| | | | | Exec summary: Sinclair is in the final stages of settlement talks with the DOJ... Google is experimenting with a local news app... Tronc is working on something mysterious... And the producers of the Grammys are getting ready for Sunday's telecast. But one story towers over all the rest: | | Stories come and go quickly in the Trump age -- but not this story. The NYT's scoop about President Trump calling for Robert Mueller's firing last June is having reverberations all over the place.
Friday night's lead story on the WashPost website: "The Mueller confrontation the GOP has tried to avoid has arrived." The most read story over on Politico.com: "It's Now Likely Mueller Thinks Trump Obstructed Justice" by Renato Mariotti. And on CNN.com, the lead story is a scoop by Sara Murray, Kara Scannell, Dana Bash and Pamela Brown. Trump "has Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in his crosshairs," they report.
More from the story: "The President has been venting about Rosenstein -- who oversees Mueller and the special counsel investigation -- in recent weeks, according to four sources familiar with the situation. At times, Trump even gripes about wanting Rosenstein removed, two of those sources said. One source said the President makes comments like 'let's fire him, let's get rid of him' before his advisers convince him it's an ill-fated idea..." | | The "massacre" that wasn't | | | Newt Gingrich dismissed it as "a non-story about a non-event." Other Fox Newsers tried to look the other way. But most other analysts admitted that this is a significant moment. "AC360" had a story explaining Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre," followed by a two-part "echoes of Watergate" panel... | | MSNBC wonders: Was it inspired by Fox? | | | On "All In," Chris Hayes pointed out that some Fox hosts disparaged Mueller and suggested he should be dismissed way back in June, around the time Trump tried to fire Mueller. After playing several clips, Hayes said to Kurt Bardella, "You have to wonder the degree to which the president himself got the idea or thought about doing it from watching that..." | | New: Hannity defends himself | | Sean Hannity pretty much reverted to form on Friday night after Thursday's awkward flip-flop. He said Trump v. Mueller is "the biggest non-story ever being hyped by the liberal media that absolutely, we all know, hates President Trump."
He claimed "they want to create a distraction... They do not want you, the American people, to know about the biggest story in their lifetimes that involve real evidence of wrongdoings and crimes they have missed." Wait! What story?! Oh, it's about those "Trump-bashing FBI lovers" and other alleged Obama-era corruption... Hannity says it's "shaping up to be the biggest scandal in American history..."
--> Jason Schwartz's latest for Politico: "Fox News hosts ramp up 'deep state' conspiracies" | | From my latest column for CNNMoney: An epic week of Russia-related reporting collided with a wild conspiracy theory about the FBI and President Trump. All of the coverage underscored one thing: Trump's anxiety about Mueller.
Look, every day, there's at least one new revelation about how many people Mueller has interviewed and how much he has learned about the inner workings of Trumpworld. The more explosive the news stories from major newsrooms, the more dramatic the counter-narratives from Trump's allies. The resulting noise from all the news coverage can confound and even turn off viewers. But the cascade of headlines this week tell a clear story.
Leak by leak, Trump seems to be in a more and more precarious situation... | | "The falsehoods told to the public by this White House are so commonplace now, they no longer seem to even raise eyebrows..."
--Jake Tapper on "The Lead" Friday afternoon... | | In the wake of the NYT's scoop, Jeffrey Toobin has a new column on The New Yorker's website. "Mueller and his team surely have evidence on obstruction of justice that has not yet been made public," he writes. "But even on the available evidence, Trump's position looks perilous indeed. The portrait is of a President using every resource at his disposal to shut down an investigation -- of Trump himself. And now it has become clear that Trump's own White House counsel rebelled at the President's rationale for his actions."
He said "abundant questions remain about Trump's fate in the Mueller investigation," but "on perhaps the most important question of all -- whether the President of the United States committed the crime of obstruction of justice -- the answer now seems clear." | | Notice what didn't happen on Friday... | | | There wasn't an all-hands-on-deck attempt to deny and discredit the NYT story. The White House did not issue a stern denial. Actually, President Trump was the only person to put his name to a denial. He called the NYT story "fake news" when reporters in Davos asked him about it... | | Instead of denials, Trump allies tried to downplay the news. Via Tom Kludt: Friday's "Fox & Friends" barely talked about the bombshell story that was dominating other morning shows. When the Mueller news did come up, it was handled delicately. It was a "typical New York Times" story, Pete Hegseth said. Ainsley Earhardt told viewers it was "something we have to tell you about because it is a headline on The New York Times."
