Forward

EXEC SUMMARY: Hey, hope you had a great weekend. Scroll down for news about Apple, Facebook, NYMag, "SNL," C-SPAN, "Captain Marvel," and more...

Trump's St. Patricks Day offensive

Not every presidential tweet is a big news story. Many are diversions, others are just press releases. Newsrooms rightly exercise caution about amplifying his posts.

But some days the tweets are so voluminous and so venomous that they are, by themselves, a big story. Sunday was one of those days. Viewers and readers are ill-informed when they're left in the dark about their commander in chief's angry, conspiratorial and fact-free rantings.

The tweets matter. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away. Fact-checking them at least helps counter the misinformation. (Hat tip to Philip Rucker for this headline.)

A partial list of his targets

Over the weekend POTUS used Twitter to criticize Robert Mueller, GM, a local UAW leader, Fox News, CNN, Google, "SNL," Hillary Rodham Clinton, Christopher Steele, the Paris climate deal and others. He also retweeted numerous fans, including a notorious conspiracy theory peddler. He wrapped up by claiming that the Dems tried to "steal" the election, and then he said "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" In the words of WaPo's Anne Gearan, "it was a weekend of nonstop grievances from the leader of the free world..."

Misplaced priorities...

Ana Cabrera said it better than I could on Sunday. She opened the 5 p.m. hour of "CNN Newsroom" with this: "Instead of joining the world condemning this hatred and offering support to the Muslim community in New Zealand and across the globe, President Trump is tweeting that 'Saturday Night Live' hurts his feelings."

The tweets "speak for themselves"

The Daily Beast's Asawin Suebsaeng asked the White House "if Donald Trump's manic retweets and tweets over the past 12 hours 'speak for themselves,'" and Sarah Sanders told him, "Yes."

What's he so worried about?

That's what I'm seeing people ask in the wake of Trump's tweetstorms. Obama-era DOJ spokesman turned MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller wrote: "There has to be something coming, right? Trump is incredibly unhinged today even for him, and with no apparent prompting."

What Trump's conservative critics are saying

-- George Conway posted this on Sunday morning and made it his "pinned tweet," which means he wants everyone to see it: "His condition is getting worse."

-- Bill Kristol tweeted: "Fellow Republicans, read today's tweets and retweets. Don't avert your eyes. Averting your eyes is refusing to come to grips with Trump's mental condition and psychological state. It's avoiding reality."

Dan Rather's POV

"Look, we have to deal with reality," Dan Rather said on Sunday's "Reliable Sources." This president "has the strongest, the most powerful platform for propaganda that humans have ever had. No president has ever had this kind of reach -- the combination of television, radio, the internet, social media, tweets."

Rather said he thinks "the public has a sense that they're facing a manure spreader in a windstorm," especially re: the tweets. "It just keeps coming and coming and coming at you. It's ridiculous but it's unrelenting. And he understands the value of that." The rest of us, he said, should "take a deep breath, say to yourself, 'stay steady.'"

IN RELATED NEWS...

Jeanine Pirro suspended

Fox News publicly condemned Jeanine Pirro last week. But in private the network went further. Pirro was suspended, a source familiar with the matter told me.

Now, Fox did not announce the suspension publicly. And the network declined to confirm or deny my reporting. Fox simply said "we're not commenting on internal scheduling matters."

But the decision to pre-empt her show for a repeat of the "Scandalous" documentary series was enough to get people speculating that she'd been sanctioned by the network. After I described the suspension on Sunday morning, the NYT's Michael Grynbaum matched the reporting. At the moment there is no word on whether Pirro's show will return next week. But to be clear, she has not been fired... And she has a very vocal supporter...

Trump tells Fox to bring Pirro back

On Sunday POTUS defended two of Fox's right-wing opinion hosts -- Pirro and Tucker Carlson -- and criticized three of the network's news anchors. Most notably of all, he used Twitter to send a long message to Fox execs, urging them to "stay true to the people that got you there." It was like Trump was saying to his favorite television network, "keep having my back and I'll have yours." Especially right now, with his world consumed by scandals and investigations, Trump needs all the TV boosters he can get.

