| | | | *Yes, there IS such a thing as truth. And the truth needs defending. But Rudy Giuliani was tapping into something real when he told Chuck Todd that "truth isn't truth" on Sunday's "Meet the Press." Something cynical, but real.
No, it won't fly in court. But, as is often pointed out, Rudy is fighting in the court of public opinion. And "truth isn't truth" for Trump's most fervent supporters. They don't trust the usual "truth" suppliers. They feel that the truth is whatever the president says it is, whatever the president's lawyer says it is.
In fact, this is one of Trump's top accomplishments in office: Destroying the notion of an agreed-upon set of facts...
| | The new "alternative facts" | | What is it about Chuck Todd?! Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" moment happened on his broadcast. And then "truth isn't truth" supplanted it, also on his broadcast.
THE CONTEXT: As CNN's Caroline Kenny explained here, Rudy was "explaining that he won't let special counsel Robert Mueller rush Trump into testifying because he doesn't want investigators to trap the President into a lie."
THE REACTION: Eugene Robinson was waiting in the wings as a panelist on "MTP." He said "jaws dropped around the set" when Rudy said it...
THE REALITY: "I think the idea that 'truth isn't truth' is going to go down as this White House's legal strategy," panelist Yamiche Alcindor said afterward...
| | "Don't do 'truth isn't truth' to me" | | That was my favorite line of the whole interview. When Todd said "this is going to become a bad meme," Giuliani answered, "No, no, no ... don't do this to me," and Todd won the exchange with, "Don't do 'truth isn't truth' to me." Todd was saying, in essence, don't lie to me and my viewers. Giuliani had lied just a few minutes earlier...
| | Competing reports, competing truths | | But again -- lemme just come back to the point about Trumpworld's relationship with truth -- we are witnessing what's at the end of a path of 1,000 lies. This is it: "Truth isn't truth." What's a lie when there's no such thing as THE truth? Just competing versions of truth?
I talked about this on CNN with Ana Cabrera on Sunday night. To most Americans, I said, this is repulsive. But Trump's fan base chooses to believe that Trump and Giuliani are presenting truth.
"Time for Mueller investigation to file report. We will release ours," Giuliani tweeted on Saturday. So in other words, there will be TWO reports, one about obstruction of justice and another that refutes Mueller and creates confusion about the findings.
For all of us journos, this means one thing: double down on our reporting. | | NYT's reporters are on fire... | | The Times owned the weekend, first with Saturday afternoon's jaw-dropper about Don McGahn's cooperation with the Mueller probe, then with a Sunday afternoon follow-up about the fallout from that article, then with a Sunday evening scoop about Michael Cohen being investigated for "bank fraud in excess of $20 million."
Maggie Haberman had a byline on all three. (The two McGahn stories were written with Michael Schmidt... The Cohen story was co-bylined with William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess.)
Key graf in the Cohen story: "The inquiry has entered the final stage and prosecutors are considering filing charges by the end of August..."
| | Keep this in mind when Trump says the paper is "failing" | | Jordan Valinsky's story about Trump's Sunday morning tirade against the NYT included this key factoid:
"In his tweet, Trump again called the Times 'failing,' but the newspaper actually reported a healthy second-quarter profit. Two years ago today, he also called the Times 'failing' and 'dying.' The Times' stock is up nearly 77% since that tweet."
Speaking of that tirade...
| | Trump's half dozen tweets on Sunday compared Mueller's "gang" to Joseph McCarthy, introduced the idea of a "John Dean type 'RAT,'" and claimed that "some members of the media" called to "complain and apologize" for the NYT's scoop about McGahn. He also misspelled the word "counsel" three times.
I said on "Reliable Sources" that if we were watching this all unfold from some other country, we'd question the US president's wellness. "Is he okay?"
Trump's Twitter behavior lends credence to one of the many details in Saturday's Times story. It said that Trump's behavior has so exasperated McGahn "that he has called the president 'King Kong' behind his back, to connote his volcanic anger..." | | | NYT's Peter Baker: "Shades of 1974? The week started with an enemies list, then came secret White House tapes and it finishes with a White House counsel spilling to a special prosecutor." | | -- New ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro spoke with a group of reporters on Friday... And he made clear "that he wants the network to focus more on sports and less on politics," Ben Strauss reports... (WaPo)
-- Charter is launching a version of NY1 in L.A.: A 24-hour local news channel that will be the first of its kind in the region. Meg James has the details... (LAT)
-- WSJ's Elizabeth Winkler writes: "What do you do when you face allegations of sexual harassment and breach of fiduciary duty? If you are CBS, you draw attention somewhere else..." (WSJ) | | Here's what @Jack told me | | I have lots to share from my sit-down with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. CNN's tweet-size news alert summed up the interview perfectly: "Dorsey wouldn't commit to a timetable for cleaning up the social media site overrun by abuse and spam, saying it will be a long-term effort."
