Good morning. Here's the latest on the "Trump reaction," Meta, The Verge, Andrew Ross Sorkin, "60 Minutes," Kai Cenat, "Wicked," and more... |
What's a media outlet supposed to do when its longtime host is picked to run the Pentagon, and then a series of eyebrow-raising news stories trigger doubts about his appointment? If you're Fox News, evidently, you just pretend the stories don't exist.
Fox, which employed Pete Hegseth for a decade, has not covered the past week's controversies involving Donald Trump's nominee for defense secretary at all, according to SnapStream and TVEyes database searches. The omission is potentially significant because Fox is the top TV outlet for Republicans, and Hegseth's confirmation hinges on Republican senators.
On Fox, Hegseth's former colleagues aren't raising alarms about the allegations or defending him from the charges – they're just not talking about the issue at all. On Monday's edition of "Special Report," Chad Pergram said Hegseth's confirmation "could be a problem" because "he faces problems about his personal conduct." What problems? Pergram didn't say. Neither has any other Fox show – there have been no on-air or online mentions of the recent revelations by The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Both of those stories are based on contemporaneous emails. I asked if Fox management knew about the emails, and a Fox spokesperson said no.
|
'I'm not going to dignify that' |
What does it look like when a media outlet takes the controversy seriously? It looks like Monday's edition of the "CBS Evening News." Correspondent Nancy Cordes said CBS had confirmed The New Yorker's scoop that Hegseth was "forced to step down" from Concerned Veterans for America after staffers accused him of "financial mismanagement, sexual misconduct and repeated intoxication."
The Cordes report showed her colleague Nikole Killion asking Hegseth during a Capitol Hill hallway sprint, "Were you ever drunk while traveling on the job?" Hegseth replied, "I'm not going to dignify that with a response." Fox's "Special Report" showed that exchange, but didn't include any of the context. Here's my full story about Fox's lack of coverage.
|
Non-denial from Hegseth camp |
Hegseth's alleged behavior, "described by the people that he worked with, really was the kind of behavior that would get anybody fired in almost any office in America," The New Yorker's Jane Mayer said on "Anderson Cooper 360" last night. She noted that Hegseth's lawyer "had two days to respond to the allegations in this story" and "did not deny a single one of them." After publication, though, Hegseth's friend and associate Sean Parnell said,"I was there for most of those alleged incidents, and this stuff is just complete fabrications."
|
Republican senators "largely steered clear of the allegations" yesterday, CNN's Manu Raju reported from Capitol Hill. Zachary Cohen pointed out that multiple senators said the scandals enveloping Hegseth did not come up during their meetings with the nominee. Cohen asked: "This is the guy who will potentially oversee the U.S. Military … and GOP senators met with him today and didn't even ask?" This incuriosity is of a piece with Fox ignoring the issue.
>> This morning on CNN Trump senior advisor Jason Miller told Kasie Hunt that "when it comes to Pete Hegseth, there aren't any concerns and we feel very good about his positioning for being confirmed by the Senate."
|
|
|
George Packer's assessment |
In January's issue of The Atlantic, George Packer tries to coin a name for this era, and I think he succeeds. "We are living in the Trump Reaction," he writes, for all the reasons explained here. This paragraph is of note:
"Journalists will have a special challenge in the era of the Trump Reaction. We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds. Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth." So "instead of chasing phantoms on social media, journalists would make better use of our dwindling resources, and perhaps regain some of the public's trust, by doing what we've done in every age: expose the lies and graft of oligarchs and plutocrats, and tell the stories of people who can't speak for themselves."
|
|
|
Political media notes and quotes |
>> "The expert class is failing, and so is Biden's presidency," Nate Silver writes: "Hunter Biden's pardon is another log on the fire."
>> During a Monday segment labeled "AMERICA IS SICK OF LYING POLITICIANS," incoming press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox's Jesse Watters that Trump is uniquely authentic: "He tells the truth."
>> Speaking of Leavitt, Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman spotlights her writing history: Two years ago she "was putting her name on a series of op-eds in right-wing publications lauding a fugitive Chinese mogul..."
>> "2,000 Mules – a movie full of debunked and bogus claims – is a central part of the election denialism movement. Now – two and a half years after its release – its creator Dinesh D'Souza is admitting the movie got some things wrong," Donie O'Sullivan reports...
|
|
|
'Meta says it’s mistakenly moderating too much' |
That's the headline on Alex Heath's new story for The Verge. Meta exec Nick Clegg told reporters on a press call that Meta's moderation error rates "are still too high," which "gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable." Clegg said "too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly."
