Exec summary: Ready for the weekend? Scroll down for the latest on lousy digital media layoffs, the sale of the Newseum's landmark building, and the Sundance premiere of "Leaving Neverland..."
HOW TWO STORIES CONVERGED ON FRIDAY...
Stone and the wall
When you think about it, there are several remarkable connections between Friday's two big stories. And not just the obvious one -- that President Trump's capitulation to the Democrats briefly diverted attention away from Roger Stone's arrest and indictment.
#1: Stone built the rhetorical "wall." In interviews, he has taken credit for coining Trump's "build the wall" phrase, calling it a "rhetorical flourish." Sam Nunberg has said that he and Stone share credit. As the NYT noted recently, the "wall" talking point was originally just "a memory trick for an undisciplined candidate," to keep Trump talking about immigration. Stone recently told Real Clear Politics about this. And what led Trump to force a shutdown? Funding to "build the wall."
#2: Trump followed "Stone's rules." One of the dirty trickster's sayings is "Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack," and Trump certainly didn't admit defeat when he surrendered and agreed to reopen the government on Friday afternoon. "Attack, attack, attack—never defend" is another of Stone's sayings, and that's what Trump did, stoking fear of immigrants and swearing to use his "powers" to "address this emergency."
#3: The FBI agents who arrested Stone were working without pay due to the government shutdown. Enough said.
#4: Both Stone and Trump like to put on a show, and both did just that on Friday. Stone seemed to savor the scene outside the courthouse, with both supporters and hecklers fighting for attention. And Trump had his aides on hand to applaud him despite his defeat. Trump's speech "was just right out of 'Alice in Wonderland,'" Jim Acosta said afterward.
Split screen day
What's the bigger story? By late afternoon, most news sites were leading with the shutdown solution, though I preferred the way CNN.com played it, with a double-barreled home page like this... | | Not mincing words
Brooke Baldwin on CNN right after the president finished speaking: "This man single handedly shut down the government. It is shameful." Terry Moran on ABC: "This is a deal he could have had weeks ago... The question is: Having owned the shutdown, proudly, as he said in the Oval, Office, what did he get for it?" George Stephanopoulos: "So far, nothing." Chuck Todd on NBC, talking about Trump and Pelosi: "The two of them got into a staring contest, essentially. She didn't blink. He did."
Checking in with right-wing media
I just looked up at Fox, and the banner was about Ann Coulter calling Trump the "biggest wimp."
Oliver Darcy emails: The reaction was swift and harsh. Minutes after Trump announced the deal, some of his biggest media allies pounced, skewering him for caving and failing to secure money for a border wall. "NO WALL FUNDS," blared a red banner headline on the Drudge Report. "TRUMP CAVES! Ends Shutdown with NO BORDER WALL -- Pelosi's SECOND BIG WIN This Week," read a headline on The Gateway Pundit. Breitbart piled on with a brutal headline on its front page reading, "NO WALL."
>> Darcy adds: It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming days: Will the base turn away? Or will Trump's more loyal allies in right-wing media like Sean Hannity, who appears ready to defend him, convince them to hold their fire?
When will the SOTU be?
"The State of the Union is not planned now," Pelosi said. "What I said to the President is when the government is open we will discuss a mutually agreeable date, and I'll look forward to doing that and welcoming the President to the House of Representatives for the State of the Union when we agree on that..."
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- Recommended: Joshua Rothman's new piece titled "What the Covington Saga Reveals About Our Media Landscape." He says "Covington is the kind of product our social-media platforms sell to us. Perhaps we should be warier consumers..." (New Yorker)
-- "The Republican-controlled Iowa House is denying press credentials to an influential liberal blogger who has covered the Legislature for years..." (AP)
-- "Netflix has come out on top in a red-hot auction for the film version of J.D. Vance's lauded bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, which Ron Howard is directing and The Shape Of Water co-writer Vanessa Taylor is adapting..." (Deadline)
Roger Stone's TV tour
While he was still at the courthouse, Stone called into InfoWars, the conspiracy outlet for which he sometimes acts as a host. His Friday evening includes hits on Tucker Carlson and Chris Cuomo's programs...
"Stay tuned"
I asked Mueller biographer Garrett Graff what info journalists should keep front and center in the coverage this weekend. He replied: "This indictment, like every court filing Mueller offers, is notable for both what it says and what it doesn't. It's worth paying close attention to the verbiage; the fact that Mueller says a senior Trump official was 'directed' to contact Stone is significant, as it implies both knowledge and evidence of the internal decision-making at the campaign. It's somewhere Mueller clearly knows more than he's saying—which too is significant. Mueller is presumably saving that piece of information for a reason. So now, again, we know the 'what' but not the 'who' and the 'why.' Mueller knows those answers too -- so stay tuned!"
BTW, have you seen "Get Me Roger Stone" yet?
If not, this weekend is a perfect time to watch the documentary. It's streaming on Netflix...
