EXEC SUMMARY: Welcome to the start of a new workweek... Here's a first look at Tavi Gevinson's NYMag cover, Jane Mayer's visit with James Murdoch, Lester Holt's trip to Alaska, and much more...
"Locked and loaded," again | | In August 2017 President Trump said "military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely." In April 2018 Nikki Haley, relaying a quote from Trump, said the United States is "locked and loaded" in the event of another Syrian chemical weapons strike. In June of this year he used slightly different language, "cocked and loaded," while warning Iran that the U.S. came close to striking back for the downing of a drone. And on Sunday Trump said "locked and loaded" again, this time in response to an attack on a Saudi Arabian oil field.
With administration officials blaming Iran for the attack, Trump indicated that his next move is, at least in part, up to Saudi: "There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification," he tweeted, "but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!" His comments are leading most major news websites right now...
Trump versus his own aides, again
In another eyebrow-raising Sunday evening tweet, Trump said "the Fake News is saying that I am willing to meet with Iran, 'No Conditions.' That is an incorrect statement (as usual!)."
But that's exactly what his administration has been saying. Mike Pompeo just a few days ago: "The president's made very clear, he is prepared to meet with no preconditions." Steven Mnuchin: "He is happy to take a meeting with no preconditions." And Trump himself, on more than one occasion, has said "no pre-conditions..."
Three big books this week
"The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation" by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly. Their first TV interview will be on the third hour of "Today" Monday morning. Their book excerpt in the NYT's Sunday Review section sparked outrage, criticism, presidential tweets, an editors' note, and more...
"Crossfire Hurricane: Inside Donald Trump's War on the FBI" by Josh Campbell... The CNN analyst will be on "New Day" Monday morning...
"Permanent Record" by Edward Snowden. He will be on "CBS This Morning" and "The 11th Hour with Brian Williams" on Monday...
Week ahead calendar
Monday evening: "Dancing With the Stars," with Sean Spicer, debuts on ABC.
Monday: "A Little Late With Lilly Singh" premieres on NBC.
Tuesday: The Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference gets underway... Randall Stephenson, David Zaslav, Bob Bakish, Charlie Ergen and Tom Rutledge all speak on Tuesday...
Tuesday: Facebook and Twitter execs speak with the FEC about disinformation, part of a day-long event.
Wednesday: A Senate committee speaks with Facebook, Twitter and Google execs about extremism and mass violence online.
Thursday: Apple launches Apple Arcade, the tech giant's new game subscription service.
Friday: "Where's My Roy Cohn?" opens in limited release.
Friday: iPhone 11 goes on sale in the United States.
Sunday: The Emmys!
SNEAK PEEK
James Murdoch speaks to Jane Mayer
I hear The New Yorker's Jane Mayer recently visited the new HQ of James Murdoch's investment firm Lupa Systems... She has a Talk of the Town item with fresh quotes from Murdoch coming out on Monday morning... While he was clearly reticent to talk about his relationship with father Rupert, he told Mayer they saw each other at a recent board meeting, but there are periods of time when they "do not" talk. The story will be live at this link at 5 a.m. ET Monday...
FIRST LOOK
"What Instagram Did to Me"
Tavi Gevinson has the cover story in this week's NYMag... Here's the cover: | | In the story, Gevinson asks who she would be and where she would be without Instagram. The piece is billed as "confessions from inside the algorithm," and it's fascinating... It'll be up on NYMag.com in the morning...
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- Speaking of NYMag, "CBS Sunday Morning" profiled the publication and new EIC David Haskell on Sunday... (CBS)
-- Slate is introducing "Who Counts?," a new effort to examine voter suppression and the right to vote. "We need readers to help us," Dahlia Lithwick told me... (Slate)
-- "Advertisers shelled out almost $100 million on U.S. TV commercials in and around the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup, exceeding expectations," Alexandra Bruell and Rachel Bachman report... (WSJ)
Covering Climate Now
Why are you seeing so much news coverage of the climate crisis this month? This is one of the reasons: More than 250 news outlets around the world have committed to Covering Climate Now, an initiative to provide focused coverage of the climate crisis in print, on air and online. Participating news outlets are running stories in the run-up to the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23. Here are the details, plus my podcast interview with CJR editor Kyle Pope...
