| | | | | Exec summary: John McCain is standing up for the press... Ann Curry is giving an interview... J.J. Abrams is working on a new script... Plus, new details about President Trump's "executive time..." And Erin Burnett's Q: "How stupid do you think we are?" | | Oliver Darcy emails: Fox News had a story at the height of the presidential election that detailed an alleged sexual relationship between porn actress Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump, but opted not to publish it, four people familiar with the matter told me. Sources said one of the network's reporters, Diana Falzone, had an on-the record statement from Daniels' manager at the time confirming her client had engaged in a sexual relationship with Trump and that Falzone had even seen emails about a settlement. But the story never saw the light of day. As one of the sources said, "She had the story and Fox killed it." Read more...
--> Last week we reported that ABC News producers were pursuing an interview with Daniels before election day. Slate and The Daily Beast were also chasing the Daniels story. Slate's Jacob Weisberg published a new story about this on Tuesday...
--> So what happened at Fox? Noah Kotch, who became EIC and VP of Fox News digital in 2017, told Darcy in a statement, "Like many other outlets, we were working to report the story of Stephanie Clifford's account in October 2016 about then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump and a possible payment by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. In doing our due diligence, we were unable to verify all of the facts and publish a story." | | YouTube assigning workers to review these videos: | | Remember Google's announcement last December that it was hiring 10,000 people to clean up YouTube? Now they're getting to work. In the wake of the Logan Paul controversy, YouTube is trying to reassure advertisers by pledging to "manually review" all the vids that are within "Google Preferred."
Paul was kicked out of "Google Preferred" last week. Going forward, workers will vet the vids to make sure they "meet our ad-friendly guidelines," YouTube said Tuesday. Here's my story about all the changes... | | -- Paul to TMZ's camera on Monday: "Everyone deserves second chances, bro..."
-- WSJ's Jack Nicas tweeted: "YouTube has made at least 10 announcements, by my count, about changes that'll make its site safer for advertisers..." | | Recode's Peter Kafka tweeted: "This week: Youtube announces more plans to self-police bad content. Last week: Facebook moves away from news/commercial content. Both trying to deal with consequence of running a platform where someone else supplies the content..."
--> Related: Frederic Filloux's must-read: "Facebook is done with quality journalism. Deal with it." | | Michael Schmidt strikes again: On Tuesday morning the NYT reporter broke the news that Steve Bannon was subpoenaed last week by Robert Mueller. Breitbart wrote a surprisingly straight story about the news, while FoxNews.com went with the tabloid headline "'Sloppy Steve to Squeal?'"
--> Bannon met with the House Intel Committee for 10 hours on Tuesday... And the committee slapped him with a subpoena, too, after he declined to answer key Q's...
--> Committee member Jim Himes in an interview with Anderson Cooper: "There was more than one copy of the recent book 'Fire and Fury' in the room..." | | Three anti-Trump books in Amazon's top 10 | | | "Fire and Fury" is holding steady atop Amazon's best selling books chart. The title surged into #1 on January 3 and hasn't moved since. But on Tuesday it was joined by two new releases: David Frum's "Trumpocracy," which is #10 at the moment I'm writing this, and David Cay Johnston's "It's Even Worse Than You Think," which is #4. Both books came out on Tuesday, and both authors have been making the rounds on TV... | | "Mr. President, stop attacking the press" | | | That's the title of John McCain's op-ed in Wednesday's WashPost. Here it is... | | Ann Curry speaks on Wednesday | | | Ann Curry really hasn't spoken in public much since being removed from the "Today" show back in 2012. She hasn't given any TV interviews since leaving NBC altogether in 2015. But she's out promoting a new PBS docuseries... So she'll be on "CBS This Morning" for two segments on Wednesday... And she'll be asked about Matt Lauer's recent firing. What will she say? Jill Disis previewed the interview here... | | | Jeff Flake's floor speech assailing Trump's "fake news" attacks is at 10:15am... Dick Durbin is on "The View" at 11am... John Kelly is on Fox's "Special Report" at 6pm... | | Ummm, what about the "corrupt media awards?" | | President Trump announced this stunt back on January 2, then rescheduled it for January 17. Meaning: Wednesday. But nothing has been announced. I've suspected for a few days that the idea has fizzled... But W.H. aides have not responded to my questions about it. On Tuesday, a reporter asked Sarah Sanders during the briefing, and she called it a "potential event" without providing any details.