When the arrest news broke, co-director Morgan Pehme tweeted, "The wily fox has finally been caught." One of the other co-directors, Dylan Bank, will be on Michael Smerconish's CNN show Saturday morning...
How CNN scored this exclusive video | | "Nice to see you guys at my house this morning," Stone quipped when a CNN crew spoke with him outside the courthouse. When CNN aired exclusive video of the FBI raid at Stone's home -- the result of CNN producer David Shortell and photojournalist Gilbert De La Rosa's early morning stakeout -- viewers were wowed and rival newsrooms were envious. On the right, there was a different reaction. Numerous pro-Trump websites ran with ridiculous speculation that CNN had been "tipped off" by Mueller. Trump fed this idea by asking "who alerted CNN to be there?"
Journalism did. This was just good old-fashioned news gathering in action. As CNN's Jeremy Herb explained here, it was "the product of good instincts, some key clues, more than a year of observing comings at the DC federal courthouse and the special counsel's office -- and a little luck on the timing." Read the story behind the story here...
The unglamorous part of the Russia beat
Hadas Gold emails: For six weeks last summer while I covered the AT&T/Time Warner trial, I witnessed the tenacity of our reporters covering the Mueller investigation up close. The team regularly had at least one reporter at the DC federal courthouse (the same place where the AT&T trial was held). They were on the look out and gathering info -- like spotting certain attorneys or people coming and going, even things like whether certain areas where closed off, and other details I don't know about. I often would see them in the hallways just waiting, or in the court's press room. This has been going on for months and doesn't even count what the rest were doing back at the bureau and everywhere else. That reporting -- actual shoe leather reporting -- is what led to Friday's exclusive video...
Friday's unanswered Q's
These are some of the questions W.H. reporters shouted as Trump wrapped up his speech:
"Mr. President, was this a waste?"
"Why did you cave?"
"Were you aware Roger Stone was updating your campaign on WikiLeaks?"
IN OTHER NEWS...
Newseum is selling its building
"Johns Hopkins University is buying the landmark Pennsylvania Avenue building that houses the Newseum in a $372.5 million deal announced Friday that will enable the struggling cultural institution devoted to news and the First Amendment to seek a new home in the Washington area," the Washington Post reports.
This is quite dispiriting for those of us who love the Newseum. "The Freedom Forum — the private foundation that created the Newseum and that is its primary funder — said the museum will remain open at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW for the rest of the year." (A few of you have asked me, and the answer is yes, my two events at the museum are still on for next month...)
| | Serious cuts at BuzzFeed News
Oliver Darcy emails: "I know it's been a hard day." Those are words from a note BuzzFeed News EIC Ben Smith sent to staff after a difficult day of layoffs. As the media company restructures to grapple with a tumultuous digital news landscape, BuzzFeed News cut its national and health desks, disbanded its national security desk, and gutted its LGBT desk. Other slashes were also made, including the closing of the outlet's offices in Spain. In total, 43 people were left without a job.
Inside the newsroom, employees shed tears as they learned their fates, and those of their colleagues. In tweets, BuzzFeed News journalists described the situation as "agonizing," "heartbreaking," and "surreal." In his memo to employees, Smith said, "We'll do our best to support the people who are leaving and to help them in any way we can going forward." He added, "I'm confident that we'll continue to do distinctive work on the biggest stories, and punch above our weight." Read my full story here…
>> Worth noting: While it was clearly a difficult day for BuzzFeed News, the outlet still boasts a newsroom of about 200 people. And the cuts left the politics, investigations, tech, and culture teams almost entirely unscathed...
Layoffs at Players' Tribune, too
"The Players' Tribune, the athlete-centric sports publisher from Derek Jeter, has laid off eight employees as the company looks to shift its business strategy going forward," Digiday's Sahil Patel reported Friday...
Making a bad situation even worse
There's been, NBC's Ben Collins reports, a "coordinated campaign organized on the far-right message board" 4chan to threaten and harass laid-off journalists. Trolls have flooded HuffPost and BuzzFeed reporters with death threats. Details here...
"Media Twitter" lends a hand amid layoffs
Katie Pellico emails: As industry layoffs tick upward, the crowdsourcing for job openings continues...
HuffPost's Amanda Terkel's Thursday thread has tons of RTs and replies from orgs like Medium, Mother Jones, TEDTalks, Daily Beast, all looking for writers, editors and the like.
BuzzFeed copy editor Emerson Malone even started a "BuzzFeed News beer fund" on Friday that had raised more than $4,000 by day's end... | |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Alex Pareene writing for CJR:
"For an industry that has grown accustomed to layoffs, it all should have seemed like more of the same. And yet, the week felt more apocalyptic than usual. That's because the 'corrections' are coming for the digital outlets that were supposed to have been the survivors..."
YouTube says it is finally fixing its recommendations system
Excuse me for the opinionated subject line -- FINALLY -- but this has been a big problem for a long while.
