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Thursday, August 17, 2023

Donald Trump blasts Fox News, Apple responds to Glenn Beck's censorship allegations, Jake Tapper calls out Laura Ingraham, Bing struggles to eat into Google's marketshare, the WGA releases report on the "new gatekeepers" in media, the MPTF calls attention to the Hollywood crew members suffering from the strikes, and more. But first, the A1.

THE A1

Facebook's News Farewell

CNN Photo Illustration/Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Facebook is shunning the news business in the U.S.

The Meta-owned company has quietly made changes in recent months that have dramatically reduced referral traffic to media outlets, more than half a dozen publishers told me. The move has put considerable dents in the daily traffic publishers see, with the damage appearing to be more pronounced among those who publish more hard news-oriented content.

"If you're a major publisher, you've gotten nicked," an executive at a major media company, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly assess the situation, told me this week.

One publisher told me they've witnessed a more than 30% drop in year-over-year referral traffic. Another said they've seen a roughly 40% drop. But both of those publishers produce a healthy volume of lifestyle content. Those who publish more hard news-focused content have seen far steeper drop-offs.

"Facebook nuked everyone's traffic," a news-focused publisher told me, adding that the platform had since tweaked its all-mighty algorithm to provide a fix, but that the adjustment "hadn't fixed" the problem much and that referral traffic was still far below what it was a year ago.

The issue is notable, given how much traffic the social media platform once sent to digital publishers. In the heyday of Facebook, news outlets were treated to a firehose of clicks, with articles regularly going viral on the platform. The amount of traffic, however, has waned considerably in recent years, taking a toll on outlets that built business models reliant on the company. The recent changes reduce the already lackluster levels of referral traffic even more.

A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment. But the changes publishers are seeing are in lockstep with the sentiment toward news that the company's executives have publicly voiced. After years and years of trying to court publishers, it's evident that Mark Zuckerberg and company are headed for the news business exit.

The exit comes as lawmakers around the world become far more serious about forcing Big Tech companies like Meta to pay publishers for the content posted to their platforms. In response, Facebook has threatened to pull news content altogether from countries that pass such legislation. When Canada passed such legislation this summer, Meta pulled news content from its platform in the country, a decision that has generated significant blowback.

Meta has long argued that publishers need Facebook more than Facebook needs publishers. "News is not a substantial part of Facebook globally," the company said in a March post, adding that "less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook Feeds are posts with links to news articles."

News is also messy for Meta, with mis-and-disinformation spawning all sorts of issues for the company to grapple with. The company's calculation is that addressing such thorny issues — which have at times landed Zuckerberg and other executives before Congress as they're accused of "censorship" — is simply not worth it. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, in Meta's eyes.

Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive who oversees Instagram, said as much when he declared this summer that the company's new real-time text-based app, Threads, is "not going to do anything to encourage" news and politics on the platform.

"Politics and hard news are important, I don't want to imply otherwise," Mosseri wrote. "But my take is, from a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them."

Publishers I spoke to also suspect that Meta is reluctant to send users offsite to their platforms given its desire to dominate the advertising market. In Canada, publishers have asked the country's antitrust regulator to examine whether the company is hurting their "ability to compete effectively in ... online advertising markets."

And, of course, given Meta's attempts to compete with TikTok, the company has had to make additional room on its platforms for short-form video content, pushing news further out of the picture.

Regardless of the reasoning, the company's break up with news is yet another hurdle in an ugly landscape, rife with uncertainty and turmoil, that publishers are doing their best to navigate — some better than others.

"News publishers are going through three bubbles bursting at the same time," said one of the publishers I spoke to. "One is no one cares about [Donald] Trump anymore; two, the pandemic is over; and now Facebook is gone."

——— BELOW THE FOLD ———

CNN Photo Illustration/Charlie Neibergall/AP

Fox & Foes: With the first Fox News GOP debate just days away, Donald Trump is continuing to breathe fire on the right-wing channel, which spent years dishonestly pushing propaganda on his behalf but now finds itself in the disgraced former president's crosshairs. Trump on Thursday claimed that his one-time favorite program, "Fox & Friends," refuses to "show all of the polls" where he is performing well against President Joe Biden. "They just won't do it!" Trump exclaimed. "Also, they purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big 'orange' one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they're not. Just like 2016 all over again…And then they want me to debate!" A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

► New reporting from CNN's Alayna Treene: Trump's read from the meeting in which Fox News executives Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace encouraged him to participate in their debate "is that the network is worried about ratings without him there."

► Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier continue to do the media rounds, talking on Thursday to The WSJ's Isabella Simonetti and Joe Flint about the debate. Baier said he has "two stacks of questions" and a lot of Trump questions in both of them: "He's gonna be a significant part of any debate, even if he's not on stage."

THE INDUSTRY

THE FOURTH ESTATE

Former Hollywood journalist Anita Busch said she was the victim of a brutal 2003 rape in a parking garage during the Pellicano saga, with her attackers sending a "message" to deter her from reporting. (The Wrap)
While covering a police manhunt, a news photographer for Baltimore's WBAL-TV spotted the escaped inmate, dialed 911, and alerted authorities who detained the suspect. (Baltimore Banner)
NBCU has teamed up with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in a bid to assess the company's successes in access and equity. (THR)
RIP: Legendary British broadcaster Michael Parkinson died "after a brief illness." He was 88. (CNN)
RIP: "Paul Brodeur, whose deeply reported articles in The New Yorker brought national attention to subjects like the toxic hazards of asbestos and the destructive impact of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer, died on Aug. 2 in Hyannis, Mass. He was 92." (NYT)

THE MARKET

"Is Dave Portnoy desperate for cash as he takes back control of Barstool Sports?" Lydia Moynihan asks, noting he slashed the price of his Hamptons mansion by $2.5 million and sold $30 million in stock last week. (NY Post)

MEDIA MOVES

NBC News hired Chloe Melas, a former CNN media colleague and contributor to this newsletter, as an entertainment correspondent. (THR)
Vox named Patrick Reis its new senior politics editor. (Vox)
Variety upped Elsa Keslassy to international executive editor. (Variety)
The WaPo announced its 2023 class of academic year fellows. (WaPo)
NBCU tapped Zoë Friend to lead its consumer insights team. (Deadline)

THE INFO WARS

CNN Photo Illustration/Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg/Getty Images

How Do You Like Them Apples?: It turns out that Apple's brief removal of Glenn Beck's program from its podcast library was a lot less exciting than the right-wing personality made out to believe. Who could have guessed, right? An Apple spokesperson on Thursday told Variety's Todd Spangler that the Silicon Valley giant temporarily hid Beck's content due to a trademark dispute that has "since been resolved." Beck, who told his followers that he was effectively being silenced so that he could not reveal the supposed truth about the Biden "crime family," conceded on his Thursday show that there had indeed been a trademark dispute that has since been addressed. But Beck, unable to abandon his conspiratorial narrative, still indicated that he did not buy Apple's explanation for the fiasco. Read Spangler's full story here.

IN THE BATTLEFIELD

Civil war rhetoric from the right has increased since Donald Trump's fourth indictment, Ethan Collier and Audrey McCabe report. (MMFA)
The press conference Trump vowed to hold about the Georgia indictment "has been cast into serious doubt and is now unlikely to go forward in any substantive capacity," Kate Sullivan and Kaitlan Collins report. (CNN)
Jake Tapper ripped Laura Ingraham for airing a dishonest segment bashing the media: "I know facts are a tough concept for the $787.5M defamation settlement channel, but in this piece CNN journalists & commentators, including conservatives, stating *facts* about Trump's legal issues are falsely described as reveling in them. Wildly, characteristically dishonest." (X)
Jeremy Barr looks at the state of Fox News prime time after Tucker Carlson's firing: The right-wing channel "has regained a significant chunk of the viewers it lost ... thanks to a new prime-time lineup designed to capitalize on the existing loyalties of the network's fans." (WaPo)
Eliana Johnson reports on how a former "60 Minutes" producer masqueraded as a journalist while "digging dirt" on Pennsylvania's David McCormick. (Free Beacon)
"The blurring line between Journalist and Oppo Researcher is going to be a big media story of the next decade," Teddy Schleifer commented. (X)
Survivors of the 2022 mass shooting at Buffalo's Tops supermarket filed two lawsuits against YouTube, Reddit, and gun-related companies alleging they aided the shooter's online radicalization. (CNN)

