| | | | The WashPost and Variety have been working on follow-ups about NBC News and sexual harassment for several months. On Thursday, both outlets published. Variety's story, by Elizabeth Wagmeister and Ramin Setoodeh, focuses on allegations by ex-NBC and Fox News anchor Linda Vester. "I was groped and assaulted by Tom Brokaw, then the anchor of 'NBC Nightly News,'" Vester said in a video and accompanying Q&A.
The Post's Sarah Ellison also interviewed Vester. "I am speaking out now because NBC has failed to hire outside counsel to investigate a genuine, long-standing problem of sexual misconduct in the news division," Vester said.
The point of Ellison's story: NBC acted quickly to dismiss Matt Lauer, "but it is facing a wave of internal and outside skepticism that it can reform a workplace in which powerful men such as Lauer were known to pursue sexual relationships with more junior women." Ellison cites interviews with "35 current and former NBC staffers..." | | Brokaw adamantly denies the allegations | | "I met with Linda Vester on two occasions, both at her request, 23 years ago, because she wanted advice with respect to her career at NBC," Brokaw said in a statement via NBC. "The meetings were brief, cordial and appropriate, and despite Linda's allegations, I made no romantic overtures towards her, at that time or any other."
CNNMoney's Robert McLean has a complete recap of the new developments here... | | Ann Curry on the record about Lauer | | The Brokaw allegations are just one piece of the Post story. Ann Curry told Ellison that "she approached two members of NBC's management team after an NBC female staffer told her she was 'sexually harassed physically' by Lauer." This was in 2012, when Curry was on the way out at "Today." Curry says "I told management they had a problem and they needed to keep an eye on him and how he deals with women."
--> Key details: "Curry declined to name the management officials she says she approached. An NBC spokesman said the company has no record of her warning and added that there was no mention of it in Lauer's personnel file..." | | Ellison's new reporting about Matt Lauer's alleged misconduct prompted him to send her a new statement:
"I have made no public comments on the many false stories from anonymous or biased sources that have been reported about me over these past several months... I remained silent in an attempt to protect my family from further embarrassment and to restore a small degree of the privacy they have lost. But defending my family now requires me to speak up. I fully acknowledge that I acted inappropriately as a husband, father and principal at NBC. However I want to make it perfectly clear that any allegations or reports of coercive, aggressive or abusive actions on my part, at any time, are absolutely false." | | What's the status of the internal investigation? | | | I've been wondering about this for a while. When Lauer was fired, NBC said an internal review was underway. NBC News chair Andy Lack "promised to share publicly the results of their findings, 'however painful,' at the conclusion of the review. That was five months ago," Ellison points out. "No announcement has yet been made about the findings, but the network said the review is nearing its conclusion..." | | Trump ranted, aides "winced" | | President Trump called into his favorite morning show Thursday and almost shouted through the phone about various grievances. He made troubling admissions that could affect him in court. Even his interviewers seemed surprised by the stream of consciousness.
It went on for 31 minutes. Afterward, I postulated that this tirade is precisely why Trump gives very few interviews nowadays. And Maggie Haberman shared some reporting that backed up this thesis. "Trump aides fought for months to keep him from doing what he did this morning," she tweeted.
"Just calling Fox and Friends and talking as if it was one of his private conversations" is the way she described it. That's what aides had been trying to avoid...
--> More: Jim Acosta reported that many W.H. aides "winced" in response to some of the president's comments on Fox... But Trump tweeted that he "loved" being on the show... | | | What were Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade thinking during the interview? | | The hosts tried to wrap Trump... even though he seemed eager to keep talking...