And let's be honest, the sheer volume of tweets was a testament to Fox's influence within the White House. He tweeted that two of Fox's weekend news anchors, Arthel Neville and Leland Vittert, and one of the network's main weekday news anchors, Shepard Smith, belonged on CNN, not Fox. In Trump-speak, of course, that's a big insult! 😉 Here's my full story...

My POV: Fox doesn't want to pick a fight with the prez

Fox declined to comment on Trump's missives. Think about it: If Fox issued a statement supporting its news anchors, it would risk incurring the wrath of the president AND his biggest fans, many of whom are also Fox's biggest fans.

But it is worth noting that one of Fox's correspondents responded to the president's barb by supporting Neville and Vittert. "They're both incredible journalists, constantly engaged and inquisitive," Jeff Paul wrote. "I'm proud to call them colleagues...as I am proud to work with @ShepNewsTeam each week."

-- 🔌: I'll be talking more about this in the 7 a.m. hour Monday's "New Day..."

David Zurawik's bottom line

After talking with me on Sunday's telecast, he wrote, "Just think if Trump spent as much time focused on serving the nation instead of watching Fox." Here's his blog post...

FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE

-- David Nakamura tweeted: "Trump spent more time over the weekend condemning a rerun of ⁦'SNL' than he did the professed white-supremacist motives of the accused Christchurch mass murderer..." (Twitter)

-- Mick Mulvaney to "Fox News Sunday" moderator Chris Wallace: "The president is not a white supremacist. I'm not sure how many times we have to say that..." (CNN)

-- Jonathan Swan's latest: "Inside Rudy's vanishing act" (Axios)

FIRST LOOK:

NYMag's podcasting cover

"The great pod rush has only just begun" is the headline atop Adam Sternbergh's piece for NYMag. It's part of a cover package about "The Golden Age of Pods." Nick Quah's feature is a "100-podcast syllabus" and Boris Kachka's story is about all the $$$ flowing into the podcast biz. "Is this all just a bubble?"

BTW, this is the second-to-last cover of the Adam Moss era at NYMag...

>> And speaking of Quah, if you missed my chat with him, it's available (where else?!) on the "Reliable Sources" podcast...

Disney-Fox's date

The long-gestating Disney-Fox is supposed to close on Wednesday.

"Anxiety is running high on the Fox lot and beyond," as VF's Nicole Sperling wrote here. She noted that "the deal could eventually result in the loss of anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 jobs, depending on whom you ask." So Wednesday is the end of something big but the beginning of something else... Terrible for some, terrific for others, transformative for all...

The "scrappy" billionaire

Brian Lowry emails: There are a lot of great quotes in Meg James' profile of Rupert Murdoch (who is described as "scrappy") as the 88-year-old mogul prepares to officially part with much of Fox, but the key one comes from former lieutenant Peter Chernin, who said simply, "Rupert has been the most influential person in Hollywood in the last 25 years. He has been the key driver of trends that now define the industry."

Media week ahead calendar

-- The big unknown: Will this be the week we hear from Robert Mueller?

-- Monday 9pm ET: Jake Tapper moderates a CNN town hall with Elizabeth Warren...

-- Tuesday: Trump is expected to hold a joint presser with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro...

-- Tuesday/Wednesday: Facebook, Knight Foundation and ONA are holding an invite-only summit in Denver about the future of local journalism...

-- Thursday: The first round of the 2019 NCAA Tournament begins...

-- Friday: R. Kelly is back in court for a hearing...

Happy birthday, C-SPAN!

America's cable home for public affairs programming turns 40 years old on Tuesday. For its birthday, the channel is getting a modernized logo:

On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," David Zurawik said "I worship at the altar of C-SPAN..." Amen to that... Here's to 40 more years...

FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO

-- Connie Schultz's latest column: "Every Democrat running for president should give journalists the access they deserve. We keep saying Donald Trump is wrong to call journalists the enemy of the people. It's time to act like we mean it..." (Creators)

-- Peter Baker and Susan Glasser "are finishing 6 years of work on a James Baker book, a full biography of his life and times, and plan publication by Doubleday next spring," Mike Allen reports... (Axios)

-- Andrew Kramer reports from Kiev: "He played a president on Ukrainian TV. Now he wants the real thing." (NYT)

Online extremism:

Like "living inside a KKK rally"

This quote stuck with me all weekend. It sums up the way the online world inflames and emboldens extremists who have always existed offline.

