Welcome to Wednesday! Here are some scoops about Politico and Truth Social, plus the latest on the World Series, the Washington Post, YouTube, Jon Lemire, Andrea Mitchell, and more... |
"Jump ball." "Coin flip." "Toss up." "Dead heat." "Deadlocked."
On TV and online, political reporters and analysts are running out of ways to say the presidential race is effectively tied. "I spend more hours figuring out ways to say this race is close than New Yorkers spend in traffic," CNN senior political data reporter Harry Enten quipped.
Journalists are typically most comfortable talking about what they do know. But right now the story is what isn't knowable. In this final week of the campaign, the most important thing for the news media to communicate is uncertainty.
"The most important thing to do is emphasize the uncertainty of the race," ABC News chief DC correspondent Jon Karl told me. "We have a responsibility to not just say what the polls show but explain what they don't and can't," his colleague Rick Klein, ABC's DC bureau chief and VP, added. "Any suggestion that the outcome of this election is certain is simply not borne out by the numbers." But some partisan media outlets are acting awfully certain...
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The dangers of over-confidence |
On the right, Donald Trump and many of his right-wing media allies are expressing unbridled confidence that the Republican is going to win next week. Fox News stars are already talking on air about how Trump will implement his second-term agenda.
"There is a real danger when media echo chambers falsely and knowingly tell half the country that their candidate is going to win," conservative political columnist Matt Lewis wrote on Monday. "People wake up to the results the morning after the election, and are incredulous."
It happened in 2020 and it might be happening again now. CNN's Donie O'Sullivan recently spent 24 hours soaking up pro-Trump media sources and concluded that "all these outlets are claiming there's no way Trump can lose if the election is fair." At the same time, he said, "MAGA media is telling their audience to expect the election to be stolen." Watch his report here.
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Avoiding Election Week surprises |
Conversely, consumers of left-leaning media outlets may find it hard to accept that Trump has a real shot at regaining power. While MSNBC hosts are not exuding certainty about a victory for Kamala Harris, they're also not getting ahead of themselves the way Fox and its counterparts are. Trump is portrayed as so aberrant and dangerous that liberal viewers are left wondering, as former first lady Michelle Obama recently said, "Why is this race even close?"
Answering that question is a key responsibility for reliable news sources. (MSNBC's Chris Hayes, incidentally, had a great monologue last night with one of the answers – he conveyed how incumbent parties around the world are getting punished by voters for post-pandemic inflation.)
So here's my new CNN.com column about this topic.
Anthony Salvanto, the
CBS News executive director of elections and surveys, told me his goal in every election "is to give understanding of why voters might break one way or the other. Viewers won't be surprised if they understand why what happens, happens."
>> BTW, Salvanto played up one other word that's going to be critical next week: patience. "It may take time to get results," he said, "so it's important to convey that we're being patient in our coverage."
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Politico hires first executive producer |
Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg/Getty Images |
This morning, Politico is appointing Zach Warmbrodt, currently the outlet's financial services editor, as its first Executive Producer for Congress. In an internal memo, Joe Schatz, John Harris and Jonathan Greenberger explain Warmbrodt's role and title thusly: "This position, unlike our more traditional editing roles, is charged with nothing less than harnessing the full resources of the newsroom and the company to further elevate our journalism surrounding Congress."
>> Politico is also hiring an E.P. for Playbook, as Puck's Dylan Byers recently reported. Broadly speaking, "the EP role is a journalistic leader obsessed with protecting, managing and advancing our business and publishing priorities..."
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250,000 cancellations and counting |
This morning The Washington Post's own Elahe Izadi confirmed that at least 250,000 Post readers "have canceled their subscriptions" in the wake of owner Jeff Bezos's non-endorsement decision. "The figures represent about 10 percent of The Post’s digital subscribers," Izadi wrote, confirming yesterday's reporting by NPR's David Folkenflik.
There are some caveats: "The number does not take into account how many new subscribers have signed up for The Post during the same period, or how many who canceled may have changed their minds later and re-subscribed." But this is a massive hit to the Post's already-imperiled business. And an entirely self-inflicted one. As I wrote over the weekend, the appearance of caving to Trump does serious damage to any enterprise that isn't identified as pro-Trump.
