednesday. Palmeri will join me on Sunday's "Reliable Sources..." | | Pastoral guidance for the prez | | Robertson's Wednesday morning interview capped what's been something of a "Holy Week" at the White House. On Monday, Trump welcomed a group of evangelical leaders to the Oval Office for a prayer session -- and the photos to emerge from the gathering were arresting, to say the least. One picture spent much of the afternoon splashed across the Drudge Report's homepage under the banner, "Prayers For Trump."
Trump isn't the first president to seek spiritual consultation at a moment of crisis, of course. Recall Bill Clinton in 1998, as the Lewinsky scandal was swirling, turning to the Rev. Jesse Jackson for guidance. And then later that year, on the morning that Congress was due to release the Starr Report to the public, Clinton told religious leaders that he had "sinned" and "repented..." | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman
-- Sean Hannity said he couldn't think of any more questions to ask Donald Trump Jr. Well worry not, Sean! Ruth Marcus has got you covered... (WashPost)
-- Three years after he first wrote that "The Internet is F*#%ed," Nilay Patel just came out with an update... (The Verge)
-- This is what happens when Mark Zuckerberg, who really wants you to know that he's not running for president, shows up at random places in the American heartland... (WSJ)
-- 👀 Kellyanne Conway sharing a CNNMoney story in a tweet... (Twitter) | | New show in development for Tamron Hall | | | Ex-"Today" show cast member Tamron Hall is co-creating a new daytime talk show with Weinstein TV. According to The Wrap, the show will "blend current events, human-interest stories and in-depth interviews with celebrities and other influencers..." | | An inconvenient half-truth? | | Oliver Darcy emails: Sometimes a story fits into a narrative. Other times, it has to be forced into one. The latter seemed to be the case when some reporters and publications attributed the breaking off of a giant iceberg from Antarctica to global warming. In reality, the truth was much more nuanced. Professor Adrian Luckman, the lead investigator of the group monitoring the break in the Larsen C ice shelf, plainly said, "We have no evidence to link this directly to climate change, and no reason to believe that it would not have happened without the extra warming that human activity has caused." He added that it was "part of the normal behavior of ice shelves" and "what makes this unusual is the size" of the particular iceberg in question. You can read CNN's story with more info here...
That said, there was at least some debate. A University of California researcher told the Washington Post he was convinced climate change played a role. But this wasn't as cut and dried of an example as some reporters and publications made it out to be. And journalists and news organizations should be careful not to fall into the trap of forcing stories to fit into desired narratives. | | Listen to any given Trump speech, and his faceless friend "Jim" is liable to make a cameo. The AP did a deep dive on the international man of mystery:
"Whether Jim exists is unclear. Trump has never given his last name. The White House has not responded to a request for comment about who Jim is or whether he will be on the trip. Trump repeatedly talked about the enigmatic Jim while on the campaign trail, but his friend didn't receive widespread attention until Trump became president." Read the rest here... | | Stand back: Grammar police are here | | Frank Pallotta emails: Writing and grammar can be a confusing thing, which is why some web commenters pulled no punches over the New Yorker's "Donald Trump, Jr.,'s Love for Russian Dirt." The New Yorker explained that the style is "pretty straightforward" and a – ahem – "collision of conventions."
"With 'Jr.' occurring in the middle of a line, where else is the possessive indicator supposed to go?" the magazine wrote. It's a good question, but as far as I'm concerned, Frank Pallotta, Jr.,'s understanding of New Yorker writing style confuses Frank Pallotta, Jr., yet again... | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- THR's in-depth look: "Behind the scenes at 'Fox & Friends,' America's most influential morning show (seriously)" (THR)
-- A great roundup of thoughts by text journalists on what happens when the media world "pivots to video..." (Digiday)
--Dana Canedy is the new administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. Canedy, a Pulitzer winner herself, is succeeding Mike Pride... (Poynter) | | By Lisa Respers France:
-- "America's Got Talent" honored a contestant who died before his audition could air. Brandon Rogers was a 29-year-old physician and viral singing sensation who was killed last month in a car crash.
-- David Letterman is tired of folks "whining" about President Trump's bad behavior and would like to see some action. The former late night host said someone needs to "figure out a way to take him aside and put him in a home."
--Madonna was surrounded by her children when she opened a pediatric medical center in their homeland of Malawi.
--The producer for "Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica" says the MTV reality show was totally real. That means Jessica Simpson really wasn't sure if Chicken of the Sea was tuna or chicken.
--There's at least one "Bachelorette" wedding fans probably won't be seeing aired on television. | | Brian Lowry emails his review of this week's big blockbuster: "War For the Planet of the Apes" brings this revisited trilogy to a satisfying conclusion, supporting star Andy Serkis' bid to gain greater recognition for motion-capture performances, and representing what's easily the most highly evolved sequel of the summer. Read Brian's review here...
-- Bonus 'Apes' content: Serkis was also on Stephen Colbert's "Late Show" on Tuesday, reading Trump tweets as Gollum from "Lord of the Rings." The show posted its third-best rating of the season with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski as the featured guests. The Hollywood Reporter has more... | | Meryl's Obama-emblazoned bag | | | Megan Thomas emails: Meryl Streep carries her love for the Obamas. She was spotted with an Obama-emblazoned bag while leaving her trailer on the set of the upcoming Spielberg-directed film "The Papers." In the film, she plays the former publisher of the Washington Post, Katherine Graham... | | ICYMI: Late night edition | | | Maybe you were glued to cable news -- or maybe you just need a breather from the tube! Either way, Frank Pallotta has you covered. Read his round-up of last night's best zingers about Donald Trump Jr. from the likes of Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah. | | | 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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