Exec summary: Just landed back in NYC. Scroll down for the headlines from AT&T's advertising confab... Plus Dick Parsons' move to CBS, Janice Min's move to WndrCo, and much more...
Is it Thursday yet?
Everywhere I go, I'm being asked about the Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle. All indications are that this story has captured the public's attention -- at least a sizable chunk of the public -- and no one knows how it will end. This is about power, it's about gender, it's about politics, it's about memory, it's about truth. This is why Thursday is shaping up to be a "where were you when?" day.
>> Look out for new polling about Kavanaugh and SCOTUS on Wednesday morning...
>> Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur on MSNBC: "We are in the wild, wild west of Senate judicial wars.'
>> As Jim Acosta said on "CNN Tonight" Tuesday night, "the U.N. this week is a sideshow to the you-know-what show back in Washington..."
>> POTUS is slated to hold a rare press conference Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET... | | Three cameras in the room
Per CNN's Sunlen Serfaty, "there will be three cameras allowed" in the hearing room on Thursday. "One camera focused on the witness, one camera focused on the questioner, and one cuts camera."
CNN also obtained details about the format... Per Phil Mattingly and Kate Sullivan's story, both witnesses will face "five minutes of questioning from each senator on the panel, or a lawyer if senators choose to yield their time." The GOP senators are expected to yield to career prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, who's been hired to do the questioning...
What this is about
Senator Lisa Murkowski, given her status as a key swing vote, had the quote of the day, via an interview with the NYT: "We are now in a place where it's not about whether or not Judge Kavanaugh is qualified. It is about whether or not a woman who has been a victim at some point in her life is to be believed."
Kavanaugh's defense
Brian Lowry emails: We'll never know, but I've spent the past week thinking about what Jeet Heer tweeted about Kavanaugh -- basically, if he had said "I drank a lot in high school and college, and I have no memory of the incidents that have been reported, but if anyone was hurt by my behavior, I sincerely apologize," wouldn't that have played considerably better than insisting -- as some of his defenders have -- that those bringing the allegations against him are politically motivated liars?
IN OTHER NEWS...
What is "USAReally?"
Via NYT's Kevin Roose, the wildest story of the day: "Is a New Russian Meddling Tactic Hiding in Plain Sight?"
He says "some cybersecurity experts" believe a website called USAReally "may be a part of a retooled Russian propaganda operation that is experimenting with new tactics ahead of November's midterm elections, and testing the boundaries of what American social media companies will allow..."
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- Monday's edition of Martha MacCallum's program, featuring her interview with the Kavanaughs, was the #1 program of the night on cable news... (THR)
-- "Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer will become the first female announcing team to cover an NFL game this Thursday, with Amazon Prime Video offering the pair as an online alternative to the Fox broadcast crew of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman..." (NPR)
-- "Ken Werner, a TV veteran and one of the most seasoned syndication executives in the business, will retire at the end of the year as president of Warner Bros Domestic Television Distribution." David Decker will be stepping up... (Deadline)
Dick Parsons is "interim chairman" of CBS
Dick Parsons, who joined the CBS board earlier this year, is now the "interim chairman" of the board. The move was unanimously approved by the directors, including Shari Redstone, who is consolidating her power now that Les Moonves is out.
Parsons said in a statement, "I think I speak for all Board members when I say I look forward to learning more about CBS' compelling opportunities and how we can help guide and support the company's growth."
Just as noteworthy about the announcement: Longtime board members Bruce Gordon and William Cohen are stepping down. You'll recall that Cohen was the lead anecdote in James B. Stewart's NYT story two weeks ago. Stewart quoted Cohen as staunchly defending Moonves: "We are going to stay in this meeting until midnight if we need to until we get an agreement that we stand 100 percent behind our C.E.O., and there will be no change in his status."
According to Stewart's story, Gordon was also initially "opposed" to suspending Moonves over the summer. Now both men are off the board...
Introducing Xandr
Here's my dispatch from the Relevance conference in Santa Barbara: AT&T introduced a new advertising business on Tuesday that seeks to disrupt Google and Facebook's tight grip on the industry. The name of the new biz is Xandr, a nod to Alexander Graham Bell, the founder of the phone company that eventually became AT&T.
"We have data. We have great content. We have direct-to-consumer distribution. and we have technology," Xandr CEO Brian Lesser said.
Of course, numerous other companies are also working on so-called addressable TV advertising. AT&T is unique because it has WarnerMedia (including CNN) and relationships with a huge # of wireless customers.
Lesser said his goal is a "premium marketplace" for buying ads on TV and the web. Here's my full story...
Harlow interviews Stephenson
After Lesser's big reveal, CNN's Poppy Harlow questioned AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson on stage. A few of the takeaways:
| | | -- WarnerMedia boss John Stankey is working on plans for increased investments at HBO. Stephenson followed up on his recent comments that Netflix is akin to Walmart while HBO is akin to Tiffany. He said Walmart CEO Doug McMillon "called me the next day," wanting to know what he meant...
-- Stephenson said AT&T wants to ensure that "there's always something new and fresh on HBO," thereby reducing the number of people who unsubscribe and resubscribe to the service. "I think we should aspire to everyday engagement on these platforms," he said...
-- Stephenson asserted that the media world is "averse and reluctant to change" when it comes to new ways of doing business. "It's fascinating to me," he told Harlow. "You think of media and entertainment, and how it moves fast, but in terms of business models and changing how you deliver the product, it is an industry that has about as much inertia as any industry I've been involved in." He said media is "a very slow moving industry," and he made clear that he'd like to accelerate it...
