Exec summary: Happy Presidents Day. Scroll down for George Conway's warning, Andrew McCabe's "60 Minutes" interview, our week ahead calendar, an Oscars telecast preview, 2020 updates, and more...
"The destructive power of absolute beliefs"
On Friday I took Jamie to see "Network" on Broadway. We loved it. One of the monologues by Bryan Cranston's character Howard Beale rang in my ears all weekend.
"Here is the truth: the real truth, the thing we must be most afraid of," he said, "is the destructive power of absolute beliefs -- that we can know anything conclusively, absolutely -- whether we are compelled to it by anger, fear, righteousness, injustice, indignation. As soon as you have ossified that belief, as soon as you start believing in the absolute, you stop believing in human beings, as mad and tragic as they are... in all their complexity, their otherness, their intractable reality... The only commitment any of us can have is to other people..."
...And this brings us to the Jussie Smollett case. | | Many people figured Smollett was telling the truth when he said he was assaulted in the middle of the night by two strangers. Did the allegation immediately become a political weapon when TMZ reported that Smollett said the attackers called Chicago "MAGA country?" Yes. Was there a rush to judgment in some quarters? Yes. Did some liberal celebs and Democratic politicians issue statements that weren't supported by the facts? Yes. Did some Trump supporters feel insulted by the news coverage of the case? Yes.
But at the same time: Was it newsworthy when the Chicago police opened an investigation into Smollett's accusation? Yes. Did high-quality news organizations approach the case with caution? Yes. Did local and national news organizations poke holes in his "hate crime" account? Yes.
In short: It's really complicated. So here's the latest...
Smollett's camp still says he is a victim
Police sources told CNN and other outlets on Saturday that new evidence suggests Smollett orchestrated the attack. But his attorneys responded by saying that he is a "victim of a hate crime" who did not play a role in the attack...
What the Chicago PD is saying
Chicago police detectives have been wanting to follow up with Smollett since Friday night. "We need to speak to him now," a police spokesman told me on Saturday, to corroborate info from the two men who were persons of interest -- both of whom are now cooperating in the case.
Per spokesman Anthony Guglielmi's most recent tweet, they're still waiting to speak with Smollett... The ball is in Smollett's legal team's court...
What Fox is saying
Nothing.
In the immediate aftermath of the alleged attack, Fox -- which makes and airs "Empire" -- took Smollett's word for it and said the company "stands united" against any act of violence and hate.
A few days ago, amid rumors that Smollett might have concocted the attack because he was concerned about being written off "Empire," Fox said that was ridiculous: "He remains a core player on this very successful series and we continue to stand behind him." This weekend Fox reps said the company had no new comment...
How the narrative is changing
The national outrage about Smollett's apparent suffering "was fueled in part by celebrities who spoke out loud and strong on social media," the AP's Lindsey Bahr wrote. "But the outrage has now been replaced by surprise, doubt and bafflement..." And the authorities still aren't commenting, so this case is still a mystery...
Two competing definitions of "media"
In the reactions to the Smollett developments, I see two competing definitions of "media."
There's one view, promoted by professional anti-media messengers like Donald Trump Jr., who portray the media as one big blob. He tweeted that "media/Hollywood desperately wanted" Smollett's claims "to be true to push their hate of conservatives."
Then there's another view -- which I know to be true -- that the "media" is made up of thousands of outlets and hundreds of thousands of people, with great journalists and lazy aggregators, with no single mission or belief system. Are there mistakes and built-in biases? Definitely. But most journalists are trying their best to report what's true. This competitive, chaotic world of media contradicts Don Jr.'s imagined world.
My question: What's the best way to help people who see a singular "media" enemy to see the wide world of "media" that actually exists?
Sunday's "Reliable" debate
Kmele Foster and Liz Plank discussed the Jussie Smollett rush to judgment on Sunday's "Reliable Sources." Foster urged skepticism on the part of the press -- he said some people had doubts about Smollett's story early on, but "were afraid to raise the questions because of the intersectional nature of this particular accusation." Afraid their motives would be challenged.
