| | | | Wrestling is fake and sometimes just plain funny. But threats against journalists are terribly real. That's the context for the strong reactions to President Trump's Sunday morning Twitter blast against CNN. Look, Trump has been trying to delegitimize the news media for a while, but we've never seen a tweet like this one before. An old WWE skit remixed into a fantastical fight against CNN?! As the NYT's Jim Rutenberg wrote in this Monday column: "Every time you think he's reached the limit..."
When I saw the video, my mind immediately went to the impact this is going to have on security. I mentioned this on "Reliable Sources" a couple of times. Newsroom leaders generally make a point of NOT talking about security, lest it invite even more threats and problems. But I'm not giving away any secrets by saying that CNN has been on a heightened state of alert lately. I noticed that several colleagues tweeted about their own safety concerns after Trump posted the video...
-- A colleague at another network messaged me and asked: "What are companies doing to protect their employees in this environment the president is fomenting?" | | | Who actually doctored the old WWE video? How did it travel all the way to the president? Who else was involved? Did any of this happen on the taxpayer dime? Do most voters think this is "modern day presidential?" What do GOP leaders really think, and will they comment? And last but not least: will Trump try to keep this going with some followup tweets? | | | A Reddit regular seems to be taking credit for the video. An earlier version of the "smackdown" could be found on one of Reddit's pro-Trump forums four days ago. The anonymous user who posted it there "often refers to African-Americans, women, and Muslims using slurs," Quartz's Dave Gershgorn writes. "He or she attacks Black Lives Matter, Islam, feminism, liberals, and, bizarrely, the state of Maryland, and references fake news outlet Infowars." One of the person's recent posts about CNN was blatantly antisemitic. The WashPost also wrote about the user's history... | | | The NYPost is going with "ROWDY DONNY GRIPER" while the Daily News calls him "WRESTLE MANIAC!" | | Some Twitter users flagged the Trump video and reported it to Twitter, saying it violated the company's terms of service prohibiting "hateful conduct." I asked the company for comment about that almost as soon as the tweet went up. Six hours later, Twitter said it had determined that the tweet is not a violation. Jackie Wattles has a full story here...
-- Agree/disagree? Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, said Twitter shouldn't be the target of ire: "Trump's tweets give us valuable insight into his state of mind, worldview, decisions..." | | Stat for the morning shows... | | The anti-CNN video now ranks as @realDonaldTrump's second most shared tweet ever, as measured by the # of times it has been retweeted. At the time I'm sending this newsletter out, it's been RTed 256,000 times. Time mag has a list of his most popular tweets here.
-- Still his #1 tweet of all time: "Today we make America great again!" posted on the morning of election day. It has 339,000 RT's...
-- Programming note: I'll be on CNN's "New Day" discussing all of this at 6:30am ET... | | CNN: "We will keep doing our jobs. He should start doing his." | | As I said on the air this morning, this is the strongest statement I recall seeing from any news organization after one of Trump's attacks. CNN PR said this:
"It is a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters. Clearly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied when she said the President had never done so. Instead of preparing for his overseas trip, his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, dealing with North Korea and working on his health care bill, he is involved in juvenile behavior far below the dignity of his office. We will keep doing our jobs. He should start doing his." | | Solidarity from journalism advocacy groups... | | | The Committee to Protect Journalists, the RTDNA, RCFP, and other groups criticized Trump's tweet and said journalists should not be intimidated. NYT exec editor Dean Baquet also weighed in: "I think it is unseemly that the president would attack journalists for doing their jobs, and encourage such anger at the media." | | Silence from GOP leaders... | | Maybe this will change on Monday. But so far I haven't seen any comment from Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, etc...
