EXEC SUMMARY: The country's top congressional reporters say Dems are nearing a tipping point on impeachment. "This week is critical," CNN's Manu Raju says. Scroll down for all the details...
New revelations from NYT publisher
NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger delivered the Ogden Memorial Lecture on International Affairs at his alma mater, Brown, on Monday. He shared some stories that he has never told before -- about threats to journalism in the age of Trump -- and you need to read them. The text of his speech is up on NYTimes.com. Here are several newsworthy sections:
"Two years ago, we got a call from a U.S. government official warning us of the imminent arrest of a New York Times reporter based in Egypt named Declan Walsh." These heads-ups are "actually fairly standard," but "this particular call took a surprising and distressing turn. We learned the official was passing along this warning without the knowledge or permission of the Trump administration. Rather than trying to stop the Egyptian government or assist the reporter, the official believed, the Trump administration intended to sit on the information and let the arrest be carried out. The official feared being punished for even alerting us to the danger." So the Times called diplomats in Walsh's native country, Ireland, and they took action: "Within an hour, Irish diplomats traveled to his house and safely escorted him to the airport before Egyptian forces could detain him." Sulzberger said "we hate to imagine what would have happened had that brave official not risked their career to alert us to the threat."
Then he shared another example, from earlier this year, when David Kirkpatrick arrived in Egypt and was detained and deported "in apparent retaliation for exposing information that was embarrassing to the Egyptian government. When we protested the move, a senior official at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo openly voiced the cynical worldview behind the Trump administration's tolerance for such crackdowns. 'What did you expect would happen to him?' he said. 'His reporting made the government look bad.'"
These are the stories we usually don't hear -- about the risks of international reporting -- and how the risks have been magnified because Trump "has retreated from our country's historical role as a defender of the free press."
Another frightening example
Another excerpt from Sulzberger's speech: "Our foreign correspondents have experienced the weaponization of the 'fake news' charge firsthand. Last year, Hannah Beech, who covers Southeast Asia, was at a speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia. In the middle of his remarks, Mr. Hun Sen uttered a single phrase in English: 'The New York Times.' He said that The Times was so biased that it had been given a 'fake news' award by President Trump, and he threatened that if our story didn't support his version of the truth, there would be consequences. Hannah felt a growing hostility in the crowd of thousands as the prime minister searched her out and warned, 'The Cambodian people will remember your faces.'"
Read the rest here...
Sources: Army soldier talked about targeting CNN HQ
CNN's Katelyn Polantz reports: "A US Army soldier discussed bomb-making techniques and bombing a major American news network's headquarters, as well as named presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke as a possible target before being arrested this weekend, according to court documents released on Monday."
The court papers didn't name the network, but two sources familiar with the matter told Josh Campbell that it was CNN -- the soldier allegedly discussed using a "vehicle bomb" to target CNN HQ. He also "suggested targeting the leftist group Antifa, cell towers and a local news station, authorities allege." Details...
"Never any imminent threat"
"I want to assure everyone that there was never any imminent threat to any CNN locations," CNN president Jeff Zucker said in a message to employees Monday evening. "We continue to actively monitor these issues on a daily basis and work closely with our security teams around the world and our partners in law enforcement. Security is our most important consideration."
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE | | -- The lede on Peter Baker's front-page piece for Tuesday's NYT: The last time Trump "was accused of collaborating with a foreign power to influence an election, he denied it and traveled the country practically chanting, 'No collusion!' This time, he is saying, in effect, so what if I did?" (NYT)
-- WaPo's editorial in Tuesday's paper: "In Ukraine, Trump's allies are corrupt oligarchs and Russian stooges" (WaPo)
-- Daniel Dale's newest fact-check: "What Trump has been getting wrong on Biden and Ukraine..." (CNN)
-- Stephanie Grisham has been the W.H. press secretary for almost three months, but "she's never stood behind the podium" to take Q's from reporters, Chris Cuomo noted... (CNN)
The impeachment terrain is shifting
Something big is happening. Just look at Monday night's home page headlines:
WaPo: "Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president, officials say"
NYT: "Democrats demand transcript of Trump's Ukraine talks"
CNN.com: "Democrats face reckoning on decision to impeach Trump"
Politico: "Dems moving to formally condemn Trump as impeachment fever grows"
And a second headline from WaPo: "Pelosi quietly sounding out House Democrats about whether to impeach Trump, officials say"
Manu Raju's insights
"It's clear the impeachment terrain has shifted," CNN's senior congressional correspondent Manu Raju told me shortly after 10pm ET Monday. "Dems have been looking for a triggering event to get behind impeachment and now have found one -- especially if it turns out Trump sought to withhold military aid in exchange for a Ukraine probe into the Bidens. That's easier to message and for the public to see as a clear abuse of power, Dems believe, than the details of the Mueller report that Trump has muddied."
