Happy Friday! Reliable will be off on Monday for Memorial Day (I'm looking forward to my town's annual parade) and will be back in your inbox Tuesday morning. Here's the latest on Apple, Steve Herman, Media Matters, The Telegraph, "The Rehearsal," Justin Connolly, Kimi Yoshino, "Lilo & Stitch," and more... |
1. "Trump takes new pages out of strongman's playbook with Harvard crackdown and crypto gala," CNN's Stephen Collinson writes in this piercing new piece.
2. "Harvard's International Students Are People — Not Pawns," the Harvard Crimson's editorial board says this morning. "If higher education — and the rest of American civil society — doesn’t stand with Harvard’s international students now, they may find themselves alone when Trump comes for them next."
3. Before PBS broadcast "Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse" last month, a 90-second sequence about Spiegelman's anti-Trump cartoon was "cut from the documentary," Anthony Kaufman writes for Documentary magazine. Daniel Engber says "a worrying pattern has taken hold in public television."
4. In Hong Kong, "authorities have targeted journalists and media outlets with what are supposed to be 'random' tax audits, in a move the industry union says adds pressure to waning press freedoms," Helen Davidson reports for The Guardian.
5. "Google's newest AI video generator, Veo 3, generates clips that most users online can't seem to distinguish from those made by human filmmakers and actors," Megan Morrone reports for Axios. The clips are "amazing viewers with their realism — and also terrifying them with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred."
6. "What happens when people can see what assumptions a large language model is making about them?" Jonathan L. Zittrain explores that question in this piece for The Atlantic.
7. "Can Nathan Fielder save you from dying in a plane crash?" Aviation journalist Jeff Wise's column about HBO's "The Rehearsal" made me start watching the new season, and now I'm hooked.
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👀 Six more revealing reads |
1. ESPN's "Around the Horn" "helped usher in the debate era of sports TV, made stars out of sportswriters and helped define for a generation of fans how to talk about sports." Today is the last episode. Host Tony Reali opened up to Ben Strauss for this insight-filled WaPo piece.
2. Podcaster Pablo Torre "has emerged as the definitive chronicler of the Belichick-Hudson saga." He talked with VF's Tom Kludt about what he's learned.
3. What's the deal with standing ovations at Cannes? Why do different media outlets report different lengths of applause? The NYT's awards season columnist Kyle Buchanan explains how it's "engineered."
4. Streaming is "starting to yield real profits," but for consumers, "it's getting messier," the WSJ's Isabella Simonetti and Nate Rattner write in this excellent look at the state of the streamers.
5. Summer movie season is officially here. "The movies hitting screens during the 17 or so weeks of summer have a strong chance to pull in a cumulative $4 billion worldwide," Vulture's Chris Lee reports.
6. The owner of OnlyFans is "in talks to sell the porn-driven company to an investor group," Reuters scoops, and the apparent valuation, $8 billion, has other investor types wondering if they can swoop in. It's "one of the best businesses on the internet," Sam Lessin says.
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Voice of America's chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, has been a public face of VOA's battle to protect its independence and preserve its networks. He has also been a target in both the first and second Trump administrations. Herman was put on paid leave in February, two weeks before the rest of VOA was gutted, and now he is ready for his next act. Later today the University of Mississippi is expected to announce that Herman is being appointed as the inaugural executive director of the Jordan Institute for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation.
Herman will continue to be a highly visible spokesman on behalf of the American Foreign Service Association, one of the plaintiffs suing the government over the VOA shutdown. Speaking of...
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"A federal appeals court on Thursday dashed the hopes of journalists and free-press advocacy groups seeking to stave off the near-total dismantlement of Voice of America by the Trump White House." NPR's David Folkenflik has the full story here... |
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RedBird's Telegraph deal is done |
RedBird Capital Partners "has agreed to buy the Telegraph Media Group in a 500 million pound deal, signalling an end to one of the most protracted and tortuous sales of a British newspaper in recent history," the FT's Daniel Thomas reports.
>> This "brings to an end a two-year limbo period which the Telegraph staff found unsettling," though the current proposed deal will still need "regulatory approval," the BBC's Simon Jack writes.
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FTC threatens Media Matters |
Another example of a Trump agency probing another Trump antagonist and in this case also an Elon Musk opponent: The FTC has notified Media Matters for America that it is being investigated. The agency sent a letter, which CNN's Liam Reilly has viewed, "demanding communications between the progressive media watchdog and advertising entities. The move is an attempt to use discovery to punish the organization and find alleged evidence that it colluded with advertisers to pull their funding from Elon Musk's X." Read Reilly's full story here...