CNN's Kaya Yurieff writes: YouTube is making changes to its recommendation algorithm, which serves up new videos for users to watch, in an effort to crack down on the spread of conspiracy theories on its platform. In a blog post on Friday, the Google-owned company said it would start reducing its recommendations of "borderline content" and videos that may misinform users in "harmful ways."
The announcement came just one day after BuzzFeed published a critical new investigation of the "Up Next" recommendations. In one case it took just "nine clicks" to go "from an anodyne PBS clip about the 116th United States Congress to an anti-immigrant video from a designated hate organization."
So what's "borderline content?"
YouTube's Friday blog post provided three examples of the content it will downgrade: "Videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, "claiming the earth is flat," and "making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11."
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- Katie Pellico emails: "Thirteen Reasons Why" author Jay Asher is suing the organization that disavowed him (and his novel) after sexual misconduct allegations... (NYT)
-- "Condé Nast plans to charge advertisers a premium for its digital subscribers, but ad buyers think the idea will flop," Lucia Moses reports... (BI)
| | This week's "Reliable Sources" podcast:
Jason Rezaian and Joel Simon together
Two new books explore what it's like for journalists behind bars -- one from the perspective of the prisoner and one from the perspective of the advocate trying to get him out. Jason Rezaian is the author of "Prisoner," about his time in Iranian captivity, and Joel Simon is the author of "We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages and Ransom." Both titles came out on Tuesday, and both men are on book tours now. So they sat down with me and compared notes... literally... it turns out they read the galleys of each other's books!
Check out our conversation via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your preferred podcast app...
This Sunday on "Reliable Sources..."
One of the reporters who was laid off from HuffPost, Laura Bassett, will join me live... Along with Shelby Holliday, Oliver Darcy, Jess McIntosh, Charlotte Alter, and Howard Schneider... Plus WHCA president Olivier Knox and famed pollster Ann Selzer... See you Sunday at 11 a.m. ET!
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
By Katie Pellico:
-- "Tinder recently agreed to settle a $23 million class-action age discrimination lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed last April in California, alleged Tinder charged people over 30 years old twice the amount for its subscription services..." (TechCrunch)
-- "Another week, another torrent of gadget leaks..." (Verge)
-- T-Mobile's forthcoming streaming video service doesn't sound like a game-changer. It will be a "snackable content app" specific to MetroPCS, launching "on two smartphones in February..." (Engadget) | |
Film about Michael Jackson sex abuse allegations premieres at Sundance
"Leaving Neverland" had its world premiere at Sundance on Friday... A couple dozen protesters "converged outside Park City's Egyptian Theatre" beforehand, per THR... After the "intense" four-hour screening, the two main accusers interviewed in the film came up on stage for the Q&A, and there was a standing ovation, per Deadline...
-- Meanwhile, the IMDb page for the film has been "vandalized..."
| | Lowry reviews "Breslin and Hamill"
Brian Lowry emails: "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists" paints a colorful portrait of larger-than-life New York columnists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, including their lives and careers. But this terrific HBO documentary risks burying its timely lede: The decline in the kind of muscular local journalism the pair embodied, in the context of the cutbacks that have so diminished those ranks and resources.
Buzzfeed's Kate Aurthur, meanwhile, addressed an often-overlooked aspect of media layoffs – namely, the survivor's guilt and unsettled feeling that lingerins around those who remain. Having experienced this several times – and once sat at my desk, fielding "Are you OK?" emails, not knowing if I was until hours later – there is a psychic toll on those who work in journalism, even if they're fortunate enough not to be among those losing their jobs.
Patton Oswalt donates to troll-turned-fan
Lisa Respers France emails: Patton Oswalt did something this country just might need right about now. When a man trolled him for being critical of Trump, he checked out the guy's Twitter feed, saw he was having hard times because of health issues and then donated to his GoFundMe. But Oswalt didn't stop there. He encouraged his more than 4 million followers to do the same. That man, Michael Beatty, is now hailing Oswalt and other supporters who looked beyond politics and saw humanity...
"Mommy, Dead and Dearest" story spurs Lifetime and Hulu dramas
Brian Lowry emails: The sensational true-crime story that director Erin Lee Carr chronicled in the HBO doc "Mommy Dead and Dearest" – about Gypsy Rose and Dee Dee Blanchard – is perhaps inevitably yielding dramatic retellings, but one apparently wasn't enough. Lifetime kicks off the chase with "Love You to Death," a movie "inspired" by the case, which changes the names, while Hulu will follow that with "The Act," an eight-part series based on Michelle Dean's Buzzfeed article...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE
-- Lisa Respers France emails: Anne Hathaway's got good news for fans hoping for "Princess Diaries 3..." (CNN)
-- Rapper DMX is a now a free man after serving time for tax fraud... (CNN) | | | That's a wrap. Thanks for joining us this week. We'll be back on Sunday! | | | |
