CNN’s ‘badge of honor’—press conference, or mess conference?—Zuckerberg on Facebook’s ‘fake news’ fight

A ‘BADGE OF HONOR’ - Around the same time President Trump was jousting with the White House press corps during yesterday’s reality-show-meltdown of a press conference , which included a memorable back-and-forth with CNN’s Jim Acosta after Acosta tried to ask a question about the president’s attacks on the network, CNN president Jeff Zucker was lunching with media reporters at Manhattan’s Time Warner Center, where he called Trump’s comments about the channel being “fake news” a “badge of honor.” POLITICO’s Alex Weprin was there, and he reports that Zucker also said CNN’s aggressive coverage of the new administration has boosted morale among his journalists. “They wear those insults as a badge of honor, because it means they are doing their jobs,” Zucker said. “I would say that morale is incredibly high ... They are not being intimidated, they are not backing down, they know they have my full support and it is a very exciting time, frankly, to be a journalist at CNN.”

Also: CNN was worried that Trump’s non-stop attacks could be hurting its credibility, so it conducted a survey throughout the month of January to see how consumers viewed the brand. “There has been no diminution whatsoever,” Zucker said. “The CNN brand is as strong as it has ever been. Incredibly trusted. And we have seen no impact whatsoever in all those attacks on the CNN brand.” Zucker said tCNN is hoping for $1 billion in profit in 2017. Not revenue -- profit. Full story is here .

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Outtakes, via Alex:

-- CNN may tinker with its schedule, but don’t expect a shakeup: “I think it is pretty stable, I wouldn’t expect any major changes with it,” Zucker said. “We are experimenting with a few shows, like the Van Jones one [‘The Messy Truth’], and we are looking at the other side of the aisle as well.”

-- The intense political atmosphere is extending beyond news. David Levy, president of parent division Turner Broadcasting, said that TBS is looking at more shows in the style of “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” and that even its scripted series are getting more political. “We are actually getting a lot of different pitches right now on programming that we have not seen before,” Levy said. “We are getting a lot of things around politics, the division of the country and we are … getting period pieces that have that presentation, about a divided country or a divided state.“

-- Turner plans to conduct a nationwide study looking at viewing habits of people across the country, county by county, to see if red counties watch different programming than blue counties. They may use that data to select what shows they develop.

TIPS AND COMMENTS: [email protected] / @joepompeo . Morning Media is produced with writing and reporting from Cristiano Lima: [email protected] / @ludacristiano . Alex Weprin contributed to today’s column. Archives. Subscribe.

RELATED - via WSJ: “Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, met with a senior Time Warner Inc. executive in recent weeks and expressed the administration’s deep concerns about CNN’s news coverage, according to a White House official and other people familiar with the matter. In a meeting at the White House, Mr. Kushner complained to Gary Ginsberg, executive vice president of corporate marketing and communications at CNN’s parent Time Warner, about what Mr. Kushner feels is unfair coverage slanted against the president, the people said.”

Dash of context: Ginsberg, previously a Clinton White House lawyer, is a former executive for and longtime confidante of Rupert Murdoch, the 21st Century Fox/Fox News chief who is close with Kushner (and who also owns The Wall Street Journal).

TWO REPORTERS WHO PROBABLY GOT A LOT OF NEW TWITTER FOLLOWERS YESTERDAY - 1. NBC’s Peter Alexander, who was widely applauded for challenging -- with a sober, definitive, real-time fact-check -- Trump’s claim that his electoral college win was the biggest since Ronald Reagan. 2. American Urban Radio Networks’ April Ryan, whose tussle with Omarosa Manigault has now been surpassed by the moment when Trump testily asked her if she could help him set up a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus .

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? “We” as in the press. I was talking about this last night with Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “Rule no. 1: forget about ourselves,” he said. “Who cares about how he handles the press? The only people who care about how he handles the press is the press. So what? We’re gonna be here long after he’s gone. All the press should do is stay completely focused on the fact pattern, and holding him accountable around a series of issues: national security, conflicts of interest, managing the federal bureaucracy, the delivery of jobs, his campaign promises around tax reduction, immigration reform, the repeal of Obamacare. These are all issues that can be defined by facts.”

MUST READS:

-- “Inside Donald Trump's White House Chaos” [ Time ]

-- “Syrian History Is Unfolding on WhatsApp” [ Back Channel ]

-- “Immigrant Mother in Denver Takes Refuge as Risk of Deportation Looms” [ NYT ]

-- “Elon Musk Is Really Boring” [ Bloomberg Businessweek ]

FACEBOOK ‘PROCEEDING CAREFULLY’ ON FAKE NEWS - One wonders if Mark Zuckerberg’s long and quixotic Facebook post (the FT called it a “manifesto” and a “treatise”) about “ Building Global Community ” would have gotten more juice in media circles were it not utterly drowned out by the Trump presser. Here’s the part about Facebook’s efforts to curtail the “fake news” phenomenon:

“Accuracy of information is very important. We know there is misinformation and even outright hoax content on Facebook, and we take this very seriously. We've made progress fighting hoaxes the way we fight spam, but we have more work to do. We are proceeding carefully because there is not always a clear line between hoaxes, satire and opinion. In a free society, it's important that people have the power to share their opinion, even if others think they're wrong. Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's accuracy.”