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Five groups launch Journalist Assistance Network |
PEN America, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom of the Press Foundation, International Women's Media Foundation, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press are promoting a network with "legal and safety resources" and training for journalists. Details here.
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The WH website is full of holes |
"If you want to know why the White House is not publishing transcripts" of Trump's remarks anymore, Thursday's "long and incomprehensible rant on drug prices makes it clear," The Independent's WH correspondent Andrew Feinberg wrote on X.
After I led yesterday's newsletter with an item about the transcript purge, I noticed some other omissions on the WH website, like a dearth of records relating to Karoline Leavitt's press briefings. Past administrations provided the text of every briefing. Broadly speaking, WhiteHouse.gov used to be "a pretty reliable (if never completely comprehensive) way of keeping track of presidential doings and utterances. It now has more holes than a moth-eaten sweater," The Bulwark executive editor Adam Keiper commented...
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Fox goes on offense against Smartmatic |
Marshall Cohen reports: Fox News is trying to ramp up the pressure against Smartmatic, the voting tech firm that sued the right-wing network for defamation over its 2020 election coverage. In new court filings that are heavily redacted, Fox News claims nearly two dozen Smartmatic employees "concealed, destroyed, and dissembled" records in a "brazen and purposeful" effort to hide critical evidence.
Sound familiar? Smartmatic recently accused Fox of destroying evidence in the case. Both sides deny tampering with any documents. Fox maintains that it never defamed Smartmatic or anyone else.
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A heartbreaking announcement on the "Today" show just now: Co-host Sheinelle Jones' husband Uche Ojeh has died of brain cancer. He was 45. He was a "devoted husband, loving father and a man whose bright spirit touched everyone who knew him," NBC says.
Jones took a leave of absence from "Today" last December, citing a "family health matter," and this morning on Instagram she thanked viewers for their love and support. May Ojeh's memory be a blessing.
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>> Baltimore Banner editor Kimi Yoshino is heading down I-95 to become a managing editor at The Washington Post. (WaPo)
>> Unionized Politico staffers allege that AI tools introduced last year "violated their contract in several ways, and are taking the dispute to arbitration this July." (WIRED)
>> "This year's NBA playoffs "kicked off to double-digit viewership growth amid a changing of the guard," Loree Seitz reports. (TheWrap)
>> "Elden Ring," the massively commercially successful video game that has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, is the latest to get the Hollywood treatment, with Alex Garland attached to direct for A24. (Variety)
>> Melania Trump "is charging fans $25 to buy her new audiobook, which is narrated by an artificial intelligence version of her voice." (Daily Beast)
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YouTube poaches Disney exec |
"YouTube hired long-time Walt Disney Co. executive Justin Connolly to serve as its global head of media and sports — triggering a lawsuit against the Google-owned video service," Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw reports. Disney is claiming "breach of contract, interference in a contractual relationship and unfair competition." This Deadline story makes clear that the contract dispute is going to be messy...
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This week two veterans of the disinformation beat, Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis, launched a "DIY news outlet" called Indicator. "We have a dual mission: to deliver reporting and investigations that expose digital deception, and to provide knowledge that empowers anyone to understand and investigate it on their own," Silverman told me. "We want to serve and grow the community of professional investigations and engaged citizens that are defending the information space." Check out the new site here...
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>> This morning Trump threatened Apple "with a 25% tariff if it doesn’t build iPhones in America." Analyst Dan Ives says "we believe the concept of Apple producing iPhones in the US is a fairy tale that is not feasible." (CNN)
>> OpenAI wants publishers to view it as a helping hand: "ChatGPT referral traffic to publishers' sites has nearly doubled this year," according to the startup. (Digiday)
>> "A federal judge in Orlando rejected an AI start-up's argument that its chatbot’s output was protected by the First Amendment, allowing a lawsuit over the death of a Florida teen who became obsessed with the chatbot to proceed," Leo Sands reports. (WaPo)
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Memorial Day weekend box office preview |
Disney's live-action "Lilo & Stitch" is eyeing a jaw-dropping 185 million to $230 million box office debut during the four-day holiday weekend, per Boxoffice Pro. (I'm taking my kids to see it when they get out of school this afternoon!)
Paramount's "Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning" is looking at a slightly more humble, though still impressive, $70 million to $85 million during its four-day weekend debut.
Rounding out the podium is New Line Cinema's "Final Destination Bloodlines," which, entering its sophomore weekend, is looking at $25 million to $30 million over four days.
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This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here. Hope you have a meaningful long weekend. We'll be back in your inbox on Tuesday morning. |
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