Lester Holt's trip to Alaska
"NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt flew to Alaska over the weekend... His report, airing on Monday's "Nightly," is part of the network's week-long Climate in Crisis series. | | Holt was in Portage Valley in Alaska, "right near the spot where he visited with his family as a young boy in 1970," per NBC PR. "Back then, you could see Portage Glacier from the shore." The first photo, above, shows Holt at the shore... The second photo is from a boat approximately three miles into the lake -- "that's how far you need to travel now to see the glacier."
Global Goal wants to create a new Live Aid
Cristina Alesci's Sunday night scoop for CNN: "Thirty-five years after Live Aid rocked the world, a coalition of nonprofits, CEOs and government leaders is reviving a global effort to unite the world through music. Dubbed 'Global Goal Live: The Possible Dream,' the event, which is presented by nonprofit Global Citizen, aims to be the largest live broadcast in 'cause event history,' according to a press release from organizers." It will be a 10-hour performance spanning five continents on Sept. 26, 2020... Teneo has helped "secure top entertainers, lead production partner and promoter Live Nation, corporate chieftains and government leaders to bring the event to life." More...
HIGHLIGHTS FROM SUNDAY'S "RELIABLE SOURCES"
Impeachment: The process vs. the substance
I opened Sunday's "Reliable Sources" by saying that Trump is winning the messaging war about impeachment, even while getting so many facts wrong. Because the Democrats are so divided, and the Dems' messaging is so mixed, I said the news coverage is focusing on the process -- not the long list of potentially impeachable conduct.
In our "A block" discussion, Susan Glasser said reporters are having a "medieval, ecclesiastical debate" on impeachment because Dems "have made the story into their own inability to understand how to counter Trump." Alexandra Rojas said Democrats need to "do better and step up, and I think they still have an opportunity to do that..."
CNN's Jim Sciutto on his Russian spy scoop
I asked Jim Sciutto for the backstory to his recent scoop about one of America's top spies inside the Russian government being exfiltrated from Russia. Key point: Sciutto said "viewers oftentimes don't realize that, that there are these weeks of conversations about what to say and what not to say in these sensitive stories..."
And speaking of that...
Inside the NYT investigation that took down Weinstein | | Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey shared new revelations from their new book "She Said." Twohey said the book brings "secretive aspects" of the Harvey Weinstein investigation on the record for the first time. And Kantor said she wants people to know that "even at a time when everything seems so stuck... like the very notion of truth is collapsing, facts can cause social change. Carefully documented facts can really trigger empathy and compassion and action."
More notes and quotes
-- Krystal Ball talked about why she called out Rush Limbaugh's recent smear against her: "Slut-shaming is a very common tactic that is employed against women to sort of shut down their voices, to make them irrelevant, to say that they can't be leaders…. and I didn't want this particular incident to go unchallenged."
-- Barry Glassner, author of "The Culture of Fear," said news outlets both stoke peoples' fears and "correct exaggerated fears and scares." Trump, he said, is the fear-monger-in-chief...
-- Listen to the audio edition of the show via Apple Podcasts or your preferred pod app... Or watch the video clips on CNN.com...
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- New reporting from Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Steve Eder: "All was quiet at the Birmingham weather office. Until a Trump forecast brought a storm..." (NYT)
-- This year's Online Journalism Awards winners include the WSJ, ProPublica, Honolulu Civil Beat and The Pudding... (ONA)
Snapchat's political move
Kerry Flynn writes: Snapchat launched a publicly accessible archive for political and issue-based Snap ads. Facebook and Twitter created similar systems last year in the wake of Russian-linked disinformation campaigns on their platforms during the 2016 US presidential election. Snap said an audit of its own ad sales did not find evidence of election interference, but it's a good move for Snapchat to release a system anyway as lawmakers push for more transparency from platforms. And of course the archive now allows anyone to analyze ad spend during the 2020 election and look for any interesting trends. More here on Snapchat as a campaign tool...