Plank was more concerned about the downstream effects of a potential hate-crime hoax. "The fact that one robbery was faked does not mean robbery is not a problem," she said. "The fact that there is one false rape accusation does not mean that there's no rape. We have to cover these issues as trends and as patterns." Bill Carter also joined in... Watch part one and part two of the segment here...
🔌: I'll be talking more about this on CNN's "New Day" in the 7 a.m. hour on Monday...
| | UK lawmakers: Facebook 'intentionally and knowingly' violated data privacy laws
The UK's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which has been investigating Facebook and "fake news" for the past 18 months, put forth its final report on Monday. The committee blasted FB for, it said, "intentionally and knowingly" violating both data privacy and competition laws. Facebook denied the charges. Read Hadas Gold, Donie O'Sullivan and Rob Picheta's full story here...
>> Donie emails: The report includes some more secret Facebook emails which the committee went to, errr, extraordinary steps to get their hands on. We documented how in November...
What the committee is recommending:
-- Social media platforms should be subject to a compulsory code of ethics.
-- An independent UK regulator should monitor tech companies, and be able to launch legal proceedings against them.
-- UK antitrust regulators should conduct a "comprehensive audit" of the advertising market on social media.
-- UK regulators should investigate whether Facebook has been involved in anti-competitive practices.
-- The government should examine recent elections for evidence of voter manipulation.
Per Donie: Will anything actually happen? That's up to the British government. A minister is due to meet Mark Zuckerberg in California later this week...
Should Facebook label state-backed media?
After CNN asked Facebook about a group of slick video pages aimed at American millennials, pages that were actually financed by the Russian government, the company took them down on Friday. The suspension came even though the pages weren't really breaking any of Facebook's rules.
>> Context: YouTube put in a labeling rule last year. And Facebook says it's considering how to resolve the issue. Read on...
>> On Sunday's show, speaking with Donie about his reporting, I said it seems like FB is making up the rules as it goes along in an attempt to clean up its site... Watch...
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- Presidents Day becomes protest day: MoveOn says it is organizing hundreds of protests against the "national emergency" on Monday... (Bustle)
-- Have you heard all the "coup" talk on Fox News? We dissected it on Sunday's show... (CNN)
Media week ahead calendar
Monday: Don Lemon will moderate CNN's town hall with Amy Klobuchar...
Tuesday: Andrew McCabe's book "The Threat" hits bookshelves... He'll be live on "Today" with Savannah Guthrie...
Tuesday: The winners of this year's George Polk Awards will be announced at a press conference in DC...
Friday: It's the start of National Girl Scout Cookie Weekend...
Sunday: The Oscars!
| | Kellyanne Conway's husband thinks we should all be questioning Trump's "mental stability"
Personally I think this should be getting a bit more attention. George Conway reacted to Trump's fact-free claim that Barack Obama was "so close to starting a big war with North Korea" by tweeting: "We should highly question the mental stability of a president of the United States who would lie about whether the United States had been on the verge of starting 'World War III' with another state possessing nuclear weapons." He's been RTed 15,000 times so far...
"I believe Putin"
This was one of the standout quotes in Scott Pelley's two-part "60 Minutes" profile of Andrew McCabe on Sunday night... It's about Trump allegedly saying he didn't believe that North Korea could hit the United States with ballistic missiles because Vladimir Putin had told him they couldn't:
PELLEY: And US intelligence was telling the president what?
MCCABE: Intelligence officials in the briefing responded that that was not consistent with any of the intelligence our government possesses to which the president replied, "I don't care. I believe Putin."
PELLEY: What did you think when you heard that?
MCCABE: It's just an astounding thing to say. To spend the time and effort and energy that we all do in the intelligence community to produce products that will help decision makers and the ultimate decision maker, the President of the United States -- make policy decisions. And to be confronted with an absolute disbelief in those efforts and an unwillingness to learn the true state of affairs that he has to deal with every day was just shocking.