>> This morning, Meta published a blog post about "what we saw on our platforms during 2024's global elections." Among the takeaways: GenAI-created deepfakes and AI-enabled disinfo campaigns "did not materialize in a significant way."
|
|
|
Today's new nonfiction releases |
Patrick Hutchison's Outside Magazine piece about a fixer-upper in the Pacific Northwest becomes a love story to place and possibilities titled "CABIN: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman." Also new on store shelves today: Catherine Nixey's "Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God," Kathy Willis's "Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing, and Touching Plants is Good for Our Health," and neurology professor Guy Leschziner's "Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human."
|
|
|
Getting ready for the DealBook Summit
|
Liam Reilly writes: One of the NYT's most exclusive events of the year, Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook Summit, is coming up on Wednesday. Interviewees include Jeff Bezos (what will he say about the Washington Post?), Sam Altman, Alex Cooper, and Sundar Pichai.
Sorkin told me "we're prepping for a big day of interviews with some of the most consequential individuals of the moment. There's so much news dropping right now that touches the people we'll be interviewing, almost by the minute, that I keep adding new questions to ask and crossing off others!"
|
|
|
>> Here's a hopeful note: A new study from the Pew Research Center finds that "most Americans say criticism from news organizations keeps political leaders from doing things they shouldn't." (Pew)
>> The Verge is "launching a sitewide subscription" today. (Semafor)
>> TelevisaUnivision will undergo "a sweeping reorganization this week under new CEO Daniel Alegre, as the Spanish-language media giant seeks to turn around its business in a challenging media environment," Alex Weprin reports. (THR)
>> Staffers at The Guardian and Observer are careening toward a strike starting on Wednesday. (Press Gazette)
|
|
|
Roy Cohn, from the CBS vault |
Today's new episode of "60 Minutes: A Second Look," a podcast that mines the newsmag's archive and features unaired audio of newsmakers, is all about Roy Cohn. "Much has been written about Cohn's influence on the young Trump and by listening through 60 Minutes' two interviews with Cohn, you can hear why the notorious lawyer is the subject of so much fascination," CBS says. "In never before broadcast conversations with Mike Wallace and Morley Safer, Cohn explains his fighter mentality and obsession with winning at all costs..."
|
|
|
>> Sam Biddle asked more than three dozen tech/data companies if they’ll provide the Trump administration with personal data to help with mass deportations, and "only four were willing to comment." (The Intercept)
>> Kai Cenat "broke the record for the highest subscriber count on Amazon's Twitch during a nonstop live stream for the entire month of November," Zach Vallese reports. Cenat doubled the previous record and earned about $3.6 million... (CNBC)
>> "TikTok's second Black Friday in the U.S. shows it's starting to drive real holiday spending, even though it remains a small fraction of overall e-commerce activity," Dan Whateley reports. (Business Insider)
>> Helpful: Ina Fried explains exactly what kinds of data OpenAI has on you. (Axios)
|
|
|
Today on the MisinfoNation beat: Apparently a totally made-up story with my CNN byline is making the rounds. The story is titled "Elon Musk Considers Melting Down Statue of Liberty to Make Series of Limited Edition Cyber Trucks." It started as satire, but then jumped to various social networks without any satirical label, and it was flagged as part of Meta's efforts to reduce misinfo. So PolitiFact stepped in on Monday and confirmed that it's an obvious fake. I appreciate fact-checkers in these instances, but I also feel like they're holding up a cheap umbrella in the middle of a monsoon, and everyone's still soaked...
|
|
|
Maybe Twitter was a bargain? |
Chew on this: "When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, it was panned as one of the worst tech acquisitions in history. Two years, an election, and a generative-AI boom later, it's starting to look like more of a bargain," Business Insider's Hasan Chowdhury and Robert Scammell write. They note that Musk is "set to wield considerable influence in the Trump administration after using X to support the former president's reelection" and that X has been a "lucrative source of training data" for xAI...
|
A reason for journalists to quit X? |
The European Federation of Journalists, which bills itself as "the largest journalists organization in Europe," says it will stop posting on Musk's X starting on Jan. 20. The rationale is what I wanted to flag: "We cannot continue to participate in the social network feed of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists," the group's president Maja Sever says...
|
|
|
>> "Wicked" has "another sales record to add to its growing list: The film soundtrack has debuted at the #2 spot on the Billboard 200 chart, the highest debut for a big-screen adaptation of a stage musical ever," Greg Evans reports. (Deadline)
>> Speaking of: Seth Abramovitch thinks "Wicked" could nab best picture at the Oscars. (THR)
>> Mubi is launching a "global publishing arm dedicated to cinema and the arts set to publish across a range of formats and genres.” (Variety)
>> NYMag's newest cover package, "39 Reasons to Love New York Right Now," includes "the magic of 'SNL' at 50." (NYMag)
>> "How Juice WRLD Arrived in Fortnite:" An avatar "for the singing rapper, who died in 2019, appeared at a special event in the video game to debut a new song alongside Eminem, Snoop Dogg and Ice Spice," Ben Sisario reports. (NYT)
|
|
|
|
® © 2024 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
1050 Techwood Drive NW, Atlanta, GA 30318 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
