| | | | Trump's first interview in weeks | | | President Trump has barely talked with the press corps since Helsinki. But the WSJ's Peter Nicholas snagged what he called a "an impromptu, 20-minute Oval Office interview" on Wednesday. The primary topic was tariffs. But lots of other things came up too: "Several times Mr. Trump interrupted the conversation to summon aides to the Oval Office to share charts showing his endorsement record and to discuss the size of his following on social media." Here's the WSJ story... | | It is darkly amusing to see POTUS say the Robert Mueller probe has been "discredited" as if he's a passive observer, when he's actually an active part of the discrediting effort.
Check out how Nicholas quotes Trump trashing the probe, then disproving the claim in the next breath: "Trump didn't rule out testifying before Mr. Mueller, but he said the special counsel's investigation has been 'so badly discredited.' The Mueller investigation last month indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers and charged them with hacking the computers of Democratic organizations and ensuring the pilfered information became public." | | Local papers standing up to Trump | | About 350 newspapers all have one thing in common on Thursday: A statement supporting the free press and decrying Trump's attacks against the media. From The Martha's Vineyard Times to the Dallas Morning News... from the Yankton County Observer in South Dakota to the Bangor Daily News in Maine... the papers are all running editorials as part of an effort first proposed by the Boston Globe earlier this month.
Marjorie Pritchard, the Globe's deputy editorial page editor, told me that more papers were still "signing on" for the effort as of Wednesday afternoon. Each paper wrote its own editorial. "This whole project is not anti-Trump. It's really pro-press," The Globe's version says... More info here...
>> The Atlantic's contribution: "The Freedom of the Press Is Yours..."
| | Lots of readers skip right past the editorials. It's fashionable to say "no one cares" about editorials at all. But I think this campaign is significant because it moves the conversation about Trump's attacks out of DC and NY and into communities across the country. The participants emphasized the local nature of most news coverage, and said Trump's extreme rhetoric -- labeling journalists "enemies of the people," for instance -- hurts everyone, not just the political reporters that typically enrage him. A few examples:
>> In Belen, New Mexico, the Valencia County News-Bulletin writes that "We are not the enemy; We are the people."
>> In Athens, Ohio, the Athens News points out that local officials inspired by Trump are increasingly going "on the attack."
>> In Benson, Minnesota, the Swift County Monitor News says "Attacks On Journalists Will Lead To Violence."
| | A handful of radio and TV stations have also decided to air editorials. But the effort mostly involves papers. The main critique is that it has the appearance of a coordinated attack. "It plays into Trump's narrative that the media are aligned against him," SF Chronicle editorial page editor John Diaz wrote. Diaz predicted that Trump will call it "collusion" and "will attempt to cite this day of editorials to discredit critical and factual news stories in the future, even though no one involved in those pieces had anything to do with this campaign."
On Fox News, some of Trump's boosters have already tried to do this. This was Pritchard's reaction when I asked her about the criticism: "We're just defending the First Amendment and that shouldn't be a controversial proposition. This is about the media's role as a watchdog."
I know these editorials are mostly just preaching to the choir. But there IS strength in numbers...
| | Tom Kludt emails: The Topeka Capital-Journal was the rare newspaper to hand Trump an endorsement in the run-up to the 2016 election. At the time, the paper's editorial board said that Trump "embraced the traditionally conservative tenets championed by The Topeka Capital-Journal's family ownership." Now the paper is participating in Thursday's editorial campaign.
So what changed? Read Tom's story for all the details...
| | Criticizing the news media "is entirely right," the NYT said in its Thursday editorial. But "insisting that truths you don't like are 'fake news' is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists the 'enemy of the people' is dangerous, period."
