Forward

Exec summary: Hello from Las Vegas... Check out our CES debrief... Plus the latest on the "shut-show," Trump v. Pelosi, a new study of viral deception, and much more...

THIS JUST IN

Trump's next interview

On Tuesday night President Trump sounded like Sean Hannity while borrowing Hannity's 9 p.m. time slot to call for border wall funding. On Thursday night they'll be together in Texas: Fox just announced that Hannity the host will be interviewing the president on "Hannity" the show.

>> The Daily Beast: "Trump has been consulting Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs during the shutdown and wall fight..."

Our CES download

Smarter, faster, better. Those are the promises being made on the CES show floor this week. Everything is "smart." Everything. During a head-spinning private tour on Wednesday, I saw smart sleep trackers, smart sensors for your indoor plants, smart juicers, smart drinking water systems, a "smart aroma diffuser," a smart "mailbox alert system," smart ovens, smart kettlebells, "smart pepper spray," a calorie-counting SmartDish, a smart plank of wood, and more smart speakers and watches than I could count.

I toured the floor with a media agency and their advertising clients. Every year, more buyers and sellers are coming to CES to see the future -- and because tech giants like Google and Amazon are here too. Most of the action happens in hotel suites and restaurants -- in meetings with tech partners, marketers, etc. But on the floor, my companions were looking for new ways to place ads and gain attention. One idea: An "in-video virtual ad service" called Tisplay that enables YouTube stars and Twitch players (and anybody else, really) to insert digital ads onto their shirts.

"Hey Google..."

I don't need a smart voice assistant embedded in my bathroom mirror. Or do I? That's what you start to wonder. Apple, Amazon and Google's voice platforms were omnipresent. I mean, I'm pretty sure I don't need a voice enabled kitchen faucet. But... maybe? Around the corner, a "parasol automation device." A voice-controlled umbrella? Sure, why not...

Hopefully someday soon the word "smart" will just be assumed about all these products. If it's not smart, it's "connected:" Motion detection cameras, GPS trackers for pets, personal ultrasounds, robot companions, connected bike helmets, voice powered rings, digestive trackers, digital assistants for drivers. Personally I was most intrigued by the rows and rows of health and wellness startups. Tim Cook's quote from Tuesday came to mind: "If you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, 'What was Apple's greatest contribution to mankind?' It will be about health."

Samuel Burke's takeaways

CNN business and tech correspondent Samuel Burke has been here for days... Here are his takeaways:

1. This year's CES has shown us that in 2019 nothing is safe from politics -- not even the the biggest gadget show on earth. The geopolitics of the trade war has dominated the conversations of many execs. About 20% fewer Chinese vendors are at the expo than last year...

2. "Micro mobility" is one of the dominant trends -- that's the car manufacturers' fancy phrase for saying "we are pushing hard into the escooter business." I was struck seeing electric scooters feature as prominently as vehicles at Ford's massive space on the floor following their acquisition of Spin...

3. 5G, 5G, 5G -- it's being talked about everywhere, for everything (especially for self-driving infrastructure). But what about your phone? Stay tuned for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month...

4. Bad news for device makers from Apple to Samsung means more announcements about these companies working together to try and sell you more services.

5. How about a TV set with no visible speakers, with the sound coming directly from the screen? It was incredible to stand in front of the TVs at the LG Display booth and hear the sound following the image around the screen...

Coolest gadgets

A visit to the show floor "is like wandering through 2.7 million square feet of a SkyMall catalog," as CNN's Ahiza Garcia and Heather Kelly put it. "Artificial intelligence" was the buzzword of the show, they wrote. I highly recommend their whole story. Here are a few of their favorite gadgets...

-- Ahiza Garcia: "My favorite thing was at the NatGeo, RESOURCE and Intel exhibit: An AI camera that can help cut down on poaching. It's able to discern movement caused by humans and alert rangers to speed up the process of catching poachers."

-- Samuel Burke: "My favorite gadget? By far the prototype for a mouthguard-looking device that promises to brush your teeth in just 10 seconds. Never thought I'd brush my teeth on international television."

-- Heather Kelly: "I was impressed with the OrCam MyEye 2, a small camera for people with vision impairments. It snaps on to regular glasses and can read text or recognize faces and tell the wearer who they're talking to. It's always nice to see technology that can genuinely improve lives in the middle of all the crap at CES that nobody really needs."

