FROM COAST TO COAST: Here's the latest media world news, from the Wall Street Journal to the Miami Herald to the El Paso Times to the Ridgecrest Daily Independent. Plus: Sun Valley week, Women's World Cup ratings predictions and so much more...
Don't ignore Trump's latest anti-media rant
Let's take President Trump at his word for a moment. His tweets on Sunday night alleged a vast and appalling conspiracy, reaching all the way from Fox News to The New York Times to MSNBC. He claimed all of the hard-working journalists at NBC are merely corporate shills. And he said Fox is "worse" than CNN on the weekends.
I know his rants against the media are nothing new. But why are they accepted as normal? They're anything but normal. The best word is unhinged. The leaders of newsrooms know this. And Trump's media cheerleaders know this. If it rains B.S. every day, and I stop pointing out that B.S. is falling from the sky because I get used to the stench, then I'm part of the problem. | |
So: Let's unpack the words Trump tweeted. "Watching @FoxNews weekend anchors is worse than watching low ratings Fake News @CNN, or Lyin' Brian Williams," pausing to attack Williams. He claimed the "degenerate" Comcast "Trump haters" at NBC and MSNBC will do "whatever Brian & Steve tell them to do." The truth is that Brian Roberts and Steve Burke just want the news division to report the news, attract viewers, sell ads, make the company proud, and avoid embarrassment. But Trump wants his base to think that Lester Holt and Savannah Guthrie are just puppets. Gross.
Trump then veered back to his favorite network: "@FoxNews, who failed in getting the very BORING Dem debates, is now loading up with Democrats & even using Fake unsourced @nytimes as a 'source' of information (ask the Times what they paid for the Boston Globe, & what they sold it for (lost 1.5 Billion Dollars), or their old headquarters building disaster, or their unfunded liability? @FoxNews is changing fast, but they forgot the people who got them there!"
Three points. One, he's calling the most-watched Dem debate in TV history "boring." Two, he's trying to discredit the NYT's superb Page One story about the migrant detention center in Clint, TX. And three, he's knocking Fox for being insufficiently loyal. A TV exec commented via email: "He hates Fox on the weekends because Steve and Brian and Ainsley and Tucker and Sean and Laura aren't there to help him." Fox News declined to respond to Trump's tweets...
Two questions
Former Fox host Juliet Huddy asked on Twitter Sunday evening, "How does anyone think this is reasonable behavior for a President? Rhetorical."
And: Was Trump's anger at Fox prompted by this Greg Palkot segment about the Women's World Cup? I doubt it, but Palkot's 1 p.m. ET hour live shot from Lyon, France went viral because of the profane anti-Trump chants in the background."
The NYT's collaboration
After Trump accused the NYT of publishing "phony" accounts about the border camps, The Times responded, "We are confident in the accuracy of our reporting..." And then promoted the link to the six-byline story. It was a collaboration, by the way, between the NYT and the El Paso Times. "Expect more collaborations with local outlets soon," Marc Lacey tweeted...
How news coverage is affecting migrant detention centers
The public, including the news media, "deserves to know what is happening in detention facilities every day at our southern border in our name and with our taxpayer dollars," immigration attorney Elora Mukherjee told me on "Reliable." She visited the troubled Clint, TX facility on June 17 and then went public with her findings. She said pressure from lawyers and activists and journalists IS making a difference: "The administration is trying to clean up its facilities in response to media attention and the outrage of the American public. The media deserves to be IN these facilities." Watch...
>> Trump on Sunday afternoon: "I want the press to go in and see" the detention centers...
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- Nancy Pelosi's gripe about the press in this interview with Maureen Dowd: "With all due respect, the press likes to make a story that is more about Democrats divided than the fact that Mitch McConnell doesn't care about the children." (NYT)
-- Gayle King interviewed Michelle Obama on stage at the Essence Festival in New Orleans on Saturday... Here are the standout lines... (CNN)
The power of one paper's investigation
In the past year the Jeffrey Epstein case was catapulted onto the national news radar by one newspaper, the Miami Herald, and by one reporter in particular, Julie K. Brown. The paper's "Perversion of Justice" series came out last November, and Brown has stayed on the story ever since.
