| | | | Even some of the Americans who approve of President Trump don't think he's honest or trustworthy. Only 37% of Americans overall say he's honest, according to CNN/ORC's latest poll, released Wednesday night. | | The CNN poll showed Trump with 44% approval -- "a modern record, though it is probably not one he wants, "Jake Tapper said on a special 9pm edition of "The Lead..." | | All five major networks have now released polls pegged to the 100-day mark... NBC/WSJ has Trump at 40% approval, CBS at 41%, ABC/WashPost at 42%, CNN at 44%, and Fox News at 45%... under Trump's definition, all five of these real polls qualify as "fake..." | | | Tapper: "Demand evidence from your leaders and from your media" | | Jake Tapper's closing essay on Wednesday night was electric... he cited with alarm the "shockingly high percentage of Americans believe President Obama intentionally spied on Donald Trump and members of his campaign..." and took a veiled shot at Rachel Maddow's Trump-Russia speculation.
"In a thriving democracy, truth matters. Facts matter," Tapper said. "We learned in the campaign that Donald trump can be cavalier about facts and truth. We learned in his first 100 days that that's not going to change. Indeed that some in the government and some of his friends in the conservative media will even work to try to make his falsehoods seem true. But you know what? There's also a lot of incendiary nonsense against President Trump on the left these days that is just as fake and just as free of any evidence. Both in progressive media and all over Twitter, being retweeted by otherwise sensible folks."
Tapper concluded: "This is a time for all journalists to be extra careful about our own reporting, to make sure we adhere strictly to facts and cogent analysis. And this is the time for you, the public, to demand evidence from your leaders and from your media, even if you already agree with the politics of the person on your TV." | | That's Jason Kint's reaction to the latest Interactive Advertising Bureau #'s showing digital ad revenues in the United States. The IAB's 2016 data, out Wednesday, showed Google and Facebook (still) dominating the industry and swallowing up most of the growth versus 2015. Exactly how much? Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser says "99% of industry growth attributable to the two companies." The IAB, however, disputes that... AdAge's George Slefo has details here... | | | ESPN lays off familiar faces | | Frank Pallotta emails: In what has to be one of the toughest days in ESPN's history, the network laid off about 100 on-air personalities, writers and other staffers. The network didn't share a full list of those let go, but the cuts included former NFL quarterback and analyst Trent Dilfer, NFL reporter Ed Werder, senior baseball writer Jayson Stark and host Jay Crawford... | | | These layoffs are not about politics | | More from Frank: Some conservative sites and commenters placed the blame on ESPN not "sticking to sports" and alienating viewers by becoming too political. Jim Brady, ESPN's public editor, rightly rejected that hypothesis on Wednesday, calling it "silly" in a Twitter thread.
"Layoffs are almost all about the less favorable economics of an unbundled cable world," he wrote... | | | Still enormously profitable, but... | | Brian Lowry emails with this gut check: Because of the enormous subscriber fees it commands, no network is more vulnerable to cord-cutting and "skinny bundles" than ESPN. A little perspective, though, on these latest cuts: The sports powerhouse still remains an enormously profitable enterprise; it's just no longer the unfettered growth engine that it was, which has made Disney -- and perhaps more significantly, the analysts that follow the studio -- nervous... | | -- Blunt stat via Recode: "ESPN has lost 10 million subscribers in just five years..."
-- Deadspin has "a running list of ESPN layoffs..."
-- "Other ESPN personalities may see their roles 'significantly reduced,'" a source told THR...
-- Dylan McLemore tweets: "Live games are ESPN's lifeblood. Cuts must come from personality-driven shows or highlights/news. Network sees more value in the former. | | | Summing up Fox's situation in four words... | | On night two without Bill O'Reilly, "Fox News won 8, 9 and 10 p.m. across the board for the second consecutive night, though total viewer figures were down from Monday. MSNBC defeated CNN in prime time," TVNewser's A.J. Katz writes... | | | Attorney says racial discrimination lawsuit against Fox 'will continue to grow' | | Following up on Tuesday's amended racial discrimination complaint against Fox News... there was a presser in NYC on Wednesday... and it generated a lot of media coverage.
>> Tom Kludt writes: A legal campaign alleging racial discrimination against Fox News that has already attracted more than a dozen plaintiffs could grow even larger, the attorney representing the plaintiffs said Wednesday. Attorney Douglas Wigdor "said he has received phone calls from some on-air employees of Fox News" who are not currently part of the suit, Tom Kludt reports. Wigdor "said his firm is in the 'beginning stages of vetting those calls...'" | | Plaintiff Kelly Wright, who's a Fox anchor, also spoke at the press conference... and countered the right-wing charge that this is all a left-wing plot... "Let me make something very plain here," Wright said, "I, or the people you see with me, do not have any incentive from some left-wing conspirator group or some left-wing financier to try to destroy Fox News." | | | Jesse Watters going on vacation | | Maybe this is a total coincidence.
-- On Tuesday night/Wednesday morning Fox's Jesse Watters was called out for watching Ivanka Trump speak and then saying "I really like how she was speaking into that microphone."
-- On Wednesday morning he claimed he meant that her voice "resonates like a smooth jazz radio DJ." Uh-huh.
-- On Wednesday night he announced on "The Five" that he's going on vacation til next Monday... which means he's missing two days of his first week in prime time, plus his weekend show... | | | O'Reilly says "a lot of people are trying to kill me right now" | | Bill O'Reilly claims he's doing "record business" on BillOReilly.com, gaining lots of new subscribers on day three of his Fox-less podcast. Toward the end of the pod, he alluded to his firing... he turned a plug for one of his "Killing" books into a personal reference... "A lot of people are trying to kill me right now, as you know. But we're going to tough that one out."
