Bring it on, Monday! Here's the latest on the Washington Post, "Fox & Friends," Apple, X, Jake Tapper, Jessica Tarlov, Timothée Chalamet and more... |
You have probably heard this year portrayed as "the podcast election" and "the TikTok election." Well, here's another: "The clipping election."
Sunday night's Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden affirmed that some of the most powerful people in this year's election cycle are the social media video-clippers.
Racist and obscene comments from some of the event's early speakers were clipped and flagged by X users like @Acyn and Aaron Rupar. Both accounts posted clips of comedian Tony Hinchcliffe likening Puerto Rico to a "floating island of garbage," sparking widespread criticism and news coverage. Vulgar remarks from the rally are still dominating the news cycle 12 hours later.
Social media video-clipping was a factor in the 2016 and 2020 elections, too, but it is much more prominent this year. The Kamala Harris and Trump campaigns have dedicated clipping teams. So do outside political groups. But the key players are a handful of obsessive media monitors and activists who post on their own. They drive news coverage because the moments they post get circulated among reporters and reposted across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms. In effect, the clippers function as an early warning system for newsrooms.
Evidence of the "clippers election" can be found all throughout the campaign season, so I wrote a CNN.com column about it...
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"An unfiltered view of Trumpism" |
The aforementioned Aaron Rupar, who produces his own Substack newsletter, Public Notice, has been "live-clipping" Trump rallies since 2017. "MAGA rallies are ugly affairs, but it's difficult to capture that in a traditional news writeup," he told me overnight. "By breaking up the rallies into clips and highlighting the most newsworthy moments, people get an unfiltered view of Trumpism without having to suffer through his Castro-like speeches."
After messaging with Rupar, I realized that the only way I consumed Michelle Obama's passionate Saturday night speech was through Rupar's clips. Of course, Rupar makes no secret that he wants Harris to win. But pro-Trump accounts are equally busy in the clipping wars. Trump's recent appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, for example, was dissected, clipped and remixed all weekend.
>> It's not always fun to be "clipped." One recent weekend, my CNN appearances were clipped by the @TrumpWarRoom one day and @KamalaHQ the next, and it can be disorienting and even frustrating, since social media viewers aren't getting the full context of the TV segment. But once you're clipped, there is little you can do about it. The clippers have the power...
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>> From the left: "Forget about October surprise — instead maybe call it the October reveal," Mark Follman of Mother Jones wrote. "Trump's hate fest at Madison Square Garden has put the whole thing on grand hideous display… perhaps a nail in the coffin of his campaign? We'll see."
>> From the right: This morning's "Fox & Friends" "opened with nearly 12 minutes of gushing praise about the rally," and the racist remarks, once finally mentioned, were defended as comedy, Mediaite's Colby Hall reports.
>> Bottom line, via CNN anchor Jessica Dean, who said this after reality-checking some of Trump's lies: "If your media diet is very narrow and you don't seek out the fact-check, you don't seek out the truth, then this worldview can feel very real." Clearly so many at MSG "feel that way and who only know what they are being told."
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Thousands of perturbed and disappointed customers continue to cancel their Washington Post subscriptions as a result of Jeff Bezos's decision to block the publication from endorsing Kamala Harris. Post leaders are shook-up – but unable to stop the proverbial bleeding since Bezos is the one in charge. And he's not talking.
Bezos may be doing the right thing by taking the Post out of the presidential endorsement game, "but coming 11 days before the election, it gave the appearance of cowering before a wannabe dictator to protect Bezos’s business interests — particularly because Donald Trump met with executives from Bezos's aerospace company, Blue Origin, the same day," Post opinion columnist Dana Milbank wrote Sunday.
The Post's newsroom, meanwhile, is covering the controversy aggressively. Jeff Stein, Jacqueline Alemany and Josh Dawsey published a new story this morning titled "Some billionaires, CEOs hedge bets as Trump vows retribution" and writing about Bezos in detail...
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>> Occasional columnist Michele Norris resigned over the weekend, calling the non-endorsement move an "insult."
>> Some Post reporters posted on social media about the wave of cancellations. Caroline Kitchener said her own mom cancelled. Kitchener said she wants everyone to understand that "when you cancel, you are hurting us, not our owner."
>> "I know loyal readers are angry. And to be clear, I’m angry too," Robin Givhan wrote. "And what I’m most angry about is that a decision made outside of the newsroom makes the newsroom's job more difficult."
>> The NYT's Ben Mullin and Katie Robertson published a tick-tock reaffirming that Lewis and editorial page editor David Shipley "privately made a case" to Bezos "not to abandon the tradition so close to an election."
>> Lewis issued a new statement on Sunday refuting former editor-at-large Robert Kagan's assertion of a quid pro quo between Bezos and Trump. "Neither campaign nor candidate was given a heads up or consulted in any way at any level," Lewis said.
>> Coming up: Shipley is set to meet with his staffers this afternoon. It will be a tense meeting.
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L.A. Times turbulence continues |
Over the weekend, the daughter of billionaire Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong suggested that her father's non-endorsement decision "was made over Harris' support for Israel’s war in Gaza." Her dad disputed that assertion, however. CNN's Liam Reilly has details here.
>> One of the editorial board members who resigned last week, Karin Klein, wrote a column for THR saying that "if Soon-Shiong had decided early last spring that he no longer wanted to endorse on presidential races, that would have been fair, neutral and legitimate." But "by making the decision at the 11th hour," he is "practicing the opposite of the neutrality he professes to seek..."
