EXEC SUMMARY: Here's the latest on Ebony's photo archive, Dan Le Batard's future at ESPN, Megan Rapinoe's book deal, Alphabet's earnings, News Emmy nominations, and more...
Trump's double standard for two men in detention
Sometimes the peculiar behavior of the president is best covered in compare-and-contrast format. For example: Contrast President Trump's interest in the A$AP Rocky case with his silence about the Francisco Galicia case.
Galicia is the U.S. citizen who was held in immigration detention in Texas for more than three weeks. His lawyer says Galicia was malnourished and filthy as a result of the ordeal. The case has been getting national news attention for the past two days. But the president hasn't said a word about it.
A$AP Rocky, on the other hand... Well, Trump has expressed support for the detained rapper several times, in part because, according to Trump, "many members of the African American community have called me -- friends of mine -- and said, 'Could you help?'"
On Thursday A$AP Rocky was charged with assault stemming from a June 30 confrontation in Stockholm. Trump, in turn, called out the Swedish Prime Minister and said "Sweden has let our African American Community down in the United States."
"Let our African American Community down?"
Complex mag's Hannah Lifshutz wrote that Trump's advocacy for the rapper "seems to be an attempt to publicly distance himself from his unrepentant racism."
The power of the Dallas Morning News
I'm sure others have made this same observation, but Bill Kristol was the first person I saw making the point that Trump "seems far more concerned" about A$AP Rocky than Francisco Galicia, who was "wrongfully detained for a longer time and in worse conditions here in the U.S."
Galicia's story was first told by immigration reporter Obed Manuel in the Dallas Morning News on Monday evening. "Galicia was released less than 24 hours after The News broke the story," the paper's newest story notes. | |
Manuel, who's also a Report for America corps member, interviewed Galicia on Wednesday. Galicia said he lost 26 pounds during the ordeal. "He said he wasn't allowed to shower and his skin was dry and dirty," per Manuel's story. "It's one thing to see these conditions on TV and in the news. It's another to go through them," Galicia said.
The case is complicated -- since the government is saying Galicia "provided conflicting reports regarding status of citizenship." But the compare/contrast speaks volumes...
Trump's latest lies
"I'm just going to open it up to you to go wherever you want with this," Sean Hannity said at the beginning of his phone call with POTUS on Thursday night's "Hannity." Per Daniel Dale's must-follow Twitter feed, here are a few of the misrepresentations and outright lies:
-- "'This was treason,' Trump falsely claims of the Mueller investigation..."
-- "Trump refers again to 'Russian bloggers,' 'a lot of bloggers, bloggers in Russia,' who were discussed in the Mueller report. It was hackers. Russian hackers. No bloggers..."
-- "Trump calls the Russia investigation an 'illegal takeover' and a 'coup attempt.' It was not illegal and was not a coup attempt..."
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- KFile's Thursday afternoon scoop: Trump's pick to be Treasury spokeswoman, Monica Crowley, "repeatedly spread conspiracy theories that suggested then-President Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim who was sympathetic to America's enemies..." (CNN)
-- Soon after KFile's story about Crowley came out, GOP operative Arthur Schwartz surfaced 2011 tweets from CNN photo editor Mohammed Elshamy and said KFile should "look into the social media activities of your employees." Elshamy's "vicious tweets about Jews and Israel" included posts "apparently celebrating the deaths of 'Jewish pigs,'" Caleb Howe wrote... (Mediaite)
-- On Thursday evening CNN PR said "the network has accepted the resignation of a photo editor, who joined CNN earlier this year, after anti-Semitic statements he'd made in 2011 came to light. CNN is committed to maintaining a workplace in which every employee feels safe, secure and free from discrimination regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion." (Twitter)
Google's ad revenue in Q2: $32.6 billion
"Any worries about slowing growth at Google parent Alphabet may have been premature, judging from its earnings for the last quarter," Clare Duffy writes. The company's stock is up almost 8% in after-hours trading.
>> Key stat: Google ad revenue "grew 14% from the same period last year to $32.6 billion." Let that $$$ total sit with you for a minute.
>> Axios' Sara Fischer with more context: "Investors have been bearish on Google's ability to grow its ads business ever since it reported a significant deceleration in the growth of its ad business last quarter. This new earnings report showed that Google's ad business is still growing slower than it used to, but it met investor expectations for how much it would slow..."
>> CNBC's Lauren Feiner: CFO Ruth Porat "said YouTube's revenue was strong..."
>> And here's Seth Fiegerman on the day's other tech earnings report: "Amazon's streak of record profits has come to an end..."
Lead of the day
Steve Lohr's latest for the NYT: "Chris Hughes used to huddle with Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room building Facebook from scratch. Now, he's huddling with regulators to explain why Facebook needs to be broken up."
The news is in the next graf: "In recent weeks, Mr. Hughes has joined two leading antitrust academics, Scott Hemphill of New York University and Tim Wu of Columbia University, in meetings with the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department and state attorneys general. In those meetings, the three have laid out a potential antitrust case against Facebook..."
