| | | | AT&T says it will not sell CNN | | AT&T exec John Stankey is in line to oversee Time Warner once the deal gets OKed by DC. Stankey is a mystery man to Time Warner staffers, so this interview with THR's Kim Masters is a big deal. It's his first interview since being appointed CEO-in-waiting.
Key grafs from the story:
-- "Despite widespread speculation to the contrary, AT&T will not sell CNN after its acquisition of parent Time Warner closes..." Stankey said AT&T wants news in its portfolio: "It would be a strategically missed opportunity if we weren't in that business..."
-- "There will be no changes with respect to CNN's editorial independence. 'You can't run a national news organization with that importance to our society without maintaining its editorial independence,' he says..."
-- Re: Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara's future, which may have been the reason THR was calling in the first place: "Categorically to the extent that Kevin is interested in continuing to work with us, we'd love to have him here. He's a talented guy." Here's the full story... | | Lots of other media biz news today... | | | Better-than-expected profit and revenue at CBS... Les Moonves says he is seeing a "huge opportunity for CBS to go direct to consumer on a much bigger scale worldwide..." FX is testing a commercial-free channel for Comcast customers... Comcast says it's "providing networks with a sand box to experiment and test what it means to be a TV network in 2017..." For more, including Netflix's acquisition news, scroll down... | | Stunning #'s about the White House's credibility crisis | | One of the headlines from CNN's brand new poll conducted by SSRS:
Do you trust most of what you hear from the White House?
Yes: 24%. No: 73%.
CNN.com's headline right now: "Trump has a real trust issue." Here's Jennifer Agiesta's full story about all the poll results...
>> Emma Lacey-Bordeaux made a great point on Twitter: This data about widespread mistrust "should worry more than just Trump administration. Will the trust rebound with a different person in the White House?" | | Views about Trump's Twitter usage | | | If you're like me and you've ever replied or RTed @realDonaldTrump, you're a distinct minority. The CNN poll finds only 10% of Americans have ever done so. But many non-tweeters are critical of Trump's habit. "A majority (52%) say his tweets are not an effective way for him to share his views on important issues... 71% that they are a risky way for a president to communicate..." Details here... | | 13 @realDonaldTrump tweets on Monday... | | | I get it, Mr. President. I have a really hard time giving up on Twitter when I'm on vacation, too. Even when I delete the app from my phone, I still peek at Twitter.com sometimes. Does the First Lady ever catch you tweeting? Jamie will never let me forget the time she caught me tweeting on our honeymoon... | | ...That the president was stuck inside on a rainy day, so he was watching a lot of TV news and reacting to what he was seeing, his tweets about watching Richard Blumenthal's interview on CNN's "New Day" being the clearest example.
CNN's Tal Kopan wondered aloud: "Do you think Trump *knows* it's a slow news day and so everyone will breathlessly discuss his tweets? Because I'm pretty sure it's a no-lose situation for him. Even when the coverage is to 'correct' the tweet, it helps his cause." A big part of me agrees with Tal, but we still have to fact-check... | | Mr. Trump, the sanctions have been a big story | | | CNN's Danielle Wiener-Bronner writes: "President Trump says the media is ignoring the U.N.'s sanctions against North Korea. He's wrong." Here's the proof of all the U.N. news coverage... Gotta give props to Fox's Dana Perino here, she pointed out on "The Five" that CNN was covering the sanctions at the exact moment Trump tweeted his complaint... | | These false tweets remind me of something Jeff Greenfield said... | | | Jeff Greenfield on Sunday's "Reliable Sources:" "It is possible that as far as the president himself is concerned, he's never lying, and that's scary." Never lying? "In the sense that he believes that because he has said something or thinks something, it is by definition true. I'd much rather have a president who knew he was disassembling than one whose distortion of reality is so great that he thinks that he got phone calls that he didn't get, that he counted crowds that weren't there." | | Trump totally wrong about the NYT | | | In the A.M. he repeated one of his favorite falsehoods... that the NYT "apologized" for predicting he would lose the election. In the afternoon he slammed the paper again: "How much longer will the failing nytimes, with its big losses and massive unfunded liability (and non-existent sources), remain in business?" | | NYT responds with facts -- and says "our stock is up nearly 50%" | | The NYT went there in a statement on Monday evening: "We are extremely proud of our coverage. We believe the President is responding to our story from Sunday about the Republican shadow campaign for 2020. We stand by that story, which was thoroughly reported by journalists who spoke with over 75 Republicans at every level of the party."