So... Is POTUS going to disappoint his fans and skip this stunt? I think the right response is to ignore it... Since it's so absurd... But if Trump doesn't follow through, that's worth noting...
--> Fox News anchor Heather Childers tweeted Tuesday evening: "Tomorrow is the day! Dishonest & Corrupt Media Awards supposed to be announced by @POTUS! Who do you think made the list?" Seriously? Exclamation points and everything? | | -- Hey, here's a "family photo" of me, Jamie, Sunny... with Brooke Baldwin! Photographers from the home site 6sqft came over to check out our apartment last month... But then some news broke... So I ran back to work, and that's how this funny picture came about... (6sqft)
-- The 2018 duPonts were awarded in NYC on Tuesday night... CBS News and PBS each won two awards... (Columbia)
-- "No, Trump's approval among black Americans hasn't doubled." This false claim spread from Breitbart to Fox to the president's Twitter feed... (WashPost)
-- Check out Kaitlan Collins' latest story: "A window inside Trump's morning 'executive time'" (CNN) | | "Who does this administration think it's fooling?" | | "How stupid do you think we are?" That's how Erin Burnett began her CNN program on Tuesday night. "Trump's allies in Washington are covering for him, and they shouldn't get away with it. The president called African countries 's-hole' countries, and it was racist. And tonight's Trump allies are trying to pull a fast one on the American people."
Burnett brought up the conflicting accounts about Trump's racist remarks and said "who does this administration think it's fooling at this point?" Check out Burnett's full piece here... | | Tuesday's good news about the president's health, delivered by Dr. Ronny Jackson in a nationally televised briefing, was accompanied by lots of praise for the administration's transparent approach (nearly an hour of Q&A!) and lots of arguments on social media. When Jackson said Trump is "fit to serve" and has "absolutely no cognitive or mental issues whatsoever," I saw some Trump supporters saying, in effect, "Concerns about Trump's mental health were always absurd. Case closed now."
Sean Hannity came after me (and lots of other TV journalists) on Tuesday's "Hannity" and said we need to be examined for daring to ask questions about the president's fitness. So let me just point out: The widespread concerns about Trump's fitness are multifaceted.
Here's exactly what I said on CNN five months ago, in the wake of Charlottesville: Questions about his fitness for office are coming up in newsrooms and TV studios, "usually after the microphones are off, or after the stories are filed, after the paper has been put to bed." That's when "people's concerns and fears and questions come out. Questions that feel out of bounds, off limits, too hot for TV. Questions like these: Is the President of the United States a racist? Is he suffering from some kind of illness? Is he fit for office? And if he's unfit, then what?"
A medical exam is helpful for many reasons. Government transparency is a good thing. But a doctor can't answer all of those questions... | | -- My favorite quote from Jackson's briefing: "The president can watch as much TV as he wants. I don't know how much TV he watches..."
-- It was great to see CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta asking Q's in the briefing room. Beat reporting at its best... | | Tom Kludt emails: First Gawker, now The Awl. Tuesday brought yet another unfortunate development on the digital media front, with top editor Silvia Killingsworth making the announcement in a pithy post with a straight-forward title: "Awl Ends."
