| | | | | Good evening from the Kennedy Center Honors in DC -- a Trump-free awards ceremony. This was the first time in over 20 years that a president skipped the celebration. Scroll down for sightings and highlights... | | | This sure looks like the start of Billy Bush's attempt at a TV comeback... First an op-ed in Monday's NYT, then an appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert..." | | "Yes, Donald Trump, You Said That" is the headline of the op-ed. He says he decided to speak out after news reports indicated that Trump has been casting doubt on the authenticity of the "Access Hollywood" tape. The stories "hit a raw nerve in me," he said.
Left unsaid: The stories also gave him an opening to reemerge in public. He's positioning himself against Trump -- as the "better man" who made a mistake and learned from it -- etc...
--> This is going to trigger several more news cycles about the tape and the allegations in Trump's past... Bush recounted specific allegations made by two of Trump's accusers, Jill Harth and Kristin Anderson, and pointedly wrote, "I believe her." Here's my full story... | | "It's a major embarrassment" | | Oliver Darcy emails: ABC's Brian Ross is suspended without pay for four weeks... in the wake of his faulty report about Michael Flynn. The decision was announced Saturday night, roughly 24 hours after he "clarified" (corrected) his reporting. Here's our full story...
>> In a statement, ABC News said the reporting "had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process" before being relayed to viewers on-air. The network called it a "serious error" and apologized...
>> ABC News employees I spoke with over the weekend said there was internal embarrassment over the blunder: "It makes me sick to my stomach," one employee told me. Another added, "It's a major embarrassment..."
>> Ross commented on Twitter: "My job is to hold people accountable and that's why I agree with being held accountable myself..." | | "Like handing a sword..." | | | Jeff Greenfield to me on Sunday's "Reliable Sources:" "This is exactly what Trump and his allies want to say: 'No matter what you hear on mainstream media, it's fake. They're doing it to hurt us.' And this is like handing a sword to the people who want all media to be looked at in that regard." | | Trump's response: People should sue ABC?! | | President Trump tweeted his "congratulations" to ABC for suspending Ross. The next morning, he ramped up his language, tweeting that "people who lost money when the stock market went down 350 points" after Ross' reporting "should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC."
For the record, not all of Friday morning's losses are attributable to the ABC report, and by the closing bell, the market had mostly recovered.
More important -- this is the president musing that people should sue a news outlet. "This is not normal," I said to Greenfield, who kinda shrugged: "You can say that five times a day, this is not normal."
On Sunday, CNNMoney interviewed legal experts who said Trump misunderstands how the law works: "It's complete nonsense," said author and attorney James Rickards. "Brian Ross may have been sloppy, but it's pretty clear that he didn't intentionally create a story with the intention of sinking the stock market..." | | Would ABC News have corrected on its own? | | | Darcy adds: It's worth asking if ABC News would have admitted to this significant error had we not started asking questions. As I noted on "Reliable," the network initially tried to downplay the mistake, referring to its correction as a mere "clarification." Which is unfortunate. It's important that when news outlets make errors, they are up front with their audiences about them... | | -- Former ABCer Shelley Ross wrote on Facebook: "Brian Ross is a superb reporter who does occasionally make mistakes which he immediately owns and corrects..."
-- Dan Gillmor tweeted: "Was Brian Ross lied to by (unnamed) source, or did he report what wasn't said? If the former, ABC should out the source..."
-- Q from "Reliable:" What's going to happen at the end of the four-week suspension?
-- One last point from Darcy: In the last year, both CNN and ABC News have taken serious action when certain reporting didn't live up to each network's respective standards. That said, it's worth remembering right about now that Fox News never announced any disciplinary action for its retracted Seth Rich report... | | -- WSJ: "Walt Disney Co. has re-engaged in discussions with 21st Century Fox..." And Comcast "remains in the mix..." (WSJ)
-- CVS is buying Aetna in a deal that is sure to draw antitrust scrutiny. Bill Carter tweeted this reaction to the news: "Interesting. Wonder if Trump DOJ will find this merger as problematic as the one involving a news org he doesn't like..."
-- "MSNBC host Joy Reid issued an apology on Sunday for a series of blog posts nearly a decade ago, mostly critical of former Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, that have been criticized as homophobic and 'anti-gay...'" (NBC) | | Jeff Glor starts on Monday | | | Anthony Mason signed off on Friday, and Jeff Glor will take over as "CBS Evening News" anchor on Monday. CBS is going to start rebroadcasting the newscast on its streaming service CBSN at 10pm ET... | | Media week ahead calendar | | -- Monday: The Poynter Journalism Ethics Summit in DC... I'll be moderating one of the panels...
-- Monday night: Billy Bush on Colbert...
-- Thursday: Status conference in DOJ v. AT&T...
-- Friday: POTUS holds a rally in Florida... Near the Alabama line...
-- Friday: "The Crown" season two arrives on Netflix... | | The "Today" show is about to start its first full week without Matt Lauer. And Hoda Kotb will continue to fill in all week, per a source.