As soon as The Daily Beast broke the news that Epstein had been arrested on Saturday evening, fellow journalists and other observers credited Brown and thanked her for the tenacious investigation.
But Brown, true to form, shifted the spotlight: "The REAL HEROES HERE were the courageous victims that faced their fears and told their stories," she tweeted Sunday...
Behind the scenes of Brown's reporting
Brown was actually scheduled to interview another one of Epstein's accusers on Monday. Instead, she cancelled that flight and booked a ticket to New York. She'll be in court on Monday when Epstein has a bail hearing.
"There are some women who now feel they need to come forward. I hope that more do. It takes a lot of courage, understandably," Brown told me on "Reliable Sources" Sunday morning. "This happened to them a long time ago, and many of them feel ashamed." | | "Keep going"
This is another key point Brown made: "What I tried to do, since the story ran and got all that attention, was to keep hounding away at the story. I didn't give up on it. You know, it's sometimes easy to walk away and just let things happen. But I just felt that I had to keep pursuing it, and not let the powers-that-be, so to speak, the law enforcement people, the people in government, forget that these women were out there. And they're talking and they want to tell their story and they want justice."
In summary: "I think the hardest part sometimes of an investigation is to KEEP GOING at it, keep pecking away at it." Here are parts one and two of our conversation...
--> Herald editor Aminda Marqués González told me: "Julie's investigative series continues a tradition of award-winning journalism at the Herald that holds the powerful to account and demonstrates the phenomenal power of local journalism."
What's next
-- Will there be political fallout? Beast EIC Noah Shachtman tweeted: "I'm seeing lots of folks on the left and the right who seem absolutely sure that Epstein is going to give up their political enemies. Hot tip: he's just as likely to give up your allies."
-- What will Epstein/his lawyers say? They've been silent...
-- Will Epstein be freed on bail?
-- Will we find out what prompted the timing of Saturday's arrest? CNN's Shimon Prokupecz tweeted: "This arrest was not supposed to go down yesterday. The initial plan was Monday arrest then unsealing and court..."
-- "In an announcement planned for Monday, the FBI is expected to provide a number for other victims to contact the SDNY," the Beast reports...
IN OTHER NEWS...
20 million viewers for World Cup?
The over/under for Sunday's U.S. victory at the Women's World Cup is 20 million, per one of my most reliable TV ratings insiders. The 11 a.m. ET match started early on the West Coast, which could impact the #'s, but there wasn't much else on TV to compete with it. (Well, other than "Reliable Sources," of course! 😉) We'll get the Nielsen ratings results on Monday...
>> Jason Gay recapping his newest WSJ column: "Is there anything more American than talking the talk and then walking the walk?" Simply put, Megan Rapinoe "is a legend..." | |
The team's message
Within minutes of the 2-0 win, PR pro Molly Levinson, who's representing the players who are suing the US Soccer Federation for pay discrimination, blasted out this statement: "At this moment of tremendous pride for America, the sad equation remains all too clear, and Americans won't stand for it anymore. These athletes generate more revenue and garner higher tv ratings but get paid less simply because they are women. It is time for the Federation to correct this disparity once and for all."
If you missed Nike's ad...
Brian Lowry emails: When it comes to exploiting the World Cup from a corporate standpoint, props to Disney — which dropped its "Mulan" trailer at halftime — and Nike, whose spot devoted to the U.S. team received a huge multiplier effect on social media. If you didn't catch the minute-long Nike ad, watch it here...
What's next
A ticker tape parade in NYC on Wednesday morning...
And what about a visit to the White House? That's still very much up in the air...