The NYT has a compilation of the other papers' contributions here...
| | | The San Diego Union-Tribune smartly paired its editorial with a full-page spread titled "How We Restore Faith in Journalism." THAT'S the bigger issue here. "Distrust is not easy to dismantle," the editorial said. "But journalists at The San Diego Union-Tribune and nationwide will keep advocating for a free and fair press. With this president. And the next. And the next. And the next. And all who follow..." | | -- Russian trolls amped up tweets for a pro-Trump website called Truthfeed last summer, Ben Elgin reports... (Bloomberg)
-- The former Condé Nast editor Gabé Doppelt, "a publishing stalwart trusted by Anna Wintour and trained by Tina Brown," is the new maître d' of the Tower Bar... (NYT)
-- Task & Purpose top editor Adam Weinstein "resigned last week after alleging newsroom interference by its CEO to mollify conservative critics..." (The Atlantic) | | Brian Klaas on this week's "Reliable" podcast | | NEW: I spoke with political scientist Dr. Brian Klaas for this week's "Reliable" pod... He has a unique POV as an American living in London, writing books and WashPost pieces, trying to sound the alarm about Trump's rhetoric.
Klaas told me that Trump is echoing "history's monsters." And he asserted that the effects of dehumanizing language and anti-media attacks will linger long after Trump leaves office. When I asked, he defended his self-professed "alarmism" and said this moment in time calls for "bluntness." Listen via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or TuneIn... | | | This is the WaPo's illustration for the must-read story by Ben Terris... | | The title: "She works for Trump. He can't stand him. This is life with Kellyanne and George Conway."
As Marcus Brauchli tweeted, this is "a story everyone in Washington has been wanting to read for months. Beautifully executed..." | | Trump's move against Brennan | | | There's so much to say about Trump's Wednesday announcement about ex-CIA director/current NBC analyst John Brennan, but I'll defer to others, given the late hour. "This White House is actually attempting to claim with a straight face that lying and wild outbursts on TV and Twitter are a reason to revoke security clearance," Don Lemon commented Wednesday night. "Who else makes wild outbursts? Who else lies? ... That man, of course, is Donald Trump himself..." | | -- "Amazon Has YouTube Envy," Lucas Shaw writes: "It wants to turn its Twitch online hangout for avid gamers into a broader video service..." (Bloomberg)
-- In the WSJ: A big profile of NYT COO Meredith Kopit Levien and her "nontraditional ad deals..." (WSJ) | | Dorsey sits down with Holt | | Oliver Darcy emails: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey suggested in an interview with "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt on Wednesday that suspending Alex Jones -- or as he put, giving him a "timeout" -- could result in him potentially changing his behavior and following the social network's rules. "Any suspension, whether it be a permanent one or a temporary one, makes someone think about their actions and behavior," Dorsey said.
The Twitter CEO's comments were not-so-surprisingly met with intense skepticism from activists and journalists. It seems unlikely that a seven-day suspension will radically alter Jones' behavior on the platform. Keep in mind that Jones has been live-streaming each of his shows in their entirety on Twitter. So this isn't just about what he tweets on the platform, but what he says during the hours he's on air...
>> Darcy adds: Also keep in mind that Dorsey's position on this appears to have changed. Initially, when Facebook, Apple, YouTube rid their platforms of InfoWars and Jones, Dorsey said he wasn't doing so because Jones hadn't violated any rules. That statement turned out to be false. Twitter has since conceded that Jones/InfoWars has committed multiple violations, one as early as this week. But Dorsey still won't go beyond putting Jones in a Twitter "timeout..." | | | I'll be sitting down with Dorsey later this week for an in-depth interview. Look for it on CNN this Sunday... | | The headline on Paul Farhi's latest: "Said something you'd like to forget? CNN's Andrew Kaczynski won't let it go."
He says the KFILE team's track record "raises a couple of questions: Why have Kaczynski and his young colleagues (editor Kyle Blaine, 27, and researcher-reporters Chris Massie, 26, and Nathan McDermott, 30) proved better at vetting Trump's nominees than the people in the federal government who are supposed to be vetting Trump's nominees? And why are there so many people with questionable records knocking around Trump's administration in the first place?"
Great questions, indeed! | | | For the record, part three | | | By Julia Waldow:
-- Google officially rolled out its searchable archive of political ads on Wednesday, Axios' David McCabe details. The tool features ads from the end of May to present day, as well as information on who paid for the ads, about how much money was spent on the ads, and about how many impressions the ads received. Explore the library here...