Joel Finkelstein of the Network Contagion Research Institute told journalist Sulome Anderson that white supremacists "aren't just going to a KKK rally" nowadays, "they're living in a KKK rally, and this rally isn't just happening once, it's happening 24/7, with 100s of 1000s of others... Occasionally, someone will leave it and go kill people."

The internet is radicalizing white men...

...And Big Tech could be doing more to take action. CNN's Alex Koppelman writes: "There is still much we don't know about the suspect and his background. But before anything at all was known about him, anyone who has studied or covered extremism and these kinds of attacks could have given you an educated guess about what kind of person he was: Male. Probably in his 20s. Decent chance of at least a minor criminal record. More than likely a history of hatred toward or violence against women. Oh, and one more thing — probably spent a fair amount of time on the internet."

Koppelman's piece points out that the Christchurch terrorist "in many ways" resembled "a member of ISIS." For the most part, "there's been an aggressive takedown" of ISIS-related content on social media, GWU's Seamus Hughes said. "That same dynamic hasn't happened when it comes to white supremacy..."

My interview with Andy Parker

The Christchurch attack is the latest instance of a gunman posting his own gruesome video to social media. The first time I remember it happening was in 2015, when the murder of two WDBJ journalists was filmed and streamed by the perpetrator. On Sunday's show, I spoke with slain journalist Alison Parker's father Andy Parker, who has been publicly challenging Google and other tech platforms. He said Big Tech firms "have a responsibility to have some human decency." Watch the segment here or read Nathaniel Meyersohn's recap...

Facebook's new data

Donie O'Sullivan emails: Over the weekend Facebook said the company removed 1.5 million copies of the New Zealand massacre video in the first 24 hours after the attack. About 1.2 million reposts were caught before they went live on the platform. But FB didn't say how many people had seen the 300,000 videos that were posted. One has to wonder: Why did so many people try to repost the video?

Donie's Q's about standards

More from Donie O'Sullivan: After talking about this on TV over the weekend, an anonymous Facebook user messaged me and raised an interesting point. On 9/11 CNN and all the TV networks ran loops of the planes hitting the towers, them crumbling to the ground. No, this wasn't footage shot by the terrorists, but it did show the moment of impact, over and over. How have news outlets evolved since then, and are we applying standards to the social media platforms that we didn't previously adhere to ourselves? And what can Silicon Valley learn from the editorial decisions made by editors in Midtown Manhattan? Is this an opportunity for a more productive dialogue?

The argument in favor of showing the shooting video

Voices in the media have been almost unanimous about not showing the shooter's video. But LAT columnist Virginia Hefferman is challenging the consensus. She asks, "Should we really be 'protected' from footage that documents white supremacist terrorism as vividly as anything can? At other times in history, such documentation — whether by a professional or bystander — has been considered necessary and urgent, and to look at it without flinching has been thought a duty of citizenship..."

Peter Bergen's analysis

He says three terrorism trends converged in NZ: "Attacks against Muslim targets, the use of social media as a platform for terrorists to share livestream videos, and the violent targeting of houses of worship." Read the rest here...

Trump ignoring government intel about extremism?

Trump said last Friday that he doesn't see white nationalism as a rising threat -- despite alarming reports by his own government. On Sunday's "Reliable," Nayyera Haq, a former Obama W.H. aide, called this an example of "willful ignorance that plays into his own political agenda..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE

-- The headline on David Leonhardt's latest: "It Isn't Complicated: Trump Encourages Violence." (NYT)

-- Dan Rather's related comments on Sunday's show: Trump "knows what the effect" of his language is. "This is very dangerous to have a president talking in these terms..." (CNN)

-- "An African-American woman who was named publisher and editor of the Alabama newspaper that recently urged the Ku Klux Klan to 'night ride again' has stepped down, citing what she said was continuous and damaging interference by the paper's owner..." (CNN)

-- This is a wonderful story by Gillian Brockell about Nancy Drew: "How a teen detective inspired girls who went on to make history..." (WaPo)

Ex-Fox News reporter providing info to House committee

Nancy Erika Smith, the attorney for former Fox reporter Diana Falzone, told me on Sunday's show that TWO House committees have reached out to her in the past week, both inquiring about Falzone's effort to report on Trump and Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Falzone's editor says her story wasn't ready for publication, but Jane Mayer's article in The New Yorker quoted a source saying that the story was spiked for political reasons.

