| | | | Mika and Joe are responding to Trump | | Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough did not deserve this. There was near-unanimous condemnation of President Trump's nasty anti-"Morning Joe" tweets on Thursday... with even some of Joe and Mika's fiercest rivals standing up for them.
The recently engaged couple was supposed to start a vacation right after Thursday's show... remember, Trump's tweets came in the final few minutes of the show... and they were flooded with calls and texts in the hours afterward. A source tells me they decided to go ahead with the vacation... but they co-authored Joe's Friday column for the WashPost, which will pop on the web at 6am ET... and then they'll react to Trump's outrageous remarks and correct his misstatements on "Morning Joe" at the start of the 7am hour...
🔌: In between, I'll be on CNN's "New Day" with VF's Sarah Ellison at 6:30am... | | Friday's NY Daily News cover is one for the ages... | | Tapper's team did an analysis of Trump's tweets... | | | Of 770 @realDonaldTrump tweets since inauguration day, 85 have been attacking the press, 67 have mentioned jobs, and 27 have mentioned troops/veterans, per Jake Tapper... | | So tired of saying "this is not normal..." | | Quoting Don Lemon's pointed commentary on "CNN Tonight:" "I have heard and said the phrase 'this is not normal' so many times that I'm sick of hearing it and I'm sick of saying it. What the president did today was just flat-out gross and disgusting. Saying it was 'juvenile' would be insulting to children... And for anyone out there, any of you attempting to defend what he did, you're an enabler."
Lemon added: "The president should be ashamed of himself. But he's not..." | | | There's lots more to say about today's tweets... scroll down for complete coverage... but first, lemme catch you up on the rest of the day's media news... | | NYT staffers stage walkout in support of copy editors | | CNNMoney's Julia Horowitz reports: "Copy editors at the New York Times usually stay behind the scenes. Not on Thursday. Scores of newsroom staffers staged an afternoon walkout of the Times' NYC HQ, protesting plans to dramatically reduce the paper's editing staff." Sample signs: "Copy editors save our buts" and "Without us, it's the New Yrok Times." Lots of pics from the walkout here.
Groups representing copy editors and reporters have both sent letters to management expressing concern about the planned cutbacks. Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn's response: "Even if we were not under pressure to reduce costs in the newsroom, which we are, the newspaper editing system that served The Times well for so long has to change." Read more here... | | Here's the NYT's story about the NYT protest | | | "The restructuring would eliminate the stand-alone copy desk, which includes more than 100 copy editors. Many of those editors are applying for roughly 50 available positions," NYT's Sydney Ember reports... | | Did anybody see this coming? I sure didn't. Six months after arriving at MSNBC, Greta Van Susteren is gone... effective immediately... "I am out at MSNBC," she tweeted mid-afternoon Thursday, confirming Emily Jane Fox's scoop for VF...
Greta went into work on Thursday expecting a normal work day. But then "they let her go," her husband John Coale told me by phone. He sounded confounded by the whole situation. "We're working out contract issues now," he said... | | Reality check: Greta's ratings | | Greta was part of the new, not-just-liberal MSNBC. Her ratings were okay, but MSNBC wanted more. You could make the case that she deserved more time... or you could make the case that she was MSNBC's weakest link in the evenings and was being rejected by the audience. Here's what I mean. Looking at the Q2 ratings, Chuck Todd at 5pm averaged 223,000 viewers ages 25-54 each day. Greta at 6pm averaged 208,000 -- a slight dip. Chris Matthews, who's been on at 7pm for a very long time, averaged 351,000 -- a huge increase.
In Q2, MSNBC was significantly behind Fox and MSNBC at 5 and 6pm. MSNBC was much closer to the other two networks at 7. If you're a network exec looking at these ratings, you could easily conclude that Greta was dragging down the lineup... and convince yourself that a different host at 6pm could do better, thereby helping MSNBC's later hours... | | Ari Melber taking over the 6pm hour | | Quoting from Tom Kludt's story: A friend of Van Susteren's said the host "was given no prior notice of the decision. The same source said that Van Susteren was informed that she had not been confrontational enough in her on-air presentation, perhaps a suggestion that MSNBC is once again embracing its liberal roots... A spokesman for MSNBC did not respond to a request for comment..."