Killingsworth, who's led the site since 2016, told me in an email that the reason for the Awl's closure (along with its sister sites like The Hairpin) was simple: "Basically it was no longer a sustainable business model." And with that, a generation of reporters and bloggers mourned the loss of a site that had inspired them to pursue a career in writing online. And like Gawker, The Awl counted journalists among some of its most devoted readers. In fact, the two sites are probably forever intertwined... | | -- John Herrman: "The best way to remember the awl and the hairpin is by giving someone who hasn't been published a chance and a check without asking that they humiliate and spend themselves in return..."
-- Jia Tolentino: "The Awl & the Hairpin surfaced nearly every young and good-hearted writer with some style & personality that I can think of and it is f---ing devastating that they're gone..."
-- David Graham: "The Awl was so great -- great writing; a great sensibility, since borrowed elsewhere; a great incubator for talent -- and we all will miss it terribly..." | | | Slate has a fresh face: A new home page, new logo, new podcast branding, and more... Julia Turner says you could call it a "pivot to words..." | | -- NHK issued an on-air apology after issuing a false missile alert... (CNN)
-- Apple News is showing promise delivering traffic to publishers, but it "won't make up for Facebook shortfalls," Ross Benes reports... (Digiday)
-- "Page Six TV" is being renewed for a second season on Fox-owned TV stations... (TVNewsCheck)
-- Cutest story of the day: An interview with Ben Smith's 14-year-old son Hugo! (Slate) | | Everyone is picking sides over Babe.net's Aziz Ansari story, as Lisa Respers France recapped here. So here are a few of the many reactions...
>> "There Is No Rampaging #MeToo Mob" by Slate's Osita Nwanevu: "The cultural reaction to the Aziz Ansari allegations show the movement is more measured than its critics claim..."
>> "Babe, What Are You Doing?" by Jezebel's Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: "Because Babe did not have the range or depth to present Grace's story for what it is -- a starting point to discuss the ways consent can feel blurring, no matter how clear we might wish it were, and our lack of language to describe this -- we all ended up opening up a conversation that did us no good at all..."
>> "Aziz Ansari and the Paradox of 'No'" by The Atlantic's Megan Garber: "Much of the conversation around the current iteration of #MeToo has involved, to its great credit, a recognition of structures, of hierarchies, of power dynamics: the logic of systems, applied to the intimacies of harassment and abuse. The Ansari story, on top of everything else, is at once an inversion and an endorsement of that approach..." | | Dylan Farrow's first TV interview | | | Via CBS: On Monday she spoke with Gayle King about "her allegations that she was sexually abused by her father, Woody Allen," and she discussed #TimesUp. A preview will air on Wednesday's "CBS This Morning," with more on Thursday. Details here... | | | -- Vox is keeping a list of "every actor who has publicly expressed regret for working with Woody Allen, so far..." | | | Sandra Gonzalez emails: Matt Damon has vowed to "close my mouth for a while" after backlash to his #MeToo comments, saying in an interview on "Today" that "I really wish I'd listened a lot more before I weighed in on this. And...ultimately what it is for me is that I don't want to further anybody's pain with anything that I do or say. So, for that, I'm really sorry." More... | | "#MeToo, Now What?" on PBS | | Brian Lowry emails from the TCA Press Tour: PBS CEO Paula Kerger acknowledged that the public broadcaster has been part of the #MeToo story -- with allegations against hosts Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley -- and now wants to be part of the conversation and the solution. The result is a five-part series, "#MeToo, Now What?," which will premiere in February.
Kerger also discussed broader issues involving public television, including the latest effort, via the Trump admin, to slash its funding... Read more here... | | "It's bad enough that the president of the United States is an inveterate liar. It's even worse when members of Congress and his Cabinet feel compelled to lie on his behalf."
--That's the beginning of this editorial in Wednesday's USA Today... | | Challenges for the national media | | Gallup and the Knight Foundation are out with a new report documenting many "familiar if unsettling trends," Politico's Jason Schwartz writes. In summary: "Americans have a negative view of the media, believe coverage is more biased than ever and are sharply divided in their views along partisan lines."