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Yale history professor and "On Tyranny" author Timothy Snyder, who I quoted on Friday talking about the dangers of caving to aspiring autocrats, reacted to the developments at the Post and LA Times in a YouTube video. Bezos and Soon-Shiong are "ignoring the essential thing that we were supposed to have learned from the 20th century, which is, in circumstances like these, do not obey in advance," he said. By currying favor or trying to stay off an imagined enemies list, you are "making it more likely that [the] authoritarian will come to power... And since you have already made concessions before he came to power, you're preparing yourself for making more concessions after he comes to power."
"And what's worse – if you're in a position of wealth and power yourself, you're discouraging all the other people who are less wealthy and less powerful," he added. He concluded, "The fact that people are obeying in advance is just a sign of how great the threat really is."
>> "The argument for billionaire ownership of newspapers was that the owners were so rich that they were immune from political threat or intimidation,” Sharon Waxman writes. (TheWrap)
>> "Big Tech CEOs are calling up Trump, seeking to rekindle their relationship" with him, and he keeps bragging about the calls on the campaign trail, Steve Contorno and Alayna Treene report. (CNN)
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The Dodgers are leading the Yankees 2-0 heading into Monday's game three. Will the World Series out-rate "Monday Night Football"? It's possible. Richard Deitsch previewed the TV match-up for The Athletic here.
Fox is obviously rooting for a couple of Yankees wins to extend the series. Across all of Fox's platforms, the first two games averaged 14.5 million viewers, "up +63% over last year" and "still tracking at a seven-year high," Fox stats guru Michael Mulvihill wrote."Now just looking for a long series!"
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Monday: Apple launches its first Apple Intelligence features...
Tuesday: Harris holds a closing-argument address in prime time at the Ellipse...
Wednesday: ADWEEK is holding a Mediaweek conference, and Abby Phillip and I will be fielding Q's on stage...
Thursday: It's Halloween! Trump visits Tucker Carlson's live tour during Carlson's stop in Arizona...
Friday: The final pre-election jobs report comes out...
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It's the "busiest week of the season," per CNBC. Alphabet, Reddit, and Snap will all report Q3 earnings on Tuesday... Meta and Microsoft are up on Wednesday... Apple, Comcast, and SiriusXM will go on Thursday... and Charter will report on Friday...
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Political media notes and quotes |
>> If you haven't watched Jake Tapper's sit-down with JD Vance, you should watch the interview in its entirety here.
>> In other interview news, CBS's Norah O'Donnell taped with Harris over the weekend.
>> Daniel Dale counted at least 32 false claims Trump made on Rogan's pod.
>> The AP notes that Trump keeps referring to Anderson Cooper with a woman's first name, turning to "a stereotype heterosexual people have long deployed against gay men."
>> "Political campaigns and their surrogates are pouring millions of dollars into social media influencers with scant regulatory oversight or public transparency," Wash Post's Cat Zakrzewski reports.
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Elon Musk's X is "on track to fall well short of its goal of bringing in $100 million in revenue from political advertising in 2024, raising just $15 million in the year to date, largely from an increasing reliance on Republicans and the Trump campaign," the FT's Hannah Murphy and Peter Andringa report, through a clever use of X's own political ads disclosure database. Democrats are understandably spending $$ "on larger platforms like Google and Meta" instead.
>> Speaking of X... It is "supercharging the spread of voter-fraud conspiracy theories with the help of artificial intelligence," NBC's David Ingram reports.
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>> Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen's latest deep dive about info-diets asks: "Can a land of 50 different states thrive with 50 different info-ecosystems — and realities?" (Axios)
>> The WSJ'sIsabella Simonetti profiles CNN anchor
Dana Bash, who has "developed a reputation for maintaining ties on both sides of the aisle." (WSJ)
>> The NYT's Michael Grynbaum profiles Fox commentator Jessica Tarlov, who has "has thrived by bursting viewers' bubbles on a network where pro-Harris voices are scarce." (NYT)
>> The WSJ's Erich Schwartzel and Sarah Krouse write about how "the long friendship" between Harris and Disney's Dana Walden has "turned into a minefield of partisan politics." (WSJ)
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>> "Venom: The Last Dance" "feasted on $124 million at the international box office, a mighty start that will help to offset the comic book threequel's sluggish domestic debut," Rebecca Rubin reports. (Variety)
>> "Responding to pleas from California's film industry, which has struggled to rebound from labor unrest and industry disruption, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday announced a proposal to more than double the size of the state's film tax incentive program to $750 million annually," Shawn Hubler and Derrick Bryson Taylor report. (NYT)
>> Best story of the weekend? "Timothée Chalamet made a surprise appearance at his own look-alike contest in Lower Manhattan on Sunday..." (AP)
>> Best-sounding story, the NYT: "Hear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed After Nearly 200 Years." This is "the first such find in more than a half century." (NYT)
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Halloween costume contest! |
Patrick Beach sent in this adorable photo of "Barko Marx, aka Zuzu Beach of Austin, Texas." He says, "her favorite Marx Brothers movie, as you might infer from her shirt, is 'Rubber Duckie Soup.'"
Thank you for the costume submissions over the weekend. Keep them coming! Email us here.
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