Thursday doubled as a big promotion for Ari Melber, MSNBC's chief legal correspondent, who's been hosting a weekend evening show called "The Point." He's also a regular fill-in for Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. In July he'll move to the weekday 6pm hour... | | A major setback for Murdoch | | By now you've heard the news: The British government is delaying Rupert Murdoch's bid to buy the rest of Sky... U.K. culture secretary Karen Bradley "said the transaction could give the Murdoch family too much influence over British media," so she wants a further investigation, CNNMoney's Ivana Kottasová reports from London.
Here's what's next: "Fox and Sky have until July 14 to respond to Bradley. If not swayed by their response, she will refer the deal to the Competition and Markets Authority for an in-depth investigation." If that happens, Fox says "the transaction is expected to close by June 30, 2018..." | | And in a much smaller setback for Murdoch... | | | "News Corp's conservative digital media site Heat Street is folding in August," BuzzFeed's Steven Perlberg scooped Thursday evening. Dow Jones told him that the site "will be restructured under the MarketWatch umbrella, with the goal of strengthening cultural, entertainment and gaming coverage." The writing was on the wall when the site's editor Noah Kotch moved over to Fox News to run its digital efforts... | | Guilfoyle is definitely not becoming W.H. press secretary... | | | On Thursday Fox News announced that she has signed a new long-term deal with the network. She'll continue to co-host "The Five." "I very much look forward to what lies ahead," she said in a statement... | | Early look at Sunday's "Reliable Sources" | | | On this roller coaster of a week in media-- Carl Bernstein, Poynter's Kelly McBride and the Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik will be among the guests on Sunday's "Reliable Sources..." more to come... | | -- "Should Journalists Have the Right to Be Wrong?" Jack Shafer, reacting to this week's resignations, says "CNN screwed up. So have we all..."
-- Van Jones, who was one of James O'Keefe's targets this week, responded via a CNN.com column and a segment on "AC360" on Thursday... "Much ado about nothing (burger)..."
-- Via The Hill: "Julie Roginsky, a Democratic Fox News contributor suing the network over alleged sexual harassment by its former CEO Roger Ailes, said on Thursday that she is leaving the company..."
-- Philip Bump's interpretation of some new polling data: "Fox News fans see Trump much differently than the country on the whole..."
-- "Twitter is exploring adding a feature that would let users flag tweets that contain misleading, false or harmful information," WashPost's Elizabeth Dwoskin reports... | | It comes from Ben Collins of The Daily Beast: "NASA Denies That It's Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars."
Why did Collins have to call NASA and ask? Because Alex Jones had a guest on the air promoting this kooky theory on Thursday... | | Now back to Trump's tweets... | | MSNBC PR said it best. Within an hour of Trump's tweets, Mark Kornblau, Errol Cockfield and co. issued this statement: "It's a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty personal attacks instead of doing his job."
The tweets about Mika and Joe were offensive. For the record, the tweets were ALSO factually inaccurate in several respects. I think we'll be hearing more from them about that on Friday... | | Petty, personal grievances... | | | Dylan Byers emails: So-called "dignity of the office" does not seem to concern President Trump. He is distracted from immense responsibilities by petty, personal grievances. He cannot help attacking his critics in the media, even if those attacks reflect negatively on him, distract attention away from his executive and legislative efforts, and threaten his legacy. When his critics go low, the president seemed to indicate Thursday, he will go lower... | | (Even) Hannity breaks with Trump | | | Oliver Darcy emails: You might want to check to see if there is a blue moon outside. Sean Hannity, perhaps Trump's single staunchest defender, said on his radio program Thursday afternoon that, in his "humble opinion," it was not in the president's "best interest" to publish the pair of incendiary tweets. Hannity added, "I don't think the president should have tweeted it." Of course, he did add a caveat, saying he understood the president's frustration with media coverage... | | White House's message: "The media started it" | | Given what Hannity said on the radio, I was curious to see what he'd say on TV Thursday night. He played Sarah Huckabee Sanders' defense of Trump -- decrying media bullies and saying the prez "fights fire with fire" -- and then said "now I personally would ignore this unhinged duo" (he means Joe and Mika) but "the White House does have a point." Joe and Mika are "not innocent victims," he said. "This war was started BY the mainstream media, NOT the president." At one point he called Joe and Mika "completely nuts."
Hannity aside, many Fox hosts and commentators had harsh words for the president about his attacks. Charles Krauthammer: "Presidents don't talk like this. They never have. This is what it sounds like when you're living in a banana republic..." | | Media's message: "We'd rather be covering health care" | | "Reliable" producer Lee Alexander emails: We've been here before... with journalists ripping up rundowns when a news cycle is derailed by Trump's Twitter account... "I would love to start this segment out about health care, the travel ban... but instead I have to start with the president's tweets," Fox's Julie Banderas said to RNC chair Rhonda McDaniel.
