| | | | | Exec summary: Scroll down for my brand new column about Trump's "Hall of Mirrors," plus Oliver Darcy's update on Twitter's action against Alex Jones, Frank Pallotta's fresh look at MoviePass, and more... | | "Pre-mourning" Aretha Franklin | | The digital age allows us to witness "pre-mourning" on a worldwide scale. And that's what we're witnessing right now around the news that Aretha Franklin's health is failing. People are celebrating her life and bracing for her possible death -- and much of this is playing out in public.
Credit where it's due: On Tuesday I heard CNN.com EIC Meredith Artley use the term "pre-mourning" to describe the outpouring of love and concern. That's exactly what it is. Just take a look at a news website, TV newscast, Facebook, or Twitter. There's already a tribute concert being planned for the fall.
"It's very logical on a journalistic and a human level -- she is a global icon," Artley said via email Tuesday night. "A black woman who sings about respect, about being a woman, a moving voice and central figure of civil rights..." Artley said the interest in her life and health and legacy may speak to "a need for some soul and grace in turbulent times." Very true...
| | Friends and fans rallying around the star | | Psychologists sometimes call it "anticipatory grief." A friend commented to me that every time she sees Aretha's name now, "I check to see if she has died."
Think back to June, when there was a digital embrace of Charles Krauthammer in the weeks before he passed away. The same was true when Barbara Bush was in failing health back in April. And I hate talking this way, but I think we've seen some "pre-mourning" of John McCain, given his brain cancer diagnosis.
As for Franklin, Lisa Respers France wrote about the friends and fans rallying around the star... Here's her full story... | | Franklin is hearing the tributes | | Some deaths come as a shock -- Michael Jackson, Robin Williams, Prince. There was no "pre-mourning" them. Two recent examples were Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade. But Franklin has apparently been able to hear from some of the people who are concerned about her.
On Tuesday a source close to Franklin told CNN's Don Lemon that the 76-year-old singer "is being visited by people close to her who are reading her messages from friends and loved ones, holding her hand..."
| | A reminder: Exercise caution... | | A warning via the NYT's Ben Sisario:
"The lack of detail about Ms. Franklin's condition led to some premature comments on social media that she had died. On Tuesday, Tim Franklin, a nephew, was quoted in a report by People magazine saying that Ms. Franklin was 'alert, laughing, teasing, able to recognize people.' That comment was rebutted by the rest of the Franklin family... " A family rep said "that Ms. Franklin had met with her nephew in a 'very brief visit two weeks ago.' But by then the People report had been picked up by numerous other media outlets."
My final thought on this: Are some sketchy websites seizing on concern about Franklin to grab some cheap page views? For sure. That's the web at its worst. But at its best, the content connects people and helps them feel a little less alone while pre-mourning the loss of a giant... | | Ben Mullin's Tuesday afternoon scoop for the WSJ: "New York Media, owner of New York magazine and several websites, is exploring options including a possible sale, according to people familiar with the matter."
NYMag, Grub Street, Vulture, The Cut, etc. are held by "the heirs of Bruce Wasserstein, a financier who purchased New York magazine in 2003 for $55 million." The owners sorta-confirmed the sale chatter in a statement: "We are focused on building our business organically, but we also explore investment interest and strategic opportunities as a general practice...Given the growth New York Media has seen, it makes sense for us to evaluate the market for opportunities to continue to develop the business."
--> Rafat Ali said it best: "Just because they are potentially exploring a sale doesn't means NYM isn't doing well," he tweeted, "in fact chances are it is doing very well and this is a great time to be a seller of a solid fast growing media biz, not encumbered with crazy high valuations of investors." That's my impression as well... NYMag has been in expansion mode lately... | | The founders of @BreakingNews, which was bought and later shut down by NBC News, are launching a new startup called Factal.
"The service will cost a few thousand dollars a month (via yearly subscription) and, for now, is aimed solely at businesses who need to make quick decisions (whether to close a store, for instance) in emergencies," NiemanLab's Laura Hazard Owen reported.
Here's what co-founder and VP of product Cory Bergman told me: "We've all seen mis- and disinformation in politics, but it's also increasingly pervasive in breaking news about shootings, wildfires and other incidents. If a company has a store a block away from an active shooting, for example, bad information creates confusion and slows the response time to keep people safe. Through a combination of journalists and machine learning, Factal surfaces and verifies early details and alerts companies who have locations physically nearby." A consumer product is likely to follow next year... | | Axios hires Felix Salmon and Courtenay Brown | | Felix Salmon will be writing a Sunday newsletter, "Axios Edge," with "a focus on big personalities in markets and business," Axios announced on Tuesday.