Over the weekend, there were gossipy items about NBC combing through Lauer's corporate email (logical but unconfirmed) and emptying his office (also logical). One outstanding Q: How long will NBCUniversal's "review" take? Several weeks, I'm told... But this sounds like a "weeks, not months" situation... | | -- THR's Marisa Guthrie said this on Sunday's "Reliable:" "Noah Oppenheim at an 'NBC Nightly News' meeting on Friday said that people who knew about this and didn't say anything would be dealt with very severely..."
-- Hadas Gold: "I don't think that we can at all avoid what these people did behind the scenes, and how that might have translated into their work." Katie Rogers wrote an NYT piece on this same theme the other day. Title: "When Our Trusted Storytellers Are Also the Abusers..."
-- Video: Here's the full conversation with Guthrie, Gold and Sarah Ellison... | | Still "America's First Family" ? | | On "Reliable," I mentioned the "Today" show's 1990s branding, "America's First Family," i.e. "Katie, Matt, Al and Ann." Al Roker is the only one of the four still on the show. But "family" perception remains vitally important to NBC.
Frank Radice was watching the show from London... He was responsible for NBC News promos back then... He told me via Facebook, "When I wrote 'America's First Family' I believed it." For a while, we both agreed, it really was a family... | | It's women all this week on "Today" and CBS | | While Savannah and Hoda host on "Today," Bianna Golodryga will join Norah O'Donnell and Gayle King on "CBS This Morning." Last week, Vladimir Duthiers filled the Charlie Rose spot. John Dickerson will fill in the following week.
As I noted in this story, some cultural critics have proposed that the networks do away with -- or at least rethink -- the traditional man and woman co-host format. "In talking to a lot of women anchors in the last few days, what they hope is that this will explode that myth," Guthrie said on "Reliable..." | | The weekend's other developments | | -- Suki Kim says she felt "violated" by former public radio host John Hockenberry "in a way that felt sexual, though the man in question never touched me." She interviewed other women with similar experiences and wrote this for The Cut...
-- The NYT culture desk just broke this news: "The Metropolitan Opera suspended James Levine, its revered conductor and former music director, on Sunday after three men came forward with accusations that Mr. Levine sexually abused them decades ago, when the men were teenagers..."
-- Via BuzzFeed: "Actor Geoffrey Rush has stepped down as president of Australia's screen industry academy days after the Sydney Theatre Company revealed a complaint of 'inappropriate behaviour' against the Oscar-winner..."
-- AP's latest headline: "Los Angeles, NYC, London chase growing mass of sex cases..." | | A round of applause for Francesca! | | | Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman, one of the most reliable contributors to this newsletter, is moving to weeknights... Shifting from the "Reliable Sources" producing team to "Erin Burnett OutFront..." Their gain is our loss, but she says she'll still send in items when she has time! | | Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman emails:
-- An important reflection on "the death of the internet" by Joshua Topolsky at The Outline. "Trump, Facebook, Twitter, and the serial abusers they all rely on have destroyed what it was, and now they're working hard to kill it entirely. And when it dies, something bigger than a network dies — the "real world" goes with it..." (The Outline)
-- Margaret Sullivan's latest, filed from Alabama, on how the Opelika-Auburn News in the eastern part of the state is grappling with the Roy Moore story in a "cautious" way... (WashPost)
-- The end of an era at Gizmodo Media Group: Dodai Stewart, the editor in chief of Splinter, formerly of Fusion and Jezebel, is leaving the company to pursue scriptwriting... (Splinter) | | | "I Spent 90 Days With a Baby Instead of Donald Trump" by Jackie Kucinich. "I have to say, there's something uniquely disturbing watching the president bait nuclear war whilst feeding a newborn," she writes. But she says she mostly avoided the nonstop news cycles while on maternity leave. This is what it felt like. "In many ways I feel like I'll never catch up and yet, at the same time, the political world is exactly how I left it..." | | Here's how I started the show... Scroll past this if you watched:
Right now, the news is overwhelming, confusing, and sometimes frightening. Four of President Trump's associates have been charged by Robert Mueller... Trump is attacking the FBI and trying to discredit the Mueller probe... His media allies working overtime to help him... Even as journalists uncover new links between Trumpworld and Russia almost every single day.
The biggest challenge for newsrooms right now: Cutting through the craziness and explaining what's going on -- in clear, accurate language. This moment calls for more explainers, more timelines, more summaries, more fact-checks. We need to start with the basics. We need to exercise caution and precision, without shying away from the truth. We need to describe the crisis that we are seeing with our own eyes. We need to write our stories not to impress each other, but to inform the public. And above all else, we need to protect our credibility at all costs... | | -- Our "B block" conversation: Are some of Trump's tweets actually dangerous?
-- Brian Karem on POTUS tweets: "I call it Twitter litter..."
-- April Ryan on being left off the W.H. Christmas party invite list: "I am so fine... I would not have gone anyway..." | | "The lying, the lying, and lying" | | Does Sally Quinn see parallels between the Nixon and Trump administrations?
