| | | | | We had to turn off the news for a while tonight. Just needed a break. But hundreds of journalists in Nevada, Puerto Rico and elsewhere don't have that option. This special edition of the newsletter recaps the coverage of the Las Vegas attack... | | Continuing wall to wall coverage | | | First the authorities said 2 concertgoers were dead. Then 20+. Then 50+. Now the death toll is 59, with an almost unimaginable 527 injured. There are hundreds and hundreds of stories to tell about the victims and survivors and rescuers. National news outlets flew scores of journalists into Vegas throughout the day... ABC's David Muir, for example, woke up in Puerto Rico, where he was planning to anchor Monday's "World News Tonight." But he was quickly rerouted to Nevada. Same for CNN's Chris Cuomo -- he'll anchor "New Day" from the strip Tuesday morning... | | "If one person" can hurt this many others "with this machinery that we sell, and we can't talk about the machines," i.e. the guns, then "we're stuck," Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC Monday evening. She was speaking with Chris Hayes, who said: "It honestly feels like madness to cover these over and over again, and to end up in the same dead end."
Meantime, over on Fox, Tucker Carlson was talking about the "machines" in multiple segments -- he brought on Democrats and mocked their positions on gun control. Sarah Sanders said Monday that it's "premature" to talk about policy. But make no mistake -- the gun debate is already raging...
--> Conversation starter: Guitarist Caleb Keeter, who was at the festival, wrote in a heartfelt post on Monday, "I've been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life. Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was..." | | | Jake Tapper on Monday afternoon: "I wish I could tell you this is the last time I'm ever going to report to you about the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, but I cannot tell you that. I wish I could report that lawmakers are huddling right now to try to figure out how to do everything they constitutionally can to keep these weapons of mass murder out of the hands of violently insane individuals who will use them to harm innocent people. But they are not doing that..." | | | David Becker was at the concert to photograph the artists, but he ended up taking iconic photos of the dead and injured. Via Getty Images, he described his experience to Time mag... Here's the interview... | | Country music community in mourning | | | "There's a lot about this attack in Las Vegas and the damage it caused that we don't know about yet. But what I do know is that the country music community will face it with strength and resilience," Kurt Bardella, the publisher of the Morning Hangover country music newsletter, wrote in this CNN.com piece... | | The Route 91 Harvest Festival is hosted by the events company LiveNation. It has been held each year since 2014. Jason Aldean, a country music superstar, was the headliner on the third and final night of the festival...
-- Live Nation, in a statement, said the company "will do everything in our power to support the victims and their families... To our Live Nation on-site employees, we cannot thank you enough for your bravery and perseverance over the past 24 hours and will ensure you have the resources and support necessary to heal from this..."
-- Live Nation was also the promoter for the Ariana Grande show in Manchester last May... | | Aldean's next scheduled tour date is Friday in Los Angeles. Jon Loba of BBR Music Group, Aldean's label, told Billboard that he hasn't heard anything about the status of the show yet. Here's the interview...
-- By The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich: "Let's stand with Jason Aldean fans..." | | What about concert security? | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: In the days to come, there will be many discussions about concert security. Even though this is a situation that would not have been avoided by stricter or more comprehensive screenings of concertgoers -- since the shooter was across the street -- the issue is sure to be top of mind for concert organizers.
Austin City Limits Music Festival, which this year will welcome acts like Jay-Z and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is set to start Friday. C3 Presents, which produces the festival, said in a statement that its staff and security team "works year-round" with local officials "to plan and rehearse security and response plans," including through "unseen" efforts. The festival is set to go on as planned over the next two weekends... | | CBS legal exec fired after hateful Facebook posts | | | "CBS has fired a network legal executive who wrote on social media that she is 'not even sympathetic' to victims of Sunday's Las Vegas shooting and referred to country music fans as 'Republican gun toters.' The exec "violated the standards of our company and is no longer an employee of CBS," the company said, per The Wrap... | | Vegas felt elsewhere, including the football field... | | Frank Pallotta emails: ESPN originally had no plans to air the National Anthem during "Monday Night Football," but changed course following the Vegas attack. ESPN showed the anthem as well as a moment of silence that took place before the game...
