| | | | | Good evening from DC... I'm here for the Online News Association's annual conference... I can think of at least seven stories that could be the lead story tonight... so here are all of them for you... | | Weinstein stories coming soon? | | The rumors of looming stories about Harvey Weinstein spilled into the open on Wednesday. "The Weinstein Co. film and television mogul has enlisted an army of attorneys and crisis managers in recent weeks and has unleashed them on The Times over a planned story on his personal behavior," THR's Kim Masters and Chris Gardner reported, citing multiple sources. They said NBC's Ronan Farrow has has also "been digging into the mogul's past."
This has been the subject of gossip for months, but the NYT and NBC haven't published anything yet. Per THR, Weinstein has his usual lawyer David Boies plus Lisa Bloom and Charles Harder helping him... | | Verizon's top media exec is leaving | | Verizon's Marni Walden, who oversees Yahoo, AOL, go90 and the company's other media efforts, "will be switching to an advisory role at the end of the year and leaving the company in early 2018," the WSJ's Ryan Knutson reports. He says her departure came after "it became clear to Ms. Walden that she was unlikely to win the CEO job." Who's still in line to succeed Lowell McAdam? John Stratton and Hans Vestberg...
-- More: "One of her lieutenants, Tim Armstrong, who is CEO of the division that oversees Yahoo and AOL, will now report directly to Mr. McAdam..." | | | That's what Wednesday will be remembered as, right? "Moron" day? At 5:50am, NBCNews.com published its story about Rex Tillerson's "disputes and clashes with the White House," including the detail about Tillerson calling Trump a "moron" back in July. Minutes after Tillerson spoke in front of cameras to dispute portions of the story, President Trump called on the network to apologize. Unsurprisingly, the network shrugged off his Twitter demand and said "we stand by our reporting..." Even as Tillerson's spokeswoman unconvincingly denied that Tillerson ever said "moron." Here's my full story... | | Why Trump's "fake news" slur is back | | | Reality check: Trump's first four Twitter statements on Wednesday referred to "fake" news -- first about his trip to Puerto Rico and then about the Tillerson turmoil. In Trumpworld, when the going gets tough, the news gets "fake..." | | Four more journos arrested in St. Louis | | At Tuesday's "state of press freedom event" at the Paley Center, the speakers highlighted a disturbing increase in the # of journalists arrested and assaulted at protests this year. At almost the same time we were speaking, there were more arrests in St. Louis. Two journalists from the progressive outlet The Young Turks -- Jordan Chariton (shown above) and Ty Bayliss -- were arrested. So was live-streamer Jon Ziegler (for the second time in less than a month) and freelance photojournalist Daniel Shular. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has the details here...
--> Over 100 people were arrested last night in the ongoing protests... | | Asked about Zucker, Stephenson says he wants to "keep key talent in place" | | Considering Trump's campaign trail criticism of the pending AT&T-Time Warner deal... and his ongoing criticism of CNN... there's a lot of interest every time AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson speaks about CNN. What about CNN president Jeff Zucker? Back in June, a few days after Stephenson was at the White House, Trump claimed in a tweet that CNN was looking at "big management changes" and said he'd heard Zucker was "going to resign at some point pretty soon."
Well, it's October and that hasn't happened yet. Stephenson was asked about Zucker at the summit on Wednesday. Per the WSJ's Joe Flint, "Mr. Stephenson stopped short of saying Mr. Zucker would definitely stay after the deal closes but said when AT&T acquires a company, it aims to retain successful management teams. CNN 'is having a lot of success' and AT&T's goal is 'to keep key talent in place,' he said. CNN also shouldn't play any part in the Justice Department's review of the acquisition, Mr. Stephenson said. 'I don't understand what the relevance is of CNN to an antitrust review.'"
