"The Escalator Ride That Changed America"
I wish I had thought to write this Michael Kruse feature in Politico Magazine. So I'm doing the next best thing: Linking to it. "Four years ago," he writes, "Donald Trump stepped onto an escalator in the atrium of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York and began descending into a lobby packed with cameras. It's safe to say the 10 or so seconds that followed are the most consequential escalator ride in American history."
Kruse created an oral history of that day -- June 16, 2015. This Sunday is the anniversary. I once went back and re-watched CNN's coverage of Trump's announcement, and wrote about how the first hour foreshadowed everything. Here's the story and video. But Kruse took it to another level -- speaking with reporters, aides, and Trump biographers about what the day was like. Check it out... | |
ABC landed the week's biggest interview
Fresh reporting from CNN's Jim Acosta and Abby Phillip: "Since President Trump's interview with ABC News on Wednesday, White House officials privately acknowledge that the president answered handled the questions about foreign interference poorly and one even questioned the wisdom of giving such extensive access to the network. But at the same time, officials do not believe that the fallout has been significant. Instead they view it as being largely limited to Democrats and the media, discounting the dissent from some Republican lawmakers." Officials do not believe the controversy will penetrate to the president's base." To the degree that it has penetrated, Fox's biggest stars have accused Democrats of "phony outrage" and defended Trump..
"The clips from the last few days have been tough"
Meanwhile, headlines like these just keep coming. Via Mediaite: "Ex-CIA Director Leon Panetta: Trump's Foreign Dirt Comments Are 'Violation of the Oath of Office.'"
Here's more from Phillip and Acosta: "A source close to the WH said there was frustration inside the WH and among the president's political advisers with Sarah's handling of the ABC interview prior to the announcement of her departure. 'The clips from the last few days have been tough,' the adviser said. The ABC interview was an 'issue' for Sanders, the adviser said. But the decision to grant the interview was ultimately the president's." It always is...
ABC's prime time special
The network keeps dribbling out more news from George Stephanopoulos' sit-downs with POTUS. Among Friday's clips: Trump contradicting Don McGahn and repeating his criticism of Jerome Powell, saying of the Fed reserve chair, "He's my pick—and I disagree with him entirely." Stephanopoulos will have a prime time special about his two days with Trump... It is slated for Sunday at 8 p.m. ET...
Lowry's take on Trump's network interviews
Brian Lowry emails: The fact that Trump has landed himself in hot water in two interviews with network anchors -- the famous Lester Holt interview, and now Stephanopoulos -- would really suggest what poor preparation most of his Fox interviews are for dealing with anyone who might test him with a substantial question or follow-up...
Fifty minutes on "Fox & Friends"
"All right," Steve Doocy said after Trump's birthday phone call to Fox, "we thought that interview might go 10 minutes. It went 50 minutes and 20 seconds." Chris Cillizza has some of the highlights/lowlights here... And Holmes Lybrand and Maegan Vazquez have a full fact-check...
>> Later in the day, Fox's Chris Wallace called the interview "cleanup on aisle four..."
Whoops?
Trump's comment on Fox "that Tom Homan would be his new 'border czar' appears to have been premature. Homan, a Fox News contributor, was caught by surprise by the announcement, according to a source familiar," Priscilla Alvarez and Abby Phillip report. "Two senior White House officials acknowledged the details of a position are still being worked out and conversations are ongoing..."
The next W.H. press secretary will be...
Stephanie Grisham? Hogan Gidley? Those are the two names in CNN's story about the press secretary job.
Depending on who you believe, other contenders may include Heather Nauert, Tony Sayegh, Morgan Ortagus and Steve Cortes. NYT's Annie Karni reports that there's "internal debate" about the W.H. "over whether to revive the daily news briefing as President Trump heads into the thick of election season.."
Hallie Jackson confronts Sean Spicer in 🔥 interview
Oliver Darcy emails: Hallie Jackson had some sharp questions for Sean Spicer on Friday when he appeared for an interview about Sarah Sanders' exit on MSNBC. Jackson asked Spicer point blank, "Do you regret setting the precedent for dishonesty when you were at the podium?" Spicer laughed the question off, and replied, "No." He then conceded he made mistakes and said he "tried my best to make up for those."