--> Sally Hubbard's new Perspectives piece for CNN Business: "The Facebook fine won't work. A real solution is PAIN - Privacy regulation, Antitrust enforcement (that stops anticompetitive conduct and acquisitions), Interoperability and Non-discrimination." (CNN)
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- CNN is scheduling a Democratic presidential town hall "focused on the climate crisis" for September 4... (CNN)
-- Also: MSNBC is the media partner for "Climate Forum 2020," a two-day forum later in the month... It will be live-streamed, and portions will air on "All In with Chris Hayes..." (Georgetown)
-- Democrats have made more than 1,200 podcast appearances ahead of the 2020 election" according to data from Podchaser... (TheWrap)
Gabbard v. Google
Donie O'Sullivan emails: Tulsi Gabbard's campaign sued Google on Thursday after the company temporarily suspended her Google Ads account following last month's primary debate. Google says it was an error. Gabbard's campaign says the company has it in for the candidate.
The suit even cited alleged actions took against Breitbart as an purported example of the steps the company takes against its critics. Here's the Breitbart bit... And here's my full story...
Twitter allows vile conspiracy about Clintons to trend
Oliver Darcy emails: Twitter raised a lot of eyebrows on Thursday when it allowed the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount to trend. The hashtag was being used by conspiracy theorists who were baselessly suggesting that the Clinton family tried to harm Jeffrey Epstein in his jail cell because he might otherwise share damaging information on the Clintons. There is, of course, zero evidence of this.
But conspiracy theorists have for years peddled the unfounded notion that the Clinton family has killed people close to them who might possess harmful information. The conspiracy theory has been shared far and wide in right-wing circles. Fox News host Laura Ingraham's former website even created a video in 2016 tallying up the Clinton's "body count." (After I asked for comment back then, the video was mysteriously deleted.)
When I reached out to Twitter for comment, a company spokesperson told me that "trends are determined by velocity, not volume." The spokesperson pointed me to a rules page that said Twitter wants "trends to promote healthy discussions on Twitter" and that "at times" it "may prevent certain content from trending." But, in this case, it appears Twitter chose not to take action because the #ClintonBodyCount trend didn't violate any of Twitter's rules governing trending topics. Hmm…
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- Penguin Press has acquired the rights to a book by Megan Rapinoe... It will come out in the fall of 2020... And she "has also signed on to do a middle-grade book with Razorbill, a division of Penguin Young Readers..." (NYT)
-- "What makes a badass journalist?" That's the first question in this joint Q&A with Jane Mayer and Julie K. Brown... (InStyle)
-- 🔌 for my better half: Jamie will be on "CBS This Morning" on Friday, talking about miscarriages and other fertility struggles... (Twitter)
-- What I learned from Meghan McCain's interview with ELLE: She met her husband Ben Domenech via Twitter when he "slid into my DMs..." I met Jamie the same way 😃 (ELLE)
Ebony photo archive sells for $30 million
| | On July 16, the NYT's Julie Bosman wrote that the Ebony and Jet archives, "the most significant collection of photographs depicting African-American life in the 20th century," was about to be auctioned. Other outlets had previously written about the impending sale -- but it was Bosman's story that grabbed Darren Walker's attention.
Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, read the article on his phone, per Bosman's followup story. Soon he was in touch with Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, who believed "they had to do something."
Now, barely a week later, Ford and Mellon and two other foundations have "banded together in a highly unusual effort and bought the archive for $30 million."
They have "agreed to donate the archive to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute so that it would be widely accessible to researchers, scholars and the public," Bosman reports. Here's her followup story... And CNN.com has a full report here...
Tepid ratings for Mueller TV coverage
If the Dems were banking on massive viewership of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's televised testimony, they're likely feeling broke today. About 13 million viewers watched the hearing across the six major networks on Wednesday, according to Nielsen. Now, this is just the average of the audience that was watching at home on TV throughout the two hearings, which together lasted a total of seven hours. Not everyone watched the whole time, so the total "reach" was much higher. And not everyone watched on TV, either -- some tuned in to the hearings on radio, social media sites and streaming services. But with all those caveats aside, the Nielsen TV #'s are lower than many people expected.
I think it's a sign of Trump-related fatigue. For comparison's sake, back in June 2017, James Comey's explosive day of testimony drew about 20 million viewers. Here's my full story...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
-- David French's column for TIME: "It was telling that in hours of testimony and sometimes acrimonious cross-examination, Mueller's critics did not undermine a single one of the report's material factual assertions..." (TIME)
-- David A. Graham argues that many journalists are more comfortable with "theater criticism" and "odds-making" than the substance of Mueller's findings and answers... (The Atlantic)
-- Following this stunning WaPo story that described how Trump spoke "in front of a presidential seal doctored to include a Russian symbol," an AV aide for Turning Point USA has been fired... (CNN)
-- More: "Meet the man who created the fake presidential seal — a former Republican fed up with Trump..." (WaPo)
Le Batard and Pitaro "aligned?"
That's the word from an ESPN source following network president Jimmy Pitaro's sit-down with host Dan Le Batard on Thursday. Le Batard condemned ESPN's no-pure-politics policy last week... And he's been walking on eggshells ever since... But the source said the two men had a "positive meeting" where "progress" was made... No word on the exact progress, but Le Batard remains at work and "there's alignment" between the two men, per the source...