"Please. Please give us a day where we can talk about the health care policy of this nation," and not a "ridiculous tweet," Dana Bash said on CNN after the W.H. briefing... | | Brian Lowry emails: Thursday's Sarah Huckabee Sanders briefing was illustrative, as she singled out the key constituencies that Trump continues to campaign against -- the media and Hollywood "elite" -- as forces that he'll retaliate against when they "bully" him.
Still, beyond the question of whether the president can be bullied, the broader and more significant issue of his latest broadside against media figures was articulated by the NYT's Bret Stephens, who zeroed in on Trump's efforts to delegitimize negative reporting and criticism. Writing about the exit of three CNN journalists over a retracted story, Stephens said, "Journalistic honesty is better measured through corrections than dismissals. That's a lesson that bears repeating now, as the White House's media vilification strategy comes to resemble a war on truth itself." | | Trump's worst tweet yet? Think again... | | Tom Kludt suggests a little bit of perspective: Yes, Trump's tweets this morning were disgusting, but I'd caution against declaring this his nadir. After all, it was only about a year ago when he tweeted this in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre that left 49 people dead and wounded nearly 60:
"Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!"
There are moments when critics rightly note that members of the news media express the loudest indignation when one of their own is feeling the heat, all while not summing the same level of outrage at moments of greater concern to the rest of the country. Similarly, politicians frequently throw their arms up in disgust over "incivility" but gloss over the real-world harm inflicted by their policies. Over at Deadspin, Albert Burneko tugged on this thread as he skewered Republican handwringing over the tweets... | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- The "Trump bump" in subscriptions is starting to fade away for some outlets, Digiday's Lucia Moses reports. The story mentions Slate, Vanity Fair, and ProPublica...
-- Instagram is using DeepText, an AI tool built by Facebook to interpret words in context, to weed out negative comments from the platform... Wired has the details here...
-- On the eve of Jay Z's album release, which will be exclusively available to Tidal and Sprint customers on Friday, The Verge has analyzed just how fine a businessman he is. Sprint now owns 33% of Tidal, valued at $600 million, and is funding the production and marketing of exclusive content related to the album, titled 4:44... | | BuzzFeed News adding opinion section | | | Oliver Darcy emails: BuzzFeed News is adding a "full-fledged new track of opinion writing" to the site. That's according to a staff memo from Ben Smith, who announced that Tom Gara would jump from his role as business editor to edit the new opinion section. You can read the memo here... (The "buried lede," as Smith put it, is that with Gara taking over the opinion section, BuzzFeed is now looking for a new business editor.) | | | For the record, part three | | | By Howard Cohen:
-- Jake Tapper is this year's recipient of the RTDNA's John F. Hogan Distinguished Service Award... It'll be presented on September 8...
-- Very interesting: "Would You Pay More Money to Watch AMC Shows Live Without Commercials? AMC Is Hoping So." Joe Adalian's analysis here...
-- Take this one with many grains of salt, since it's self-serving for Time Inc., but the company commissioned a survey that found "consumers are very open to custom content," a/k/a branded content... | | Lowry reviews "Despicable Me 3" | | | Brian Lowry emails: "Despicable Me 3's" Minions are going to collect a lot of money this weekend. But this is one of those cases where commerce shouldn't be confused with creative achievement, as the third time for this Universal franchise isn't the charm. Read the full review here... | | In reversal, Netflix orders 'Sense8' wrap-up special | | | Sandra Gonzalez reports: "Netflix has done a 180 on the future of "Sense8." Well, sort of. After pulling the plug on the sci-fi drama earlier this month, co-creator Lana Wachowski announced in a statement posted to Facebook that the streaming network has ordered a two-hour finale special set to be released next year. The move follows an outcry from the show's fans..." | | | For the record, part four | | | By Chloe Melas:
-- Venus Williams was involved in a car crash that resulted in fatality of a passenger in the other vehicle. The police report claims she was at fault for blocking the right of way...
-- Corinne Olympios says she's dropping her legal investigation against "Bachelor in Paradise." Read her statement here...
-- Excited for Spider-Man: Homecoming? You should be! I had a chance to sit down with Tom Holland, the franchise's latest Peter Parker, and he got real candid about that Spidey suit...
-- John Mayer is that you? The singer is all grown up and has given one of his most mature interviews to Rolling Stone... | | | 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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