But Jackson wasn't done. "Were you or not setting a precedent for the tone and behavior that a press secretary should hold?" she asked. Spicer called it a "pretty loaded question." See the full interview here via Mediaite...
>> Recommended: "Sarah Sanders Broke the News," by The Atlantic's Megan Garber...
WaPo: Hollywood hit by trade war with China
"As the United States ups the stakes in a trade war, there are growing signs that China is quietly retaliating against the U.S. entertainment business," WaPo's Steven Zeitchik reports. Sources tell Zeitchik that "Beijing is now constricting Hollywood's ability to peddle its product in the country."
For context, "China officially has a quota allowing in several dozen Hollywood movies per year — 38 in 2019, 35 the year before. Those numbers are up by more than 20 percent in the past five years." Zeitchik says that "Rocketman" and "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" are already struggling to secure one of these "slots."
"Both films would benefit greatly from a Chinese release but already could face an uphill climb because of edgy content, which Chinese censors frown upon. That would provide an added reason — or cover — to block them in the instance of a trade war."
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- The DOJ is "moving closer to approving T-Mobile's $26 billion merger with Sprint, but only if the companies sell multiple assets to create a new wireless competitor," Cecilia Kang reports. Such a deal could undercut the lawsuit filed by state attorneys general in NY, CA and other states...(NYT)
-- No new updates on CBS and Viacom on Friday... The CBS board met, but was mum afterward...
-- Laney Pope emails: At least five affiliates of ABC posted a "digital birthday card" for Trump that was really just a "petition website created by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to harvest email addresses that can be used during the 2020 campaign..." (The Daily Beast)
#DemDebate lineups are set | | On Friday, NBC News announced the groupings for the two debates on June 26 and 27. Here's the info. "A representative from NBC News Standards & Practices conducted the drawing," CNN's story says.
Historian and CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer has a new look at the debates and their place in the "media-political complex" on CNN.com...
Hey, how high-rated will the debates be?
Mark me down as skeptical. It seems like Peter Hamby is too. His latest column for VF is about this very question: Will the two-night debate on NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo be a ratings smash? What if the debates matter less than the chattering classes think? Per Hamby, "among the campaign managers I've spoken with in recent days, the betting line is that 15-20 million viewers will tune in on June 26." Having the debates on a broadcast network will juice the overall total, but I'd be shocked if 20 million tuned in...
Andrew Yang on Sunday's "Reliable Sources"
I'm looking forward to talking with the 2020 contender on Sunday morning... The guest list also includes Margaret Sullivan, David Zurawik, Samantha Vinograd, and Max Boot... Email me what's on your mind for the program...
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- ABC has landed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "first Sunday morning interview since taking office" – Jon Karl will speak with her on "This Week..."
-- Pete Buttigieg and Beto O'Rourke will join Jake Tapper on "SOTU" Sunday morning...
-- For this Cronkite News Lab piece, Chuck Todd, Caitlin Conant and Rick Klein spoke with Andrew Heyward about strengthening the collaboration between the broadcast networks and local stations...
-- Key quote from Klein: "We're not lacking for punditry. We're not lacking for prognostication. We are lacking for listening."
Recommended reads for the weekend 👓
Curated by Katie Pellico:
-- Susan Glasser's weekly column for The New Yorker: "Forget 'No collusion.' Trump is now pro-collusion." A+ line: "Trump is a political octopus, squirting so much diversionary black ink at us that diversion is the new normal."
-- Heather Timmons for QZ: "The White House does not need to hire another person to lie for the president."
-- WaPo's Jonathan Greenberg tick-tocks through Trump's "startlingly effective campaign to suppress the truth about his failures as a businessman," mostly through headlines.
-- The Daily Caller's Peter Hasson calls out POTUS: "Trump warned America's exploding national debt was dangerous. Now he's president, and the debt is still growing."
-- The Reuters Institute's annual Digital News Report came out this week, diagnosing "subscription fatigue" among news users.
-- And here's Laura Hazard Owen's sum-up for NiemanLab: "Even people who like paying for news usually only pay for one subscription."
-- On the heels of "Late Night's" wide release Friday, the LAT's Meredith Blake does the math on "how bad it really is" for women in late night.