"We'll see you next Thursday, Mr. President," Kilmeade said, jokingly alluding to Trump's weekly spot on the show before the campaign began. "The phone line's open," Kilmeade said. "Call in again some time," Doocy added... | | Quick thought about Kanye | | | I don't have anything to add to the Kanye-Trump coverage... Except to point out that the pro-Trump media is loving every minute of this bromance... Kanye is leading Breitbart right now... And Sean Hannity is in celebration mode. The Kanye storyline made it easier for right-wing web sites and TV shows to downplay/ignore the terribly embarrassing Ronny Jackson withdrawal news... | | -- Six bylines on this CNN reconstruction: "Inside the dramatic collapse of Ronny Jackson's bid to lead the VA..." (CNN)
-- Chris Cillizza tweeted: "Don't overlook the fact that Scott Pruitt admitted today that he lied on national TV..." (CNN)
-- Amazon Prime, now $99 a year, is going up to $119 per year. "The change will go into effect May 11, and it will apply to Prime renewals beginning June 16..." (CNNMoney)
-- Announced on the same day: Amazon and the NFL have renewed their "Thursday Night Football" streaming deal through 2019. The games are also shown on TV, so this still just amounts to "experimenting," Peter Kafka notes... (Recode) | | "Avengers" assembling for box office history | | | Frank Pallotta emails: Marvel's "Avengers: Infinity War" hits theaters Thursday night... The floor for this weekend's box office is $230 million... If the movie gets to $250 million, which some analysts believe it can, it'll be the biggest opening ever, beating "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." But here's the thing… no matter who comes out on top, the real winner is Disney. The Mouse House owns both brands, and after this weekend it'll likely own 9 of the top 10 biggest openings in history... | | "Infinity War" is a TV series finale, not a movie | | | Frank Pallotta adds: "Infinity War" is Marvel's magnum opus, a culmination of 18 straight number one hits, and Disney has marketed the film as such. Trailers and featurettes stress words like "Legacy" and "Family," and ads have been playing up the nostalgia with splashy photo shoots that included nearly every actor, director and producer from the Marvel universe. The sense that "Infinity War" could be an end of an era has made the film an event that feels more like a TV series finale than a movie, and that's an excitement that'll pay off this weekend... | | | The long weekend of White House Correspondents Association dinner festivities is underway... I'll have some dispatches from DC on Friday... In the meantime, check out C-SPAN's new mashup video... It's a compilation of jokes about C-SPAN told by comedians, from Elayne Boosler in 1993 to Hasan Minhaj in 2017, and lots more in between... Revealing the cable network's self-deprecating side! | | Reimagining "Firing Line" | | Deadline had the scoop on Thursday: PBS is bringing back "Firing Line," this time hosted by Margaret Hoover, executive produced by Tom Yellin. It "will launch at 10am Saturday, June 2, on New York's Thirteen, which will air the first three episodes before the series bows on PBS stations nationwide."
Hoover tells me: "My hope is to reinterpret the Firing Line tradition for a contemporary audience, by inviting vastly different viewpoints to engage in a respectful, even witty, contest of ideas." | | This week's "Reliable" podcast | | Did the press corps learn the wrong lessons from the presidential election? There was so much coverage of "economic anxiety" both before and after election day. But Diana C. Mutz's new research finds that "status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote." The key factor: Threats to "white Americans' sense of dominant group status."
So on this week's "Reliable Sources" podcast, I talked with Mutz about the differences between media narratives and social science findings. And I asked: "What do you want journalists to learn from your study for future campaigns?" Listen to our conversation via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or TuneIn... | | | Hadas Gold and Jessica Schneider's update: "Court is not in session on Friday; it will resume on Monday, when closing arguments will take place beginning at 11 a.m. ET. Each side will have one-and-a-half hours for their closing argument, followed by 15 minutes for a rebuttal by the DOJ." | | Here's what happened on Thursday | | -- Judge Richard Leon "slammed the government's attempts to enter into evidence hundreds of pages of documents..."
-- "As he closed out Thursday's session, Leon noted the magnitude of the case and said 'both sides deserve a round of beer...'"
-- DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim told reporters that his "line is always open" if AT&T wants to settle, but said he's "not expecting anything." He added: "I never would bring a case I don't think I could win..." | | -- Via Betsy Klein, this is what happened when kids took over the W.H. press briefing... (CNN)
-- Speaking of take your kids to work day, here's what happened when Sunny visited Jamie's morning show on Thursday... I can confirm that this 29-second video is adorable... (Twitter)
-- Dylan Byers' latest: "The Disney-Comcast war gets personal..." (PACIFIC)
-- Lauren Johnson is jumping from Adweek to Business Insider... She'll be BI's senior advertising reporter... (Twitter)
-- And WWD financial reporter Kali Hays is becoming the site's media editor...
-- Julia Waldow emails: MoviePass mayhem continues (THR) But Ted Farnsworth says he's "not worried about the viability of MoviePass at all..." (NYT) | | | PROMOTING DIGITAL NEWS SUBSCRIPTIONS... | | "A coalition of quality news organizations" | | | I interviewed New York Times Co. chief operating officer Meredith Kopit Levien on stage at Social Media Week Thursday morning. Some news from the session: She said the NYT intends to play a leadership role in "making a market" for digital news subscriptions. Tens of millions of people are accustomed to paying for Netflix and Spotify... But not for news, not yet. Levien indicated that she's almost ready to announce a "coalition of quality news organizations" that will "fight for a free press..." | | Thursday's strangest story | | Oliver Darcy emails from DC: The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday invited Diamond & Silk to testify about their experience with supposed Facebook censorship -- and, since I'm in DC for the week, I decided to drop by. The pro-Trump media personalities were given license by Republicans to continue making false claims about Facebook, including that the social media company had "censored" their page, even though it had not.
The affair was a fitting end to weeks of right-wing media fueling a false narrative that Facebook is censoring conservatives. At times, watching the surreal spectacle unfold, it felt as if I had been transported to an alternate universe in which facts came second to political narrative and outlets known for misinformation were held up as gospel truth...
Read Darcy's full story here... | | | Magnolia Pictures hosted a DC screening of "RBG" on Thursday evening in advance of the theatrical premiere of the CNN Films/Storyville Films doc... Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in attendance along with her daughter Jane Ginsburg... CNN's Dana Bash moderated the Q&A... Other sightings: Justice Stephen Breyer, Nina Totenberg, Jeff Zeleny, Michelle Hurd, Jim Sciutto, Kaitlin Collins, Laura Coates, Amy Entelis, Ted Olson, Sam Feist, Diane Weyermann, Matt Cowal, Samantha Vinograd, David Chalian, Joan Biskupic, Irin Carmon, Shana Knizhnik... | | | For the record, part three | | | -- New from Q: "Republicans say 51 - 37 percent that the media is the enemy of the people, rather than an important part of democracy, the only group to believe that. Voters trust the media more than President Trump 53 - 37 percent to tell the truth about important issues..." (Quinnipiac)
-- Tim Alberta's latest must read is about Brent Bozell and his Media Research Center: "The Deep Roots of Trump's War on the Press" (Politico Mag)
-- Via Daniella Emanuel: Colin Moynihan writes about "the anarchists" fighting against far-right YouTubers, and the software they released to help take them down... (The New Yorker) | | Glenn Beck's name for this: "Make America Dinner Again" | | | Oliver Darcy emails: Glenn Beck and Riaz Patel gathered a group of individuals with diverse backgrounds ("a transgender man, a Christian conservative, a Second Amendment advocate, a liberal college professor") for a dinner to discuss the issues that face America. "We have been taught to play for a team, to avoid opinions that aren't just like the ones we already have," Beck says. The result of the project is quite neat. I recommend you watch the 22-minute video... | | ESPN's Texas-sized NFL Draft | | Frank Pallotta emails: They say everything is bigger in Texas. So it's fitting that the NFL Draft, which has ballooned in recent years from an off-season process into a bona fide, fan-focused spectacle, kicked off at AT&T Stadium in Dallas Thursday night. ESPN, which will be broadcasting its 39th consecutive Draft, is ready with more than 500 player highlight packages, 40 cameras, 30 player live shots and nearly a weekend's worth of around-the-clock coverage.
