| | | | "It's going to be a late one" in Georgia, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said as she wrapped up her show at 10pm. But at the very same time over on CNN, Don Lemon announced CNN's projection that Republican Karen Handel will defeat Democrat Jon Ossoff.
It turned out the Georgia special election was not a late one -- but the celebrations and explanations and rationalizations will continue into the morning. Scroll down for complete coverage... | | Who's the next press secretary? Here's what Dylan is hearing | | Dylan Byers spoke with three key White House sources and summed up the intel this way:
1. Daily Mail's David Martosko was never under serious consideration for the press secretary job. He sat down with President Trump in the Oval Office and offered him advice, but there was never a serious discussion about him joining.
2. The White House will likely announce the addition of comms staff soon, including new employees as well as more input from current staff like Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway.
3. Laura Ingraham is someone who has seriously been under consideration (though it's not clear she is interested).
4. Sean Spicer is not going anywhere. He may stop being press secretary, but he will take on that larger comms strategy role Jim Acosta has previously reported on. He is very much staying with the White House.
5. The way White House aides see it: There is no "shakeup." They are simply looking to add staff in order to deal with the demands of the job. They believe the media is far too concerned with drama/palace intrigue and who-has-what-role. In their eyes they're part of a team and they need more firepower. | | W.H. briefings just once a week? | | Spicer held an on-camera briefing on Tuesday after a full week without one. We'll see what happens in the days ahead. NYT's Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush say the White House may roll back briefings to once a week:
"The biggest shift Mr. Trump is discussing is a dramatic change to the briefing room schedule, including limiting briefings that he has described as a 'spectacle' to once a week and asking reporters to submit written questions. Some of Mr. Trump's outside advisers, including the Fox News host Sean Hannity, have urged him to curtail the freewheeling — and often embarrassing — barrage of questions. Mr. Trump has been particularly irked by CNN, and other allies such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have suggested banning the cable network." | | It almost goes without saying that once-a-week briefings would be a radical break with recent history and would look awful to everyone except Trump's most ardent supporters. He'd score a few points with his base for "punishing the media," but he'd lose points with everyone else for so blatantly avoiding questions and accountability.
After all... if this is the most productive, successful admin in our lifetimes... shouldn't they be holding EXTRA briefings to tout all the accomplishments? | | Trump admin "less transparent than its predecessors" | | "In important ways, the Trump administration has been less transparent than its predecessors. It's just an empirical fact," Jake Tapper said on "The Lead" Tuesday afternoon. Watch his straight talk here...
-- Related: I wrote this piece about the White House's lack of accessibility and lack of accuracy. I'll be talking about it on NPR's "1A" on Wednesday along with Nicole Hemmer, Philip Rucker, and Margaret Talev... | | Hannity claims a "soft coup" is underway | | | Oliver Darcy emails: Sean Hannity amped up his rhetoric even further on Tuesday night, claiming there's a "soft coup" taking place to remove Trump from office. During the opening monologue on his program, he said it's "an attempt to overturn November's election results" and he called it "a clear and present danger." Then he predictably recycled his anti-media talking points... | | | That's the CNN.com headline about Handel's win in Georgia. The cablers scheduled extra hours of live coverage... Bret Baier live at 11pm, Rachel Maddow live at midnight, etc... but the results came in a bit earlier than expected. CNN called it at 10... the AP and Fox around 10:15... and Ossoff conceded around 10:30... | | Breitbart's home page headlines tell the story | | Breitbart sure knows how to celebrate:
-- "🎲🎲 Dem$ Go Bu$t: Bigge$t Bet of All Time Fail$ in GA06"
-- "Surprise! Race Called Early for Republican"
-- "AGAIN! POLLING HUMILIATION... AGAIN! TRUMP SCORES VICTORY... AGAIN! MASSIVE FAILURE FOR HOLLYWOOD LEFT"
-- "TRUMP: THE MAGA MANDATE IS STRONGER THAN EVER. BIG LEAGUE" | | -- Text message from a senior admin official to CNN's Jeremy Diamond: "Democrats haven't figured out how to beat Trump."
-- 538's Perry Bacon: "Trump is still in a weak position. But it's not clear that congressional Republicans are, particularly, after tonight. I think how the media, along with Democrats in Congress, perceive the Handel win is just as important as tonight's results."
-- Josh Jordan a/k/a @NumbersMuncher tweets: "I don't think these elections will matter one bit in 2018, but the hype put on them means when you lose you can't pretend they don't matter."
-- Ken Spain, former comms director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, tweets: "Warning signs for both parties coming out of this race. Plenty of time to address over the next 17 months. Political enviro likely to change" | | | The Hollywood Reporter's 100 list... the mag's "second annual ranking of Hollywood's most powerful people..." lands on Wednesday morning. No. 1 on the list: Disney CEO Bob Iger... | | -- Here are this year's Murrow Award winners! CBS News (TV plus radio) picked up eight... CNN won five... other winners included Snapchat, ESPN, and Netflix... (RTDNA)
-- "CNN will invest $40 million over the next two years in Great Big Story, transforming the in-house social video startup into a 24-hour streaming channel..." (Bloomberg)
-- Weather Channel president David Clark is jumping to an advanced advertising job at Comcast... (TVNewser)
-- Dylan Byers tweets: "James Bennet has tapped Kathleen Kingsbury, digital managing editor at Boston Globe, to join him at NYT as deputy editorial editor..." | | Nightly newscasts among TV's top 10 shows | | A stat via TVNewser: "The 3 network evening newscasts may be losing viewers, but they were all Top 10 shows on TV last week." This says a lot about the relative weakness of summer prime time shows...