"RBG" wins the Emmy
"Add an Emmy to the growing list of acclaim for the documentary on the life and career of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 'RBG,'" IndieWire's Steve Greene wrote over the weekend.
Julie Cohen and Betsy West's project for CNN Films took home the Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking at the Creative Arts Emmy ceremony. "In a rare category tie, Rudy Valdez's HBO film 'The Sentence,' which focuses on federal and state mandatory minimum sentencing laws, also shared the victory in this year's category," Greene wrote.
Full list of Creative Arts winners
Via Variety, here's the list of Saturday night's winners... And here's the still-being-updated list of Sunday night's winners...
>> CNN earned a total of five Emmys: Two for the final season of "Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown," two for "United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell," and one for "RBG..."
| | RIP Ric Ocasek
Here's the latest from CNN: "Ric Ocasek, lead singer of the new wave rock band The Cars, died Sunday in New York City, police said. He was 75."
People have been sharing their memories and tributes all evening long on social media. THR noted that "Ocasek and The Cars' video for 'You Might Think' was instrumental in MTV's early success. It also won the first-ever MTV Video Music Award for video of the year in 1984..."
| | "Hustlers" beats box office expectations
Frank Pallotta writes: "Hustlers" didn't take the top spot at the box office, but it was arguably the weekend's biggest winner. The Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu film made an estimated $33 million at the North American box office this weekend. That was enough to give the film the No. 2 spot, but more importantly than the film's ranking at the box office, "Hustlers" exceeded industry expectations and its budget. It was projected to make roughly $25 million, according to the film's studio STXfilms. Its production budget was just $20 million. Details here...
>> Plus: Pallotta notes that the film's strong performance is also a big win for original films at the box office...
A big hit and a big miss for Warner Bros.
More box office news from Pallotta's story: "It: Chapter Two" took the No. 1 spot and made an estimated $40.7 million in its second weekend. The Warner Bros. horror film based on the Stephen King bestseller has so far made $323 million worldwide. But Warner's latest film, "The Goldfinch," flopped at the box office. The film, which is based on the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, made only $2.6 million. It was widely panned by critics, with a measly 25% score on Rotten Tomatoes...
"Jojo Rabbit" wins top award at Toronto International Film Festival
Brian Lowry writes: Despite a mixed critical response to "Jojo Rabbit," the film — which features director Taika Waititi as a buffoonish version of Hitler — took the top prize in Toronto, which historically presages at least an Oscar nomination. It's the second surprising choice out of a recent festival, following "Joker's" win in Venice, which is probably good news, primarily, for all the outlets that feed off "For your consideration" ads...
>> More via THR: "The first runner-up for TIFF's top award was Noah Baumbach's 'Marriage Story,' followed by Bong Joon-ho's 'Parasite...'"
"Country Music" begins on PBS
Brian Lowry writes: Ken Burns' documentaries are always classy and meticulously researched affairs, connecting the topic to the larger rubric of American history. "Country Music" — an eight-part, 16-hour epic for PBS — certainly falls within those parameters, but still registers on the lower scale of Burns' work, especially compared to his great war trilogy.
>> Here's a second opinion: John Avlon viewed the doc more favorably...
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- On Sunday's "SOTU" with Jake Tapper, Andrew Yang responded to racist comments made by new "SNL" hire Shane Gillis by "saying he's faced Anti-Asian racism throughout his upbringing but also that 'our country has become excessively punitive and vindictive about remarks that people find offensive or racist...'" (CNN)
-- "Director James Gunn has revealed the full list of super villains and anti-heroes cast in his upcoming 'The Suicide Squad' movie. Gunn said Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn will be back in the 2021 film along with Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, Joel Kinnaman as Colonel Rick Flag and Viola Davis, who is also reprising her role as Amanda Waller..." (CNN)
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