The second graf took on Trump's "big losses" claim: "The facts matter. The New York Times Company is a thriving business with the largest digital subscriber base of any news organization. We just reported 3.3m paid subscriptions, our most ever, and growing profit, income, and revenues. Our stock is up nearly 50% this year."
Speaking of the NYT... | | Scientists are evidently worried the Trump administration won't give the 👍🏼 to release this federal climate change report. So... it seems like someone "released" it to the NYT. This is a big scoop by Lisa Friedman of the Times, sure to be on Tuesday's Page One... she quotes Princeton prof Michael Oppenheimer saying "this is the first case in which an analysis of climate change of this scope has come up in the Trump administration, and scientists will be watching very carefully to see how they handle it..."
>> The paper has published the draft report so everyone can read it...
>> A related leak: The Guardian obtained emails from inside "a USDA unit that oversees farmers' land conservation," showing how some staff "have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work." Instead: "Weather extremes." | | | 🔌: I'll be on CNN's "New Day" talking about all this with Bill Carter at 6:30am ET Tuesday... | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- The HBO hackers are promoting a link to a cache of HBO internal documents, including a month's worth of emails from an exec's inbox and a summary of an upcoming "GoT" episode... (THR)
-- AT&T's DirecTV Now has struck a carriage deal with CBS... (Multichannel)
-- Highly recommended: Mic publisher Cory Haik, writing for Recode, says "We're in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism It's more than a pivot to video -- it's an evolution of text..." (Recode) | | | -- @realDonaldTrump retweeted a fan and said "Thank you Nicole!" on Saturday. "Here's the problem: There is no evidence the Twitter feed belongs to someone named Nicole Mincey. And the account, according to experts, bears a lot of signs of a Russia-backed disinformation campaign," the WashPost's Abby Phillip reports... | | Suspended Fox host Eric Bolling tweeted Monday: "Overwhelmed by all the support I have received. Thank you I look forward to clearing my name asap." Lisa Boothe filled in for him on "Fox News Specialists" Monday evening. Here's my story noting that both Bolling and Fox Biz host Charles Payne remain on the sidelines...
-- The Daily Beast's Andrew Kirell says Bolling "has a history of saying piggish things on-air..." | | Netflix's first-ever acquisition | | The headline in Barrons: "Netflix waited 20 years to make this move."
"On Monday, the streaming service announced its first-ever acquisition: Comic book publisher Millarworld," Danielle Wiener-Bronner reports. "In a statement, Netflix said that it will will develop new films, series and shows with Millarworld, and will also draw on Millarworld's existing portfolio..." | | What will Netflix acquire next? | | I asked BTIG Research analyst Rich Greenfield... he said he expects more acquisitions of "globally exploitable" intellectual property, for example, kids content:
1) "Netflix doesn't have balance sheet for large acquisitions."
2) "Likely to focus on assets they can leverage globally that are not country or language specific -- comic books are a great example."