Trump is back on an anti-Mueller Twitter kick
I'm guessing this is partly due to McCabe's book tour. On Sunday Trump was quoting Rush Limbaugh, retweeting past tweets and posting new tirades about the Mueller probe, calling it "totally conflicted, illegal and rigged!"
How's the Mueller probe being viewed in Moscow?
That's what I asked Julia Ioffe, who's there right now. "What do Russians hear about the Mueller probe?" Pretty much nothing, she said. McCabe's claims, for example, are "hardly registering at all" in Russian state-controlled media, Ioffe said on Sunday's "Reliable." Coverage of the issue "would give credence and legitimacy to the American accusations that Russia helped elect our president."
She added: "Basically, most Russians think we've all gone totally crazy and whipped ourselves up into a lather over nothing." Full segment here...
More security needed at Trump's rallies?
Just days after journalists were shoved and interrupted at Trump's rally in El Paso, he went back to tweeting "enemy of the people" smears on Sunday. | | On "Reliable," I spoke with the man who intervened and restrained the attacker in El Paso. His name is Ben Bergquam, and he's a big supporter of Trump who hosts a Fresno radio show and runs a live-streaming site. He was in the press pen when he saw the commotion. He said he agrees with Trump's "fake news" claims, but the attacker "made all MAGA-hat wearers look bad," so he stepped in. Bergquam said he thinks more security at rallies needs to be considered...
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- Trump has "complained repeatedly about news coverage depicting the wall as not being built and has told his campaign and communications officials they have to convince people that more of the wall is being built..." (WaPo)
-- Flashback to Friday: "Forced to confront arguably the biggest surrender of his presidency, Mr. Trump did what he often does after a loss: respond with distraction, digression and entertainment, through a fog of words..." (NYT)
-- Philip Bump said on "Reliable" that Trump's "appeal to emotion" has consistently worked with his base... (CNN)
Trump says he's found the real collusion...
...And it's between the TV networks.
His Sunday morning tweet -- calling "SNL" unfunny and unfair -- indicated that he probably saw Alec Baldwin's sketch from the night before. (Here's Frank Pallotta's full story about the cold open.) | | "Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into," Trump tweeted. "This is the real Collusion!"
So the president is talking about "retribution" for a sketch comedy show, and... most people are just shrugging it off. But the NYT's Peter Baker noted that "no other president in decades publicly threatened 'retribution' against a television network because it satirized him..."
Baldwin's reaction to Trump's tweet
At the end of the day on Sunday, Baldwin tweeted, "I wonder if a sitting President exhorting his followers that my role in a TV comedy qualifies me as an enemy of the people constitutes a threat to my safety and that of my family?"
Schumer's reaction to "SNL"
Hey, here's another way for a politician to respond to an impersonator. "Weekend Update" showed "Chuck and Nancy" gloating about the budget deal, with Alex Moffat playing Chuck Schumer. The senator tweeted a link to the segment -- which had Moffat holding up a smartphone -- and said: "Good impersonation, SNL. But got one thing wrong. I use a flip phone!" | | >> Molly Jong-Fast tweeted: "See, this is how you're supposed to respond to being parodied by a comedy program."
Heather Nauert is out of a job
Curious time to make this announcement, right? On Saturday night Fox News host turned State Dept spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was withdrawing from consideration as UN ambassador. Sources said her announcement was related to the fact that she "employed a nanny who was in the United States legally but was not legally allowed to work," per CNN's story.
Nauert declined to comment. Trump announced that Nauert was his pick for the job -- but she was never formally nominated -- so this is yet another sign of disarray within the admin.
>> Per CNN's Jamie Gangel, "Nauert is not expected to return to her State Department job," so this looks like the end of her government service...
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- FoxNews.com is pointing out that its "prolonged Twitter hiatus" hasn't hurt its traffic growth... Remember, @FoxNews stopped tweeting to protest Twitter's sluggish response to tweeted threats against Tucker Carlson last fall... (Mediaite)
-- AI software wrote this Axios story... (Axios)
-- For her column this week, Maureen Dowd spoke with "Leaving Neverland" director Dan Reed about Michael Jackson's "cotton-candy lair..." (NYT)
"How sexist will the media's treatment of female candidates be?"
