Oliver Darcy here with two weeks until Election Day... Scroll down below for the latest on Jeffrey Toobin, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and Jeff Bridges. Plus, what Donie O'Sullivan discovered when he visited two QAnon rallies, Fox's endless hyping of a story the network reportedly passed on, Bustle Digital Group's union, and more...

The debate is on

President Trump is attacking the moderator, deriding the debate commission, and complaining about the topics, but he is committing to attend Thursday's presidential debate with Joe Biden. So we now know what the next few days of political news will revolve around.

And we now know what the widely criticized commission will do differently. The members met on Monday and agreed to enforce the rule giving each candidate "two minutes of uninterrupted time" at the start of each round by muting the microphone of the other candidate. Trump interrupted Biden a whole lot more than vice versa, so this tweak may benefit Biden. But...

-- Brian Stelter writes: "This feels like a halfway measure, a predictable compromise by the commission, since there will be muting or other structural changes for the free-flowing portions of the 15-minute rounds. When I was on 'AC360' talking about this, Anderson Cooper pointed out that the speakers in the hall will still be able to hear each other, mic or no mic, so Trump could still try to trample over Biden. David Chalian agreed: 'There's no foolproof way of doing this.'"

-- Per CNN's Kevin Bohn, a source close to the commission says the muting decision was unanimous among its members. "This is not a change to rules but rather a move to promote adherence to rules that have been agreed to by both campaigns," a/k/a the two-minute answering time, the source said. "A change to the rules would have required protracted and ultimately, in our view, unworkable negotiations between the two campaigns."

-- Trump's camp responded with a grievance-filled statement, but most importantly campaign manager Bill Stepien said Trump IS committed to attending the "biased" commission's debate...

-- The NYT's Nick Confessore tweeted: "The idea of muting during the debate, pro or con, is such a perfect miniature of the entire Trump-era debate about how he should be covered and by extension how social platforms should handle him." So true...

Trump's disgusting shots at the moderator

Stelter writes: "He kept up his cynical campaign against NBC's Kristen Welker on Monday, calling her a 'died in the wool' Democrat (nonsense) and demanding to know why she deleted her Twitter account. Allow me to answer that question: She didn't. Here's what happened: After would-have-been moderator Steve Scully claimed he was hacked, Welker temporarily disabled her account to avoid any risks, per her spokesman. It turns out that Scully lied about the hack. She consulted internally, made sure her account was secure, and turned @KWelkerNBC back on. Yet Trump keeps implying there's something sinister going on... He's working the ref and claiming the game is rigged against him..."

>> Charlotte Alter on Sunday's "Reliable Sources:" The president "attacks everybody but he saves his most personal attacks for women and particularly for women journalists..."

TUESDAY PLANNER

Trump will call into "Fox & Friends" at 8am ET. He will also hold an evening rally in Erie, PA, while Biden stays in DE...

Netflix reports earnings after the bell... Frank Pallotta has a curtain-raiser here...

At 6pm ET Stelter is moderating a Center for Communications discussion about "how to spot fake news..." Register here...

"537 Votes" premieres at 9pm on HBO...

Two timely documentaries debut on PBS; scroll down for the details from Brian Lowry...

Toobin suspended

Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended by the New Yorker and is on personal leave from CNN after having exposed himself during a Zoom call with colleagues. Neither news outlet said how long Toobin would be out. But Toobin being benched comes at a pivotal time in American politics, with a controversial Supreme Court confirmation coming up and an election that could end up being challenged on legal grounds. More here in my story with Brian Stelter...

'I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake'

That's what Toobin told Vice's Laura Wagner, who first reported on his suspension. Toobin said he believed he was not on camera, and apologized to his wife, family, friends, and colleagues. "I believed I was not visible on Zoom," he said. "I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video." We asked if he had any further comment for CNN, but he declined...

FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE

-- "A new poll from PRRI documents the extent to which Trump’s most energetic base of support overlaps with those who are most likely to trust Fox News for television news," Philip Bump writes... (WaPo)

-- The WaPo Tuesday A1 is focused on coronavirus. The top story is about the drama unfolding inside the WH coronavirus task force over Dr. Scott Atlas (more on that below)... (WaPo)

-- The state of things: MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace said Monday during a reporter's live shot from Trump's Arizona rally: "I would hand out 'Nicolle Wallace sucks' masks if some of those people behind you would wear them..." (Twitter)

-- Trump's attacks on the press seem to be getting even worse. On Monday, he lashed out at two reporters, calling one "criminal" for not covering the New York Post's sketchy Hunter Biden story... (Mediaite)

Capturing the state of America

The series of banner headlines featured on the Drudge Report Monday offered yet another disturbing portrait of the state of America's political climate in 2020. Matt Drudge's site has been particularly good at conveying the sheer craziness and disconcerting nature of the current news cycle over the past several months. Through his trademark big, bold headlines, he's done an effective job at tying themes together and highlighting the President's transgressions and detachment from reality. In fact, I'd argue he's done a much better job than many news organizations.