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- For her Monday media column, Margaret Sullivan traveled to Youngstown and spoke with local residents about the impending loss of The Vindicator... (WaPo)
-- The Chicago Defender will "cease print operations" on Wednesday, "ending a storied 114-year newspaper legacy that included driving the Great Migration of African Americans to Chicago from the South and bolstering the black electorate as a key constituency in national politics..." (Sun-Times)
-- "Mozilla has started teasing an ad-free news subscription service, which, for $5 per month, would offer ad-free browsing, audio readouts, and cross-platform syncing of news articles from a number of websites..." (The Verge)
Media week ahead calendar
-- Monday: Congress returns from its July Fourth recess...
-- Tuesday: CBS launches "Love Island," a version of the popular U.K. dating show that will run five nights a week...
-- Tuesday: Erin Lee Carr's two-night documentary "I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter" premieres on HBO...
-- Wednesday: The Global Conference on Media Freedom begins in London... Details below...
-- Thursday: The White House's Social Media Summit...
Sun Valley week
Allen & Company's annual Sun Valley conference for media and tech bigwigs begins in Idaho on Tuesday. As the local paper notes here, the event is famously secretive, but reporters will be behind the fences trying to glean any info they can.
--> But: Charlie Gasparino's look ahead story for Fox Biz notes: "Sprint-T-Mobile decision and CBS-Viacom talks may overshadow Sun Valley media confab..."
THREE NEW BOOKS, BEGINNING WITH...
"Three Women"
Lisa Taddeo's "Three Women" hits bookshelves on Tuesday. Kate Dwyer's piece for the NYT explains why the book has been so highly anticipated. A "reported piece of literary nonfiction on the subject of female desire," the book "follows the sex lives of three American women (two are given pseudonyms), exploring the moments of passion that altered their lives." But Taddeo started out with so many more -- during her eight years of reporting and writing, she "spoke to hundreds of people, 30 or so at length, for weeks and months and even years." She wrote about the process for the WaPo, here...
>> TIME mag's Lea Carpenter: "In many ways Taddeo's subject isn't sex. Or even desire. It's memory. 'We don't remember what we want to remember,' she writes. 'We remember what we can't forget.' Memory is central to the sexual self-discovery of all three of her subjects..."
About the "Madness"
Allen Salkin says some people don't want to believe the story he and co-author Aaron Short present in "The Method to the Madness." Trump really IS strategic, they say. At least he and his associates were... in the long run-up to the 2016 election... the period of time covered in this oral history book.
"Trump was intentional and worked for 15 years to become elected president. He had a strategy... This wasn't just a whim," Salkin told me on "Reliable Sources." The book -- which boasts of having "no unnamed sources" -- is out on Tuesday...
"American Carnage" is starting to leak
Tim Alberta's "American Carnage" isn't coming out until July 16, but The Guardian obtained a copy and wrote up some of the newsy nuggets over the weekend. The headline: Trump compares Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Eva Perón. He also, improbably, claims he was "starstruck" when he saw AOC on cable TV before her surprise primary win. The only problem? As Dave Weigel wrote on Sunday, she was not on cable TV until after she won. Her handful of media appearances were on The Young Turks, The Intercept and NY1...
Anyway, AOC is embracing the nickname. And we'll be hearing more about "Carnage" this week...
White House social media "summit" or sham?
Oliver Darcy emails: The White House is holding what it has dubbed as a social media summit on Thursday, but it will apparently be doing so without the participation of at least two of the major social media companies. Sources told me that the W.H. has not extended an invite to either Facebook or Twitter. The official invite list has not been disclosed, but WaPo reported last week that a number of right-wing media figures have been invited.
What's interesting is that the lack of an invitation to the social media companies was not all that surprising to the sources with whom I spoke. They characterized the summit as an event that appears to be aimed at attacking large technology companies over issues of perceived bias -- grievance politics 101 -- not a summit where a serious discussion on various issues will take place...