-- Related: Tom Bergeron began ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" with an acknowledgement of the victims... | | "WELL HERE WE ARE AGAIN..." | | Late night hosts addressing the attack | | Hosts like Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah discussed the tragic events of the day in Monday's monologues. "We seem to do everything to avoid talking about guns," Noah said. "I've never been to a country where people are as afraid to SPEAK about guns." Here's the video of his comments...
Jimmy Kimmel's monologue was particularly poignant because he hails from Las Vegas. "Here we are again," he said, "in the aftermath of another terrible, inexplicable, shocking, and painful tragedy." His voice shook. At one point he said the gun lobby "runs the country" and he showed the faces of the senators who, he said, had voted against closing loopholes last year. Frank Pallotta will have a recap on CNN.com overnight...
Keep scrolling for much more about the TV coverage... | | -- Sean Hannity's Wednesday interview with President Trump has been cancelled due to Trump's planned trip to Vegas... First, however, POTUS will head to Puerto Rico on Tuesday...
-- Via Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman: Indira Lakshmanan looks at how racial biases have trickled into the coverage, specifically around the phrase "deadliest shooting in U.S. history..." (Poynter)
-- Via Megan Thomas: "The media moved seamlessly and unavoidably from hurricane devastation and Trump's tweeting to its depressingly well-practiced coverage of mass shootings," James Warren says... (Poynter)
-- Via Jordan Valinsky: The rebooted "TRL" on MTV began with a moment of a silence for the victims and a message about donating to Everytown...
-- Lisa Respers France emails: Hollywood stars expressed shock about the tragedy... | | Why news outlets are being criticized for reporting ISIS claim | | ISIS claimed credit for the shooting on Monday. Should we in the news media report this claim of responsibility? Or should we refrain from covering it unless/until there's any solid evidence of an ISIS connection? So far, there isn't any evidence. The FBI says it has found "no connection with an international terrorist group." But some newsrooms ran with the ISIS claim and passed it along to millions of people. The AP caught flack for sending out a news alert. Fox News brought it up throughout the day.
-- Reasons to be wary: There's a history of ISIS falsely claiming credit for acts of violence. Reporting a claim like the one made on Monday can stoke fear and cause confusion, giving ISIS the publicity it seeks and making the group seem more powerful than it really is. Here's my full story...
-- Zack Beauchamp's piece for Vox: "The media's carelessness is helping ISIS use Las Vegas to its advantage" | | What's the "fact" about America and guns? | | Tom Brokaw on Monday's "Today" show: "No other Western nation has the number of gun deaths that we have in America, and we need to talk about it."
Later in the day, on Twitter, NBC's Cal Perry went further: "Been a journo for a while now. It has become impossible to report just 'facts' about gun violence. The fact is America needs gun control."
I would just add: Perry is based in NYC, but the geotag said his tweet was posted from London. That's a relevant detail. Why? Because when you're on the outside looking in, it's really clear that America has a unique problem... | | "Today, as with most days that the media focuses on guns, has been filled with misinformation, misunderstanding, and bias. It's unfortunate," Stephen Gutowski of the Free Beacon tweeted Monday evening. His thread is worth reading in full:
"The industry is incomprehensibly inept at reporting on guns. No major outlet currently employs a single reporter on the gun beat... So, when a major gun-related story breaks, none of the reporters have expertise. They're not informed on the topic beforehand." The ensuing errors frustrate a lot of gun owners.