"With Axios Edge, the company is signaling an expansion of its coverage of markets and finance, an effort that also will include CNBC alumna Courtenay Brown, another fresh recruit," VF's Joe Pompeo wrote... | | -- Journalist Austin Tice disappeared in Syria six years ago today. Tice's parents spent the day publicizing his case... "We know he's alive," his father Marc said... (NYT)
-- "America's silence makes it complicit in Saudi bombing of Yemeni children" is the headline on Jill Filipovic's latest for CNN.com. She says "American journalists and the public are so focused on our domestic disorder that they pay ever less attention to conflicts abroad..." (CNN)
-- Another show of briefing room solidarity: Fox's Kevin Corke deferred to NBC's Kristen Welker when Sarah Sanders tried to cut Welker off... (The Hill)
-- On Tuesday evening, Sanders apologized for her false claim about African-American jobs at the briefing... (CNN) | | I wish I could say I came up with that headline ;-) But no, it came from the brains of the "AC360" team.
Omarosa's book and Trumpworld's reactions dominated the day... I'm not going to sort through it all... As Jake Tapper said, "This is a challenge for all of us here, we honestly have a story where there are like thirty liars."
But here's what I do know...
| | Journalists should stand up for decency. | | That's what I said on CNN International earlier in the day. Journalists should stand up for decency. Decency is nonpartisan. And Trump's tweet calling Omarosa a "dog" is another example of indecent behavior by the president.
No matter what you think of her... No matter whether you voted for Trump... The insult was beneath the office of the presidency.
I know it's far from the first example... and it won't be the last... but it seems like Trump is using more and more dehumanizing language. Calling someone a "crazed" "dog?" C'mon. Americans will look back at this period in our history with shame, regardless of party... There's a certain amount of shame that comes from seeing a grown man, the leader of the free world, using this kind of language...
| | -- O was on "The Daily Show" Tuesday evening...
-- Chris Cillizza's newsletter has the day's highlights and lowlights here. He says Sarah Sanders' "inability to say -- definitively -- that the President has never used the N-word on tape is startling..."
-- The Trump campaign is taking legal steps against O...
-- WaPo's Ashley Parker with the line of the day: "Like in the 'Jurassic Park' film series — in which the dinosaurs turn on the scientists who created them — Manigault Newman has unleashed Trump's own tricks and tactics against him..."
-- "Inside the White House, aides readied a strategy to try to 'starve' Ms. Manigault Newman of additional attention," WSJ's Peter Nicholas wrote. But Trump ruined that by tweeting so much...
-- Bret Baier's simple Q to Kellyanne Conway: "Why does he feel compelled to keep tweeting about Omarosa?" Conway said he wants to defend himself...
-- Check out Chris Cuomo's Tuesday night essay about why we must hold our leaders to a higher standard...
| | Checking the Amazon best-seller chart... | | On Monday night, Omarosa's "Unhinged" was #5 on Amazon's best-selling books list. Now, as I write this on Tuesday night, the book is at #2.
On the Barnes & Noble site, the book was at #18, and now it's at #3.
I can only conclude that the president's nasty tweets... and all the subsequent media scrutiny... helped O sell some more books. | | If you've ever been in a Mirror Maze attraction at an amusement park, you'll know that it's disorienting and repetitive. You're seeing the same thing over and over again, but some of the reflections are distorted and confusing, making it difficult to find your way out. THAT is what it's like to step inside President Trump's hall of mirrors.
See, Trump's media cheerleaders repeat what he says, and he relays the message back to them, and the mirror effect continues. There is a fresh example of this effect nearly every day. So I wrote a column all about this for CNNMoney... I hope you'll check it out.
The reflections in the mirrors directly relates to this next story... | | How many Americans think journalists are the "enemy?" 👇 | | "A majority of Republicans said they believed the news media is 'the enemy of the people' rather than 'an important part of democracy' in a poll released Tuesday by Quinnipiac U, CNN's Eli Watkins reported.
It was a slim majority of GOPers -- 51% -- but it showed an "ongoing partisan breakdown on the validity of the press."
"Only 5% of Democrats and 24% of independents called the news media 'the enemy of the people'" in the poll.