-> One theory: Stephenson is being careful not to say much about Zucker or CNN while the government is still reviewing the deal... | | Plepler says HBO "screwed up" the "Confederate" announcement | | | "We screwed up in an important way" with the announcement of "Confederate," HBO CEO Richard Plepler said at the summit. The alt-history series will be set in an America where the south won the Civil War and continued to enslave blacks. "Confederate" is about "showing what we call the thin line, the thin veneer of civilization -- that's what we were meant to explore. Where we screwed up was we tried to explain a complicated subject in a press release in three paragraphs," Plepler said. Vocal objections to the show soon followed. But it remains in development... | | | After listening to two days of A-listers at the event, Dylan Byers emails: Truly my big takeaway is that all the BS industry-speak boils down to one thing: Good stuff succeeds, bad stuff doesn't... | | Google's latest and greatest hardware | | | Google showed off the Pixel 2 smartphone, futuristic headphones and two new smart speakers at a launch event on Wednesday. Heather Kelly has a complete recap here... | | If you're heading to ONA in DC... | | | Make sure you wake up early enough for our 9am panel... the opening keynote... I'll be joined on stage by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Michelle Holmes, Asma Khalid, Elle Reeve and Cenk Uygur. Q's for them? Email me... | | -- The Atlantic officially unveiled its "first-ever membership program," The Masthead, on Wednesday... Here's Jeffrey Goldberg's note... (The Atlantic)
-- Bingo, Chuck Todd: "I'm held to a standard of decency in my job. I think there's nothing wrong w/ doing the same to politicians..." (NYT Mag)
-- Staffers at the Los Angeles Times are "trying to form a union," setting up a serious fight with Tronc... (NYT) | | Fox News going live at 4am | | | Tom Kludt emails: Fox News boasts a show that is required A.M. viewing inside the White House. The network is also lagging behind CNN in the 25-54 demo in the pre-dawn hours. Those two factors aligned to bring us Wednesday's announcement that the "Fox & Friends" franchise will now begin an hour earlier. "Fox & Friends First" will start at 4am... Read Tom's full story here... | | -- James Poniewozik tweeted: "Guys, Trump has to sleep at some point..."
-- Remember: Fox is also adding a live show at 11pm at the end of this month... Matching CNN and MSNBC... | | | Frank Pallotta emails: It's official: Katie Nolan is leaving Fox Sports 1 and heading to ESPN. Her start date is October 16. It's not really clear what Nolan will be doing yet, but the network said she'll appear "across multiple platform in a variety of projects." That makes sense since Nolan has found a viral voice on both digital and TV. (She's also really good at making fun of CNN reporters in interviews.) | | THE RUSSIA INVESTIGATIONS | | | "If you look from 10,000 feet," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr told reporters at a briefing Wednesday, "the subject matter" of the 3,000 Russian-bought Facebook ads "seems to have been to create chaos in every group that they could possibly identify in America." Read Dylan Byers' full story about Wednesday's presser right here... | | Twitter and Facebook agree to testify | | | Dylan Byers tweets: "Facebook and Twitter will testify at public hearing on Russian interference on Nov. 1 ... still waiting to hear from Google..." | | Will we ever see the ads? | | Alex Koppelman emails: One big question still hanging out there after today: Is anyone ever going to show the public the ads Facebook has turned over to Congress and Mueller? At the briefing, Burr made it once again very clear that his committee does not release material handed over to it... but he and ranking member Mark Warner invited Facebook to release the ads themselves. Facebook didn't waste much time before saying its position hasn't changed, and that it won't be putting the ads out...
So: stalemate? Maybe. Except Adam Schiff, the ranking member on House Intel, put out a statement saying he wants the ads to come out. It's still possible everyone will decide they don't want to be the one to do it, and so no one will -- or it may be that it's just a matter of time before the ads see the light of day... | | -- FX chief John Landgraf has penned a must-read "memo to Silicon Valley..." all about the power of brands... (THR)
-- The latest network to try out six-second ads: AMC. They'll run in "The Walking Dead" this fall, if buyers are interested... (AdAge)
-- Intriguing: "The media mogul David Geffen, one of the cultural world's leading philanthropists, attacked wealthy New Yorkers on Wednesday for what he called a 'shameful' record of failing to donate to the city's concert halls and allowing these institutions to downsize their ambitions." There's a NYC v. L.A. subplot here... (NYT)
-- Speaking of the east/west rivalry: Entertainment Weekly mag is relocating its HQ from NYC to L.A... (Variety) | | Gun control debate enters country music community: "Is this the kind of world we want to live in?" | | Lisa Respers France writes: Some members of the country music family are reflecting on the gun culture long associated with the music. A gun control debate is raging on the airwaves of country music radio stations, around dinner tables and on social media...
Read Lisa's full story here... She's on to something important... A change in the dialogue? | | Hadas Gold emails: Ouch… Newsweek had a big retraction on Wednesday. The magazine took down a report which claimed the Las Vegas shooter's girlfriend had two Social Security numbers and was married to two people at the same time.