>> It appears I'm not the only one with this thought. Tim Miller tweeted, "Am I wrong to say that Drudge has done the best job of capturing Trump’s crazy out of any media outlet for the past 6 months since the face turn?"

Fox reportedly passed on story it's endlessly hyping

A report from Mediaite published Monday caught my eye. The report, from Colby Hall, cited two sources to say that Fox News passed on the Hunter Biden story Rudy Giuliani eventually shopped to the New York Post. The reason? The network, per Hall, wanted time to apply proper vetting. Sounds like Fox is being a responsible news organization, right? Well, no — not when you consider what happened afterward.

The network has hyped the Hunter Biden story with wall-to-wall coverage for days. As I pointed out last week, at one point, the story accounted for nearly 40% of the network's coverage. The progressive Media Matters pointed out that Fox has run more than 100 segments on the story. And it's not just their opinion hosts. Per Media Matters, 46 such segments occurred on Fox's so-called "straight news" shows. Which is to say, Fox doesn't get to wipe its hands clean and pretend that it has taken a higher ground when it is hyping the sketchy story that it passed. If anything, this just makes the network look worse, given the endless coverage it has devoted to the story...

"This is what governance by Fox News looks like"

Renewed attention was placed on Dr. Scott Atlas Monday, after reports about his role inside the WH coronavirus task force and Trump's attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci. "This is what governance by Fox News looks like," Matt Gertz pointed out. "The White House plucked a purveyor of the network’s coronavirus happy talk from its green room, and his view has overwhelmed those who have actual expertise on the subject -- with potentially disastrous results." Gertz is spot on...

>> Meanwhile, it sure seems like Trump does not want Fauci or other top health experts to be on TV contradicting his own Covid denialism. Dana Bash said it very bluntly on CNN Monday night: "Trump doesn't like that Fauci gets good press. He can't stand it."

FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO

-- "For fact checkers, the period from Friday through Sunday was one of the most challenging of Trump's entire presidency," Daniel Dale writes... (CNN)

-- Whitney Phillips writes about how the 2020 election "will bring a hurricane of misinformation," so people need to prepare for the "disaster" ahead... (WIRED)

-- Drawing on a "lengthy series" of conversations with various experts, Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff wrote up 10 tips for news organizations re: covering the election... (CJR)

-- Since Stelter is mostly off today, I'm going to embarrass him for a second and link to this new Forbes profile: Madeline Berg wrote about how he "has gone from media critic to truth crusader..." (Forbes)

Rush Limbaugh: 'The days where I do not think I'm under a death sentence are over'

On his radio show Monday, Rush Limbaugh offered his listeners a candid update on his health. Limbaugh said, "It's tough to realize that the days where I do not think I'm under a death sentence are over." He talked about tweaking his treatment plan and said, "When I last left off, I was rounding second base and I was chugging toward third. The objective was to hit a home run, to get a home run: Go all the way around the bases, go to home plate and beat this. So I was rounding second, on the way to third — and I realized I wasn't gonna make it. I had to turn around and make a mad dash, head back to second base. I slid in there, got into second base safely, and that is where I am."

>> Looking forward: Limbaugh has been the king of conservative talk radio for decades – and thus a key figure in the right-wing media universe. As Brian Rosenwald, who wrote a book on talk radio, tweeted, it's a "major post-election story to watch..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE

-- "Former Fox News anchor Ed Henry is seeking to dismiss a lawsuit filed by two women, including one whose complaints got him terminated in July for alleged sexual misconduct..." (USA Today)

-- Matthew Rosenberg writes about how with encouragement from Trump, Republican voters have taken QAnon mainstream... (NYT)

-- California state Sen. Scott Wiener writes: "What I learned when QAnon came for me..." (NYT)

-- Sarah Perez reports that TikTok's QAnon ban has been "buggy..." (TechCrunch)

-- "Despite efforts by Facebook to ban right-wing militant organizations, a new report published Monday has found that some of those groups continue to organize and run pages," Salvador Hernandez and Ryan Mac report... (BuzzFeed)

-- Meanwhile, Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike is “trying to bring normality to the Internet..." (New Yorker)

Following QAnon

Donie O'Sullivan emails: "I spent the last two weekends going to QAnon events in Arizona and California. There’s a lot to unpack — one event was billed as an anti-pedophilia protest in Hollywood, the other was a gathering of the most devout QAnon peddlers in the country. What both showed me is for many QAnon followers the conspiracy theory is a way to distract from the failures of a President they see as the hero of a fight against an all-encompassing villainy, to elevate themselves by casting his critics and political opponents as those villains, and to not have to pay attention to all of the US' very real problems, like Covid-19 and systemic racism."