-- In advance of Father's Day, Jeremy Gordon writes for The Outline about the flipside of all the social media celebrations.
-- Cosmopolitan profiled NYT columnist and celeb profiler Taffy Brodesser-Akner, ahead of the release of her first book "Fleishman Is in Trouble," which comes out on Monday. The story comes with this amazing pull quote: | |
Sundar Pichai responds to looming antitrust probes
Oliver Darcy emails: Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded to looming antitrust probes into his company and other tech giants, telling CNN's Poppy Harlow in an interview that he is "perfectly fine" with Google being scrutinized. "We have gone through similar situations in Europe, so it's not a surprise to us," Pichai said. "For some of the other companies, maybe the scrutiny is newer." It was Pichai's first extensive interview since news of the new probes into Big Tech emerged. CNN Business' Seth Fiegerman has a full writeup of the interview here...
...and Elizabeth Warren's anti-Big Tech rhetoric
Darcy emails: During the interview, Pichai also responded directly to Elizabeth Warren's anti-Big Tech campaign rhetoric. Warren has, of course, called for the large tech companies to be broken up. Pichai said that he does think there should be "healthy debate," but added, "I worry that if you regulate for the sake of regulating it, it has a lot of unintended consequences." More from the interview will come out on Monday...
Facebook spox throws cold water on exec's comments about evaluating individual journalists
Darcy emails: A Facebook exec raised some eyebrows when he said the social media company planned to "look at individual journalists" in addition to news organizations when evaluating trustworthy sources. But when I asked a Facebook spokesperson on Friday for more information on the supposed plan, the spokesperson told me the executive's comments were actually incorrect.
The comments were made by Jesper Doub, the director of news partnerships for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Speaking at a conference, Doub said, according to a report, "We look to treat trustworthy reporters and news organizations differently. It's not only about the New York Times or Der Spiegel, we also look at individual journalists."
The comment started circulating online on Friday morning. Soon after, Facebook spox Adam Isserlis offered some clarity, tweeting, "This is related to our News Page Index, which doesn't look at individual reporters and isn't specifically based on 'trustworthiness,' but rather a set of criteria around news practices."
Facebook gets a first win in its appeal over Cambridge Analytica fine
Hadas Gold emails: A judge ruled that Facebook's procedural challenge against a £500,000 ($630,000) fine it got from a UK regulator over the Cambridge Analytica scandal can proceed.
Facebook has alleged that the way the regulator called the Information Commissioner issued the fine was "predetermined" and "biased" against it, and that public statements by the ICO generated "significant public confusion" and caused Facebook "serious (global) criticism and loss of public trust."
Now Facebook could easily afford a $630,000 fine. But for Facebook, this is about a bigger issue: Facebook's lawyer, Anya Proops, called the ICO's conduct a "serious injustice we have suffered at the hands of the ICO."
Judge Alison Mckenna seemed to agree with Facebook's allegations of bias: "I'm persuaded that the procedural challenge should be allowed to proceed in this case. I say so on the basis that there are very particular circumstances which hopefully will never arise again but there are a very serious and in my view properly pleaded case of actual bias before the tribunal, which is capable of affecting the lawfulness of the monetary penalty notice." The case will continue in the coming weeks.
>> For more, check out Gold's Twitter thread from inside the courtroom on Friday...
What you can't see on FB can hurt you | | Katie Pellico writes: This is the prompt you have to click past to read the results of the year-long investigation by Reveal reporters Will Carless and Michael Corey, which promises to be the "first in a series."
What they found: "Hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers from across the United States are members of Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook." Most of the groups are "closed," or private.
Already, "More than 50 departments launched internal investigations after being presented with our findings, in some cases saying they would examine officers' past conduct to see if their online activity mirrored their policing in real life." One officer was fired in February. Read the full report here...
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- Facebook is "ramping up its global advertising spending" to burnish its reputation, Alexandra Bruell reports. "The push, which Facebook marketing chief Antonio Lucio said could more than double the company's advertising spending, will involve working with a revamped roster of creative agencies on campaigns for brands including WhatsApp and Instagram..." (WSJ)
-- CPJ has "condemned the decision by Turkey's judiciary to charge two Bloomberg reporters over their coverage of the Turkish economy..." (CPJ)
-- "The Weekly" is airing its third episode this Sunday. And it will be the first time that the show is breaking some news before it appears in print. Caitlin Dickerson's story is about the "youngest known child taken from his parents at the U.S.-Mexico border." His name is Constantin Mutu... (NYT)
Who watches OANN?
