EXEC SUMMARY: The Toronto Star's headline right now: "Raptors crowned NBA champions for first time in team history." Scroll down for our Friday planner, E3 takeaways, my podcast with Kevin Roose, and much more...
Who wants to be press secretary?
The White House press secretary is supposed to be the No. 1 liaison between the president and the press corps. Sarah Sanders diminished the job. When she leaves the W.H. later this month, few reporters will be sorry to see her go. So... will Trump even fill the job now? | | I asked one of the most plugged-in W.H. correspondents I know... And they said: "Truly it's anyone's guess. So says the White House. There's certainly speculation they could promote from within — Hogan Gidley was once seen as a dark horse, but in recent months, officials have contemplated seeing him in that role. But it's Trump... and of course he could always pick someone from the outside. That's my bet."
But who on the outside would want the job at this moment in time? Wait -- I take that back -- on Fox News Thursday night, Laura Ingraham joked with Sean Hannity about tag-teaming the briefings for a week. "That'd be fun," said Ingraham, who was mentioned as a press secretary candidate in the past. Hannity cracked up laughing.
The correspondent added: "A good point many have been making today is: Why pick anyone? What difference does it make?"
Sanders' legacy
Sander's main legacy as press secretary will be the death of the daily press briefing. On her watch, we saw the end of a custom that had provided a level of government transparency and accountability for decades.
In her nearly two years in the job, Sanders first shortened the on-camera briefings and then did away with them altogether. Her most recent appearance in the briefing room was back on March 11 — and that session was only 14 minutes long. Friday will be day 95 without a briefing. On Thursday, she said she doesn't regret the lack of briefings. This is the first time I actually hope she is lying.
Here's my full piece... Plus CNN's main story about Sanders' departure...
Why now?
Fox's Neil Cavuto, among others, questioned the "odd" timing of the announcement and asked if Trump was "pointing the finger" at her for the ABC interview mess. But a WH official told Jim Acosta "she'd chosen this date well in advance." And Trump gave her a hero's farewell on Thursday... | |
No credibility
Sanders had no credibility left. None. I mean, according to the Mueller report, she admitted under oath that she lied to the press corps about James Comey. Still, I'm not sensing a lot of confidence that the man or woman who takes her place will be candid and truthful. The "enemy" tone comes from the top...
Trump's 8 a.m. appointment
Two days after the ABC interview, Trump will be back on Fox on Friday: He has an 8 a.m. phone call scheduled with the "Fox & Friends" cast...
FRIDAY PLANNER
-- It's President Trump's birthday...
-- The IRE conference continues in Houston...
-- US prosecutors are expected to detail all charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange while seeking his extradition in a London courtroom...
-- NBC will announce how the qualifying Dem candidates will be split up between the two-night debate on June 26 and 27...
-- Sony's "Men in Black International" and WB's "Shaft" open in theaters...
-- Kate Bennett's CNN prime time special, "Woman of Mystery: Melania Trump," premieres at 9 p.m. ET...
SNEAK PEEK
Poppy's interview with Sundar Pichai
CNN's Poppy Harlow sat down exclusively with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in Oklahoma on Thursday. Her Friday morning newscast will have Pichai's first response to the DOJ's expected probe into Google.
Harlow emails from her flight home: "He tells me he is not surprised by news of a possible US antitrust probe -- but cautioned against regulating for the sake of regulating." | | Harlow also asked about Elizabeth Warren's call to break up Google and its big tech competitors -- Pichai said "there are many countries around the world which aspire to be the next Silicon Valley, and they are supporting their companies too. So we have to balance both."
Harlow and Pichai toured Google's data center in Pryor, Oklahoma. More from the interview -- including his comments about YouTube and China and censorship -- will be out on Monday morning... That's when it will be posted in full on her "Boss Files" podcast...
Big CBS board meeting on Friday
"CBS and Viacom are expected to begin seriously discussing a merger next week, culminating months of speculation about an eventual combination," CNBC's Alex Sherman wrote Thursday.
Friday's board meeting is another step in the merger direction. "Though no formal announcements are planned, the board of directors is expected to decide to increase the level of seriousness around discussions with Viacom." More...
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- A Turkish court has "accepted an indictment from a prosecutor requesting a jail term of between two and five years for two Bloomberg reporters" along with dozens of other people. John Micklethwait has condemned the indictment: "We fully stand by them and will support them throughout this ordeal..." (Bloomberg)
YouTube's rabbit holes
Kevin Roose says he didn't set out to write about YouTube. Which makes his recent NYT story, "The Making of a YouTube Radical," all the more remarkable.