>> Check out Donie's digital story and video package here...

YouTube’s QAnon crackdown…

O'Sullivan adds: "The daylong QAnon event I went to in Arizona was streamed live all day on YouTube Saturday — despite the platform's crackdown prohibiting QAnon content. At one point when I opened up the feed YouTube was showing an ad on it for Senate Republicans. The way YouTube ads work mean advertisers often don’t know what kind of videos their ads are showing up next to."

FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR

-- "Employees of The Sacramento Bee and their union say they are fighting an effort by owner McClatchy to base employee performance reviews on the popularity of their stories as measured by clicks..." (Sacramento Biz Journal)

-- That proposal didn't go over well in the journalism community. Noah Shachtman wrote, "We tried some version of this experiment at @WIRED for a while. It was bad for the company, and bad for the writers..." (Twitter)

-- And former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao weighed in: "The most frustrating thing about the internet is that people just don't seem to learn anything from its failures and keep making the same mistakes again and again..." (Twitter)

-- NYT's story about a "pay-for-play network" of partisan local news sites continued to get attention on Monday. Mathew Ingram tweeted a smart point: "Maybe you thought all those local news 'deserts' would just remain deserts, but when other journalistic lifeforms disappear, strange and desperate creatures often emerge to take their place..." (NYT)

-- WSJ is also out with a new story about networks of slanted sites that are "playing down their partisan interests and often obscuring their donors..." (WSJ)

-- CNN SVP Mitra Kalita will join The Philadelphia Inquirer’s board on Nov. 15... (Inquirer)

Bustle Digital Group unionizes

Kerry Flynn emails: "Staffers at Bustle Digital Group announced their intention to unionize Monday, the latest in a massive wave of efforts over the past few years. WGAE Executive Director Lowell Peterson told me many of the concerns BDG staffers identified while organizing -- fair and transparent compensation, diversity and inclusion commitments, clear editorial independence and standards -- are familiar. But Peterson said the solidarity among the 205 staffers in the bargaining unit is 'the key to successful negotiation.'"

>> Flynn adds: "Since 2013, CEO Bryan Goldberg has grown Bustle into a powerful portfolio of media brands. But that hasn't come without stress and unease among staffers. Earlier this year, BDG laid off two dozen staffers and shut down The Outline. And back in 2018, Goldberg was accused of union busting when BDG acquired Mic.

Peter Kafka tweeted, 'You're unlikely to find a digital media owner less amenable to unions than Bryan Goldberg. (At least in public.) But! At this point many digital media owner/operators have accepted that union shops are a reality/cost of doing business. So! This is worth watching.' A BDG spox did not respond to my request for comment..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE

-- Disney shared a "special look" at Season 2 of "The Mandalorian" during "MNF" halftime on Monday... (YouTube)

-- In other Disney news, "the new 'Supermarket Sweep' managed to weave its way through the competitive aisles of Sunday night to emerge with a decent debut rating..." (Variety)

-- "Hollywood’s revolving door keeps spinning for top-level execs," John Koblin writes: "Channing Dungey will replace the longtime executive Peter Roth to become the chairwoman of the Warner Bros. television studio early next year," WarnerMedia (CNN's parent) announced Monday... (NYT)

-- AT&T CEO John Stankey spoke at the WSJ Live conference and "praised the changes made by WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar..." (Variety)

-- Lucas Shaw's POV: "Hollywood is a mess right now. All four of the most powerful companies have restructured entertainment operations at least once in the last year, and pretty much nobody feels secure in their job..." (Bloomberg)

Jeff Bridges reveals cancer diagnosis

Jeff Bridges on Monday revealed that he has been diagnosed with lymphoma. Bridges said he has "a great team of doctors, and the prognosis is good." He said he'd start treatment and keep everyone updated on his recovery. "I’m profoundly grateful for the love and support from my family and friends," Bridges wrote. "Thank you for your prayers and well wishes."

>> Bridges added to his Twitter thread announcing his diagnosis: "While I have you, please remember to go vote. Because we are all in this together..."

>> Bridges' partners in the production of "The Old Man," a forthcoming drama series for FX and Hulu, said in a statement Monday night: “Our thoughts go out to Jeff and his family during this challenging time and they have our love and support. We wish him a safe and full recovery. And, as Jeff always says, 'We are all in this together.' Jeff, we are all in this together with you."