That's the thing about Dorsey's comments: He was confessional at times, acknowledging Twitter's problems and areas that need improvement, but he didn't say X, Y, and Z solutions are right around the corner. He was displaying transparency -- which is definitely appreciated -- but he wasn't providing the clear answers that users want to hear...
| | -- "We realize that more and more people have fear of companies like ours," Dorsey told me, citing the "perceived power that companies like ours have over how they live and even think every single day."
-- He's rethinking the fundamentals: "When we started the company and the service 12 years ago, we weren't necessarily thinking about some of the repercussions from our actions," he said. For example, follower counts. "Is that the right incentive that we should be driving?"
-- He talked about overhauling follower counts, "likes," etc, so I said, "It sounds like you are ready and willing to rebuild the entire house. To renovate everything." He answered: "We are ready to question everything..."
-- Conservative sites picked up on this comment about the "left-leaning" stance of Twitter staffers: "I think we need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is left, is more left-leaning. We need to remove all bias from how we act and our policies and our enforcement and our tools."
| | This quote stood out to me, too. I picture Twitter as a GIANT tech company. You probably do, too. But Twitter's CEO doesn't. "We're a small company -- I mean we, in comparison with our peers, we're a small company," Dorsey said, emphasizing that he doesn't have unlimited resources to police and improve his site...
| | Right-wing rallying cry: "They're silencing us" | | POTUS was tapping into a widely held belief on the right about biased tech companies when he tweeted on Saturday morning that "Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices."
Facebook, Twitter, etc. deny that their algorithms and employees discriminate against any particular political point of view. But how are they supposed to prove a negative?
--> The bottom line per WaPo's Tony Romm: "There is no evidence of systemic conservative bias, only allegations of it from folks who openly use it as a tactic to raise money ahead of the 2018 election."
--> Mike Allen said it best in Axios AM: "Tech companies are now jammed between calls for bans on conspiracy/hate speech/fake news and a coordinated conservative uprising about being muzzled by liberal CEOs." That brings us back to Twitter...
| | A "time-out" for Alex Jones is "worth a shot" | | Does Dorsey really think a one-week "time out" will change Infowars host Alex Jones' behavior? "It's worth a shot," he said. In SOME cases, temporary suspensions "will change behavior." But he said "I'm not naïve enough to believe that it's going to change it for everyone."
More importantly, he said, Twitter has to be "consistent" regarding enforcement. This will remain in the news this week because Jones' temporary suspension will end in the next few days...
| | Long on hypotheticals, short on answers? | | Oliver Darcy, who's been doing standout reporting about Infowars and Big Tech all summer long, joined me on "Reliable" after the interview. He said Dorsey sounded like a college professor: "He's dealing in hypotheticals and philosophy here. But this isn't a classroom -- there are real problems that are having real impacts on peoples' lives -- and it's happening now."
Darcy also pointed out that Twitter's current systems for reporting harassment "don't seem to be working..."
| | Brian Lowry emails: I'm with Oliver in terms of reaction to the Dorsey interview. An intellectual debate about how Twitter responds to a polarized world is fine, but after all the attention that's been devoted to the atmosphere that exists on the platform, having nothing specific to offer -- and comparing politics to K-pop -- sounded a little flip and naive. If I owned Twitter stock, it was the kind of response that would make me think seriously about selling...
| | Shares in Twitter plunged last month. And the stock hasn't really moved since. What happened? Twitter's quarterly earnings report showed a decline in user growth, which it attributed to its efforts to clean up the site, akin to gardeners removing weeds. When I brought this up, he got serious. He said investors should take a look at the long-term trends: "We see this as necessary and right and we believe in it and we have conviction around it, and we'll take the hit in the short term."
| | Here's the entire interview, all 34 minutes of it | | | We've posted the Q&A on the "Reliable Sources" podcast page. Check it out via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or TuneIn... | | -- Margaret Sullivan's Monday column: "Editorials defending the press are a good start. Here's where to go next." What she wants to see: "Meaningful collaboration..." (WaPo)
-- How did David Gelles land that extraordinary interview with Elon Musk? Here's the backstory, for Times subscribers only... (NYT) | | A new dateline for Hadas! | | From here on out, Hadas Gold is five hours ahead of me! Gold is relocating to the UK... and she made the move official over the weekend... "Starting Monday I'll be based out of CNN's London bureau," she tweeted. "Very excited to cover all things business, media, politics in Europe. Send me all your tips and recommendations!"