"I've been researching and talking to, sort of, online extremists for the past couple of years, just as part of reporting on social media," he told me. "And one thing that kept coming up, as I was asking them, 'Where'd you hear about this stuff? Where'd you get into this stuff?' They kept just saying YouTube. Over and over again I heard stories about people who went to YouTube to watch gaming videos or sports videos or politics videos and ended up getting pulled into this universe of, like, far-right people."
Roose ended up centering his story around Caleb Cain, who found a way out of the rabbit hole and now calls online radicalization a health crisis. He spoke with CNN's Alisyn Camerota on "New Day" earlier this week -- the interview is well worth the watch. (CNN posted it to YouTube.)
What the recommendation engine does to us
I asked Roose to come on the "Reliable Sources" podcast so we could talk more about the consequences of YouTube's opaque recommendation engine. "I didn't realize, until I started reporting this story, how core that recommendations bar is to YouTube," he said. "Something like 70% of the time that people spend on YouTube is due to that recommendation bar. That's really the core of YouTube, and like no one knows how it works."
Roose now likens the engine to "a very talented psychologist who shows up at the door and interviews you and learns exactly what makes you tick and what you're interested in, and then designs a customized path for you based on that. And the point of the path is to keep you inside the house, is to keep you inside YouTube for as long as possible." Maybe, he suggested, the engine even knows more about us than we know about ourselves.
Yes, it's incredible how the tech serves up so many similar videos. It knows just what song I want to hear next. But it's also perplexing to see some of the videos that get offered up when my two year old is watching "Sesame Street." And it's disturbing to hear Roose say that YouTube doesn't "handle on how it works or what it's doing to people." Listen to our podcast conversation here via Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, etc...
Just a few of this month's headlines
-- Boing Boing, reacting to another recent NYT report: "YouTube pushes children's videos to pedophiles through content recommendation engine"
-- Rolling Stone, recapping this week's "Full Frontal" episode: "Samantha Bee reveals the seamy side of YouTube's algorithm"
-- The Globe and Mail: "Pedophiles, anti-vaxxers, homophobes: YouTube's algorithm caters to them all"
-- B&C: "Hawley Bill Targets YouTube Algorithm"
-- CNN Business: "Prominent white supremacists are still on YouTube in wake of ban"
| | "We're now in unchartered territory"
Jake Tapper's lead on "The Lead" Thursday: "The president stunned the political world last night by saying he would be perfectly willing to collude in 2020... We're now in unchartered territory. Maybe we've been here for a while, but it's never been so clear before."
-- "I cannot tell you how profoundly troubling this is to the core of my professional experience," a former longtime national security official told Politico...
-- A "senior GOP source" told CNN: "It's really bad. It's really, really bad. He shouldn't say it, and if he were to do it, it would be impeachable..."
-- Much-needed historical context from WaPo: "American opposition to foreign involvement in elections dates back to the nation's founding, reflected in legal prohibitions and widely embraced norms..."
-- Naturally, the prime time hosts on Fox dismissed the concern and outrage as "phony..."
"Why are you doing this interview?"
 Louise Linton is on the cover of the new issue of Los Angeles magazine. The web headline for the story: "Louise Linton, aka Mrs. Steven Mnuchin, Is Sorry."
Maer Roshan writes that Linton is "unsurprisingly furious about her press coverage and desperate to set the terms of her public persona." His first question to her was, "Why are you doing this interview?" Here's her answer...
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- The last two 2020 candidates with town halls on Fox News criticized the network during their appearances... But Julian Castro noticeably did not knock Fox when it was his turn on Thursday... (Fox)
-- Per Fox PR, "Fox News Sunday" has an exclusive interview with Jon Stewart this weekend, "to discuss the unanimously passed bill reauthorizing the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund that will now go to the floor for a full vote in the House..."
-- Andrea Mitchell landed Anita Hill's first TV interview since Joe Biden entered the 2020 race. "Of course I could" vote for Biden, Hill said... (NBC)
This year's Mirror Award winners
The Mirrors, presented by Syracuse University, celebrate excellence in media industry reporting -- on turning the mirror on ourselves. So they're my favorite 😉 Here are the winners, named at Thursday's luncheon:
BEST SINGLE ARTICLE/STORY:
"Face the Racist Nation" by Jesse Brenneman and Lois Beckett for WNYC Radio and Guardian US
BEST PROFILE:
"James O'Keefe Can't Get No Respect" by Tim Alberta for Politico
BEST COMMENTARY:
"The great remove" by Sarah Jones for CJR
BEST STORY ON JOURNALISTS OR JOURNALISM IN PERIL:
"How Duterte Used Facebook To Fuel the Philippine Drug War" by Davey Alba for BuzzFeed News
BEST STORY ON SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE CROSSHAIRS:
A tie! Series of pieces on junk news by Miles O'Brien for PBS "NewsHour" AND a series of pieces on problems with Facebook for BuzzFeed News
JOHN M. HIGGINS AWARD FOR BEST IN-DEPTH/ENTERPRISE REPORTING:
Series of pieces on Leslie Moonves by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
Farrow's message
In his acceptance speech, Ronan Farrow made a rousing argument about the value of media reporting. Calling to mind his reporting about CBS, he said, "When a culture of corruption and cover-up flourishes" inside media companies, "when there are lies being told to us by networks we trust, the cost is not just those institutions, the cost is our democracy, it's our future, it's our freedoms."