-- BTW: O'Reilly's next "Killing" book is finished... it's coming out in September... he says "I'm going to announce it in conjunction with my publisher Holt..." | | -- ABC's Alexander Marquardt is "heading to CNN next month as senior national correspondent, based in New York..." (TVNewser)
-- If you've been following the controversy over Bret Stephens' hiring by the NYT, you might enjoy this Vox Q&A with Stephens... (Vox)
-- A recommended read from Indira A.R. Lakshmanan: "Breitbart struggles to define its role in Trump era: Bad boy, watchdog or lapdog?" (Poynter) | | | This year's World Press Freedom Index is out | | Reporters Without Borders "evaluates and ranks 180 countries" for its annual index. The rankings released on Wednesday, "which reflect data collected throughout 2016, show the U.S. has slipped from 41st to 43rd place since last year's index. The decline was largely driven by 'toxic' campaign rhetoric," HuffPost's Jesselyn Cook reports... | | Hadas Gold and Daniel Lippman's scoop: "Matt Drudge, the founder and editor of the influential site DrudgeReport.com, has hired Daniel Halper," the former NYPost DC bureau chief... It's not clear "what his new position will be at The Drudge Report..." | | | "Blockbuster has survived in the most curious of places" | | Did you know there are a handful of Blockbuster survivors in Alaska? WashPost's Samantha Schmidt wrote about it here. And Conor Knighton had a piece about the stores on "CBS Sunday Morning" last Sunday. It makes you think about what we lost when we gained access to "everything" online and on-demand... | | | Congrats to this year's Cable Hall of Fame Honorees | | Steve Burke, David Zaslav, Jill Campbell, Michael T. Fries, Ken Lowe, "The Sopranos" and David Chase were inducted at the Cable Hall of Fame celebration in DC Wednesday night... | | People I spotted at the #Time100 after last night's newsletter came out: Trevor Noah, Ali Zelenko, Jason Blum, RuPaul, Viola Davis, Linda Sarsour, Rebekah and Robert Mercer, Sam Bee, Ava DuVernay, Alex Korson, Colson Whitehead, Howard Stringer, Ronan Farrow, David Westin, Yvette Vega, Steven Rubenstein, Janet Mock, Andrew Heyward, Priscilla Painton...
At one point I overheard new DNC chair Tom Perez exchanging contact info with Sarsour and the other Women's March leaders who were there... | | | In this age of oversharing, what do you choose NOT to share on social media? | | This question came up when Ben Smith interviewed me for his new BuzzFeed podcast... I said my late-night video gaming habit is an example of something I don't tweet about... hear the full podcast here... | | | Trump talks to DC Examiner | | The Washington Examiner's Sarah Westwood had a "one-on-one Oval Office interview with President Trump" on Wednesday. She asked for a letter grade for Trump's first 100 days, and he gave himself an A...
>> Trump's big weekend interview is with John Dickerson on CBS... | | | What's wrong with this picture? | | Can you spot it? Look at the ship, captioned "Navy destroyers bound for NORTH KOREA..." | | | Bee says "there's too much to talk about" | | Megan Thomas emails: Samantha Bee was interviewed by Lena Dunham for THR in advance of the "Full Frontal: Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner" special this Saturday. Bee talked about "not having too many f—s left to give" and comedy in the age of Trump.
"There's too much to talk about. Everything is a potential tragedy. The news is changing so quickly, you think that the show's going to look one way on a Monday morning, and by Tuesday afternoon, the whole world has shifted, and everything is different, and you can't tell that story anymore, or everything has just moved on and no one would care. Every time I turn my phone off, something terrible happens in the world. It's insane." | | | Remembering Jonathan Demme | | "Jonathan Demme, whose Oscar-winning thriller 'The Silence of the Lambs' terrified audiences and introduced one of the most indelible villains in movie history, died Wednesday morning in New York. He was 73," CNN's Brandon Griggs writes. Demme "died of complications from esophageal cancer, according to a statement from his publicist..." | | | Twenty years ago this month... | | Brian Lowry emails: This is a good analysis from USA Today's Robert Bianco about Ellen DeGeneres' personal and professional coming out (the latter known as "The Puppy Episode") 20 years ago, and what that's meant for depictions of gay characters on TV... | | | Lowry reviews "Dear White People" | | Brian Lowry emails: Netflix is serving up another winner with "Dear White People." Adapted from a 2014 movie, it offers a thoughtful and funny look at a group of African-American students on an Ivy League campus (played, I should note, by my alma mater, UCLA). Read more... | | Fellow "Jurassic" fan Frank Pallotta emails: Dr. Ian Malcolm is going back to "Jurassic Park." Life -- and Universal Pictures -- found a way to bring Jeff Goldblum back for the sequel to mega-hit "Jurassic World." Malcolm is everyone's favorite chaotician... | | | For the record, part three | | | -- The first three episodes of "The Handmaid's Tale" debuted on Hulu on Wednesday. Check out Sandra Gonzalez's interviews with the stars here...
-- Via Chloe Melas: Adam Levine performed a tribute to the late Christina Grimmie on "The Voice..."
-- "Reliable" intern Beverly Danquah emails: As an up-and-coming journalist, I always appreciate advice from pros who have been in my shoes. It's almost calming to hear successful journalists like Savannah Guthrie and Lydia Polgreen say that they've felt the same jitters at my age. The Cut has some of the highlights from Monday's Matrix luncheon here... | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Send your feedback to reliablesources@cnn.com. We appreciate every email. | |  | | We'd love to share our other newsletters with you. Check out Five Things for Your New Day, CNN's morning newsletter. Give us five minutes, and we'll brief you on all the news and buzz people will be talking about. | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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