"I would say the lying, the lying, and lying," she told me in an interview about HBO's new documentary "The Newspaperman," a memorialization of her late husband Ben Bradlee. "People ask me every day how would Ben react in this environment," she said. "He would recognize this as a great story and he'd say, 'Let's get the story. Let's go out and get it. Get it right. Get it first.'" Today, she said, "we cannot afford to make any mistakes. I mean, one mistake and it taints us all..." [[See the Ross coverage above]]
-- "The Newspaperman" premieres Monday night on HBO. ICYMI, here's Brian Lowry's review of the film... | | | We ended the show on a positive note, with Quinn warning against too much doom and gloom: "I am optimistic, and I think Ben would be optimistic... We've all got to work together to get to the truth and get the story, and we will... Our country will survive. And so will the First Amendment..." | | | For the record, part three | | | -- Robert O'Harrow's scoop: "Project Veritas, an activist group that mounts undercover video stings of liberals and mainstream news organizations, received nearly $1.7 million in donations last year from a giant charity associated with the Koch brothers, according to documents filed with the IRS..." (WashPost)
-- In Germany, the NYT was just awarded a prize for "international understanding..." (NYT)
-- "I'm Michael Flynn, the Ghost of Witness Flipped..." Here's a look at the "SNL" cold open... (CNN) | | How WashPost polled Alabama | | Two new polls out of Alabama show two different leaders. CBS has Roy Moore ahead by six. The WashPost has Doug Jones ahead by 3. Notably, "to avoid influencing the answers of respondents with opinions about The Post's coverage of allegations against Moore, interviewers disclosed The Post's sponsorship of the survey only at the end of the interviews..."
--> CBS found that 71% of Alabama Republicans "say the allegations against Roy Moore are false." Those respondents "overwhelmingly" say Dems and the media are behind it... | | Moore still hiding from the media | | | "I talk to the media all the time," Moore claimed when Fox's Dan Gallo inquired on Sunday. But that's not true. Until Sunday, when he briefly fielded a few Q's, "Moore had not spoken to a legitimate news outlet -- local or national -- since the WaPo story broke on Nov. 9," NBC's Vaughn Hillyard tweeted. "Why is this noteworthy? He's a candidate who is riding out an assumption of GOP support. No debate w/ opponent. No press Qs..." | | At the Kennedy Center Honors... | | Sunday marked the 40th annual Kennedy Center Honors... and the fourth time the president did not attend. (Carter in 1979, H.W. Bush in 1989, Clinton in 1994.) "There were no Trump administration surrogates standing in for the absent President Trump and first lady Melania Trump," the WashPost's Peggy McGlone reported. Of course, it could have been awkward, with outspoken Trump critic Norman Lear among the honorees. The other four: Gloria Estefan, Carmen de Lavallade, LL Cool J, and Lionel Richie.
On stage, there were several moments that felt like subtle commentaries about the man who wasn't there. Caroline Kennedy began the evening with comments about JFK and the power of art. She quoted her father, saying, "The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us."
The event will air on CBS on December 26... | | | David Rubenstein, Les Moonves, David Rhodes, Rand Paul, Emily Estefan, J.J. Abrams, Bob Barnett, Rita Braver, Ed Markey, Jane Pauley, Ben Cardin, Ajit Pai, Jessica Rosenworcel, Eliot Engel, Laura Jarrett, Nancy Cordes, Bianna Golodryga, Peter Orszag, Steny Hoyer, Questlove, Chris Licht, Jeff Glor, Ryan Kadro, Chris Isham, Chip Reid, Kelly Kahl, Christa Robinson, Brian Steinberg, Stephen Battaglio, Dave Chappelle, and many, many more... | | Weekend box office highlights | | "With no new wide-release movies over the weekend, the well-reviewed and culturally resonant 'Coco' was number one with $26.1 million domestically," Andrew R. Chow reports for the NYT. "Globally, the film surged to a total gross of $280 million; it opened at number one in France, Spain, and Germany and continued to thrive in China and Mexico, where it became the first film to cross one billion pesos (with a total gross of $55.6 million)..."
In other weekend news: "Justice League" "fell off sharply in its third weekend, taking in $16.5 million," and "The Disaster Artist" "was a huge hit in limited release, taking in $1.2 million from just 19 theaters." "Lady Bird" also performed well...
--> ICYMI a few days ago: "The Walt Disney Studios Hits $5 Billion in Global Box Office for 2017" | | LA Film Critics Assn. winners | | | Brian Lowry emails: "Call Me By Your Name," the coming-of-age gay love story, was the big winner at the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. awards voted on Sunday. In addition to best picture, the movie's young star Timothee Chalamet won best actor and director Luca Guadagnino tied with Guillermo Del Toro of "The Shape of Water," which claimed best actress for Sally Hawkins. The voting was pretty wide open, reflecting admiration for a number of films, perhaps good news for media outlets peddling "For Your Consideration" ads. Also, best picture runner-up went to "The Florida Project," another low-budget independent project about those living in poverty in the shadow of Disney's theme parks... | | | Email brian.stelter@turner.com... I appreciate every message. The feedback helps us craft the next day's newsletter! | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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