-- Related?: Variety's Brian Steinberg says "advertisers are lining up in TV's upfront negotiations to make advance commitments in news and late-night programs that are focused on the nation's current stormy, politics-driven news cycle. In some cases, advertisers are chasing these shows even ahead of primetime fare, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions..." | | | WSJ White House correspondent "Carol Lee is joining NBC News as a national political reporter," Hadas Gold scoops. She will appear "across all NBC platforms including MSNBC, an NBC spokesperson said. She starts in July..." | | | Fox Networks announced that it is "rolling out six-second ads," following YouTube's lead, per AdAge's Jeanine Poggi... Ira Glass pitched advertisers on the benefits of podcast ads... Halle Berry announced a relaunch of her "Hallewood" web site... NYPost's Claire Atkinson wrote about the super yachts in the marina, many of them belonging to ad tech firms... | | | Don't shoot the messenger, but 47-year-old Shane Smith "is now a billionaire" on paper, Bloomberg notes. Here's the math: This week's $450 million investment from TPG, valuing Vice at $5.7 billion, "left Smith as Vice's largest shareholder, with about 21% of the closely held company..." | | -- Spotted: Jamie and I took one-month-old Sunny on her first trip downtown on Tuesday night... at The Clam we bumped into CBS's Lesley Stahl and friends... and NYT's Michael Grynbaum and "Last Week Tonight's" Juli Weiner... and the clams were 👍
-- Ainsley Earhardt's interview with Ivanka Trump is back on... it will be taped on Thursday and will air on Friday's "Fox & Friends..."
-- Gary Schreier and Tom Bowman are being promoted at Fox Business... (TVNewser)
-- The Daily News says Mike Francesa has taken his "clueless indifference to new heights:" He repeatedly referred to "Oriental-Americans" while discussing rock group The Slants on air... (NY Daily News) | | The Ofcom decision is in... | | | ...But it's not public yet. "Media regulator Ofcom submitted reports to the British government on Tuesday that could decide the fate of 21st Century Fox's bid for pay-TV group Sky," CNNMoney's Ivana Kottasová and Alanna Petroff report. The reports were filed to culture secretary Karen Bradley, who will "make an initial judgment on the case by June 29..." | | Instagram Stories added 50 million new users in 2 months | | | This chart by Recode shows the acceleration of Instagram Stories versus Snapchat. Instagram announced on Tuesday that "Stories, the feature that lets users share videos and posts that disappear after 24 hours, is now used by 250 million people every day. That means Stories added 50 million new users in two months..." | | | For the record, part three | | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Variety's Todd Spangler has a new interview with BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti... he says an IPO is just "one possible path for us..."
-- Here's Katrina vanden Heuvel's latest op-ed, saying "sensationalism and scandal play better - and therefore pay better - than substance..."
-- Would you let a computer read you today's paper? The Washington Post hopes so, and is experimenting with Amazon Polly, a technology that does just that. Poynter has the details... | | Warner Bros. says "Bachelor in Paradise" investigation is finished, and the show will go on | | Chloe Melas emails: Warner Bros announced Tuesday that the studio has concluded an internal investigation into the "Bachelor in Paradise" scandal that caused production to be suspended last week. The studio said it found no evidence of misconduct. (An outside law firm was involved.) Filming of the season will resume.
Corinne Olympios, one of the contestants at the center of the scandal, slammed the outcome in a statement via her rep... Read more here... | | | Brian Lowry emails: I'm surprised ABC and Warner Bros. would be so quick to announce "Bachelor in Paradise" will resume production for a summer run. The benefit of what amounts to late-summer filler hardly seems worth the potential PR headaches with the key figures having lawyered up... | | The facts behind the Wonder Woman/Superman pay story | | | Frank Pallotta emails: Unreliable reporting can move faster than a speeding bullet thanks to social media, and that's exactly what happened with a story about Gal Gadot's "Wonder Woman" salary on Tuesday. Stories reported Gadot made $330,000 for the hit film, much less than the "reported" $14 million Henry Cavill, who plays Superman, made in 2013's "Man of Steel." With such a stark difference in pay, the story went viral. Just one problem… the numbers didn't hold up. Unlike the very real pay gap in Hollywood, the reported differences in Gadot and Cavill's paychecks were "completely inaccurate," a well-placed source said. "Gal Gadot was paid at least as much as Henry Cavill for their first pictures." But that didn't stop outlets from picking it up and running with it faster than Superman himself, anyways... | | Here's how the bogus story took off... | | | Frank Pallotta adds: The story appears to have originated from an Elle article, which pulled the $14 million number from a Forbes story published in 2016 which in turn appears to cite data from "TheRichest.com," a site that creates sharable and viral content. Elle eventually updated its story, saying that "this example is not adequately supported by the information available," but it didn't matter at that point. Other sites and commenters on Twitter used the figures -- and up, up, and away the story went... | | 'The Mist,' 'It' try to break Stephen King adaptation curse | | | Brian Lowry emails: A big summer for Stephen King adaptations kicks off this week with "The Mist," a mediocre Spike TV series, to be followed by movies based on "Dark Tower" and "It." The question is: Can they buck history? Because while Hollywood remains enamored with the writer's work, the misfires far outnumber the gems. Read Lowry's full column here... | | | For the record, part four | | | By Lisa Respers France:
-- You have until September 26 to stock up on tissues. That's the date "This Is Us" returns for its sophomore season on NBC...
-- It seems "Melodrama" isn't just the title of Lorde's new album. The singer is really sorry for comparing her friendship with Taylor Swift to an autoimmune disease. No "bad blood" here...
-- If you didn't get a chance this weekend to pop over to the pop-up "Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library" in NYC, Comedy Central has you covered. The network created a 3D, interactive virtual tour you can take now that the exhibit has closed... | | | What do you like about this newsletter? What do you dislike? Email us... we're at reliablesources@cnn.com... we appreciate every email. | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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