CBS-Viacom buzz is back

I came away from Michael Kassan's MediaLink party on Tuesday night wondering: Is Shari Redstone going to finagle a CBS-Viacom merger sooner rather than later? Redstone was there, but I didn't have a chance to ask her. Some of the chatter in the room -- before Seal performed -- centered on the combo.

>> Related: Deadline's Dominic Patten hears that the CBS CEO search is on the "back burner" amid a new merger push...

On the sports stage

I interviewed Turner president David Levy on the CES sports stage Wednesday afternoon. Dawn C. Chmielewski's recap for Deadline: "Levy picked perhaps the perfect venue, Las Vegas, to offer his bullish predictions about the future of sports betting... In the near future, Levy said media companies will be able to develop content that gaming companies like MGM or Caesars will need to create attractive sports wagering services." More here...

Right after our session, Rachel Nichols interviewed Adam Silver and Jack Dorsey on stage, which leads us to...

Twitter's next experiment with the NBA

Katie Pellico emails: Starting in February, Twitter will start streaming the second half of some NBA games by way of a single cam focusing on a single player, as voted on by Twitter users during the game's first half. Recode's Kurt Wagner says the experimental deal "reflects the quandary facing TV executives today: As more and more people stop paying for traditional TV, professional sports leagues and their broadcast partners are trying to figure out how to translate great TV content... to places that aren't television."

My sit-down with Hulu's CEO

I spent time with Hulu CEO Randy Freer on Wednesday afternoon... You'll hear from him on this week's "Reliable Sources" podcast... He talked about increased investments in programming, his interest in the documentary and news space, and I brought up Wednesday's cancellation of Sarah Silverman's show. Scroll down for details about that...

FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE

-- "Netflix has decided not to produce a second season of the BuzzFeed show Follow This..." (THR)

-- Jennifer Robison, an alum of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has a must-read about alleged misconduct cases at the paper that did not make it into the #MeToo spotlight... (CJR)

-- Jon Ralston wanted to publish Robison's piece, but concluded that his startup nonprofit site was too vulnerable to legal action. Read his candid editor's note here... (Nevada Independent)

-- "Harvey Weinstein is reaching out to new lawyers to shore up his criminal defense team, currently headed up by superstar attorney Ben Brafman..." (Beast)

"SHUT-SHOW"

A hat tip to whomever wrote the opening banner for "AC360" Wednesday night... "SHUT-SHOW" sums it up perfectly.

With Trump still raising the possibility of invoking a "national emergency," Anderson Cooper said, "If it really is a true national security emergency, why would the president wait? If he does wait for days or weeks or months, how would it be an emergency then?"

>> WaPo's most read story on Wednesday night: "Trump's go-to negotiating tactics aren't working in shutdown standoff"

This week's TIME cover

Molly Ball's cover story, "The Art of the Duel," is illustrated with Trump slinging tweets at Nancy Pelosi, and Pelosi firing subpoenas at him... Ball's story will be out on Thursday...

Tuesday night's #'s

Vulture's ratings guru Joe Adalian with the report: "Around 40 million viewers tuned in for President Trump's much-hyped immigration speech, a solid but not all that spectacular Nielsen performance for the ratings-analyst-in-chief. While that's a very big audience by any definition — it easily beat the 32.1 million who saw then-president Barack Obama outline his health plan in 2009 — Trump snagged 46 million viewers for his much (much) longer State of the Union address last year." The Democratic response also reached roughly 40 million viewers via traditional TV. Read on...

The debate rages on

Oliver Darcy emails: Media critics lampooned TV executives in columns on Wednesday, contending they should not have turned over their valuable air time to air Trump's address. NYT's James Poniewozik wrote in a column that the "real crisis revelation" was "a crisis of TV standards." He said executives "made a gutless decision to put appearances or tradition or the fear of a presidential ragetweet over their responsibility to keep their audience from being misinformed, and for a partisan fizzle of a news event."