"What do you think about that?" Earhardt asked. "Do you even care?" | | This weekend: Will he tweet? | | | "Everybody keep an eye at your Twitter feed," Chris Cuomo said on CNN Friday night. "POTUS just landed from his Davos trip and you know he's gonna want to throw some shade on the new reporting about his efforts to oust the special counsel..." | | This Sunday on "Reliable" | | | I'll be joined by Rep. Eric Swalwell, Jackie Calmes, Noah Rothman, David French, Amy Goodman, Julian Zelizer, David Chavern, and more... See you Sunday at 11am ET on CNN! | | -- Hadas Gold's latest: "Six male staffers at the BBC take salary cuts amid pay gap outcry..." (CNNMoney)
-- Things that make you go "huh:" "Texas Monthly EIC wades into an ethical gray zone..." (CJR)
-- Jeff Bezos is making a cameo in Amazon's Super Bowl ad for Alexa... Or at least in this teaser ad... (AdAge)
-- Van Jones' twice-a-month show on CNN debuts Saturday at 7pm... It'll include an interview with Jay-Z and a traveling segment called "Van in a Van..." | | Google's vision for local news | | What would a Google-created platform for local news content look like? It would look like Bulletin, an app that the company is trying out in two cities. "With Bulletin," the company's promotional material says, "you can contribute to local stories and be the voice of your community!" In other words: Unpaid "citizen" journalists.
The new app was introduced in Nashville, Tennessee, and Oakland, California, on Thursday... It lets users post stories, photos and videos about local happenings from their phones, and share them through search tools and social media. Here's my full story...
--> Shoutout to Slate's Will Oremus, who spotted it early. He says Bulletin is "part of a trend of the big tech platforms beginning to look at how they can help to repair the news economy that they disrupted..." | | DOJ almost ready to OK the Sinclair-Tribune deal? | | | Longtime B&C reporter John Eggerton reported Friday that the Department of Justice "may be ready as early as Friday, or early next week, to OK the Sinclair-Tribune deal, with station divestitures that resolve competition issues, according to someone familiar with the deal process." Maybe there was some sort of disagreement between the two sides on Friday, because the day came and went without a settlement. But I'll be keep an eye out for an agreement next week. The DOJ declined to comment... | | Recommended weekend reading:
-- Ken Doctor's latest: "Who and what is the new L.A. Times Network?"
--"A mysterious new management team appears to be quietly building a non-union network," HuffPost's Ashley Feinberg, Dave Jamieson, and Matt Ferner report...
-- WashPost's Paul Farhi says recent events have left both "the newsroom and its readers a bit dazed and unsure of what's coming next..." | | Jemele Hill leaving "SC6" | | SI's Richard Deitsch broke the news on Friday morning: "Jemele Hill is leaving SportsCenter for a new role with The Undefeated and other ESPN projects." ESPN confirmed the move in the afternoon.
As Ahiza Garcia notes in her story for CNN, the official word is that Hill approached ESPN about making the change. "I asked to leave the show" because "of a strong desire to return to reporting, writing and commentary," she told fans. Michael Smith will continue hosting the show without her... | | | Deitsch pointed out that Hill has three years left on her contract. She said in a statement that "in addition to The Undefeated, I will be contributing to a myriad of ESPN shows. There are also some things I'll be involved in that I can't quite announce today..." | | -- Smart Chris Megerian piece about Jay Sekulow: "Behind the radio microphone, President Trump's lawyer targets his client's tormentors..." (LA Times)
-- How is BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti approaching Facebook and Google? Mathew Ingram asked him... (CJR)
-- ICYMI: Page Six's deep dive into Matt Lauer's downfall: "Even now, he struggles to accept that his fall was so swift..." (Page Six)
-- "Former Fox News anchor Juliet Huddy slapped the cheek of the network today on Twitter by claiming that Fox continues to not only employ enablers who covered up for accused sexual harassers, but actually allows them to 'run the company...'" (Law and Crime) | | Kyle Pope on this week's "Reliable" pod | | | Columbia Journalism Review editor Kyle Pope's latest column is titled "It's time to rethink how we cover Trump." We met up on Friday morning to record this week's "Reliable Sources" podcast, and we found some points of agreement, some disagreements and some spaces in between. Here's the pod on iTunes and TuneIn... | | Felix Salmon leaving Fusion | | | Fusion recruited Felix Salmon back in 2014. He has been candid about the startup's stumbles. And now he's out. On Twitter, he thanked Issac Lee "for the front-row tickets to one of the most fascinating media enterprises I've ever come across." He said he's keeping his Cause & Effect brand, keeping one foot at Slate Money, and he'll "be joining Wired as an ideas columnist. Beyond that, it's… I believe the finance term is optionality?" | | NYT breaks Clinton story; WSJ breaks Wynn story | | The NYT story came first: "Hillary Clinton Chose to Shield a Top Adviser Accused of Harassment in 2008."