The overall total who parroted Trump's hateful phrase? 26%. Per Watkins story, "65% said it is 'an important part of democracy,' with the remaining 10% saying neither or 'don't know...'" | | Update on the editorials... | | | The NYT is one of the 200+ papers that will run editorials on Thursday decrying Trump's anti-press rhetoric. The NYT's Jaclyn Peiser has a story about the initiative in Wednesday's paper... | | -- Harassment of journalists is unacceptable, no matter who's doing it. A followup to Sunday's protests: "Antifa protesters couldn't find any fascists at Unite the Right — and harassed the press instead..." (WaPo)
-- David French's latest: "It's a sad reality that too many members of the media have a soft spot for left-wing radicalism. It's part of human nature, but all too often when people believe that anger is justifiable, they see violence is excusable — or at least understandable..." (NRO)
-- "Columbine" author Dave Cullen is writing another book about another school shooting: "Parkland." HarperCollins will publish it in February. "It's all about the amazing #marchforourlives kids..." (Instagram)
-- The Reporters Committee for Freedom of Press and 30 news outlets, including CNN, filed a brief on Tuesday "urging a circuit court in Florida to dismiss a petition by the School Board of Broward County to hold The Sun-Sentinel and two of its reporters in contempt..." (RCFP) | | Alex Jones can't tweet for a week | | Oliver Darcy emails: Twitter suspended Alex Jones' account on Tuesday evening after determining that he violated another one of the company's policies. The news was first announced by an Infowars personality who tweeted an image of an email that Twitter had sent Jones. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of the email -- which said Jones can't tweet, retweet, or use the vast majority of Twitter's functions for the next seven days. Jones will also be required to delete the tweet found to be in violation of Twitter's policies...
--> More: The Twitter spox also told me that the suspension was prompted by a video in which Jones told his audience to get their "battle rifles" ready for a potential conflict with Antifa, the media, and others. The suspension also comes on the heels of our investigation last week which found that Jones had repeatedly violated Twitter's rules against hate and harassment. Read on... | | Jack Dorsey will be sitting down with "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt on Wednesday... Look for highlights on Wednesday's newscast...
And I'll be in SF to interview Dorsey on Friday. More to come... | | | For the record, part three | | | -- "NBC is expanding 'Stay Tuned,' its Gen. Z-focused daily news show on Snapchat, to Instagram and YouTube," Sara Fischer scooped... (Axios)
-- Gerry Smith checked in with John Malone... (Bloomberg)
-- A "Designing Women" revival is in the works from series creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Sony Pictures... (THR)
-- Amazon has released the first trailer for "The Romanoffs," coming in October... (Vulture)
-- Joe Adalian noted this re: the trailer: "Amazon is doing a weekly release pattern for the show (after a two-episode premiere). Makes sense, given the show is an anthology, essentially making each installment a mini-movie. Plus, good news for the recap business..." (Twitter)
-- "Paramount Players has optioned Chris Lee's Daily Beast story When Prince Made a Chambermaid His Queen for a Day. Elizabeth Banks plans to star in Queen For A Day..." (Deadline) | | Verizon plans to sell 5G broadband with YouTube TV included | | | Keep an eye on this. Via Variety's Todd Spangler: "YouTube TV service and Apple TV 4K set-tops will be included with Verizon's initial 5G residential broadband offering in four cities — Sacramento, Los Angeles, Houston and Indianapolis — the telco announced. With the pacts, Verizon is looking to build a competitive edge in new 5G wireless technology by leading with video entertainment delivered over the high-speed networks..." | | Today's MoviePass updates | | On Tuesday the parent company of MoviePass, Helios and Matheson Analytics, "posted a staggering quarterly loss just as a class-action lawsuit was made public as shareholders seek some compensation after watching the value of their stock sink 99 percent in less than a month," THR's Paul Bond reported. On Wednesday, the service's new "three movies per month" cap goes into effect.
-- What's at stake: A group of highly devoted users "have structured their social lives around MoviePass," the NYT's Amanda Svachula wrote...
-- "People are struggling to cancel their MoviePass subscriptions," the LAT's Ryan Faughnder wrote. The company "says it has fixed the 'bugs...'"
-- How does this feature end? Check out Frank Pallotta's new video interviews with the CEOs of MoviePass and AMC... | | Bullish forecasts for "Crazy Rich Asians" | | | THR's Pamela McClintock says you can "forget about the dog days of August at the box office this year." Last weekend "The Meg" had a great debut... And "fellow Warner Bros. film 'Crazy Rich Asians' is now tracking to post a five-day debut of $26 million-plus, according to the latest prerelease surveys. That's up from $20 million several weeks ago." The film opens wide on Wednesday... | | | For the record, part four | | | By Lisa Respers France:
-- Here's why John Legend wants Louisiana to amend its constitution...
-- Pauley Perrette called out "Family Feud" for "filthy answers..."
-- The Lennon and McCartney sons decided to come together for a selfie... | | |
Thanks for reading! Email me your feedback... See you tomorrow...
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