I was struck by this stat: "58% of Americans say the increased number of news sources makes it HARDER to be informed..."
And here's more from Schwartz's story: "Americans are so polarized that they cannot even agree on the definition of 'fake news.' Democrats, the study found, hew more closely to the original definition of the phrase that emerged after the 2016 election, referring to fabricated news stories that are intended to deceive. Republicans, on the other hand, are more likely to have also adopted the meaning that President Trump has ascribed to the term, which he often tags on stories that he dislikes, regardless of whether or not they are factual..." | | Applause for the local media in Montecito | | | Joan, a regular reader of the newsletter, sent me a story the other day, and I thought you all would like to hear it. She's a native of Santa Barbara, adjacent to Montecito, where the mudslides did so much damage last week. She was at a vigil over the weekend where first responders were honored with applause. She said one of the speakers, a local official, also praised the local media for informing the public about the emergency. "She called them heroes. Which is true," Joan wrote. "One of the Independent's photographers found a woman's mangled body and helped neighbors cover her with a tarp." So at the vigil, there was applause for the journalists in the room, Joan wrote, "for the wonderful way they've covered our tragedy..." | | | For the record, part three | | | -- Megan Thomas emails: This fantastic headline from Vulture sums up an astute and very funny story by Hunter Harris: "The New York Times is definitely not bitter about 'The Post,' why would you ask?" (Vulture)
-- Ricky Van Veen talked about Facebook's foray into video at NATPE on Tuesday... (Variety)
-- Fox News is launching "Scandalous," which it hopes will become a weekend franchise. Up first: A seven-episode series on the Bill Clinton impeachment saga... (Variety)
-- Kristen Baldwin is joining Darren Franich as a TV critic for EW... and Alex Suskind is the mag's new music editor... (EW) | | | February's issue is all about free speech... Here's the cover story by Zeynep Tufekci... | | Trump hotels swarmed with one-star reviews on Yelp | | | Donie O'Sullivan emails: We've learned a lot about the manipulation of online platforms these past 12 months... but here's another one. Anti-Trumpers organized on social media to give Trump hotels a one star rating and call them "shitholes" after the president's reported comments last week. It's been a success, for them -- Trump's hotel in DC dropped from 4 stars to 2 stars since Thursday. Yelp is working to figure it out... | | Apple and HBO vying for this J.J. Abrams script | | | Lesley Goldberg's scoop for THR: J.J. Abrams is "shopping a space-set spec script that, should it go to series, would be the first show he wrote and created since 'Fringe' in 2008. Sources say Apple and HBO -- where Abrams serves as an EP on 'Westworld' -- are both in the running for the untitled drama, with producers Warner Bros. Television also open to additional bidders as the project is still being shopped. Warners, Apple and HBO all declined comment." Read more... | | Lowry reviews the new "American Crime Story" | | Brian Lowry emails: "The Assassination of Gianni Versace" doesn't measure up to "The People v. O.J. Simpson," but with a compelling central performance from Darren Criss, it has demonstrated the elasticity of FX's "American Crime Story" banner, as well as producer Ryan Murphy's strengths, and excesses...
--> Meanwhile, Murphy remains one of TV's busiest producers, with Fox having just renewed his emergency procedural, "9-1-1," for a second season... | | "The Mortified Guide" coming to Amazon and Netflix | | | Megan Thomas emails: If you haven't caught a "Mortified" stage show or listened to the podcast in which adults read from their childhood journals and share their most embarrassingly awkward moments, it's delightfully cringe-inducing and totally entertaining. "The Mortified Guide" docuseries will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month before debuting on Amazon and Netflix in February... | | | Lisa Respers France emails: Kim Kardashian & Kanye West have welcomed their third child, this time via a surrogate... | | | Email brian.stelter@turner.com... I love the feedback, corrections, suggestions, and tips. Thank you! | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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