>> BTW: Gold will be moderating this session at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday... | | Omarosa is holding steady at #3... | | | "Unhinged" has been out for nearly a week now, and the book is still #3 on Amazon's best sellers page... While the book never hit #1, it certainly has some staying power... | | Ralph Peters: "Fox isn't immoral, it's amoral" | | Retired Lt. Col. and former Fox News analyst Ralph Peters was sharply critical of both his former network home and Trump when he joined me on Sunday's "Reliable Sources." Peters said he is speaking out because he believes Trump is a danger to the republic.
Regarding Fox, he said "people that only listen to Fox have an utterly skewed view of reality." He called Trump a "gift to Fox," and says "Fox in turn is a gift to Trump."
Peters resigned from Fox back in March. A Fox News spokesman said Sunday that the network's previous statement about Peters still applies: "Ralph Peters is entitled to his opinion despite the fact that he's choosing to use it as a weapon in order to gain attention. We are extremely proud of our top-rated primetime hosts and all of our opinion programming." | | Quotes from Sunday's show | | Sabrina Siddiqui, Carlos Lozada and Susan Glasser joined me for the "A block" of Sunday's show. On the subject of Trump's intensifying tweetstorms, Glasser said he is "freaking out in a way that we haven't seen" before...
Lozada weighed in on the power of the pro-Trump book world, the subject of his feature in Sunday's WaPo...
And Siddiqui reacted to the new Quinnipiac poll showing 51% of the GOP agree with Trump's depiction of the press as the "enemy." Siddiqui said the poll shows a "ceiling" for Trump's attacks, since "the majority of Americans still are supportive of the media..." | | Following up on our item in Friday's newsletter about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez barring the press from two town halls that were otherwise public, here's what Susan Glasser said when I brought it up on "Reliable:"
AOC "has been rocketed to national stardom on the basis of winning one primary election. I think she's learning, perhaps the hard way, that the national media scrutiny isn't always going to give you flattering portrayals, but that openness means openness. She made a mistake, in my view..." | | You can hear Sunday's "Reliable" on our podcast, watch the video clips on CNN.com, or watch the full program via CNNgo or VOD...
| | | For the record, part three | | | -- Very interesting read: "Biblical truth-telling at college newspapers can sometimes conflict with the way administrators want to portray the school. Here's a case study of how Liberty University handled the tension last spring..." (World)
-- Brian Steinberg's latest: "Late-night TV may be falling back to earth after a recent boom- how else to explain a series of cancellations of newer entries to the format?" (Variety) | | No, Netflix is not adding commercials... | | This silly idea gained traction on Reddit the other day. Netflix IS "testing out video promotions between episodes and movies," CNNMoney's Danielle Wiener-Bronner explained. But they're not external ads, and "they can be skipped."
--> Matthew Ball tweeted the key context: Netflix is "obsessed with keeping you watching (first with autoplay next, credits skipping, only one with autoplay from title card, etc.). If Netflix finds that these impede engagement, rather than aid it, they will yank it. And if they keep, it'll be occasional and one-click-skip." | | | Megan Thomas emails: I saw "Crazy Rich Asians" on Friday night in a sold-out theater --apparently a lot of other people did too -- and can't remember the last time I had that much fun at a movie... | | Frank Pallotta emails: "Crazy Rich Asians," the latest rom-com from Warner Bros., was expected to have a $25 million five-day box office opening. It blew past that. The film -- the first major studio feature since "The Joy Luck Club" 25 years ago to feature a predominately Asian cast -- made $34 million.
"Hopefully this is another signal to Hollywood that diversity and inclusion is good business," Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at comScore, told me... | | | Frank Pallotta adds: This has been a great summer for films with diverse casts. "Ocean's 8," "Sorry To Bother You," "BlacKkKlansman" and "Crazy Rich Asians" were all successes with audiences and at the box office. It's important for these films to stand out in the summer because this is the busiest season for Hollywood at the ticket booth. Having these films do well shows studios that inclusive films can compete with even the Iron Man's of the world. So with that, let the old Hollywood adage of "diversity doesn't sell" sink into the ocean... | | About the final song in the film... | | | Megan Thomas adds: I love this THR story... Director Jon Chu shared the letter he wrote to Coldplay to convince them to allow the song "Yellow" to be used in the film... and why he fought for it. | | | Chloe Melas emails: The MTV VMAs are Monday night at Radio City Music Hall. I'll be on the carpet. Until then, here's my preview... | | | Ending this newsletter on a fun note... | | | Usually Taylor Swift takes pictures with her fans. But on Saturday night, SHE was the fan... See, Swift is a self-proclaimed huge fan of "Dateline NBC," and correspondent Dennis Murphy was at her concert in Miami... So the two posed for a backstage photo... | | |
Thanks for reading! Email me your feedback... See you tomorrow...
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