No press pass for RT for media freedom conference
Hadas Gold emails: Russian state-funded outlets RT and Sputnik were denied press passes for a media freedom conference this week organized by Canada, the UK and human rights lawyer Amal Clooney. Sputnik and RT blasted the decision on their websites as did the Russian Embassy (according to Sputnik).
A spokesperson for the foreign office, which is organizing the conference in London, said it did not give RT credentials "because of their active role in spreading disinformation." The rep said other journalists from Russia ARE attending...
>> Background: In December the UK's media regulator ruled that RT had breached the UK's media code by failing to preserve "due impartiality" in seven programs that aired after the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal...
Happy 130th birthday, WSJ
| | Quoting from Matt Murray's editor's note in Monday's paper: "One hundred and thirty years ago today, Charles Dow, Edward Jones and (the sadly overlooked) Charles Bergstresser published the first edition of The Wall Street Journal from their office in lower Manhattan. It was a four-page afternoon newspaper intended to fill a growing need for objective business and financial news in an emerging market where industry was growing but was hampered by opaque and unreliable information. The opportunity for fair, factual, full reporting and analysis was clear." Read on...
The Daily Mail's big scoop
Hadas Gold emails from London: The Mail was the first to obtain a trove of leaked diplomatic cables from the UK's Ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, describing President Trump and his administration as inept, insecure and incompetent. The Mail splashed the scoop on its Sunday front page. CNN and other outlets soon confirmed the veracity of the cables.
Right away, theories began floating as to how and why these cables were leaked. Diplomatic cables like these are often juicy (recall the WikiLeaks trove) but this leak struck many as targeted, as the UK is in the midst of a leadership election between Boris Johnson, considered more in line with Trump's brash style, and Jeremy Hunt, the current foreign secretary. Some questioned whether the disclosure was a way to force out the ambassador so Johnson can install someone else – say, Trump favorite Nigel Farage (though Sky's deputy political editor shot that down)...
--> A formal investigation into the source of the leaks has been launched. The author of the scoop, Isabel Oakeshott -- who is close to many in the pro-Brexit wing and helped write the "Bad Boys of Brexit," a memoir by the major funders of the pro-Brexit campaign -- weighed in on Twitter, writing "Enjoying the conspiracy theories. Isn't it much simpler? In the absence of government, the civil service becomes politicised." She also teased that there could be more to come...
Best quote from the leaked cables
From Oakeshott's story quoting Darroch: "In reference to Trump's ability to shrug off controversies in a life which has been 'mired in scandal', he says that the President may nonetheless 'emerge from the flames, battered but intact, like [Arnold] Schwarzenegger in the final scenes of The Terminator.'"
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- Rep. Justin Amash sat down with Jake Tapper on Sunday after his Independence Day announcement about leaving the GOP. Amash said some GOP officials thank him for speaking out against Trump: "There are lots of Republicans out there who are saying these things privately. But they're not saying it publicly. And I think that's a problem for our country..." (CNN)
-- David Atkins' reaction: "At Some Point Justin Amash Should Name Names..." (Washington Monthly)
LOOKING BACK AT THE BIG STORIES FROM THE HOLIDAY WEEKEND...
Recovering from the quakes
The largest earthquake to strike Southern California in 20 years was centered near Ridgecrest, California... And the Ridgecrest Daily Independent newspaper felt all of it. Ceiling tiles and other debris littered the office after Friday night's 7.1 tremor, one day after the 6.4 quake that turned out to be a foreshock. "We're not putting anything back on the walls" yet, the paper's city editor Jessica Weston told "Reliable" producer Diane Kaye on Saturday.
I can really relate to what Weston said here: Once she knew her loved ones were okay, she went "into work mode in my head," she said. "And I actually feel fortunate I have that to go into," she said. "We get to be active and react to this in a constructive way," by reporting, she said. "Others don't have that." Read on...