On Monday evening, seven key freshman Dems came out with an op-ed signaling support for impeachment. Raju said this is another sign that Dems are nearing a tipping point: "Pelosi has sought to protect vulnerable freshmen -- her first priority -- but as more come out for impeachment, many believe she will too. As one Dem put it to me today, Pelosi wants to be the leader of the parade -- not the follower of the parade."
"The dam is breaking"
It's been hard to keep up with all of the developments in the past few hours. "The dam is breaking" on impeachment, an unnamed House Dem told the NYT's Jonathan Martin. "I can't overstate what a shift there's been," Politico's Heather Caygle tweeted Monday night. "Some members have been wanting to back impeachment for a while and wanted cover. For others, this really was the last straw. The most important thing is that leadership recognizes this and is shifting strategies as a result."
On MSNBC, Ali Velshi spoke of a "growing tide for impeachment." Even Laura Ingraham, speaking around the same time on Fox, said this scandal is a "shot in the arm to the impeachment movement," even though her guests all defended Trump and tried to spin away damning Ukraine-related details...
The House Dem caucus will meet on Tuesday
"The House Democratic caucus will meet Tuesday afternoon," per Raju's story. A leadership aide told CNN that the topic is likely to be about the next steps on investigations..."
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- Susan Hennessey's warning: "No one should kid themselves or feel gleeful in this moment. Impeachment always tears at the fabric of a nation. The only thing that is more destructive would be to not impeach when the Constitution demands it." (Twitter)
-- Michael Gerson's rousing message: "Opposing Trump's corrupt abuse of power is today's form of patriotism..." (WaPo)
-- Because I know you're wondering: Sean Spicer survived the first elimination round of the "Dancing With the Stars" season... The Supremes' Mary Wilson is heading home... (ET)
"Biden wages war on Hunter-Ukraine reporting"
That's the headline on Politico's latest. Kate Bedingfield, Biden's comms director, "acknowledged Monday that the fierce pushback was in part aimed at preventing a reprisal of the 2016 presidential campaign, where questions over Hillary Clinton's emails cannibalized her campaign." She told Politico that Trump "makes the press an unwitting accomplice in spreading his lies when they don't keep their focus on egregious abuses of power. The smears he's trying to spread have been universally debunked and are only true in some MAGA-land alternate universe..."
THREE NOTABLE MOMENTS ON FOX NEWS:
"Far more serious..."
Reacting to the Ukraine scandal, Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Fox Biz that "I think this is the most serious charge against the president, far more serious than what Bob Mueller dug or dragged up against him."
--> Brian Lowry emails: The really striking part about that viral Napolitano clip is the way host David Asman kept trying to steer him back to Biden. It's a perfect illustration -- indeed, practically a case study -- of the way many of Fox's anchors, and not just its opinion hosts, subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly put a finger on the scale that tilts the conversation in Trump's favor, and downplays anything that might reflect negatively on him...
Shep Smith's hour continues to be wormhole into reality for Fox viewers
Oliver Darcy emails: For most of the day, Fox viewers are fed pro-Trump opinion programming, or news programming that leans right. The notable exception? Shepard Smith's 3pm show. On Monday, Smith noted that "the real issue" isn't about Biden, but about "the claim that the president pressured a foreign leader to investigate a political rival and the failure to pass the whistleblower complaint to Congress."
Smith, of course, was spot on, and his program continues to serve as a wormhole into reality for Fox viewers who are conditioned by the network to think stories like this are not real...
Fox News apologizes to Greta Thunberg
The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona and Maxwell Tani report: "The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles joined other conservative pundits and Fox News personalities in openly attacking 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg" on Monday. Knowles called the teenager a "mentally ill Swedish child." The other guest on the segment, Christopher Hahn, said "you're a grown man and you're attacking a child—shame on you." Later in the evening, as the segment stirred outrage on social media, Fox sided with Hahn: "The comment made by Michael Knowles who was a guest on 'The Story' tonight was disgraceful -- we apologize to Greta Thunberg and to our viewers."
TUESDAY PLANNER
Advertising Week continues in NYC...
The Atlantic Festival begins in DC... Tuesday's speakers include Nancy Pelosi, Nick Clegg, and Evan Spiegel...
The 40th annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards will be presented in NYC...
New books by Bob Iger, Jonathan Van Ness, Demi Moore, and Dan Bongino hit bookshelves...
