Trump labels media ‘enemy’ before Putin meeting — View from Helsinki — Kavanaugh’s record

THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE PUNISHED CNN by canceling a scheduled Sunday interview with national security adviser John Bolton in response to “bad behavior.” What CNN correspondent Jim Acosta did to merit that description was ask Trump a question at a joint news conference with the British prime minister on Friday. Trump responded by dismissing CNN as “fake news” and turning instead to a reporter from Fox News, which he declared “a real network.”

— Trump’s “fake news” attack was “music to the ears of dictators and authoritarian leaders,” the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Rob Mahoney told the New York Times. And Trump on Sunday declared much of the U.S. news media the “enemy of the people” as he headed to Helsinki for today’s meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

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— ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Bolton on Sunday’s “This Week” if Trump “branding real news organizations, real news stories, as not real, contributes to this effort that we see from the Russians and from other authoritarians to undermine a free press.” Bolton, who joined the White House from Fox News in March, said the question was “silly.”

— Both Trump and Putin will appear today on the "real network," as the president has dubbed it. Putin will give his first post-meeting sit-down to Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who has been known to conduct tough interviews and promises "no subject off limits." Trump, meanwhile, will turn to a couple of his biggest media boosters: Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.

Good morning and welcome to Morning Media. You can reach me at [email protected] / @mlcalderone . Daniel Lippman ( [email protected] / @dlippman ) contributed to the newsletter. Archives . Subscribe .

MORE THAN 1,400 JOURNALISTS DESCENDED on Helsinki for Trump’s meeting with Putin, including many top U.S. network anchors and correspondents. The private, closed-door meeting is scheduled to begin at 6:20 a.m. on the East Coast and could last as long as 90 minutes. "Amid investigations and tensions, Trump-Putin going 1-on-1," the Associated Press wrote Monday.

— "We've never had a summit with a KGB spy master, someone who has completely studied and examined Donald Trump, and a president who spent the weekend golfing, and has not been preparing," NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell said on MSNBC from Helsinki. "There were no principal meetings, no planning for this summit."

— The agenda for the private Trump-Putin meeting remains unclear. But Trump set the tone in the hours before it started by blaming "U.S. foolishness and stupidity" for poor relations with Russia and again denouncing the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election as a "Rigged Witch Hunt."

— U.S. and Russian aides next join the two leaders for a working lunch. Trump and Putin are scheduled to hold a joint press conference at 9:50 a.m.

— In addition to live reporting and analysis on cable news, “CBS This Morning” and the "CBS Evening News" will air more of Jeff Glor’s Saturday interview with Trump. Fox News will have Wallace's interview with Putin and Hannity's with Trump later on Monday.

VIEW FROM HELSINKI: POLITICO’s Reid Standish writes : “Juha Ristamäki, the political editor of Iltalehti, one of the country’s most-read newspapers, was supposed to head to the countryside, as about one-third of the Finnish workforce typically does. Instead he’s shifting his newsroom into high gear.”

— “Finns are following everything very closely, it’s the biggest story here without a doubt,” Ristamäki said. “It’s not just the politics, either. They’re most interested in the whole circus around the two presidents.”

— Another newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, greeted the two leaders with the following message: “Mr. President, welcome to the land of the free press." Kaius Niemi, the paper's senior editor in chief, tweeted that there are 300 billboards on routes from the airport to the Trump-Putin meeting. They are in Russian and English, including one highlighting Trump’s “enemy of the people” attack.

— A video accompanying the billboard project notes Finland’s high ranking when it comes to press freedom. Reporters Without Borders ranked Finland fourth last year, with the United States in 45th place. Russia clocked in at 148 out of 180 countries surveyed.

FLASHBACK, DEC. 2015: MSNBC host Joe Scarborough tells candidate Donald Trump that Putin “kills journalists that don’t agree with him.” Trump responds, “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe.”

SOUND BITES

“On the eve of a summit with Putin, critics of whom in the journalistic community often end up jailed or murdered, President Trump calls journalists the enemy of the people.” [ Jake Tapper ]

“An attack on the free press while overseas, just hours before meeting with one of the most brutal journalist-killing authoritarians in the world.” [ Chuck Todd ]

“Actually a @CNN reporter disrespected @POTUS & PM May during their press conf. Instead of rewarding bad behavior, we decided to reprioritize the TV appearances for administration officials.” [ Sarah Huckabee Sanders ]

“Come on. All Acosta did was try to ask a question. Something that has taken place in previous administrations for, well, forever.” [ Maggie Haberman ]

“Note the phrase ‘rewarding bad behavior’ here. Consistently over the last year and a half covering this White House, I’ve noticed that press officials of all levels of seniority have attitudes that suggest we’re all there on a school field trip.” [ Olivia Nuzzi ]

MORE IN POLITICO: Josh Meyer looks at how the Mueller indictment Friday shows the “fearsome skill” of Russia’s military officials.” Annie Karni, in Scotland, reports on Trump promoting his golf resort there. Michael Crowley and Karni write why Trump can’t cancel Putin summit. In a video, Crowley highlights “Trump's strange Putin fascination.”