Farrow said "we need to keep this precious thing" -- journalism -- "honest and transparent," and "reporting on ourselves is the only way we keep that momentum going. It's the only way we maintain that trust. It is one of the most important things that we can do as journalists. It mean burning bridges sometimes. It means alienating people. It means giving up job opportunities. It's not always easy."
As if to prove the point, he then said, "I see some people who have lied to protect power" in the room. "Who have lied to the public. Who have lied to The New Yorker." But "I also see a far greater number of people who are pushing back on that exact culture of corruption." When I approached him later, Farrow declined to say who the liars were. The AP's David Bauder has more here...
More memorable quotes
Lemme share a few other Mirror Award highlights with you:
-- Lois Beckett said the lack of diversity in American newsrooms "is a crisis:" The newsrooms covering white supremacist terrorism are "overwhelmingly, disproportionately white. And that is a problem," she said. Unlike "so many external challenges journalism is facing these days," economic, political, etcetera, "this is our problem to fix. And we can fix it, if we want to."
-- Tim Alberta said "there's a real risk of self-censorship these days" due to people on the right and left "telling us what we should and should not cover." He urged reporters to tune them out: "We all need to proceed not with caution but with courage."
-- Multiple award winners from BuzzFeed urged the company to recognize the newsroom's union.
-- David Zaslav presented Jeff Zucker with the Fred Dressler Leadership Award. Zucker said "the press is under attack from the most powerful people in the world, and that is wrong. And it is dangerous." For journalists, "there has never been a more important time in our lives and in our careers," he said.
"Frontline" announces Local Journalism Project
Laney Rose emails: Throughout the next four years, "Frontline" is planning to partner with four to five local news organizations annually as part of a new Save Local Journalism initiative. Funded by the Knight Foundation and CPB, the project aims to improve local coverage and shine light on "under-covered" stories by introducing them to PBS's national viewership.
During the project, "we will collaborate with local news organizations to support reporters in producing trustworthy investigative journalism — especially in communities where the health of independent reporting is endangered by the changing economics of the media," exec producer Raney Aronson-Rath says. Would-be partners can apply here...
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- "Investigative Network aims to bring more documentary video to local TV (but it'll need funding first)..." (NiemanLab)
-- Here's Andrew McCormick on the two new bills in Congress hoping to lend a "helping hand for a hurting" news industry... (CJR)
-- The Associated Press discovered that a LinkedIn profile with ties to influential political actors does not belong to a real person, and even has a face that was most likely generated by a computer program. Experts fear the profile belonged to "foreign spies [who] routinely use fake social media profiles to home in on American targets..." (AP)
Takeaways from the E3 Expo
This photo is from the LAT's excellent photo gallery: | | Jon Sarlin writes: Greetings from the last day at E3! The buzz here this year is all about the dawn of video game streaming -- think instant gameplay with the highest specs on any phone, TV, or laptop, all streaming through the cloud. It is obviously a huge technological challenge -- the feedback from your controller back to your screen needs to be nearly instantaneous. But the tech seems like it's finally ready, with Google's Stadia and other services in the works.
The question now is whether game studios will play ball and license out their content to Google or try to strike out on their own services.
So far we've seen signs of both. Bethesda —one of largest studios — announced it will partner with Stadia while also announcing its own streaming service, Orion, and Ubisoft announced its own separate service. Will Google have to follow Netflix's example and develop its own original content?
--> Amazon is also looming in the background too -- it hasn't announced a streaming games service but has begun investing in developing games through its studio Amazon Games. Amazon tells me they should have something big to announce soon...
--> Bottom line: No one knows how this will all play out, but it's clear that a new front has opened in the content wars...
THR: "Facebook settles class action claiming company inflated video viewership metrics"
From THR's Eriq Gardner: "Several advertising agencies told a California federal court on Wednesday that Facebook has agreed to settlement terms to resolve a putative class action alleging that the social media giant wildly overstated the average time its users spent watching paid advertisements."
The lawsuit, filed back in October, claimed Facebook had knowingly inflated ad viewership metrics by up to 900%. (Some have argued these numbers prompted the infamous "pivot to video.") The terms of the settlement "will need to be approved by the judge and figures to be presented in court in the next few months..."
