| | | | | Happy October! Exec summary: Condé Nast is mourning the loss of S.I. Newhouse Jr... Puerto Ricans are living a "nightmare..." Disney and Altice are still talking... and VF's New Establishment list is out... Scroll down for details... | | Trump revives "fake news" slur | | President Trump is promoting an alternative reality about Puerto Rico. Some of his administration's claims are contradicted by journalists and officials on the ground...
-- His tweet about Puerto Ricans wanting "everything to be done for them" was insensitive at best, a racist dog whistle at worst. There were other "is this a new low?" posts over the weekend...
-- Trump also revived his "fake news" slur, which was especially insulting to the news crews that have been working almost nonstop in Puerto Rico since Maria made landfall 11 days ago...
-- I've been seeing some social media users with family in Puerto Rico sharing updates by saying "this is REAL news..."
-- On Fox, FEMA boss Brock Long said "this is the most logistically challenging event the United States has ever seen," causing some viewers to respond, "What about the moon landing?" "Or World War II?"
-- Not The Onion: "Trump dedicates golf trophy to hurricane victims..."
-- BTW, Patch says a passerby snapped these pictures of Trump golfing on Sunday. The W.H. won't confirm or deny that he played...
-- Meanwhile, Trump's tweets undermining Rex Tillerson had me asking, "Are we at the point where folks on TV should be questioning the president's stability?"
-- Later in the day, State Dept. spokeswoman Heather Nauert tweeted that North Korea "will not obtain a nuclear capability." This tweet dumb-founded experts, since the country has had nuclear capabilities for many years...
-- Looking ahead: Trump will meet up with his friend Sean Hannity in WV on Wednesday... Ostensibly to push tax reform... Looking up at this summary, I can think of some questions that Hannity won't ask... | | Here it is: The New Establishment list | | | Jeff Bezos maintained his status at #1 on VF's New Establishment list, which came out Sunday afternoon. Mark Zuckerberg remained #2. Tim Cook moved up to #3, from #14 last year. Larry Page moved up to #4, from #13. And that's all you need to know about tech's dominance over the media landscape... | | Dean and Marty, Glenn and Maggie, Mike and Jim... | | Robert Mueller ranked #6 thanks to his "assignment of a lifetime." Bob Iger is #7, Reed Hastings is #9, and Les Moonves is #13. Two notable additions: Randall Stephenson, who wasn't on the list last year, is #8, and Jeff Zucker is #14. Some media world duos on the list:
Marty Baron and Dean Baquet at #10...
Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush at #32...
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei at #95... | | -- Dylan Byers pointed out that Snap's Evan Spiegel fell from #3 last year to #28 this year... Rupert Murdoch was #8 last year, #16 this year, despite his "Trump whisperer" status... Lowell McAdam was #36 last year, #48 this year...
-- Clever work by VF's editors: Ted Sarandos and Richard Plepler are right next to each other, #27 and #26 respectively...
-- Laurene Powell Jobs, #73 last year, is #44 now... The blurb notes her new "majority stake in The Atlantic" and says "many assume that she now has her eye on The New York Times..." | | VF's summit starts Tuesday | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: Dylan Byers and I will be filing dispatches from the New Establishment summit in Beverly Hills on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Bob Iger's chat with VF's Nick Bilton has the potential to make some news, especially if he provides any further details on Disney's in-the-works streaming services. And, personally, I'm looking forward to Ted Sarandos and Ava DuVernay sharing the stage for a panel on storytelling in the new media age on Tuesday... | | S.I. Newhouse Jr., 1927-2017 | | Publishing giant Samuel Irving Newhouse died Sunday. He was 89. "Today is a day of emotion, of genuine loss, for our family and for Si Newhouse's extended family at Condé Nast," Donald, Jonathan and Steve Newhouse wrote in a company-wide memo. "Si loved Condé Nast. He was proud to publish the finest magazines in the world and to offer exceptional content on every digital platform."
"On behalf of everyone in our family, we look forward to celebrating Si's legacy by continuing his passionate support for Condé Nast and for your extraordinary work," the family wrote.
-- Newhouse retired as chairman emeritus in 2015. "He had dementia and was rarely seen in public," the NYT's Sydney Ember noted. But he was seen at the company's One World Trade offices just two weeks ago...