ANOTHER NEW NAME ON THE NEW YORK TIMES MASTHEAD - Welcome to the club, Carolyn Ryan, who was named an assistant editor yesterday following her stint running coverage of the campaign and election as political editor. In Ryan’s new role, according to a memo, her “primary responsibility will be to recruit investigative reporters, narrative writers, beat reporters, editors and visual journalists,” as as well as taking on “additional projects,” like “to think about ways to cover the phenomenon of fake news.” The appointment of Ryan, formerly metro editor and Washington bureau chief, marks the latest change for a senior management team that’s been thoroughly re-shaped over the past year, between the elevation of Joe Kahn to managing editor; the departures of Susan Chira (now a writer), Ian Fisher (now Jerusalem bureau chief) and Lydia Polgreen (now EIC of HuffPost); and the additions of Times vet Cliff Levy and, perhaps most notably, Rebecca Blumenstein, who recently joined the Times’ deputy-managing-editor circle after 22 years at The Wall Street Journal. Full memo on Ryan’s move is here .

NEXT HEADACHE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL? Rumblings about its global footprint, apparently. As I reported first last month , the paper’s offices in Europe and Asia were recently hit by a round of cuts, with some bureaus closing down altogether. Now, as The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray reported yesterday , “A slew of layoffs around the world, combined with uncertainty over the paper’s direction in the Trump era, have left foreign correspondents on edge. … There’s ‘nobody left between Stockholm and Greece, and between Berlin and Moscow there is nobody’ except for the remaining reporter in Warsaw, said a former reporter in one of the European bureaus who was laid off in the latest round.” Journal spox: “Global coverage is a hallmark of The Wall Street Journal and we remain committed to covering these regions robustly”

SOUND BITES:

-- “said a Republican aide who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid to avoid being written about by Mr. Trump on Twitter.” [ WSJ ]

-- “The President needs to succeed for America but he has crossed the line too many times. This feels like a fake Presidency.” [ Mika Brzezinski ]

-- “Little boy Kushner, tough guy who's supposed to achieve Middle East peace, is complaining about me to CNN.” [ Ana Navarro ]

-- “It’s crazy what we’re watching every day.” [ Shep Smith ]

ON THIS WEEK’S MEDIASHIFT PODCAST… Mark Glaser and POLITICO’s Kelsey Sutton talk leaks, leakers and the latest drama at The Wall Street Journal. Local Media Consortium executive director Rusty Coats talks about “fake news,” native advertising and Facebook/Google as local news partners. Listen here .

TRUMP BUMP? CHECK. NOW WILL ADVERTISERS FOLLOW? via Reuters : “The Trump administration's combative view of traditional news media as the ‘opposition party’ and ‘fake news’ is turning out to be the best hope in 2017 for newspapers struggling to attract more digital readers and advertisers. The New York Times (NYT.N), the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and Gannett Co (GCI.N) are building on the online readership they gained during the 2016 presidential election by marketing unbiased reporting as a sales strategy. The risk, however, is whether those new readers will attract advertising dollars to the newspapers, some of which have been criticized for having political leanings.”

CHANGE OF PLANS! via Bloomberg : “The Kremlin ordered state media to cut way back on their fawning coverage of President Donald Trump, reflecting a growing concern among senior Russian officials that the new U.S. administration will be less friendly than first thought, three people familiar with the matter said.The order comes amid a growing chorus of anti-Russian sentiment in Washington, where U.S. spy and law-enforcement agencies are conducting multiple investigations to determine the full extent of contacts Trump’s advisers had with Russia during and after the 2016 election campaign. Vladimir Putin’s administration justified the decision to curb coverage of Trump by saying that Russian viewers no longer find details of his transition to power interesting, according to one of the people. In reality, some of the most popular TV segments on Trump touched on ideas the Kremlin would rather not promote.”

SOUNDTRACK: The Chameleons, "View From a Hill"

EXTRAS:

-- Michael Calderone: “Leaks Renew Scrutiny Of New York Times’ Pre-Election Story Finding No Trump-Russia Ties” [ HuffPost ]

-- Fox News anchor Heather Nauert is in talks to be State Department spokesperson. [ POLITICO ]

-- Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen: “The media IS the opposition party” [ Axios ]

-- Fox News anchor Shep Smith went on a tear against Trump’s refusal to answer CNN’s question about Russia. [ BuzzFeed ]

-- “How an arrest solidified a reporter’s dedication to covering Standing Rock” [ CJR ]

-- Ken Doctor: “Craig Newmark, journalism’s new Six Million Dollar Man” [ Nieman Lab ]



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