3) "Natural to want to continue moving up the content food chain from other people's old IP to others' new IP to owning the IP to build content off directly." | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- New podcast alert: NPR is launching "Rough Translation," hosted by international correspondent Gregory Warnes, exploring "how ideas we talk about in the US are being discussed somewhere else in the world..." (NPR)
-- BuzzFeed News is creating a morning show... it will stream live on Twitter from 8 til 9am ET... and it will be sponsored by Wendy's... (Poynter)
-- NYC media startup Fatherly, a site catering to millennial dads, just raised $4 million in venture funding... (Fortune) | | Remembering Richard O'Brien | | | "Richard O'Brien, the creative director whose pioneering work helped build Fox News into America's most watched and most trusted cable news channel, died over the weekend," Fox reports. O'Brien was a Fox News original and only left the channel in the past year. "He literally changed the look of TV on this network and our competitors changed to try and catch up," anchor Jon Scott said on the air Monday morning... | | | For the record, part three | | | By Howard Cohen:
-- By next year, CBS plans to expand CBS All Access to Canada and other international markets... (Variety)
-- Eros International, the Indian movie production and distribution giant, "is in discussions with Apple, Netflix and Amazon to sell the rights to its 3,000-plus film and music library..." (Variety)
-- Here's Business Insider's take on why Google should acquire Snap... (BI) | | ICYMI: Pod with Katherine Goldstein | | | Katherine Goldstein is urging newsroom leaders to pay more attention to paid leave policies and other ways to support working parents in the industry. Goldstein and I talked about it on the latest "Reliable Sources" podcast... Francesca has a recap here... | | | For the record, part four | | | -- Two days after announcing her exit from CNN, one day after appearing in a Trump campaign video, Kayleigh McEnany was named as the new spokesperson for the RNC... Tom Kludt has a full story here... (CNNMoney)
-- "Open Road Films, the distributor behind the best-picture Oscar winner 'Spotlight,' has been sold to Tang Media Partners, a Los Angeles-based company with backing from China..." (LATimes)
-- "Amazon Studios has acquired 'Lucy and Desi,' the Aaron Sorkin-scripted drama from Escape Artists that has Cate Blanchett attached to star as TV's pioneering star Lucille Ball..." (Deadline) | | | Conservative media types are cheering the relatively weak opening weekend of "An Inconvenient Sequel," the new Al Gore documentary about climate change and the Paris accords. Sample headline from Fox News: "Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Sequel' bombs at the box office, ranks in 15th place." Monday's "The Five" devoted a whole segment to making fun of Gore, with a big graphic that said "GORE FILM FLOPS..." | | About Sunday's "Game of Thrones" battle... | | | "Game of Thrones'" hugely eventful season produced another massive battle and collision of major characters on Sunday, closing with a perilous cliffhanger. Only click here if you're okay with spoilers... | | "TCA Panel For 'Inhumans' Got Seriously Uncomfortable" | | | Brian Lowry emails: Marvel receives so much favorable press -- from media outlets eager to cash in on the traffic that the company's projects generate -- that its executives don't have to endure much criticism. Perhaps that's why Marvel TV chief Jeph Loeb got notably testy during Sunday's TCA panel for the company's new comics-inspired ABC drama, "Inhumans," which based on the questions and social-media snark was coolly received by many of the critics. Comicbookmovie.com has a pretty good breakdown, complete with some of the tweeted sniping... | | | For the record, part five | | | By Lisa France:
-- Fans were positively devastated when Chris Pratt and Anna Faris announced they are separating. The popular couple were definitely #RelationshipGoals...
-- Singer Aaron Carter has come out as bisexual. The former teen star has had some troubles lately including an arrest in Georgia last month, and the revelation about his sexuality was met with lots of support...
-- Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood has revealed he had lung cancer. He's better now, he says, and ready to head out on tour with Mick and the boys... | | | Four ways to catch up on the show... | | Leaks were the theme of Sunday's "Reliable..." | | I started the program by showing how leaks to reporters exposed lies from the White House...
And pointed out how attempting to plug one leak can sometimes cause a whole lot more leaks...
Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation said he thought Jeff Sessions' anti-leak event "was incredibly disturbing on multiple levels..."
Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union said constant leaking from the West Wing is "hurting their agenda" and "demoralizing their supporters..."
And what about the 12 sources who told Bloomberg's Jennifer Jacobs and Margaret Talev about how Kelly urged the staff not to leak? Talev said those are "not really leaks, they're just people talking on background about politics..." | | Why 'cosmopolitan' is a loaded word | | | At the end of Sunday's "Reliable," Greenfield discussed Miller's accusation that Acosta displayed a "cosmopolitan bias." The term has troubling connotations, Greenfield said, dating back "to Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini." Cosmopolitan meant "you're not loyal to the traditions of this country or the religion." Here's our discussion... | | | Email us at reliablesources@cnn.com... we appreciate every message. The feedback helps us craft the next day's newsletter! | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
Post a Comment