-- Remembrances: By David Remnick, Graydon Carter, Tina Brown... | | Thirty days in the magazine industry... | | | LAT's Steven Zeitchik tweeted: "Rolling Stone on block, Hef and Si Newhouse dead. This has to be magazine publishing's saddest month in decades." The dominos started falling on Sept. 7 when Graydon announced he was stepping down... Three other editors are leaving top mags as well... | | -- ICYMI: Here's Frank Pallotta's recap of the "SNL" season opener... (CNNMoney)
-- Brian Steinberg tweets: "NBC says approx 7.02M viewers tuned in last night's 'SNL' -- the show's second most-watched season premiere in 7 years..." (Twitter)
-- Secretary of Defense James Mattis is "on a tight rope" talking to press, former Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren told me on Sunday's program... Here's the video... (CNN) | | | On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," we discussed how coverage of Hurricane Maria compared to Harvey and Irma... And I asked if there's a correlation between TV news coverage and Trump's interest in a given topic. Tara Palmeri said yes, there is. Here's the full segment... | | | Two of the standout correspondents in P.R. have been CNN's Leyla Santiago and CBS's David Begnaud. Both have been there for nearly two weeks. On Sunday's program, Santiago -- who was born on the island -- told me the situation is a "nightmare," but then said that word "just doesn't seem to be enough." She paused and said: "I haven't been able to find the words." She added on Twitter later: "I may never find the words." | | Cooper, Cuomo anchoring from San Juan | | | Chris Cuomo is co-anchoring CNN's "New Day" from San Juan on Monday morning... and Anderson Cooper remains there for "AC360..." | | Will this be the week Facebook hands over its trove of Russian-linked ads to Congress? And if so, how quickly will the ads leak out? "Facebook doesn't want to show these ads," Dylan Byers said on Sunday's program, but he predicted leaks...
Byers, Julia Angwin and I talked about media/tech literacy as a partial solution to the problems plaguing Facebook and other tech giants. Here's the video... | | | Oliver Darcy emails: Paul Krugman made a jarring claim on Twitter this weekend, telling his 3.5 million followers that there was cholera in Puerto Rico. The tweet, which by Sunday evening and been retweeted more than 13,000 times, was incorrect, according to the CDC which said it doesn't expect any cases in Puerto Rico. In a follow up tweet, Krugman acknowledged his error. But the famed New York Times columnist chose not to delete his tweet, allowing it to continue to be shared on the Internet. (Of course, the correction was shared far less than the initial tweet.) Why not scrub the tweet and apologize? It's not clear. But given Krugman's stature in society, and the fact that he works at the Times, he should be far more careful about what he posts online. His tweet not only misinformed people, but opened the Times up to criticism. All Sunday I watched as Trump supporters used it to hurl "fake news" slurs at the newspaper. Krugman owes more to his Times colleagues and those who look to him for news and information... | | Disney and Altice avert a blackout | | | As Joe Flint put it: The bundle lives. Disney and Altice came to the edge of an ESPN and WABC blackout on Sunday, but then announced a truce: "We have reached an agreement in principle and have extended the deadline accordingly to try and finalize the terms." | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Margaret Sullivan's Monday column on the real crisis in journalism: not Trump, but crumbling business models... (WashPost)
-- As more and more First Amendment questions crop up, Jill Lepore has a historical overview... (The New Yorker)
-- Zeynep Tufekci poking some serious holes in Zuckerberg's "both sides" argument from this week. She calls his defense of Facebook "preposterous..." (NYT) | | Media week ahead calendar | | Monday: Harris Faulkner takes over the 1pm hour and Dana Perino takes over the 2pm hour on Fox News...
Tuesday evening: I'll be moderating an event at the Paley Center about "The State of Press Freedom..." Details here...
Wednesday morning: Google holds a product reveal event...
Thursday: The Online News Association conference gets underway in DC...
Thursday evening: News & Documentary Emmy Awards ceremony in NYC...
Friday: The New Yorker Festival begins... | | Charlie Sykes' book "How the Right Lost Its Mind" hits on Tuesday... In a preview, published by The Daily Beast, he says the real damage of the Trump era "is the damage it does to the culture, ranging from the ways we talk to each other to whether we care about truth anymore..."