-- Re: Trump's attacks and AT&T's defense of the press: "The full weight and resources of AT&T will be committed to protecting First Amendment rights wherever our people operate."
Janice Min joining WndrCo
The former THR editor tweeted out on Tuesday: "I'm officially joining Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg's new venture on Monday. So YES - you can assume there will be news programming (Hollywood, political and more) on the platform. Stay tuned..."
Katzenberg and Whitman spoke at the aforementioned Relevance conference. They said NewTV -- official name TBA -- "will seek to charge subscribers $5 per month for content with ads and $8 per month for an ad-free experience," Variety's Brian Steinberg reports.
-- More from Steinberg's story: "The pair said they expected to reveal a formal name for the project in coming weeks. Launch of the new service is expected in late 2019 or 'the start of 2020,' Whitman said. The company expected to distribute a premium lineup of original, short-form series comprising episodes of 10 minutes each, sometimes less..."
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- Raj Shah plans to leave the W.H. press shop after the Kavanaugh confirmation process, Hunter Walker reports... (Yahoo)
-- Politico's Issac Dovere is jumping to The Atlantic... (Twitter)
-- "Facebook has removed over a dozen American hyperpartisan liberal and conservative pages with more than 30 million combined fans after discovering they were administered by the same fake account and were in violation of policies against spamming..." (BF)
| | Will Bunch's latest
Writing for the Philly Daily News, he says there "needs to be an industrywide conversation about how to better handle a government that tells lies to successfully manipulate televised reality by day, and then campaigns for reelection by attacking 'the fake news' by night. That means making some tough decisions about how a more muscular brand of journalism can give readers and viewers the one thing that's essential for a democracy: a reality-based world..."
Who's laughing?
President Trump has repeatedly claimed that "the world is laughing at the United States." Cue Tuesday's UN General Assembly, where some attendees audibly laughed at Trump's claim that his admin has "accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country."
This was, Jim Acosta said, "yet another sign (and we hear this privately from foreign diplomats from time to time) that many world leaders aren't really intimidated by Trump's rhetoric. They have accepted it and are sometimes amused by it... but often don't take it seriously. Shock value wearing off..."
Speaking of shock value...
| | "The internet gives us innumerable tiny shocks every day, as far-flung upsetting stories are packaged up and dropped suddenly onto our screens as notifications of breaking news... To not be shocked by the newest offense feels like a concession, as if you've been slowly ground down into accepting the unacceptable. But to continue being shocked feels naïve, as if you're letting yourself, and the country, be toyed with…"
--Nausicaa Renner writing for NYT Mag...
Cosby in cuffs
Even while we were all seeing it on live TV, it was hard to believe. Bill Cosby was sentenced on Tuesday to 3 to 10 years in state prison... | | Bill Cosby's last lesson: Separating the public person from the private one
Brian Lowry emails: As someone weaned on Bill Cosby's comedy, the sentence offers the starkest reminder imaginable of the need to separate the public image from the private person. Wholesomeness was an inherent part of Cosby's act, from his work-clean standup in the 1960s to "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" to his '80s sitcom and success as a product pitchman. Because his material was so personal, there was an even greater sense among fans that they knew him; turns out, we didn't...
Redemption for Mel Gibson?
Megan Thomas emails: As Bill Cosby is sent to prison and other high profile #MeToo offenders remain exiled, Hollywood has apparently redeemed Mel Gibson. The Atlantic's David Sims has a smart look at this:
"The Hollywood redemption machine is always ripe for satire, since its formula is so depressingly simple. Take one once-beloved artist, add a bottled statement of apology, give them just long enough for their worst misdeeds to fade somewhat from public memory, and combine with the industry's never-ending desire to use great artistry as an antidote to past sins." Here's the rest...
Jane Fonda's view of #MeToo
Chloe Melas emails: I spoke with Jane Fonda about the #MeToo movement and her thoughts on men such as Charlie Rose reportedly wanting to make a comeback.
"You know when a guy has done the work ... it doesn't matter if it's been two weeks, a year or two years, it matters what kinds of changes they've gone through. If they haven't gone through the changes, then why should they come back?" More here...
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- "Former CAA agent Adam Berkowitz was fired over an incident in which he allegedly groped a top executive at J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions." Berkowitz, CAA's co-head of television, suddenly exited the company on Monday. He has not commented... (Variety)
-- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is joining the writing staff of Hulu's "Veronica Mars" reboot... (Bleacher Report)
-- Part two of "Making a Murderer" premieres on Netflix on 10/19... (THR)
| | Checking on the network pipes...
Brian Lowry emails: There's still something kind of exciting about the new TV season, and the uncertainty -- to use an old expression -- about how well the network pipes still work. It was a mixed bag for new series premieres on Monday, as NBC's "Manifest" drew 10.3 million viewers, per Nielsen estimates, the most-watched opening (other than post-NFL previews) for a drama series debut since "Blindspot" in the same time period three years ago. CBS's "Magnum P.I." delivered a more modest 8.1 million viewers, and perhaps not surprisingly, skewed older. More details here from Deadline's Nellie Andreeva...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
By Lisa Respers France:
-- Some TV stars protested the Kavanaugh nomination by wearing black and walking off their sets...
-- Pete Davidson says he received death threats over his romance with Ariana Grande...
-- On a much happier note: Happy 50th birthday, Will Smith!
That's a wrap! I'll be back tomorrow. Your feedback is always helpful... Email me here...
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