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Susan Zirinsky speaking at the NYT's New Rules Summit:
"Both the #MeToo movement and the issues of unconscious bias, they're not going to go away. Sometimes there's a movement and you achieve a level of success - which I think these movements are. But they're not over, and they're never going to be over."
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
-- "Cuba Gooding Jr. has been charged with forcible touching, a misdemeanor, and sex abuse in the third degree relating to an alleged groping incident in New York City last weekend," Chloe Melas and Marianne Garvey report. He has pleaded not guilty... (CNN)
-- "CAA has filed a motion to dismiss the WGA's lawsuit against the Big 4 talent agencies, asking the court to remove the guild as a complainant because it allegedly lacks standing under state law to represent members in such a case..." (Deadline)
-- "The possibility of a host-less Emmys is among the leading options being considered by Fox and the Television Academy as it preps for this year's telecast," Michael Schneider reports... (Variety)
| | A tale of two (long-delayed) sequels
Brian Lowry emails: "Toy Story 4" delivers a cinematic grand slam – a movie as touching, funny, adventurous and even profound as its predecessors, and sure to fill Disney's toy box with goodies. It feels like an even more notable accomplishment given the role in this particular franchise played by John Lasseter, who took a leave of absence in late 2017 and never returned.
"Toy Story" won't land until next week, leaving a small window for two other sequels: "Men in Black: International" and "Shaft," which revisits the '70s detective that Samuel L. Jackson played in a 2000 movie and comes pretty close to striking out. As for how the sausage gets made, there's a quote by Jackson in a LAT feature that encapsulates the problem, describing his initial reservations this way: "I read the script, they were going straight wild comedy and I was like, 'We can't do that because we owe a certain reverence to the character.'" The result: A mish-mash that winds up in a sort-of creative no man's land, and it shows...
More on 'Toy Story 4'
| | Frank Pallotta writes: I wrote in Wednesday's newsletter that "Men In Black International" was getting panned by critics. Now I'm back with another review roundup, but this time for "Toy Story 4," which opens next week. So did the Pixar and Disney film fare better with critics? Well, in a word, yes, as you can tell from Lowry's praise up above.
"Toy Story 4" has a perfect 100% score on review site Rotten Tomatoes with film critic Kenneth Turan at the L.A. Times saying that it will "blow you away in ways you won't be expecting." My two cents on the film, which I saw at a press screening on Wednesday night, is that it's a worthy — and quite beautiful — installment to pretty perfect franchise. Oh, and also bring tissues because you're going to cry.
>> "Toy Story 3" made more than $1 billion when it hit theaters in 2010. Will "Toy Story 4" top it? If the reviews are any indication, its box office ceiling may be... oh yeah... to infinity and beyond!
FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE
By Katie Pellico:
-- Wondering about Quentin Tarantino's 10th film? An R-rated "Star Trek" film is reportedly in the works... (Esquire)
-- MTV's "Daria" reboot plans are taking shape: VF's Joy Press reports Tracee Ellis Ross will EP (and voice) "Jodie," based on Daria Morgendorffer's BFF Jodie Landon... (VF)
-- "Dead to Me" creator Liz Feldman writes for THR about why "It's Time for TV to Embrace Angry Women..." (THR)
Eye on the miniseries Emmy race...
Brian Lowry emails: A quick footnote to yesterday's item about Netflix touting the viewership for "When They See Us," Ava DuVernay's miniseries about the Central Park Five: The numbers might be opaque, but as a tactic, it's a pretty transparent response to reports of big digital tune-in for HBO's "Chernobyl," deemed its top competition in the best-miniseries race. And reporters are still pretty bad when it comes to deciphering premium-TV ratings, thanks in no small part to the murky data those companies provide, when they provide it at all...
New fallout from "When"
CNN's Faith Karimi and Rob Frehse report: Elizabeth Lederer, one of the Central Park Five prosecutors, is leaving her post at Columbia Law School in the wake of "When They See Us." The Columbia Black Law Student's Association had launched a petition demanding she step down..
FOR THE RECORD, PART SIX
-- Steve Pond writes: "Inside a wild and rocky week for the Emmys and the Oscars, from disqualifications to schedule shifts..." (TheWrap)
-- Netflix is "unveiling new video games based on its shows," starting with "Stranger Things 3: The Game..." (Bloomberg / CNN)
-- "Warner Bros. TV has promoted four veteran executives to lead the development and current programming teams:" Clancy Collins-White, Adrienne Turner, Maddy Horne and Odetta Watkins... (THR)
-- IMAX Entertainment is expanding… hiring an ex-Paramount exec and an ex-20th Century Fox exec… (TheWrap)
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