-- FT CEO John Ridding has pledged to give his 2017 pay increase back to the company after staff criticized his financial package, which appeared to be more than half of FT's 2017 operating profits, the FT's Matthew Garrahan reports. Ridding is calling for the money to go to a "women's development fund" to support women in senior roles and reduce the gender pay gap, with leftover money to fund FT operations...
-- Watch the official trailer for "Follow This," a Netflix docuseries about BuzzFeed reporters' big stories... (IndieWire)
-- ICYMI: Despite a drop in app store rankings, the trivia app HQ may get a second wind through Apple TV... (TechCrunch) | | PRX and PRI, "two of the nation's four national distributors of programming for public-radio stations," are merging, WSJ's Anne Steele reports. "The other networks, National Public Radio and American Public Media, are much larger."
Details: "No money will change hands in the tie-up. Boston-based public broadcaster WGBH, which bought PRI in 2012 and recently turned to PRX as a partner for podcasts, will invest $10 million in developing new content, including a new production studio and a Podcast Garage in Washington, D.C., to train new creators..." | | Crazy high expectations for "Crazy Rich Asians" | | Entertainment editor Megan Thomas emails: I highly recommend this piece from the New Yorker's Jiayang Fan, "How to Watch 'Crazy Rich Asians' like an Asian-American."
Fan writes: "What does it mean that 'Crazy Rich Asians' must accommodate simultaneous, conflicting demands -- to tell a coherent narrative, to represent Asians of all stripes, to showcase Asian culture without alienating the dominant culture, to sell something palatable to the average American -- when other movies, starring white leads, are asked only to tell a single story convincingly? Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group that is united, more than anything else, by a historical marginalization in society, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter of a century. In this sense, we can't help but become emblematic of another stereotype: the overbearing Asian parent, demanding the best of our creation, endowing it with our greatest hopes and, like any good tiger mom, our fiercest criticisms." | | Brian Lowry, back from vacation, emails: A Washington Post opinion piece headlined "Is 'Crazy Rich Asians' Asian Enough?" is rightly receiving some grief and derision, mostly for this line:
"Some say it struggles to showcase diverse perspectives, falling short of adequately representing the wider Asian experience or what life is like in Singapore, where most of the movie takes place."
LA Times critic Justin Chang, for example, lampooned the Post for tweeting that "some say the movie fails to capture the diversity of the Asian experience."
The bottom line is any fictional narrative focuses on its specific characters, so expecting the movie to do more than tell their story -- and significantly, help open up the avenues for more films like it -- is a pretty ridiculous ask... | | "Veep" is back in production! | | Showrunner David Mandel shared this photo on Twitter on Wednesday, hashtagged "first day of shooting."
As The Wrap notes here, Julia Louis-Dreyfus announced last September that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer... Production was postponed while she underwent chemotherapy treatment... But now "she and the rest of the cast are back in the swing of things." JLD shared a video showing her giving Tony Hale a shave... | | Mixed response to Academy changes | | One more from Lowry: I was on vacation when the Academy announced its revised plans for the Oscar telecast, which happened to mirror some suggestions I made after the low ratings for this year's show, including holding the length of the telecast to three hours and streamlining the presentation of some lower-profile categories. But the group botched the carve-out for a "popular film" category, which it had hoped to achieve organically when it expanded the number of best-picture nominees a few years ago.
At any rate, the debate continues, with both Variety and THR finding decidedly mixed response among members, with some fearing the move risks turning the Oscars into the MTV Movie Awards... | | | For the record, part four | | | By Lisa Respers France:
-- Reality star Lyric McHenry has died at 26. She appeared on and was one of the producers of E!'s "EJNYC..."
-- Priyanka Chopra debuted her ring, and it looks like Nick Jonas did good!
-- Emmys co-host Colin Jost is, uh, not a fan of awards shows...
-- Female pop group Danity Kane is (kind of) reuniting... | | |
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