--> Jemele Hill's latest for The Atlantic: "ESPN Backs Itself Into a Corner." She writes that "sports take place in the real world, not an alternative universe where Trump's bigotry doesn't exist..."
New polling about Trump's racist tweets
Some newsworthy results from this new Fox News poll:
-- 63% of Americans say Trump's racist tweets "crossed the line."
-- 56% say saying "go back" is a racist thing to say to people of color.
-- Only 34% say Trump respects racial minorities.
Congrats to this year's News & Doc Emmy nominees
"As usual, PBS tops the nominations for the News & Documentary Emmy Awards by a mile, with an ever wider margin over the field than last year. But the big news is how close HBO came to overtaking perennial No. 2 noms-hoarder CBS," Deadline's Erik Pedersen wrote Thursday. Here's the full list of nominees. PBS racked up 47 nomations; CBS had 33; HBO had 32; and CNN's brands had 23...
--> "Also among the nominees was Fox News Channel, which received its first-ever mention," THR notes, for Chris Wallace's exclusive interview with Vladimir Putin...
NBCUniversal plans streaming service launch in April
Frank Pallotta emails: "Our goal is to launch the service next April," NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said during Comcast's earnings call on Thursday. "We have over 500 people working on the service at present."
Burke also talked about one of the service's biggest content additions: "The Office." He said "'The Office' was important to us because, according to Nielsen, the Office is the #1 show on Netflix. I think for competitive reasons, we believe we've got some ideas that are innovative and don't really want to share those until we get right close to launch but we're very pleased to have 'The Office' and very optimistic about our streaming plans at this point..."
| | "Mike Wallace is Here," in theaters
The film is opening in selected theaters on Friday...
Brian Lowry emails: I'm not a big fan of the archive-only documentary, mostly because it precludes having contemporary voices to help put the material in context. So while I found "Mike Wallace is Here" to be an often-fascinating trip through the legendary CBS newsman's career and major interviews, it falls short in director Avi Belkin's stated mission -- namely, connecting the showbiz pizzazz and huge profits that "60 Minutes" generated with the excesses of broadcast journalism today. In one of the most telling sequences, for example, Bill O'Reilly at the height of his Fox News run draws a direct line from Wallace's success to his own. That's a matter worth further discussion, but it's sort of left dangling. Read on...
| | Which studio will land the 'Game of Thrones' creators?
Megan Thomas emails: I suspect this deal will blow all previous big-name creative partnerships out of the water, wherever they land. Variety's Elaine Low reports that "Game of Thrones" creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are shopping "an overall global deal around town," and "the field has narrowed to Netflix, Amazon and Disney..."
| | Lowry's "Once Upon a Time..." review
Brian Lowry emails: Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" weds the writer-director's filmmaking gifts with his love of old Hollywood in this case, revisiting 1969 through a mix of fictional and real characters, whose paths intersect. It's an interesting but not wholly satisfying movie.
Tarantino has implored journalists to reveal little about the movie, which is both understandable and -- in terms of characterizing the project for anyone waffling about seeing it -- less than helpful. Then again, the extent to which "Once Upon a Time" works likely depends on one's appreciation of the period and level of enthusiasm regarding the prospect of another Tarantino film, sight unseen. The easiest form of recommendation thus becomes comparing this to the director's previous efforts -- a litmus test that finds his latest film less fresh, surprising and consistently tension-filled than his very best. More...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE
By Lisa Respers France:
-- Selma Blair's famous friends are helping her in MS battle including feeding her and her young son...
-- Lil Nas X and RM of BTS have dropped a new "Old Town Road" remix titled "Seoul Town Road," virtually ensuring that the country rapper will break the Billboard's Hot 100 record that he recently tied...
-- Even Beyoncé isn't a fan of the scale, but how she's dealt with her post-pregnancy weight is not sitting well with some people...
Interviewing Diamond and Horovitz
Marianne Garvey emails: I interviewed the two remaining Beastie Boys, Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz, in Brooklyn about their new art exhibit and their new sneaker with Adidas. They talked about everything from the passing of Adam Yauch (MCA) to what they do all day now that the group is done. Surf, chill. I was completely starstruck having grown up on their music, but they were sweeter than a cherry pie with Reddi Whip topping. Read on...
FOR THE RECORD, PART SIX
-- Here's the newly announced line-up for the Venice Film Festival... (Venice)
-- Megan Thomas emails: Netflix's "The Laundromat," directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Meryl Streep, and "The Joker," directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix, are among the Oscar-bait films competing in both the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals...
-- The new "Zombieland: Double Tap" trailer is pretty wild... (CNN)
-- Bella Swan's 'Twilight' home is now available for Airbnb rental at $330 a night... (USA Today)
-- Janice Dickinson speaks out about her "epic" settlement from Bill Cosby's insurance company... (Yahoo)
"Will & Grace" coming to an end -- again
Sandra Gonzalez writes: "The cast and producers of the show on Thursday announced the series will be signing off NBC after its upcoming season, airing in 2020..."
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