At a joint presser with the Polish president on Wednesday, Trump could have called on The AP or NBC or CNN or the Post first... But instead he called on OANN's Emerald Robinson. She is the conservative channel's W.H. correspondent and, as you can see from her Twitter feed, a devoted right-wing commentator as well.
Trump has obviously been playing OANN and Fox off one another. So I sought out some ratings info for OANN. How many people besides the president are watching? As I reported last month, OANN does not subscribe to Nielsen. The network touts data from ComScore instead -- and has shared the #'s with the White House. Maybe that's why Trump tweeted that he heard about a "big ratings jump" at OANN.
So I dug deeper. It turns out that Nielsen is measuring the network in what's known as the metered markets -- the biggest metro areas in the country. In those markets, in the second quarter of this year, OANN has been averaging just 14,000 viewers at any given time of day. Fox News has been averaging 631,000 viewers in those same markets.
In the final #'s, including all the smaller markets, Fox's total audience roughly doubles. So even if we're being generous to OANN -- let's say the average audience is two or three times bigger than 14,000 -- the network is not filling a football stadium. It's as if Trump is calling on a suburban weekly newspaper rather than the major national and international news sources...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
-- "The Toronto Raptors' first-ever NBA championship gave ABC strong ratings Thursday night... In the final ratings, Game 6 came in at 18.34 million viewers..." (THR)
-- Earlier in the week, Stanley Cup Game 7 scored a "25-year high" for the NHL... (THR)
-- The ratings race is intense and the competition is fierce, but Ryan Glasspiegel makes the case that "live sports on broadcast TV" are showing "remarkable resilience..." (The Big Lead)
-- Through its success with Tasty, "BuzzFeed expects to drive $260 million in sales in 2019 of BuzzFeed-branded product," including cookware, cookbooks and food, Digiday's Max Willens reports... (Digiday)
How did the NYT's Kevin Roose crack YouTube's algorithm? By watching a YouTube video
I love this headline on Laney Pope's story... She recapped this week's "Reliable" podcast about YouTube and its recommendation engine... Read the story and/or listen to the pod here...
| | HBO's "Euphoria" makes waves
Brian Lowry emails: HBO's "Euphoria" is making waves, so much so that there are pieces counting up the amount of male nudity in it. But it joins a long tradition of movies and TV that have found the shortest route to the "edgy" label by pushing the envelope in terms of depicting teens in sexual situations and using drugs, even if, in this case, most of the cast members are really in their 20s, including star Zendaya.
>> A couple quotes did stand out in this Hollywood Reporter piece about the show. "There are going to be parents who are going to be totally f---ing freaked out," said series creator Sam Levinson, which seems to be largely the point, despite HBO's Casey Bloys saying "It's not sensational to be sensational." Unsurprisingly, the Parents Television Council is already sounding alarms, accusing HBO of "marketing extremely graphic adult content" to teens...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE
-- I can't believe I missed this news last night! Taylor Swift's big announcement... (CNN)
-- "Refinery29 has been bitten by the 'Bandersnatch' bug," Variety's Todd Spangler reports: "The millennial-female-focused digital media and entertainment company inked a pact with Eko... to produce several 'choose-your-own-adventure'-style series..." (Variety)
Lowry reviews "Murder Mystery"
Brian Lowry emails: The latest movie in Netflix's longterm deal with Adam Sandler, "Murder Mystery," reunites the producer/star with Jennifer Aniston, but is otherwise about as generic and uninspired as its title. Indiewire's David Ehrlich even less charitably (but not inaccurately) described Sandler¹s Netflix movies as "gristle for the content mill."
...and "Jessica Jones"
Lowry looks ahead: Netflix's weekend lineup also includes the third and final season of "Jessica Jones," one of its Marvel series. Much has been made of why Netflix and Marvel split as Disney launches its own rival streaming service, but an overlooked point is that even for a different kind of superhero show, this last season is slow and boring...
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