Even more new books! | | -- Ta-Nehisi Coates' novel "The Water Dancer," out Tuesday, is the first selection in Oprah Winfrey's rebooted book club... (CBS)
-- BTW, Winfrey will interview Coates on "Oprah's Book Club," a series that will stream on Apple TV+ starting November 1... (USA Today)
-- Tom LoBianco will be on CNN's "New Day" Tuesday morning, talking about "Piety & Power," his brand new book about VP Mike Pence... (HarperCollins)
-- Chanel Miller, the "Emily Doe" at the center of the Stanford sexual assault case, is releasing her memoir, "Know My Name," on Tuesday. Following her "60 Minutes" interview over the weekend, she will be on "CBS This Morning" Tuesday... (CBS)
-- Gretchen Carlson tweeted about Bill O'Reilly's next tome, "United States of Donald Trump," saying "He's paid out millions in settlements to shut up women. Then Henry Holt publishes the book and sees nothing wrong with it? Will O'Reilly appear on a network?" So far, I haven't seen any network bookings... (Twitter)
Encryption and misinformation
Donie O'Sullivan writes: Resembling more a world leader than a tech COO, Sheryl Sandberg stood with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in New York Monday evening as they announced plans for an organization to fight extremism online. It has been six months since the Christchurch attack, and NZ has been leading the charge pressuring Big Tech to act. Sandberg explained all the work Facebook had done in taking down videos of the Christchurch attack (after it initially streamed live on Facebook).
But here's the thing... Facebook owns WhatsApp, and by design, that platform does not allow for monitoring the way Facebook does -- it's encrypted -- and while that might be great for most of us, particularly journalists, it does pose a whole new challenge in fighting misinformation online. There is simply no way to remove videos, like the Christchurch massacre vid, from WhatsApp.
Law enforcement has long locked horns with Big Tech about encryption– but with encrypted apps becoming more popular in the United States, expect it to become an issue we talk about when it comes to misinfo in 2020. Here's my story about Monday's announcement... | |
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- Richard Cohen has penned his final column for WaPo, 51 years after joining the paper. Here it is... (WaPo)
-- Zeynep Tufekci is joining The Atlantic as a contributing writer... (The Atlantic)
-- Stephen Battaglio's latest: Inside the "nerdquarium," a/k/a the Fox News polling unit, which has "a long-running reputation of being a nonpartisan source of research on voting and public opinion — even if its findings irritate the Fox News fan watching in the White House..." (LAT)
-- Casey Newton's latest is on "YouTube's big verification mess..." (The Interface)
-- "A number of Facebook's current and former competitors are talking about the company's hardball tactics to investigators from the FTC," and one of them is Snap. Read about Snap's "Project Voldemort" here... (WSJ)
How newsrooms across the country are covering the climate crisis
Kerry Flynn writes: Timed with the UN Climate Action Summit, more than 300 outlets agreed to elevate their climate coverage in a significant way in mid-September. As CJR's Kyle Pope discussed on the "Reliable Sources" podcast, scientists and researchers have criticized major news outlets for not devoting more resources to this coverage in the past. So how is the Covering Climate Now effort going? I checked in with participants -- including WNYC, Bloomberg and The Toronto Star -- and wrote about the takeaways here. Editors and reporters told me their climate stories are getting traffic... there's definitely a lot of talk about deepening their investments in climate coverage...
"It's a Fact"
Alexandra Alter's story in Monday's NYT was titled "It's a Fact: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry." True. But, as she wrote, there still isn't "broad agreement on who should be paying for what is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process in the low-margin publishing industry." Read on...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
By Kerry Flynn:
-- BuzzFeed, Group Nine and Insider formed an ad sales alliance to sell video advertising and better compete with tech giants and TV networks... (WSJ)
-- Yahoo has a new logo. The Verge's headline jokes that the change was made so you remember Yahoo exists... (The Verge)
-- Fortune's Most Powerful Women in Business list is out and includes tech and media execs like Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Wojcicki and Shari Redstone... (Fortune)
And speaking of that list...
The women leading Netflix into the streaming wars
 Frank Pallotta writes: The Fortune cover belongs to five female content execs at Netflix: Cindy Holland, Bela Bajaria, Lisa Nishimura, Melissa Cobb and Channing Dungey.
Michal Lev-Ram says the content leaders at Netflix bear "little resemblance to the typical C-suite crew sitting around a Silicon Valley conference room." The company has execs of different "ethnicities, races, and sexual orientations," and several of the senior members of the team also happen to be women.
