Welcome to Wednesday! Here's the latest on The AP, VOA, The Atlantic, PBS, YouTube, Disney, BuzzFeed, and more...
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Out with the oldspeak. In with President Trump's newspeak – or else.
Yesterday the White House blocked an Associated Press reporter from attending an Oval Office Q&A with Trump and Elon Musk because the newswire hasn’t changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to "Gulf of America." The restriction "plainly violates the First Amendment," AP executive editor Julie Pace said, signaling a likely legal challenge.
Later in the day, "a second AP reporter was barred from a late-evening event in the White House Diplomatic Room," the agency's media reporter David Bauder wrote overnight. So this was not just a one-off. It is a standoff.
And it's part of a much larger weaponization of language to advance the Trump administration's agenda.
The AP supplies information to newsrooms across the country, and its stylebook is an industry standard, so the White House action was also a warning to the wider world of media and tech.
The president evidently wants journalists to obey his guidance; repeat his words; follow his rules. Outlets that don't fall in line might lose access.
Overnight I heard from editors and reporters who wondered if the administration will next penalize news outlets that acknowledge the existence of transgender people or cite data from purged government databases. Let's zoom out...
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Trump's "first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak," the NYT's Shawn McCreesh wrote yesterday, referencing George Orwell's "1984."
"In its place is a new vocabulary... containing many curious uses of doublespeak."
McCreesh pointed out that Trump said he "stopped government censorship" while simultaneously policing language around gender, diversity and immigration.
In the past few weeks the administration has deleted the White House’s Spanish-language website; stated that the government recognizes "only two genders;" and directed agencies to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts. As a result of Trump's edicts, employees have been fired; websites have been removed; and scientific papers have been withdrawn.
Language is at the heart of this overhaul. At agencies like the National Science Foundation, workers reviewed active projects with a list of keywords "to determine if they include activities that violate executive orders" issued by Trump. "The words triggering NSF reviews provide a picture of the sievelike net being cast over the typically politically independent scientific enterprise, including words like 'trauma,' 'barriers,' 'equity' and “excluded,'" the Washington Post reported last week.
In "1984," Syme tells Winston that "the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought." I know Trump loyalists would argue that they're doing the opposite, and making it easier to think freely, by reversing progressives' language-policing. I'll leave that debate to others. But I want to recognize that language – from the meaning of the word "censorship" to the name of the Gulf – is at the very heart of Trump's scorched-earth approach to governance, and right now, he's winning the war of words.
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The latest on The AP dispute |
Yesterday Trump triumphantly posted a Google Maps screenshot showing that Google has adopted his name change (for users in the U.S.). He wants The AP to do the same.
While he held forth in the Oval Office in a very newsy Q&A featuring Elon Musk, The AP released a statement saying it had been barred from participating. The AP, because it represents so many news outlets, is typically always part of the press pool. But the wire service had been told earlier in the day that – in Pace's words – "if AP did not align its editorial standards" with Trump's Gulf of America order, it would be blocked at the door. And it was. CNN's Hadas Gold has more here.
"The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors' decisions," the White House Correspondents' Association said, calling the action against the AP "unacceptable." But it happened a second time last night when Trump welcomed Marc Fogel home from Russia in front of the press pool. Notably, on both occasions, the AP's photographer was allowed in. Only the reporter was barred.
The AP's stylebook guidance about the Gulf is transparent and nuanced. The news outlet isn't ignoring Trump's renaming, it is simply recognizing that "Trump's order only carries authority within the United States;" thus its stories still say Gulf of Mexico but do acknowledge "the new name Trump has chosen."
Maybe this will turn out to be an isolated incident. But it doesn't feel that way. As Jonah Goldberg wrote back in 2021, "if you control the language, you control the argument, which means you control how reality is perceived."
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Four more notes about language |
>> The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression's statement: "Punishing journalists for not adopting state-mandated terminology is an alarming attack on press freedom. That's viewpoint discrimination, and it's unconstitutional."
>> Words matter. The other day Musk said "FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants." The "luxury" depiction was strenuously denied by city officials (and defied common sense). But when four FEMA employees were fired over the (properly-allocated) funding, a Homeland Security spokesperson called the four people "deep-state activists," recasting the civil servants as enemies of MAGA. Look around, and you'll see these linguistic battles being waged all over the place.
>> Yesterday Musk conceded that "some of the things that I say will be incorrect" when a reporter asked about last month's "condoms in Gaza" nonsense.
>> Carlos Lozada's latest NYT column is all about language. He says "the second Trump administration is delivering a clear message: The United States is full of the wrong kind of people..."