Falzone has been silenced by a non-disclosure agreement with the network. But the congressional requests will free Falzone to speak, according to her attorney. Smith told me that Falzone will hand over documents to House investigators "this week." And she will speak with the committee soon too: "We're going to schedule that hopefully for later on this week."

Standing up for tech literacy

Political leaders need to be tech savvy, I said in this essay on Sunday's show, but POTUS keeps showing his lack of tech knowledge -- whether it's about airplanes or Apple or 5G or climate-change science.

The NYT's Katie Rogers, though, said Trump's old-fashioned approach is an advantage for him: He can "go up in front of his supporters and say come with me to the past when things were better..."

How to catch up on Sunday's show

Watch the video clips on CNN.com... Listen to the pod via Apple Podcasts or your preferred app... Or watch the entire episode via CNNgo or VOD...

FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR

-- John Herrman's latest: How the Citizen app really works... (NYT)

-- This weekend's most-buzzed-about new streaming show: "Shrill" on Hulu... (THR)

-- "Captain Marvel" sold "an estimated $69.3 million in tickets nationwide this weekend," so it easily topped the chart for a second weekend... "Wonder Park" was No. 2 with about $16 million in sales... (NYT)

-- "The Hallmark Channel has confirmed that its series 'When Calls The Heart' is not being canceled, despite the parent company's firing of key player Lori Loughlin..." (Deadline)

NYT's new look at Apple's secretive streaming plans

The premiere date for Apple's streaming service "is getting closer, with the first of a dozen or more shows likely to start streaming before the year is out," the NYT's John Koblin wrote in this story for Monday's paper. "At next week's presentation, Apple is expected to reveal details of what it has been working on." March 25 is the big day. Here are two key grafs from Koblin's story, with the disclosure that I'm a consultant on one of the many shows:

-- "Five series have completed filming. Around a half dozen more are on the verge of wrapping production, according to several people familiar with the shows who were not authorized to speak publicly. And the number of original productions is expected to increase in 2020..."

-- "Many of the people working with Apple said they have received little or no information on how, exactly, their shows will be released. Or even when they will be released, other than a vague assurance of 'later this year, probably fall.' They also don't have a clear idea of Apple's marketing plans for the shows. Or what their colleagues in the newly built Apple stable are up to..."

Let me circle back to late-night TV before wrapping up this edition of the newsletter...

Trump musing about an FCC probe into "SNL"

What did this weekend's "SNL" have in common with the president's tweets? They were both... reruns.

Trump began his Sunday morning by saying "it's truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of 'the other side.' Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows......"

I guess I shouldn't even bother pointing out that Jimmy Fallon knocked Beto O'Rourke, a/k/a "the other side," on Friday's "Tonight Show." I shouldn't even waste my time pointing out that Sunday's "Fox & Friends" showed the Fallon video and loved it! I shouldn't bother because Trump's tweets are about rage and resentment, not reality. But his second tweet about "SNL" WAS important -- because some of us have to keep track of every time Trump muses about using his government power to punish his critics.

He wrote, about those late night shows, "Should Federal Election Commission and/or FCC look into this?"

See, he was technically just asking, but everyone understood what he was saying. Here's how David Zurawik reacted to the implied threat...

What Colbert tries to tell his audience: "You're not crazy"

Brian Lowry emails: Stephen Colbert referred to President Trump as a "delicious idiot," which was the most headline-grabbing phrase the "Late Show" host uttered during his sold-out Paleyfest interview in Hollywood on Saturday night. But the more interesting part of the discussion with comic Pete Holmes (who like many celebrity moderators, participated in the chat a little too much) involved how Colbert sees his role in the Trump age, saying the intention is to tell an audience asking "Can you believe what happened today? Can you believe what he said today?" that "You're not crazy."

Colbert also agreed with Jay Leno's recent lament that late-night has become so overtly political – a statement that first "Fox & Friends," and then the president, mischaracterized – adding, "I don't think there's anything wrong with saying 'I think what this person is doing is damaging to the nation' with jokes."

Thanks for reading! Email me feedback anytime. See you Sunday...