Hurried reporting, "combined with a general distaste for guns throughout the industry, leads to generally bad reporting across the board," Gutowski wrote... | | The Onion weighs in, again... | | | Zeynep Tufekci tweeted: "I'm actually surprised none of the shooters has done this until now" -- opened fire on a crowded space from a tall building. She said she's "worried that intense media focus on method will encourage copycats... It is, sadly, an obvious method and I worry -- just like using trucks and cars to ram into people -- the method is out and will now be copied..." | | "AC360" avoiding the gunman's name | | | Anderson Cooper's show stuck with its longstanding policy of not naming the gunman on Monday night. If you're not familiar with the "No Notoriety" campaign by parents of mass shooting victims, Tom Kludt wrote about it in the wake of the Orlando massacre here... | | BACK TO SUNDAY NIGHT'S COVERAGE... | | Why so many TV reporters were already in Vegas | | | Hadas Gold writes: Journalists had flooded into Las Vegas to cover the release of former football star O.J. Simpson, who was freed Sunday morning after nine years in prison. Their assignments quickly changed just after 10pm local time. "Had there been no O.J. Simpson release, far fewer [national/international] media would have been so close for initial shooting coverage," NBC's Kelly O'Donnell wrote. NBC's Joe Fryer, CNN's Jean Casarez, and Fox's Adam Housley were among the reporters who shifted beats... | | The attack happened just before the 11pm local news | | | Hadas adds: The networks were in special report mode all morning long. They utilized their local affiliates, which were the first to break in to their broadcasts during the 10pm hour, right before the regularly scheduled 11pm live newscasts... Read moe... | | Google and Facebook's misinformation problem | | Oliver Darcy emails: People turned to Facebook and Google for news and for updates on their loved ones. What they were presented with, in some cases, was bad information. In one instance, Google's algorithm prominently featured a 4chan thread that wrongly identified the shooter in its "Top Stories" section. Facebook, for its part, promoted several websites with questionable credibility on its Crisis Response page, including a blog called Alt Right News.
Both companies took action after the issues were brought to their attention. And it's clear what happened was a result of algorithms used by each company. But some questions do remain. Why doesn't Google's algorithm automatically filter out junk websites like 4chan? And why didn't Facebook hand-curate the stories featured on its Crisis Response page, considering its visibility after the shooting? Read Oliver's full story here... | | Showtime debuted "Active Shooter" docuseries last week | | | Brian Lowry emails: Last week, Showtime premiered a documentary series titled "Active Shooter: America Under Fire," with each of the eight episodes chronicling a different mass-killing event, from Aurora to Orlando. The program didn't generate a whole lot of attention, in part because the focus was on the specifics of each of these stories -- through interviews with survivors, authorities and loved ones of victims -- and less a discussion of the phenomenon as a whole. And in part because we've collectively become numb? | | | Brian Lowry adds: A number of major Hollywood figures -- such as director Joss Whedon and "Modern Family" producer Steve Levitan -- were active on Twitter Monday advocating for Everytown. The inevitable pushback against the movie and TV industry will be that depictions of violence in entertainment also contribute to the problem, an argument historically used to brand them as hypocrites. The bottom line is that many of the people currently saying "We shouldn't politicize this" are often the first to do so when they perceive the politics of the situation favor them... | | "We know that everything about the news coverage and political response would be different, depending on whether killer turns out to be 'merely' a white American man with a non-immigrant-sounding name..."
--James Fallows writing for The Atlantic... | | The rest of the day's media news... | | Facebook says Russian ads reached 10 million people | | | On Monday Facebook provided Congress with detailed records about the now-infamous ads bought by accounts linked to the Russian government. The company disclosed that an estimated 10 million people saw at least one of the 3,000 political ads. Dylan Byers has all the details here... | | | "The Senate voted largely along party lines Monday" to reconfirm FCC chairman Ajit Pai for "another five-year term at the FCC," CNNMoney's Seth Fiegerman reports... | | By Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman:
-- Andrew Ross Sorkin's latest: "Katzenberg's Big Ask: $2 Billion for Short-Form Video Project" (NYT)
-- Google is officially ending its "first click free" program, partly to appease publishers. Paywalled news sites won't be penalized by the Google algorithm... (Bloomberg)
-- Pew analyzed 3,000 stories from 24 news outlets to learn how the first 100 days of the Trump presidency was covered... (Pew)
-- Sahil Patel says Facebook's video ad program had publishers "pivot to pennies" as monetization struggles continue... (Digiday) | | | 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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