KAVANAUGH AND PRESS FREEDOM: The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has released a special report looking at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s record on press-related matters. “Of particular note for the news media,” the reports finds, “Judge Kavanaugh has written favorably with respect to the ‘actual malice’ standard as articulated in New York Times v. Sullivan, which sets him apart from the late Justice Scalia, who famously disagreed with the unanimous decision in that 1964 civil rights era case.”

— Kavanaugh “has also taken a number of positions that may put him at odds with journalists,” the report finds. “In an area of increasing relevance to the news media and free press issues, Judge Kavanaugh took a permissive approach to government authority in the national security context. In one case, for instance, Judge Kavanaugh wrote separately to argue that counter-terrorism, broadly construed, constitutes a ‘special need’ justifying suspicion-less searches under the Fourth Amendment.”

JUDGE ORDERS LA TIMES TO ALTER ARTICLE: The Los Angeles Times’s Cindy Chang reports that a federal judge ordered the paper on Saturday remove information that had mistakenly been made public on a database of court documents. The Times revised the article, but intends to contest the order, wrote. “We believe that once material is in the public record, it is proper and appropriate to publish it if it is newsworthy,” Norman Pearlstine, the Times’s executive editor, told the paper.

CHINA CENSORING NEWS OF U.S. TRADE WAR: The South China Morning Post’s Orange Wang and Xie Yu report, “China’s censors are scrambling to control the narrative about the trade war with the U.S. by giving the media a list of do‘s and don’ts when reporting on the topic.”

MISSING CLIMATE CHANGE: Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, argues in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that the news media “tends to stop short of linking extreme weather events to global warming” when covering the latest fire, hurricane or flood. “As a result, we’re missing what is arguably the biggest story of all: The climate we knew is no more,” Stokes writes. “We’ve already warmed the planet, whether we deny it or not.”

SACHA BARON COHEN'S BACK: The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever looks at Cohen’s new Showtime program in this fractured political moment.

— "The joke hasn't changed, but in the years since Cohen last played this sort of game, the American political climate has grown nastier and more partisan, experiencing a corrosion of trust, in constant sway of a president who falsifies and distorts even the most basic facts,” Stuever writes, adding that “our world has become as absurd as anything Cohen could conceive.”

— BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel writes how "Cohen — a consummate troll himself — is a perfect foil to the current political climate of grift and trolling."

LISTEN: “The Wilderness,” a 15-part podcast series on the history and future of the Democratic party, hosted by Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau, launches. “I call it The Wilderness, but we’re not completely lost,” Favreau told The Guardian’s Rory Carroll. “It’s a party that is rebuilding and is rediscovering the grassroots energy that has always propelled it.”

CONGRATS: The Society of Professional Journalists has named NBC’s Chuck Todd, PBS’s Judy Woodruff and The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Robert J. Rosenthal.

REVOLVING DOOR

Judd Legum, who has spent 13 years at ThinkProgress, most recently as editor in chief, is leaving to start a newsletter, “Popular Information,” according to Wired .

Shelley Venus, most recently global head of video at HuffPost, is joining Facebook later this month as video lead for news partnerships.

OPENING: The Baltimore Sun Media Group is hiring community news journalists for papers such as the Capital Gazette.

EXTRAS

— Capital Gazette editor Rick Hutzell addresses the president, “I’m sorry you didn’t make it to Annapolis.”

— Joshua Partlow, the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Mexico, writes about being trapped with students rebelling against Nicaragua’s government.

— Vanity Fair's Joe Pompeo delves into the HBO-AT&T relationship.

— POLITICO's Dan Diamond reports two HHS officials were forced out following incendiary tweets.

— The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani reports that Billboard CEO John Amato was ousted amid allegations of sexual harassment.

— The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan writes how the hiring of former Fox News co-president Bill Shine, presumably a major scandal, has largely receded from the headlines.

— The Times Styles section revisits Neil Strauss’s pickup artists piece 14 years later — and in light of #MeToo.

KICKER

“What Donald Trump does on a day-to-day basis ... we struggle to explain on programs like this or in The New Yorker, or the New York Times, or wherever. But there are some days when you have to throw up your hands and say, ‘What the hell is going on?’ That's what leads to, I think, part of the deep suspicion against him. It is sometimes beyond explanation.” — New Yorker editor David Remnick on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”