| | | | | I'm back after a week in the Arizona desert... strapped in for a busy media news week... with John Kelly taking over as W.H. chief of staff... Scripps sale news right around the corner... Apple earnings... and much more. Here's a preview: | | "Fox & Friends" has a great responsibility | | While I was on vacation, Fox News took out a full-page ad in the NYT, trumpeting TV critic James Poniewozik's remark that "Fox & Friends" is "the most powerful TV show in America" because President Trump is the show's #1 viewer. This gave me a chance to quote Theodore Roosevelt on Sunday's "Reliable Sources."
"I believe in power," Roosevelt said in 1908, "but I believe that responsibility should go with power."
This was the point of my essay on Sunday's show: Time and time again, irresponsible "Fox & Friends" segments have misled the president, and in turn, the prez has misled the public. While the show's hosts may or may not consider themselves reporters, they have an obligation to be careful like reporters -- to be correct -- to be fair if not balanced. There's even more pressure when the president is watching. (And that's true for other cable news shows too, not just "F&F.") Watch the essay here... and David Zurawik's reaction... | | "Veep" producer says Trump is "doing a rival comedy" | | | Sean Hannity, here's fresh fodder for your Hollywood-hating segments: "Veep" EP David Mandel, at Politicon on Sunday, taking a swipe at the Trump White House: "It does seem like they are doing a rival comedy." He's at work on the sixth season of the show now. "On a daily basis, and sometimes on an hourly basis, they just outdo us, and it sucks," he said... | | Insane traffic for "insane" interview | | According to New Yorker PR, Ryan Lizza's insane* interview with Anthony Scaramucci has totaled 4.4 million unique visitors since Thursday, "making it NewYorker.com's most-read piece of 2017 so far." Another in-house record: The site had "more than 100,000 concurrent visitors in the hours following publication." The mag says there's been a bump in subscriptions too...
-- *Insane* That's what Lizza called it. He told CNN's Ana Cabrera that he labeled the recording "Insane Scaramucci Interview..." | | Scaramucci keeping a much lower profile... | | | Ever since the Lizza story, he's gone from being the most visible man in the Trump admin to practically invisible, except in the tabloids. Will that change this week? Kelly will be sworn in at 9:30am, and Trump will hold a cabinet meeting at 10... | | -- Real quote in this WashPost deep dive about the Jeff Sessions standoff: "The problem for Trump is: Who would be attorney general, if not Sessions? Judge Jeanine?"
-- Tim Alberta's latest must-read: "Without Priebus, Trump Is a Man Without a Party"
-- Jeff Greenfield's Sunday afternoon tweet: "I'm not much at reading tea leaves, but there are FIVE items hostile to Trump on DRUDGE's front page right now."
-- Jennifer Rubin on Sunday's "Reliable:" "I think there's a very small segment of the conservative base that is becoming alarmed. It's not the majority..."
-- Politico's in-depth piece about Javanka: "Both Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner declined to comment for this story." | | | Keep scrolling for a complete recap of Sunday's "Reliable" and the latest Trump + media news... | | A sign of the WashPost's independence? | | The next time President Trump or anyone else questions the independence of the WashPost, consider this: the front of the paper's Sunday Business section featured this sprawling Steven Pearlstein column about Amazon. The title: "Is Amazon getting too big?" His answer is "not yet," but it is "well on its way to becoming" a threat to competition. "Jeffrey P. Bezos, the company's founder and chief executive, is the owner of The Washington Post," Pearlstein noted in a graf about Amazon's no-comment.
Pearlstein used to be a full-time staffer at the Post. Now he writes a regular column on contract. I asked Marty Baron if this was a particularly complicated piece, and Baron replied thusly: "He wrote the column, and we published it. There is no back story." | | NYT v. WashPost in September's Vanity Fair | | | James Warren talked with Baron and Dean Baquet for this #longread about the newspaper rivalry that's resulting in scoop after scoop about the Trump admin. "Competition is the least examined motivation in American journalism," Baquet told him. Warren also tells a David Carr story and works in a jab at the WSJ: "You have to wonder what ever happened to The Wall Street Journal, which ought to be in the same league when it comes to covering Trump but is not even close..." | | TWO IMPORTANT MONDAY MEDIA COLUMNS | | Margaret Sullivan's latest | | | Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman emails: Margaret Sullivan says there's such a thing as a "Gawker effect," in that several publications got cold feet about publishing the R. Kelly "cult" story, fearing a lawsuit like the one that wiped Gawker out. The story ultimately ran on BuzzFeed, and the site's head of U.S. news Shani Hilton tweeted on Sunday night, "I am still truly baffled by the unwillingness of other outlets to publish this story." Read Sullivan's full column here... | | | Jim Rutenberg files from Berlin, writing about concerns over Wikileaks-style leaks ahead of the German election, and how news outlets are preparing. "If the data does leak," the German media "will face a test like the one the American media did. I had to wonder: Will it do better than we did? And should we have done better in the first place?" Read the rest... | | | (Without Carson Daly.) MTV prez Chris McCarthy shared the news with the NYT's John Koblin for this "strategic pivot" story: "TRL" will "return in October, and a massive studio facing Times Square was under construction in the hope of capturing the old magic." McCarthy also has stinging words about MTV News, which recently endured layoffs... | | -- "Apple removes VPN apps from the App Store in China..." (TechCrunch)
-- "From the team that brought you The Daily..." the NYT has a new podcast called "The New Washington..." (iTunes)
-- PBS prez Paula Kerger's message at TCA press tour: If Trump ever succeeds in cutting all federal funding for public broadcasting, "PBS itself will not go away, but a number of our stations will..." (THR)
-- Big Monday WSJ story about Megan Ellison's "big Hollywood gamble," a "movie studio for grown-ups..." (WSJ) | | Discovery + Scripps news coming very soon | | | If last week's reports hold up, we're likely to see a deal between Discovery Communications and Scripps Networks sometime this week. Maybe Monday morning? | | Media week ahead calendar | | -- All week: The Television Critics Association press tour continues! Sandra Gonzalez is there covering it for us...