THE VALLEY

CNN Photo Illustration/CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Microsoft's Miss: Remember all the talk about how an OpenAI-infused Bing could steal significant market share from Google? Well, it has simply not happened. "When Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered version of Bing in February, the company said it could add $2 billion of revenue if the revamped search engine could pry away even a single point of market share from Google," The WSJ's Tom Dotan reported Thursday. "Six months later, it looks as if even 1 percentage point could be a tough target, with some new data showing Bing's place in search has barely budged—partly because of how Microsoft handled its high-profile rollout." Read the full story.

TOO MANY TABS

Advertising on YouTube's channels for kids may have facilitated tracking children online (NYT)
Caleb Ecarma writes about how X/Twitter "can't seem to buck its advertisers-don't-want-to-be-seen-next-to-Nazis problem." (Vanity Fair)
Spotify is looking "to ban white noise podcasts to become more profitable," Ashley Carman reports, adding that doing so could allow the audio streamer to net $38 million more. (Bloomberg)
Tumblr's new web interface "looks a lot like" X/Twitter, Aisha Malik notes. (TechCrunch)
Alphabet's latest round of cuts will affect Verily Life Sciences, its research organization whose investigations include extending human life, Miles Kruppa reports. (WSJ)
Google has debuted its new Transparency Center, which seeks to provide additional clarity to its product policies. (TechCrunch)

CURTAIN CALL

CNN Photo Illustration/Mario Tama/Getty Images

The WGA's Wishes: The Writers Guild of America, West, on Thursday issued a new report about "the new gatekeepers" in media, calling on government to do more to protect writers. The report — which named Disney, Amazon, and Netflix as the three powerhouses — argued that the "new gatekeepers have amassed market power through mergers and other anti-competitive practices" and offer "an alarming window into the future of media." The report asked lawmakers and gov't agencies to "block further consolidation" in the industry, "increase regulation and oversight in streaming," and "proactively investigate anti-competitive issues and outcomes. Read the full report here.

HOLLYWOOD HELL

"We are not doing enough to support the tens of thousands of crew members": The Motion Picture & Television Fund is calling attention to the crew members who he said have become "forgotten casualties" of the dual strikes. (THR)
"As workers in Hollywood wait out the dual work stoppages... they're leaning on each other for more than emotional support at the picket lines," writes Ella Ceron. (Bloomberg)
"The trustees of New York City's five pension funds ... have sent letters to Disney CEO Bob Iger, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish, calling on the executives to address Hollywood's ongoing double strike," Lucas Manfredi reports. (The Wrap)
What brought the WGA and studios back to the negotiating table? "Several factors have prompted a new sense of urgency," Wendy Lee and Meg James report. (LAT)

OFF STAGE

In a conversation with Ben Strauss and Molly Hensley-Clancy, Michael Lewis denied NFL lineman Michael Oher's claims about his one-time guardians cashing in on him, saying "the money is not" in their pockets: "Everybody should be mad at the Hollywood system." (WaPo)
Last Hurrah: To mark the end of an era, Netflix is allowing fans one final chance to order DVDs by mail before the red envelopes vanish. (Variety)
"The summer of 'Suits' continues, with the legal drama racking up its fourth consecutive week of more than 3 billion minutes of watch time," Rick Porter writes. (THR)
Michael Cera wanted to be in "Barbie" so badly that he personally emailed Greta Gerwig who told him she wanted to "get on a Zoom right away." (Variety)
FX teased a first look of "Fargo" season five — which features Jon Hamm and Juno Temple — slated to premiere on Nov. 21. (The Wrap)
AppleTV+ revealed a first look of its Godzilla TV series, titled "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters." (THR)
Miley Cyrus's new song and music video, "Used To Be Young," will arrive on Aug. 25, in conjunction with an ABC special. (Deadline)
Green Day will reissue its 1994 album "Dookie" to mark its 30th anniversary … and to make us all feel old. (Pitchfork)

Thank you for reading! This newsletter was edited by Jon Passantino and produced with the assistance of Liam Reilly. Have feedback? Send us an email here. We will see you back in your inbox next week.