-- WHAT A STAT: In 2005, there were 438 media applications. This year that number is over 2,000... | | | Bill Cosby was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion more than three years ago. On Thursday he was convicted by a court of law... | | "A step in the right direction..." | | | Chloe Melas emails: Moments after the Cosby verdict was read, I spoke with #MeToo's Tarana Burke, who said: "People have been using the term 'culture shift' since #MeToo went viral in 2017, but I think this verdict might be the first step we've seen toward the way our culture views and thinks about survivors and sexual violence. It took 61 women to come forward to get this one conviction... It's a huge deal to go through two trials and actually win one. I hope it means people will pay attention to survivors and listen to them when they talk about the trauma they've been subjected to and hear our voices when we say we want justice and recourse. Justice looks different for different survivors. It's not always a conviction in a court of law. The most important part is listening to the survivors. I think this is a step in the right direction for accountability and that will be huge for so many people." | | Brian Lowry emails: Nobody spent more time listening to Bill Cosby records (yes, records) growing up than I did. So I can speak from some experience in noting that guilty verdict in his retrial only makes official the damage that had already been done to his significant entertainment and cultural legacy... while adding a new wrinkle to our understanding of celebrity justice...
--> WashPost's Steven Zeitchik summed up the latter, noting, "A lot of people -- I'll admit to being one of them -- who covered the first Bill Cosby trial were skeptical that the Montgomery County D.A. could secure a guilty verdict on retrial. A lot of us were wrong." | | What happened to Allison Mack? | | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: I took a deep dive into Allison Mack's journey from a TV star to an accused sex trafficker. How did someone who played Clark Kent's bubbly bestie on a teen TV show take such a wrong turn? Lauren Hersh, a former prosecutor and national director of advocacy group World Without Exploitation, enlightened me on how sex traffickers recruit others, prey on people's vulnerabilities, and sometimes turn their victims into traffickers themselves. "I wouldn't be surprised that as we unpack this we learn that [Mack] is not just a perpetrator but a victim as well," she said. Read more here... | | Lowry reviews "Bobby Kennedy for President" | | | Brian Lowry emails: The ripples from the events of 1968 continue to echo through pop culture, with Netflix's latest first-rate documentary, "Bobby Kennedy for President," looking back at what was, and evoking thoughts about what might have been... | | Jost and Che hosting the Emmys! | | Emmy nominations will be announced on July 12... the awards will be on September 17... and now we know who will be hosting: The "SNL" duo of Michael Che and Colin Jost.
Lorne Michaels will executive produce.
"We're proud to be the first duo hosting the Emmys since Jenna Elfman and David Hyde Pierce, and somehow that's a real fact," said Jost and Che in a joint statement... Sandra Gonzalez has a full story here... | | "Star Wars: Resistance" coming soon | | Brian Lowry emails: While Disney gets ready for "Avengers'" big opening, the company unveiled a new project featuring its other prized asset, Lucasfilm.
Animation has often been the best creative expression of the "Star Wars" universe, and the company has announced another Disney Channel series, "Star Wars: Resistance," will make its debut in the fall. The series takes place prior to events in the 2015 movie "The Force Awakens..." | | | For the record, part four | | | -- By Lisa Respers France: "Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin says "No, winter is not coming ... not in 2018, at least. You're going to have to keep waiting for THE WINDS OF WINTER..."
-- By Chloe Melas: Janelle Monae opened up about her sexual orientation in a new interview with Rolling Stone...
-- By Melas and Gonzalez: Avicii's family revealed his personal struggles in this new statement... | | | Email your feedback and thoughts to brian.stelter@turner.com... the feedback helps us improve this newsletter every day... Thanks! | | | | | | |