Speaking of the truth... | | | POTUS hasn't given an interview to NBC/ABC/CBS since May, but on Wednesday he'll give his second interview in a week to Fox News. He'll be participating in a special edition of "Hannity" taped in front of an audience in Morgantown, WV. Sean Hannity will interview him, and then a crowd of Republicans, Democrats and independents will ask him Q's... | | | Brian Lowry emails: Sunday morning's frenzied Trump news cycle -- North Korea; Puerto Rico; NFL -- offered a strong endorsement of Timothy Egan's most recent New York Times column, titled "The Trump Fog Machine." Egan suggests that the effect of this presidency is to "induce amnesia in the public, as if we'd all been given a memory-loss drug." And just to give Egan's colleague Bret Stephens equal time, he made some interesting points about how the conservative-media apparatus has filled the void left within the Republican Party, as well as the implications of that. "These are not ideas guys," Stephens wrote. "They're anger guys." | | | -- Video: On "Reliable Sources" I discussed Trump news cycle overload with Seth and Bethany Mandel, a husband and wife pair of conservative writers... As if to prove the point, we changed the focus of the segment just a few minutes before air time... | | The NFL story has pivoted to something that has "nothing to do with what Colin Kaepernick was talking about."
--Wesley Lowery, on Sunday's program, urging the press to recognize the origins of the anthem protest... | | New demonstrations at NFL games | | "For the second consecutive Sunday, NFL players around the country and in London demonstrated in a variety of ways in response to President Trump's call for NFL owners to fire any 'son of a bitch' who 'disrespects our flag,'" CNN's Eliott C. McLaughlin and Darran Simon report....
Foreshadowing the day's events, a source familiar with the NFL anthem matter told me that many of the players who kneeled last week in protest of Trump's comments would stand this week -- "but will do so out of respect for our country and military, not out of respect for Trump." Sure enough, fewer players took a knee during the anthem, but there many other kinds of statements... | | Megyn Kelly's second week begins... | | Over the weekend there were even more rough reviews of "Megyn Kelly Today." In this Friday piece, BuzzFeed's Kate Aurthur said Kelly "is learning the very hard way." And the NYT's James Poniewozik weighed in Sunday. "The entire argument for her show is that she's burned out on the politics thing and needs a break," he asserted... Check out his kicker about "joy..." And lemme know what you think of week #2...
-- Counterpoint: Maria Menounos on FB: "Why is everyone geared toward being negative? Yes Megyn Kelly is trying something different, why can't we be supportive? Why do we have to tear her down?"
-- David Folkenflik nails it: "Kelly is attempting profound transformation in public view. Yet in TV, the past is never quite past..." | | "Not moving on from the election?" | | | Oliver Darcy emails: Small thing, but Fox News had a whole segment on Saturday morning about how the "mainstream media" is "not moving on from the election." As I stared at the chyron, I couldn't help but wonder: are the good people at "Fox & Friends Weekend" aware Trump regularly relitigates the 2016 campaign? Have they never watched their own network where many hosts still continue to be obsessed with Hillary Clinton? | | ICYMI: Podcast with Media Matters president Angelo Carusone | | | On our "Reliable Sources" podcast, separate from the TV edition, I spoke with Media Matters president Angelo Carusone about his organization; the future of Fox News; and much more. Here's the podcast... Subscribe via iTunes... | | | For the record, part three | | | Via Francesca:
-- Here's Sapna Maheshwari's recap of Advertising Week in Monday's paper... (NYT)
-- On Sunday a new law to curb hate speech on social media went into effect in Germany. There are concerns that it may bring about more censorship... (Quartz)
-- The Outline looked into the pressures faced by secure messaging app Telegram in Russia, and on the possible ties between the app and the Kremlin... (The Outline) | | Two CNN weddings over the weekend! | | | CNN's Sonia Moghe married Precision Strategies managing principal Eric Koch on Cape Cod on Saturday... the NYT wrote up their meet-cute story, which involves Moghe calling Koch for comment... Spotted: Sara Sidner, Mallory Simon, Rob Frehse and Yon Pomrenze, Lis Smith, Dave Arnold, Julia Kelly, Samantha Fields, Na'eem Douglas, Haimy Assefa... | | | CNN International anchor Zain Asher married the AP's Steve Peoples on Saturday. Asher tweeted: "So... this happened yesterday! It was blissful, beautiful, serene and it went by so quickly. Still floating on air. What a day!" Picture... | | | "Curb Your Enthusiasm" returned to HBO Sunday night... Review screeners weren't provided in advance, so look out for some reviews overnight... | | Weekend box office report | | | Brian Lowry emails: Tom Cruise's "American Made" got off to a so-so start in terms of box office, finishing in a three-way photo finish with the holdovers "It" and "Kingsman: The Golden Circle." But this really is one of those instances where the praise heaped on the movie -- and especially Cruise's performance -- counts as a win, after the star's run of mediocre films and a major summer flop with "The Mummy..." | | | Email brian.stelter@turner.com... I 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. | | | | | |