Over at WaPo, Margaret Sullivan characterized Trump's address as a "pure propaganda opportunity" and said there was "zero" news value in Trump's address. Sullivan added, "After Tuesday night's debacle in the Oval Office, television network executives should be spending the day in their spacious offices practicing a simple word: No. No, Mr. President, you may not break into prime-time programming to fundraise and mislead." Moving forward, it will be interesting to see whether TV execs heed Sullivan's advice…

Checking the fact-checks

Alex Koppelman emails: I wrote in last night's newsletter that as media outlets rely more on fact-checking, especially when airing or printing things we know will likely contain misinformation, we should be working with and even funding researchers who are studying ways to make those fact-checks work for our audiences. Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact and a Duke professor, sent over a piece he wrote for NiemanLab last year about an experiment that tested ways networks could display live fact-checks during events like speeches. It's an initial step, but if you're interested in this subject (and not to beat my point to death, but: if you work in the media, you should be) it's very much worth reading to see what they found...

FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO

-- Heading up to the Shorenstein Center this spring: Koa Beck, Ed O'Keefe, Adam Serwer, Maria Hinojosa, more... (Shorenstein)

-- Al Roker came out and defended Jeremy Kappell, the meteorologist who was fired from WHEC for saying "Martin Luther Coon Park." Kappell said it was an accident. Roker tweeted that he thought Kappell "made an unfortunate flub and should be given the chance to apologize" on air... (CNN)

-- Yahoo is premiering the first episode of "Influencers with Andy Serwer" Thursday at 5 p.m... His guests will include Glenn Hutchins, Barry Diller, Jill Abramson, Danny Meyer, Tarana Burke... (Yahoo)

100 days since Khashoggi's murder

The Washington Post is running a new full-page ad in print to demand justice for Jamal Khashoggi. Thursday's ad, marking 100 days since Khashoggi was murdered, features a smiling photo of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. The ad looks like a message to the crown prince: The text at the top says "when one voice is silenced, we all lose."

"Who was most likely to share fake news in 2016? Seniors."

That's the headline on a WaPo recap of this new research in the journal Science Advances. "The proportion of people on Facebook who shared links to fake news websites was relatively low," according to the researchers. "Older Americans — especially those over 65 — were much more likely to share fake news than younger ones, and conservatives and Republicans were more likely to share fake news than were liberals and Democrats."

>> The Verge's Casey Newton: This finding "could help social media users and platforms design more effective interventions to stop them from being misled."

The Sun chases Drudge bait...

Oliver Darcy emails: The Sun, the UK tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, has become "increasingly insistent on creating what they have internally referred to as 'Drudge-bait' in an effort to secure huge amounts of traffic from the aggregator," BuzzFeed's Mark Di Stefano reported Wednesday, citing interviews with staffers and emails he had seen. Sources told BuzzFeed that Drudge is like "an invisible hand on the editorial direction" and one source told him, "Stories are now being done entirely because they might get Drudged."

…but it's not just The Sun

Darcy adds: BuzzFeed's story focused on The Sun, but Murdoch's tabloid isn't the only outlet that churns out stories with the sole hope of getting on Drudge. This is, in fact, a fairly common practice at various outlets in the United States – particularly, but not only, in the conservative media space. John Ziegler wrote about this in 2016, explaining, "Because of the enormous traffic and attention that a well-placed Drudge link can bring, when it becomes clear what narrative Matt is favoring, a literal 'market' is created for stories which fit that storyline so that they might be linked on the Drudge Report."

FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE

-- Daniella Emanuel emails: Due to a deal that Samsung has made with Facebook, Android users are unable to delete the FB app from their phones... They can only "disable" it... (Bloomberg)

-- More from Daniella: The Harvard Business Review highlights the tactics that media unions have used to grow their memberships. "In total, the number of unionized workers in internet publishing has risen 20-fold since 2010..." (HBR)

-- Lisa Respers France writes: Rose McGowan plans to plead no contest to a drug charge. She had previously questioned whether the charge had been pursued to "silence" her during the Weinstein scandal...

A mixed ruling in Judd's lawsuit against Weinstein

"Ashley Judd's legal battle against Harvey Weinstein came to a bit of a crossroads on Wednesday," Chloe Melas wrote Wednesday night. "U.S. District Judge Phillip S. Gutierrez dismissed Judd's claims of sexual harassment against the movie mogul stating in the ruling obtained by CNN that Judd's legal team had 'not adequately alleged that her relationship with Defendant was covered by the statute.' But Gutierrez did rule that Judd could move forward with her defamation case against Weinstein in which she claims he derailed her career after she denied his alleged sexual advances towards her in the 90s." Look for the full story on CNN.com overnight...