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>> "In Hungary, newspapers were not destroyed by censorship, but rather by government pressure and threats to owners and advertisers. It’s now very easy to see how that could happen here," Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum tells the Post's Jennifer Rubin.
>> Post media critic Erik Wemple asks if Bezos is "taking the first step toward banishing opinions altogether from this space?" If so, he warns, "gird for more subscriber defections, catastrophic ones."
>> Writing for The Daily Beast, former Post media reporter Paul Farhi says "in this instance, Bezos, a man who became obscenely wealthy by intuiting what people want, misunderstands his customers."
>> Fortune's Jason Del Rey checks in with former Amazon PR boss Craig Berman, who thinks the Trump-Elon alliance motivated Bezos's "cowardly" decision.
>> Elsewhere, USA Today and USA Today Network "will not issue presidential endorsements this year," Liam Reilly reports.
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YouTube's $50 billion milestone |
Every so often it's good (and humbling) to be reminded just how gargantuan YouTube is. Here's the latest data point, via Alphabet's latest earnings report: "YouTube's total ads and subscription revenues surpassed $50 billion over the past four quarters for the first time."
Alphabet "doesn't regularly report total quarterly revenue for YouTube," Variety's Todd Spangler noted, so this stat was quite telling, as it "averages out to more than $12.5 billion in revenue per quarter." From ads alone, YouTube earned $8.92 billion in revenue in Q3...
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>> Reddit shares "jumped 22% in extended trading Tuesday, topping $100 for the first time, after the social media company reported third-quarter results that topped analyst estimates and issued an optimistic forecast for the current period..." (CNBC)
>> Shares in Snap also beat expectations... (Reuters)
>> Today Meta and Microsoft both report after the bell...
>> "Elon Musk's xAI is in talks with investors for a funding round that would value it around $40 billion," Berber Jin and Meghan Bobrowsky report... (WSJ)
>> Instagram's recent disclosure "that it lowers the quality of older, less popular videos has been criticized as 'alarming' by creators," Liv McMahon reports. (BBC)
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New Truth Social traffic stats |
Even on the verge of a historic election, "the majority of right wing news websites experienced declines" in year-over-year traffic, Howard Polksin reports in his latest monthly report for The Righting. But some sites are growing, like FoxNews.com and National Review.
Polskin gave us a sneak peek overnight. In the September data, he found that "for the third consecutive month, the Donald Trump-controlled Truth Social platform generated impressive year-over-year increases in unique visitors." Truth Social is still tiny by social media standards, but election enthusiasm is helping both the platform and the parent company's stock...
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>> Legendary NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell is giving up her daily MSNBC show sometime after the inauguration – foreshadowing other changes to come across cable news schedules next year. She will remain NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent and chief DC correspondent... (Wash Post)
>> "Jonathan Lemire — host of 'Way Too Early,' at 5am ET on MSNBC — will be promoted in January to co-host of the 'Morning Joe' 9am hour," Mike Allen scoops. (Axios)
>> Let's say you sign up for Elon Musk's X and show interest in nonpolitical topics like crafts and cooking. You're still going to be "blanketed with political content" that's pro-Trump in nature. Kudos to the WSJ for conducting this experiment... (WSJ)
>> "Pro-Trump groups have spent years building election denial networks that, combined with Big Tech’s hands-off approach and continued foreign interference, have created a toxic information ecosystem," David Gilbert reports. (WIRED)
>> When Latino voters "look to YouTube and WhatsApp for their news," they can find "unchecked conspiracy theories that align more with their cultural histories than current American reality," Sarah Ellison and Adriana Usero report. (Wash Post)
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The Yankees won last night, to the palpable relief of Fox Sports execs, since they'll at least get a Game 5. Fox's Michael Mulvihill says the World Series "has found a high cruising altitude," with viewership up 65% versus last year "and 7-year high through three games..."
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>> New from THR's Alex Weprin this morning: "Inside Disney's Race to Replace Bob Iger." Weprin "games out six succession scenarios..." (THR)
>> Netflix is expanding its deal with NBCUniversal, "adding rights to stream live-action films to an agreement for animated pictures,"
Thomas Buckley and Lucas Shaw report. (Bloomberg)
>> "Feeling the buzz from the upcoming film adaptation and maybe a little from some pre-Halloween spirit," the Broadway production of "Wicked" is topping the box office chart "once again," Greg Evans reports. (Deadline)
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