That's part of the headline atop Margaret Sullivan's Monday WaPo column.
"Yes," she writes, "we're a sexist society, and the media reflect and amplify this." It's a big concern heading into 2020 with a historically diverse field of Dem candidates. But "some see hope: The sheer number of women running for president will make it easier for female candidates to succeed..." Read the rest here...
2020 candidates are competing with the undecideds
Looking at the weekend's headlines about the Dems, it's striking to see how much the declared candidates are competing for attention with the undeclareds. Of course not all the attention is positive -- "Fox & Friends" and right-wing websites spun up an outrage cycle over a Joe Biden speech in Europe -- but it's a challenge for the Dem candidates nonetheless.
Beto O'Rourke was in the news this weekend for making two stops in Wisconsin. Biden was in the news for saying that most Americans "understand" that Trump's anti-immigrant policy "makes us an embarrassment." (He didn't invoke Trump's name, but everyone knew what he was talking about.) Pro-Trump outlets ran with the quote, portraying Biden as an America-hater, while downplaying the immigration context.
>> And Sanders was in the news because Politico's Holly Otterbein scooped that he has recorded a 2020 announcement video. Will Sanders publish the video and launch his candidacy this week?
Making the case for climate-change alarmism
David Wallace-Wells' climate-change warning, titled "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming," hits bookshelves on Tuesday. Farhad Manjoo calls it "the most terrifying book I have ever read."
Wallace-Wells had an op-ed in Sunday's NYT titled "Time to Panic." It explained why some scientists are embracing alarmism when it comes to climate-change messaging. "This, to me, is progress," he wrote. "Panic might seem counterproductive, but we're at a point where alarmism and catastrophic thinking are valuable, for several reasons..." | |
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
-- 2020 hopefuls want/need viral moments, Elana Schneider writes: "Campaigns are courting social-first online video outlets and taping their candidates constantly after watching big moments pay off in 2018..." (Politico)
-- Dave Weigel's reality check: "The Democratic electorate showing up to meet its candidates is far less ideological and skeptical than the one that lives on social media. Some days, the gulf between the discussion on Twitter and the discussion at campaign events is a mile wide..." (WaPo)
"A travesty of justice"
Maria Ressa, fresh from her night in jail on a "cyber libel" charge, told me on Sunday that her country's case against her is "ludicrous" and "unconstitutional."
Speaking from Manila, the Rappler CEO said the Philippine government's latest action against her is "definitely intimidation..." She said "I came out of that night thinking this is now a travesty of justice." Read Jill Disis' recap here and/or watch the full interview...
Using the display power of print
In Sunday's paper, The Miami Herald printed the name of every young person "killed by guns in 12 months" -- the year since Parkland. The list filled two pages. This was a print version of the "Since Parkland" project we wrote about here...
The NYT used a full page of Sunday's paper to list "a detailed history of Trump's signature promise," that Mexico would pay for the wall, repeated over and over again. Here's the web version...
| | Oscars week begins...
And last year's big decline in awards-show ratings is weighing heavily on the producers of the show. On Friday the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that "they were bowing to pressure and abandoning their plan to shorten the ceremony by awarding four trophies during commercial breaks, with the winning moments being edited and aired later in the show," the NYT's Brooks Barnes wrote.
The decision meant tha Donna Gigliotti, the show's lead producer, "would have to quickly retool the broadcast so that every Oscar was presented without edits, in the traditional manner." Read on...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE
-- More from Barnes: Inside Lisa Taback's campaign to win Netflix a best picture Oscar for "Roma." In truth, he writes, "no film wins the top Oscar unless it's paid for..." (NYT)
-- Katie Pellico emails: Awkwafina reacted to HuffPost's headline announcing her "Comedy Central show will have an all-women writers room." She clarifies "it wasn't even done on purpose. I'm blessed to have some brilliant writers on my show, who all happen to be women..." (Instagram)
-- And don't miss Sandra Gonzalez's John Krasinski feature! (CNN)
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