>> Key quote from Bela Bajaria, the head of Netflix's non-English language original programming: We are obviously a global platform, and every show will launch everywhere, right at the same time. But when we go into a country, it really is about the storytelling — a creator with a vision from that country." Read the rest here...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE
-- "Catherine Powell, who ran the U.S. and Paris theme parks for Walt Disney Co. during the opening of two new Star Wars lands, is leaving the company," Christopher Palmeri reports... (Bloomberg)
-- Daniel Fienberg's review of "The Politician," which premieres on Friday: "I didn't like 'The Politician' and bring on season two!" (THR)
-- "'Free Solo' filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have signed a first-look deal with National Geographic." The first deal "is an as-yet-unannounced feature documentary which is currently in development at Nat Geo..." (TheWrap)
-- Gabriella Paiella calls "Dateline" correspondent Keith Morrison "the granddaddy of true crime..." (GQ)
-- New York mag has signed with WME and "has launched a TV/film production initiative led by consulting producer Scoop Wasserstein, brother of New York Media CEO Pam Wasserstein..." (THR)
-- Jonah Hill might play a villain in Matt Reeves' "The Batman..." (Variety)
Here's how much Rupert and Lachlan are being paid this year
"Both Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch will take home quite a bit less in compensation than they did last year, reflecting the completion of the spinoff to Disney and the skinnier Fox Corp. portfolio of companies," THR's Alex Weprin reports. "According to a Monday proxy filing with the SEC," Rupert "will see total compensation of $42.1 million in fiscal 2019, down from $49.2 million in 2018," while Lachlan "will also take home $42.1 million in total compensation, down from $50.7 million last year." Details here...
| | The cratering Emmy ratings
"Watched by 6.9 million viewers from 8pm to just after 11pm ET, the hostless ceremony pulled in the smallest audience for any Emmys ever," Deadline's Dominic Patten reports. That's "a 32% fall in sets of overall eyeballs from the Monday airing of the show on NBC last year and a 39% drop from the previous Sunday airing on CBS back in 2017. In addition, the decline this year from the last time Fox had the Emmys in 2015 is a hard to swallow 42%." The reasons are pretty numerous and pretty obvious...
What the Emmys should do differently
Brian Lowry emails: After an alarming if not wholly surprising drop in Emmy ratings ― off an already record-low in 2018 ― my modest suggestion: Dispense with the "wheel" deal that sees the show rotate among the four broadcast networks, and give the Emmys a regular home, like the Oscars, Tonys, Grammys and Golden Globes all have. That might not stem the ratings decline, but it should slow the free-fall by giving the host network an investment in the ceremony that the current scenario ― originally put in place years ago to ensure comity within the industry, when the networks actually had a dog in the fight ― sorely lacks. It's worth noting, too, that if the fragmentation that impacted the ratings and results was evident this year, the ads within the Emmycast for Disney+ and Apple TV+ only augur more of the same...
Big wins for HBO, Amazon, and Netflix
"HBO finished the two-part Emmy process with 34 Emmys -- including nine on Sunday night, or a third of those doled out -- followed by Netflix, with 27," Lowry noted here. Amazon was right behind HBO in terms of high-profile victories on Sunday, with seven, and finished the Emmy season with 15 total awards.
The bottom line, as headlined by the LAT: "HBO wins more Emmys than Amazon and Netflix." But, at the same time, "Amazon had its best Emmys season yet," THR noted...
Phoebe Waller-Bridge wins everything
"Fleabag" star Phoebe Waller-Bridge could barely carry all of her prizes, and her fans were thrilled for her. The Cut posted a photo gallery of Waller-Bridge's post-show celebrations. The NYT's Maya Salam has more on her "breakout night..." | |
Explaining the voting...
Another note from Lowry: Meanwhile, the unpredictable outcome of the awards had prognosticators trying to explain why the voting turned out the way it did. Certainly, as THR's Scott Feinberg suggested, split voting ― with an abundance of "Game of Thrones" nominees vying against each other in the supporting categories, for example ― was a factor, but they might as well admit that all the handicapping is based on educated guesses based on past behavior, then justified by labeling the unexpected results "snubs" and "surprises..."
FOR THE RECORD, PART SIX
By Lisa Respers France:
-- Natasha Lyonne's clap won Twitter on Emmys night. She's totally the new Nicole Kidman...
-- That whole music situation during the Emmys was awkward as hell...
-- We can't let it go, let it go. The new "Frozen 2" trailer is full of action...
-- Based on the "El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie" commercial, that Netflix film looks intense!
Bringing back "Walker, Texas Ranger?"
"'Supernatural' star Jared Padalecki is set to headline and executive produce 'Walker,' a reimagining of CBS' long-running 1990s action/crime series 'Walker, Texas Ranger,'" Deadline's Nellie Andreeva reported Monday. The project is "being shopped by CBS TV Studios." Andreeva hears that "the CW, home of Padalecki's long-running series 'Supernatural,' has emerged as a leading contender for the new show, with CBS, which aired the Chuck Norris-starring 'Walker, Texas Ranger,' also considered a possibility..."
ICYMI:
Sunday's "Reliable" highlights
Read the transcript; listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn; watch the video clips on CNN.com; or catch the full episode via CNNgo or VOD...
| | Thanks for reading! Email me your feedback anytime. See you tomorrow...
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