Communities that stay calm in crisis
Megan Thomas emails from L.A. with an observation about the quakes: California — and L.A. in particular — has a reputation for sprawl, a lack of center, community or heart, but in the aftermath of two significant quakes in which thankfully no one was killed or seriously injured, I saw people checking in on one another, resilience and focused response. Emergency personnel in this state — and journalists from Yreka to San Diego — are well prepared for nature's disasters. People like to write Californians off as crazy and flakey, but that's an easy cliche. I would argue this state is home to people who are calm in crisis with a steadfast will to rebuild after losing to forces greater than us again and again. Ask residents why we live here despite the wildfires, risk of earthquakes and cost and answers may vary a little, but I believe the consistent thread you'll hear is California is where all things are possible; dream, build, become. The occasional natural havoc only seems to embolden us.
Trump and the Fourth
Reactions on the right: Trump delivered an inspirational speech and all his haters, including in the media, were proven wrong.
Reactions on the left: The entire event was a giant stroke of Trump's ego, and he made embarrassing mistakes, like a reference to the Continental Army taking over "the airports," which didn't exist.
"The problem isn't the Revolutionary War airports," WaPo's Philip Bump wrote afterward. "The problem is the unwillingness to acknowledge even tiny little mistakes."
Who will buy Univision?
Confirmation of the WSJ's report that Univision is exploring a sale, again, came on Wednesday evening... And there haven't been any big developments since.
Reuters' followup story says Univision "decided to explore a sale after it improved some of its ratings in challenging markets and saw the shares of Walt Disney Co, which it considers a peer, soar..."
Congratulations to the Melas family! | | The best kind of news! CNN entertainment reporter Chloe Melas and her husband Brian Mazza welcomed Luke Alessandro Mazza into the world on Friday at 9:46 a.m.
>> Chloe emails: "Our 2 year old son Leo is already walking around the house calling himself big brother! As much as I'll miss the CNN team I'm excited for this next chapter. See you in the fall!"
| | How Disney is in a league of its own
Brian Lowry emails: Just to reinforce how Disney is playing in a different league at the box office, "Toy Story 4" just became its fourth movie to pass $300 million in North American ticket sales this year, a plateau that "Spider-Man" — released by Sony, but made under Marvel's auspices — should reach next weekend. No other film has hit $200 million domestically in the first half of 2019...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
-- Here's more about the first trailer for the live-action remake of "Mulan..."
-- "Netflix has promised to curb depictions of smoking in new programs following a report that pointed a finger at its hit series 'Stranger Things,' whose first two seasons featured tobacco in every episode..."
-- Jerry Seinfeld says he's sorry for accusing British comedian Robert Llewellyn of ripping off "Comedians In Cars..."
Disney mourning the death of Cameron Boyce
Cameron Boyce, aged 20, was "already a veteran to show business," the company said. The actor died in his sleep "due to a seizure which was a result of an ongoing medical condition for which he was being treated," according to a statement.
Disney CEO Bob Iger tweeted: "The Walt Disney Company mourns the loss of #CameronBoyce, who was a friend to so many of us, and filled with so much talent, heart and life, and far too young to die. Our prayers go out to his family and his friends."
Ariana Grande pens letter to fans after videos show her crying on stage
CNN's Amir Vera writes: "Videos released on social media showed Ariana Grande crying onstage at a recent concert. The 'thank u, next' singer was seen in the video appearing to struggle getting through a song. Fans took to Twitter showing their support and concern for Grande who then tweeted out a long letter Sunday..."
--> "I feel everything very intensely and have committed to doing this tour during a time in my life when I'm still processing a lot ... so sometimes I cry a lot! I thank you for accepting my humanness," the letter said...
LAST BUT NOT LEAST...
Catch up on Sunday's "Reliable Sources"
I have to admit: I had an eye on #USAvNED during the commercial breaks on Sunday's "Reliable." If you were watching the match live on Fox, and want to catch up on our media conversations, you can hear the podcast edition via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your preferred app... And/or watch the video clips on CNN.com...
| | | Thank you for reading! Email me feedback anytime. See you tomorrow... | | | |
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