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Political media notes and quotes |
>> This is a real headline: "Trump envoy accuses VOA reporter of 'treasonous' behavior for reporting a quote critical of the president." (Mediaite)
>> The envoy was Richard Grenell, who was named the interim exec director of the Kennedy Center earlier this week, "leaving its future uncertain." (Wash Post)
>> Speaking of the Kennedy Center upheaval: "Trump now appears to be setting his sights on the country’s cultural landscape..." (The Hill)
>> While Trump allies are making all sorts of transparency pledges, "the Trump White House will not release visitor logs." (Wash Examiner)
>> "Trump’s aid cuts will lead to a surge in propaganda and misinformation, say press freedom groups." (The Guardian)
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Karoline Leavitt will hold a WH press briefing at 1 p.m. ET.
Reddit reports earnings after the bell.
The NHL's rebranded All-Star weekend, now known as the Four Nations Face-Off, starts tonight with Canada vs. Sweden on TNT.
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The Atlantic Festival is coming to NYC |
The Atlantic Festival, the publication's biggest annual event, has been a mainstay in Washington for 16 years. But this year it is moving to New York City for the first time. The festival will take place at the Perelman Performing Arts Center and other venues TBA in mid-September.
"We'd been thinking about bringing The Atlantic Festival to New York for a little while, in part because we have so many subscribers there, and in part because we're half-headquartered in New York now," editor Jeffrey Goldberg tells me. "Mainly, though, we've been making a big push to expand our culture coverage, and I think the culture center of the world is ready for us."
>> Fret not, Washingtonians: The Atlantic is also holding a one-day festival event in DC, On the Future, on April 29.
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'Beware the internet mob' |
That's always good advice, and especially in the case that Isaac Saul wrote about for The Free Press. He took a step back and assessed last week's sound and fury over USAID allegedly possibly funding Politico. The line items were just subscriptions. The outrage-machine lie "epitomizes everything that’s wrong with our current media environment," Saul wrote...
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>> CNN vet Kyle Blaine is joining Politico as the executive producer of Playbook. (Politico)
>> "Public broadcaster PBS is closing its office of diversity, equity and inclusion" in response to Trump's executive order. (The Hill)
>> Will NPR do the same? NPR "also has a diversity office and dedicated DEI employees. It has not responded to requests for comment about whether it is considering closing the office." (NPR)
>> "Disney is adjusting the content warnings ahead of some of its old movies... amid an overall shift in DEI strategy at the company." (Variety)
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I'll admit it: I really enjoy Jonah Peretti's manifestos. Lots of people have lots of opinions about what he's done with BuzzFeed, but the man knows how to write a memo. His latest is "The Anti-SNARF Manifesto."
SNARF = Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. Here's how he explains it:
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"SNARF is the kind of content that evolves when a platform asks an AI to maximize usage," he writes. "Content creators need to please the AI algorithms or they become irrelevant. Millions of creators make SNARF content to stay in the feed and earn a living."
Peretti argues that "much of our society, culture, and politics are downstream from big tech’s global SNARF machines." Even in news: The stories "that break through aren’t the most important stories, but rather the stories that can be shaped into SNARF." He says we're all consuming an "endless stream of addictive content that leaves everyone feeling depressed, scared, and dissatisfied."
This memo is the setup for a startup pitch – specifically a new social media platform called BF Island. Axios reporters Sara Fischer and Kerry Flynn have details here. Whether it works or not, his depiction of the current internet is worth contemplating...
>> CNN Business editor David Goldman's two cents after reading about SNARF: "I think important stories DO break through if they're framed correctly. We can't keep telling people 'read/watch/listen to this boring stuff.' It's our job to make it interesting. I think the SNARF formula is broadly correct, but as long as we're backing up the journalism and putting it into correct context, I think presenting news in ways that matches what we know about human behavior is smart, not evil..."
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>> "Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States." (WIRED)
>> Allison Morrow's latest: "What Elon Musk’s $100 billion bid for OpenAI is really all about." (CNN)
>> YouTube CEO Neal Mohan's annual letter on Tuesday included a surprise stat: TV screens have overtaken mobile devices as the "primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S." (THR)
>> Mohan's other main points: "YouTube is the epicenter of culture," "YouTubers are becoming the startups of Hollywood," and "AI will make it easier to create and enhance the YouTube experience for everyone." (YouTube's blog)
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Paul McCartney's surprise set |
"It was announced suddenly at noon, with no advance warning," Variety's Jem Aswad writes. "PAUL McCARTNEY ROCKS THE BOWERY" would start at 6:30, with tickets on sale only in person at the Bowery Ballroom box office. "For the lucky people in the room" – just about 575 people – "it was a night worth screaming over," he writes in this concert review.
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>> Mariah Carey, Oasis, Outkast, and The White Stripes are among this year's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Nominees. (THR)
>> Final #'s are in, and Fox's Super Bowl telecast registered a "3% increase over last year’s record-breaking game on CBS," Jordan Valinsky reports. (CNN)
>> Following up on our item about Kanye West's hate speech yesterday: The website that was selling his T-shirts embossed with swastikas "has been deactivated by Shopify." (CNN)
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