-- HuffPost headline: "GOP Leaders Notably Silent As Trump Tweet Endorses Violence Against Journalists"
-- Reax from former Bush 43 press secretary Ari Fleischer: "I never minded a good 'fight' w the press. It's part of our democracy to disagree. But this goes too far... Some will think it's funny. I find it in poor taste.. The reason POTUS does it is because the press has made themselves so unpopular. It's a fight POTUS actually wins with much of the country." | | Serious concern from Dems... | | | Nancy Pelosi tweeted: "Violence & violent imagery to bully the press must be rejected. This #July4th, celebrate freedom of the press, guardians to our democracy." Adam Schiff pointed out that Ben Jacobs was recently body-slammed by Greg Gianforte. Putting the focus on Trump, Schiff then asked, "Where will his downward spiral take us?" | | A legal POV from Floyd Abrams | | | Famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told the WashPost: "I think it is foul. It is repulsive. But it is not illegal. The president has First Amendment rights, too. While he may abuse them sometimes, it takes more than he has done so far to move into the area of illegality." | | Is this "abuse of office?" | | I was on a 6pm hour panel with CNN legal analyst Michael Zeldin, who tied various threads together in a very interesting way: "This wasn't incitement in and of itself," he said. But he brought up four stories...
1) Trump's wiretapping tweets
2) his insinuation about "tapes"
3) Joe Scarborough's allegation about the Trump White House using the National Enquirer against him
4) the anti-CNN video...
And said: "When you bundle these things together and aggregate these tweets together, you have to look at this in legal terms as abusive -- as an abuse of office." | | Trump fans say we're overreacting to a joke | | Oliver Darcy emails: It's striking how Trump's tweet is playing in the conservative media universe. The chief talking point seems to be this: "CNN and the 'mainstream media' are melting down over a lighthearted joke. Journalists have no sense of humor! It was a tweet made in jest! Relax!"
But it's hard to imagine these very same actors on the right responding with such a sentiment if the tables were turned around. Imagine if Obama had tweeted a video showing him body slam a person with the Fox News logo superimposed over him. I don't think the conservative media would find it very amusing. They'd likely decry it as unpresidential and rightly point it out as an effort to delegitimize critical voices. But when Trump does it, these individuals mock the press. It's a shame they don't hold their allies to the standard they demanded of Obama... | | To Oliver's point, Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Desiderio of The Daily Beast spoke with "three senior Trump administration officials" on Sunday, and when granted anonymity they said:
-- "I thought it was funny."
-- "The president fights back. It's rich that some of you people [in the media] can never take a joke."
-- "Pure Trump."
Key graf from the story: "When asked if they were concerned that these kinds of messages Trump sends could encourage actual physical violence against journalists, all officials ignored the follow-up questions..." | | | Sean Spicer, speaking on June 24, reacting to Johnny Depp's outrageous assassination reference: "The president's made it clear that we should denounce violence in all of its forms." | | "There's an important distinction to draw between bad stories or crappy coverage, and the right that citizens have to argue about that and complain about that, and trying to weaponize distrust..."
--GOP senator Ben Sasse speaking with Jake Tapper on Sunday's "SOTU..." | | "It's not just anti-CNN..." | | | Carl Bernstein was up first on Sunday's "Reliable Sources." When I asked him to react to Trump's video, he said, "It's not just anti-CNN. It's anti-freedom of the press. It's anti-freedom of speech." He said "I think it also goes to the question" being asked by military officials and lawmakers "about the stability of the president of the United States." The president's tweets, Bernstein said, "are an index of his state of mind, visually. It's very disturbing. There's nothing like light-hearted about it whatsoever..." | | Notes and quotes from Sunday's show | | -- Conservative talk radio host Ben Ferguson said he initially laughed at the video. Trump, he said, feels like some media figures "have made it their personal mission and their job to destroy this president..."
-- Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik: "I think the most dangerous thing is to say, oh, have a sense of humor, let's just laugh at it." He said "part of the problem with social media is that people don't think about what they say. And they put out hateful, nasty stuff like this." Here's Zurawik's recap of the discussion... | | One subtext of Sunday's "Reliable" was whether this video was a wasteful "distraction" from bigger stories and issues. Poynter's Kelly McBride said journalists should "focus on the stories that need our attention. What's going on with the health care act? What's going on with our taxes? What's going on with trade?" Etc...