Skydance hires John Lasseter

Frank Pallotta reports: "John Lasseter, the former Disney Animation chief who left the company after he was accused of sexual misconduct, has found a new job. Lasseter will lead the animation arm of Skydance Media, the company announced..."

>> Skydance CEO David Ellison: "John has acknowledged and apologized for his mistakes and, during the past year away from the workplace, has endeavored to address and reform them," Ellison said.

>> And Lasseter said in a statement that he spent the last year away from the industry in "deep reflection," learning how his actions "unintentionally made colleagues uncomfortable, which I deeply regret and apologize for."

Is that sufficient?

Time's Up objects

Megan Thomas emails: Time's Up was not pleased with Skydance Media's decision... The move "endorses and perpetuates a broken system that allows powerful men to act without consequence," the group said. Reaction from other women's organizations in Hollywood echoed that sentiment. More via THR...

QUOTE OF THE DAY

My wife Jamie says this comment, from Kelly Ripa's "How I Get It Done" interview with The Cut, feels like a good mindset for daily TV:

"I do the show and assume it's never as good as we think it is and assume it's never as bad as I think it is."

FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR

By Katie Pellico:

-- Since Regina King's vow (and challenge) during her Golden Globes acceptance speech to only work on projects with teams comprised of "50% women," she told ET Online that Brett Salke and Tyler Perry have already reached out in support... (ET Online)

-- Just in time for Sundance: Sheroum Kim, a VP of production at STX Films, has been named Netflix's director of independent films... (Deadline)

-- ICYMI: After stepping down from his role of Pitchfork EIC last year, founder Ryan Schreiber announced Tuesday that he is leaving the company. The decision was reportedly a year in the making. In a farewell memo to colleagues, Schreiber said, "I'm at a point in my life where I feel I have more to offer..." (Billboard)

Kevin Hart on the Oscars: "I'm over it"

CNN's Don Lemon said the other day that, after speaking with Kevin Hart, he doesn't think Hart will reverse course and agree to host the Oscars. Hart himself said the same thing on "GMA" Wednesday morning. In an interview to promote "The Upside," Hart told Michael Strahan, "I'm over it. There's no more conversation about it ... I'm over that, I'm over the moment." Here's the full story by Chloe Melas...

Lowry's column on the Academy's missteps

Brian Lowry emails: Hart's latest "I'm out" announcement merely underscores how badly the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has botched its hunt for an Oscar host, which should have been resolved -- even if that means no single host, which isn't necessarily a bad idea -- right after the group split with the comic over his resurfaced tweets. As is, the Academy has delivered a how-not-to course, and wound up looking indecisive and desperate. Read Lowry's full column here...

>> Page Six says Whoopi Goldberg is "game" to host...

Steve Harvey: "Social media has made the price of fame too costly"

Lowry adds this footnote to the Hart story: Interviewed at the Variety Summit at CES on Wednesday, Steve Harvey said he has mixed emotions about social media — which as Hart's situation illustrated, can be a minefield for performers — saying, "Social media has made the price of fame too costly. It used to be fun to be famous. It's no longer fun anymore, and social media has taken that away."

Hulu axes "I Love You, America"

On Wednesday Hulu cancelled Sarah Silverman's "I Love You, America" after two seasons. Silverman announced the decision on Twitter, saying, "we're all pretty damn heartbroken."

As The Daily Beast pointed out, this is the third female-fronted late-night show to be axed recently: "That leaves the well-established Samantha Bee on TBS and the newly-launched Busy Phillips on E! as the only two women hosting regular late-night shows in a sea of (mostly white) men. So much for progress."

'The Dictator's Playbook' looks at history, with an eye on today

Brian Lowry emails: PBS' six-part "The Dictator's Playbook" deals with 20th-century figures, like Franco and Mussolini. But its point-by-point look at the tactics associated with dictatorships -- particularly in terms of controlling the flow of information and seeking to discredit the press -- will surely have modern-day resonance for many viewers...

Lowry on the British streaming invasion

Brian Lowry emails: Four new British series premiering on Netflix, Amazon and Hulu over the next few weeks mark the latest wave of what has become a streaming-TV invasion, as these services rely on imports (including the occasional subtitled entry) to flesh out their programming menus...

That's a wrap. See you tomorrow!