"Newsweek has retracted its story that reviewed the public records of Marilou Danley, the girlfriend of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock. The initial report was based on many public records, but included an error that came to light after publication when a family member came forward," the magazine said in language published in place of the article. Other reports said that public records Newsweek referenced in its original account were for two separate people... | | What went wrong? Gold's take --> | | | Hadas adds: The Newsweek article illustrates an unfortunate problem in the wake of huge and horrific events like the Las Vegas massacre. Journalists are scrambling to get exclusive information on the who, what, why and hows of the situation. And with the shooter dead, his friends and family are under intense scrutiny. Public records are great resources for reporters, but they should just be starting points, verified by further information or interviews... | | Conservative group says Hollywood is "normalizing violence" | | | Brian Lowry emails that he saw this one coming: In response to Disney CEO Bob Iger's comments about gun violence after the tragedy in Las Vegas, the Parents Television Council has responded by urging Hollywood to "take seriously its own role in contributing to normalizing violence" in movies and TV shows. This is a frequent rejoinder to media industry calls for gun control, citing the hypocrisy of dealing in violent content. It's a predictable pattern, as I wrote one year after the Newtown massacre, which serves to deflect from the gun-control debate... | | | For the record, part three | | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Such a smart piece: Steven Perlberg and Mark Di Stefano looked at how Rupert Murdoch has consistently antagonized Facebook and Google, and how his tech-skepticism is helping his image in the media world... (BuzzFeed)
-- Sahil Patel says the average time a Facebook Watch video is viewed is 23 seconds. That's more than the 16.7 seconds videos get in News Feed... (Digiday)
-- Jack Dorsey has just celebrated (hmmm, marked?) two years as Twitter CEO. Rani Molla reviewed his tenure with charts... A lot has changed, except investors' confidence in the company... (Recode) | | "How We Found Tom Price's Private Jets" | | Wednesday's must-read: This Politico Mag piece by Dan Diamond and Rachana Pradhan, detailing exactly how they discovered HHS secretary Tom Price was taking private flights on a regular basis. It was a LOT more complicated than you might've thought. Read all about their stakeouts at Dulles...
-- Diamond emails: "Now on to the next story..."
-- Related: Erik Wemple spoke with the two reporters... Check it out... | | Another striking Trump-related magazine cover | | | Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a dozen memorable Trump-related magazine covers from the past nine months. Here's another: The November cover of the New Republic. We're sharing it here first... The cover and the story will be released on Thursday morning... | | | The cover story is by Matthew Shaer, who "reports from the front-lines of climate change: Levy County, Florida, a dead-red, rural Trump locale that will be devastated environmentally and financially by global warming..." | | "The press is as strong as it's ever been. It's a Renaissance era for the press. There's scoop after scoop after scoop."
--New podcaster Preet Bharara speaking at VF's summit on Wednesday... | | | Thursday is the deadline for Sinclair to "respond to a request from the FCC for more information and documents regarding the broadcaster's pending acquisition of Tribune Media," THR's Jeremy Barr writes. Many conservative-leaning media upstarts have expressed concerns about the deal. For example: "On Sept. 27, Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy met with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai." Some Dems are also trying to organize opposition. "We need a lot more sand kicked up about this. We need hearings, we need members speaking out," Rep. David Price said Tuesday. Still, the deal is likely to win approval, which is why I haven't spent much time writing about it here... | | Crooked Media hires Brian Beutler as EIC | | | Crooked Media, the progressive media company behind "Pod Save America" and a set of other podcasts, launched a full-fledged website on Wednesday... with a contributor network, a new show, and an editor in chief, Brian Beutler, formerly of The New Republic and TPM. Here's the announcement from Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor... | | | For the record, part four | | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and a prominent First Amendment scholar, reflects on whether America is currently "careening backwards" towards intolerance... (CJR)
-- Speaking of the First Amendment and Columbia, the Knight Institute filed a lawsuit seeking the release of documents on the government's "claimed authority to exclude or remove non-citizens from the United States based on their speech, beliefs, and associations," particularly as it relates to monitoring and keeping records of their social media profiles... (Knight Columbia)
-- The Outline checked out food writing in "flyover country," discovering a vibrant scene, minus the coastals lining up for Cronuts and sushi burritos... (The Outline) | | Lowry reviews "Blade Runner 2049" | | | Brian Lowry emails: Despite a chorus of early raves, I found some glitches in "Blade Runner 2049," an ambitious and visually dazzling sequel, 35 years later, to the science-fiction classic. Notably, Warner Bros. made a plea for critics to be as spoiler-free as possible, citing director Denis Villaneuve's desire that audience get to experience the film without knowing much about it. Read Lowry's full review here... | | Universal delaying Fast and Furious 9 | | | The next "Fast" has been moved from April 2019 to April 2020. LAT's Ben Fritz exclaimed on Twitter: "Three whole years without a F/F movie!" | | | 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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