The counterpoint is that a presidential push to delegitimize the media is a huge story. That's what NYMag's Olivia Nuzzi said later in the hour -- the video is a "little bit silly, but it's also potentially really damaging. And I think we need to take it very seriously..." | | | CNN senior W.H. correspondent Jim Acosta called in to Fredericka Whitfield's Sunday afternoon newscast. He said: "We have to stand up to this. We have to confront this and say that it's wrong." The bottom line, Acosta said, is that "he's trying to silence us." | | "I'm the president, and they're not" | | The video was not Trump's only slam against the fourth estate over the weekend. On Saturday morning he posted some conspiratorial tweets about MSNBC and CNN. And then, at an event honoring veterans on Saturday night, he said this:
"The fake media is trying to silence us. But we will not let them, because the people know the truth. The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House. But I'm president, and they're not." | | -- After playing that sound bite, I asked this question on Sunday's "Reliable:" "Is this president trying to impersonate Hugo Chavez, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin? Because this is exactly the kind of language that leaders use when they're trying to undermine the press." I added: "Of course, the American press is much more free than reporters in places like Russia and Turkey and Venezuela. On this Independence Day weekend, that's something we should all be celebrating..."
-- A worthwhile tweetstorm: the WashPost's Alex Horton has some thoughts about why on why Trump bashes the media in front of crowds of vets... | | Eroding America's "moral high ground" | | | Oliver Darcy emails: Trump's tweet, and his larger war on the media, erodes America's moral high ground to denounce attacks that journalists face while working in less-than-ideal conditions around the world. It seems a bit more difficult for the U.S. to criticize oppressive governments for their treatment of reporters when the sitting president is tweeting videos of himself metaphorically body slamming an organization like CNN... | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- National Review's Kevin Williamson "that "of course Trump needs the media," "like a junkie needs his junk..."
-- Jack Shafer says "Trump shares a physical aesthetic with the readers of the National Enquirer, that work of parajournalism that has long covered for him..."
-- From Friday: Hadas Gold reports that "more conservative outlets" are getting "official seats" in the White House briefing room, including Newsmax, One America News (sharing its spot with the BBC) and the Daily Mail... | | Donors rewarding Trump's media rants? | | | From Sunday's "Inside Politics:" "CNN's Sara Murray explored the connection between the 'Fake News' tweets and speeches and Trump's campaign coffers. Donors 'have it made clear they're willing to write big checks to his outside group to take on his number one enemy, the media -- and then at the fundraiser this week the crowd went wild when Trump was taking his swipes at CNN. They raised $10 million at that event,' Murray said..." | | A shocker in Maureen Dowd's column | | Maureen Dowd dropped this bombshell in her Sunday NYT column:
"I gave Trump the benefit of the doubt after his comment on Megyn Kelly about 'blood coming out of her wherever' when he claimed he meant her nose. But later, a longtime Trump associate told me that Trump had practiced that line before he said it on CNN and that it was meant to evoke an image of Kelly as hormonal..." | | "We need to be having more transparency" | | | CNN's Lindsey Ellefson has a recap of our "Reliable Sources" discussion about new limits on press access. "I hope it's not the new normal. I think we need an opportunity to question the White House officials on the record, on camera, to hold them accountable," Olivia Nuzzi said... | | By Howard Cohen:
-- MSNBC is testing out a new series for Richard Engel on Friday nights...
-- Some privacy concerns are surfacing with respect to Snapchat's new maps feature...
-- A Facebook drone that could eventually provide internet access across the globe has completed its first test flight... | | Three ways to catch up on Sunday's show | | Weekend box office report | | | "Once again sequel fatigue appears to be having an impact as estimates have Despicable Me 3 coming in about $10 million shy of the opening weekend for Despicable Me 2 after a larger than anticipated dip on Saturday," BoxOfficeMojo's Brad Brevet reports. "That said, the film easily secured the weekend top spot in the domestic, international and worldwide marketplaces, leading the charge over the first three days of this long, five-day Fourth of July holiday weekend. Behind it, Sony's Baby Driver out-performed the studio's expectations while WB's R-rated comedy The House failed to generate much heat." Read more... | | | 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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