-- Monday night: "CBS: On Assignment" starts a four-week run on CBS... AP's David Bauder has a preview here...
-- Tuesday after the bell: Apple reports earnings...
-- Tuesday evening: Anderson Cooper moderates a CNN town hall with Al Gore pegged to the new climate change doc "An Inconvenient Sequel..."
-- Wednesday before the bell: Time Warner and Sinclair report earnings...
-- Friday: "Detroit" opens nationwide... | | | Via Francesca: Poynter's Daniel Funke continues to keep track of which NYTers are taking buyouts. New to his list on Sunday: LaSharah Bunting, senior editor for digital transition, who had been with the Times for 13 years, and metro reporter David Dunlap, a 35-year vet... | | UK's Sunday Times deletes "anti-Semitic" article after backlash | | "The editors of London's Sunday Times and the newspaper's Irish edition have apologized after publishing an article Sunday suggesting that two well-known British TV and radio presenters were paid more than other women because they were Jewish," CNN's Hilary Clarke reports from London. The Kevin Myers column "has since been taken off both publications' websites." But how did it get published in the first place?
-- The paper says Myers "will not write again for The Sunday Times Ireland..." | | | Breitbart, AlterNet, Media Matters, Newsmax, and Mediaite all wrote up CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley's comments on "Reliable Sources." How's that for a collection of media brands? Brinkley told me that the Trump White House is in "utter disarray" and the president is "unfit for command." His message: "He thinks you can govern by chaos, and it's not working." Remember, Brinkley met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago right before New Year's... | | | Brinkley mentioned how we all "saw John McCain give the big thumbs down to Donald Trump." I told him I think the 👎 is going to become a symbol of anti-Trump sentiment on the right... | | Notice this? Scaramucci hasn't plugged the leaks yet | | | "So many people are leaking" inside the administration, April Ryan said on Sunday's show, despite Anthony Scaramucci's one-week-old pledge to ferret out leakers. Richard Wolffe said the infighting has been "exceptional." Watch our discussion here... | | Four ways to catch up on Sunday's "Reliable" | | "The conspiracy peddling. The constant bad-faith arguments. The decision to equate coverage that makes you uncomfortable as not representative of reality. None of it is happening in a vacuum. It is all leading somewhere..."
--Charlie Warzel in the latest edition of his excellent INFOWARZEL newsletter... | | WSJ: "Priebus Wasn't the Problem" | | Rich Barbieri emails: The editorial board at Rupert Murdoch's biggest U.S. newspaper is not letting go of its running critique of President Trump.
This weekend the Journal defended ousted W.H. chief of staff Reince Priebus and slammed Trump as the source of the chaos in his own administration. "Presidents get the White House operations they want, and Mr. Trump has a chaotic mess because he seems to like it. He likes pitting faction against faction, as if his advisers are competing casino operators from his Atlantic City days. But a presidential administration is a larger undertaking than a family business, and the infighting and competing leaks have created a dysfunctional White House."
This follows the Journal's scathing July 17 editorial, "The Trumps and the Truth." As it did in the Priebus editorial, the Journal editorial board warned Trump to get his act together: "They don't have much more time to do it..." | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Heidi N. Moore, writing for the WashPost, explains why Scaramucci's press tactics feel familiar to her: other Wall Street hot shots behave exactly the same way...
-- Asterisks or no asterisks? Sydney Ember rounded up all the ways newsrooms faced the challenge of reporting on Scaramucci's profanity-laden interview...
-- AAJA's 2017 convention just wrapped up Saturday in Philly. Here are the group's latest findings on diversity in newsrooms... | | "Dunkirk" #1, "Emoji Movie" #2 | | Brooks Barnes says "the disconnect between Hollywood's taste and that of the masses has rarely been more sharply drawn as it was over the weekend, as the stylish 'Atomic Blonde' sputtered and 'The Emoji Movie' pushed past horrified critics to become a box office success."
"Dunkirk" was #1 overall, but "The Emoji Movie" was "an unexpectedly close second," Barnes writes in his recap for the NYT... | | Kidman: "Would I love to do more TV? Absolutely" | | | Sandra Gonzalez files from TCA: Between her Emmy nomination and her upcoming role on the critically acclaimed "Top of the Lake," Nicole Kidman is taking over TV -- and she's open to doing even more on the small screen. "Would I love to do more TV? Absolutely. Is it in the future? I don't know," Kidman said Saturday at a panel during the press tour... Read more here... | | #OscarsSoWhite creator starts social media campaign to stop "Confederate" | | Another one from Sandra: The woman behind the #OscarsSoWhite movement, April Reign, has set her sights on a new quest: to get HBO to say #No to "Confederate," a recently announced series from the creators of "Game of Thrones." The series will imagine what would have happened if Southern states successfully seceded from the Union during the Civil War and slavery continued to be practiced.
-- "The premise of the show itself is without merit," Reign told Sandra. "The commodification of Black pain for the enjoyment of others must stop." Details here... | | | Send us an email... we're 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. | | | | | |