Then came this WSJ story: "Dozens of People Recount Pattern of Sexual Misconduct by Las Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn." The WSJ noted that Wynn and Trump are close.
Naturally, sadly, some right-wing outlets only focused on the Clinton-related story while some left-wing outlets only focused on the Trump-related one. The most respectable outlets covered both... | | | He was one of the five panelists on a recent pilot called "The Wise Guys." I'm guessing that Fox will turn it into a regular series. But if so, Wynn won't be involved: "We will not be booking Steve Wynn on any potential future installments of The Wise Guys, if it moves forward beyond a one-off special," the network said Friday... | | Clinton's tweet and Trump's "like" | | | On Friday night HRC tweeted about "something that happened in 2008." Meanwhile, Trump and the RNC remained silent about Wynn. But @realDonaldTrump's account faved one of the @WSJ's tweets about the Wynn story. ⭐ After an hour of intrigue, the account un-faved it... ⭐ | | | For the record, part three | | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Karen K. Ho writes about Scott Reid, an investigative reporter at the Orange County Register who has been covering USA Gymnastics since 2004. "If people had really started to take a hard look, that was 13 years ago, then I think a lot of this would have been avoided," Reid says... (CJR)
-- The Times Insider has a delightful read on what happens when a journalist finds a faded black and white picture inside a book at the NYT's library... (NYT)
-- Adrian Chen writes about Google Arts and Culture, the app you've seen on everybody's Facebook pages these days, and elaborates on its larger cultural meaning... (New Yorker) | | | In last night's newsletter, I said Graydon Carter's letter and the three-legged cover were part of March's VF. But no, both are in the 2018 Hollywood Issue... We'll see the March issue in February... My apologies. | | Hey, speaking of the Hollywood issue... | | | Lisa Respers France emails: James Franco was pulled from the cover. "We made a decision not to include James Franco on the Hollywood cover once we learned of the misconduct allegations against him," VF said in a statement to CNN on Friday... | | | James Corden is hosting... Hip hop may prove to be a big winner... Some attendees plan to wear white roses to support #TimesUp... Lisa Respers France has a preview of Sunday's awards telecast here... | | | Brian Lowry emails: Not the Super Bowl, but not too shabby. Reflecting the appetite for live events -- the kind people are less apt to zap through -- CBS is asking for $1 million per 30-second spot on the Grammys, according to Variety's Brian Steinberg... | | What's that TV maxim? "There's no such thing as a new idea?" First CBS ordered 13 episodes of "Murphy Brown." Now it's green-lighting pilots for "Cagney and Lacey and "Magnum P.I." Variety has details here...
And speaking of pilots: | | ABC orders Marcia Clark pilot | | | ABC also ordered a batch of pilots on Friday... And one of them is "The Fix," which has Marcia Clark attached as an exec producer. The show is about Maya Travis, "a former prosecutor who, after losing the biggest case of her life, has left Los Angeles for a quiet life in rural Oregon. Eight years after her devastating defeat, the murderer strikes again, forcing Maya to return to Los Angeles to confront him one more time. Will she play by the rules, or will she do whatever it takes to get him behind bars?" | | Lowry reviews "A Futile and Stupid Gesture" | | | Brian Lowry emails: Doug Kenney -- the co-founder of National Lampoon, who died at age 33 -- gets an appropriately irreverent biography in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture," a Netflix movie that derives its title from a line in "Animal House." Read all about it here... | | Showtime previewing "Our Cartoon President" starting Sunday | | | A programming note from Brian Lowry: Although it doesn't officially premiere until Feb. 11, Showtime's "Our Cartoon President" -- the animated Trump satire spun out of Stephen Colbert's "Late Show" -- will be previewed online and on demand beginning Jan. 28, in advance of the State of the Union address... | | | For the record, part four | | | By Lisa Respers France:
-- Octavia Spencer got emotional relaying the story of how friend and movie co-star Jessica Chastain got her five times the salary after Spencer explained to her that pay disparity is even greater for women of color...
-- Gwyneth Paltrow says ex-husband Chris Martin "is like my brother..." which... isn't weird at all...
-- Reba McEntire has debuted as KFC's first female Colonel Sanders... | | | Email brian.stelter@turner.com... I love the feedback, corrections, suggestions, and tips. Thank you... | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
