Holiday weekend guide; 'democracy at risk'; Brazile leaves Fox; remembering Tulsa; Hannah-Jones mulls legal action; sign of normalcy at box office?

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Happy Memorial Day Weekend! Oliver Darcy here at 8:30pm Friday. Before we get started, one housekeeping note: We are taking Sunday off. But we have got a jam-packed edition to power you through the holiday weekend. Let's get started with some long-reads, a viewing guide, a weekend calendar, and the 2021 summer reading lists...

Recommended reads

-- "Five days, 100 vaccine doses and a wildfire of conspiracy theories:" Jose A. Del Real's new WaPo story shows how anti-vaccination lies are hurting vulnerable farmworkers, but also offers a dose of hope. The key question: "Can mutual trust beat disinformation?"

-- This lead by the NYT's Hannah Beech, about poets in Myanmar being jailed and killed after the coup, will haunt you. "After the first and second poets were killed, the third poet wrote a poem..."

-- The first excerpt from Ben Rhodes's new book "After The Fall" is a doozy. He describes meeting a woman who believed in the "alternative Ben Rhodes" cooked up by Fox News, showing "how far our shared reality has fractured..."

-- The WSJ is out with a new package all about the promise of 5G, from how it could "improve early warnings of severe weather" to how it'll "take Esports to a whole new level for gamers and fans..."

-- Sarah Bartlett and Julie Sandorf write that NYC's rule "requiring city agencies to direct at least half their budgets for digital and print advertising to community newspapers and websites" has been "a resounding success," essentially providing taxpayer support for struggling local news outlets...

-- Arielle Pardes's recommendation: "Hide your Instagram likes—and be free." She writes, "A feed without likes is far from a revolution. But I want to enjoy this summer with my friends, not my metrics..."

-- An important call to action by ProPublica prez Richard J. Tofel: "There has been an explosion in funding for local news, but most of it is national." Local funders need to play their part, he writes...

-- Tatiana Siegel's THR story about defense attorneys and their celeb clients in the #MeToo era is full of surprises. One litigator says "people live in this world now of where there's smoke, there's fire. But what people don't realize is the smoke builds upon itself..."

-- New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane writes about "cinema's fixation on children's classics and their authors..."

-- In a package titled "Still Here," Vice interviewed activists, politicians and others who the newsroom had previously spoken to about the murder of George Floyd...

-- On Minneapolis, Tulsa, and memorial days, plural: "It's not the necessity of remembrance that serves as a burden. It's the inability to forget, even if you want to," Jelani Cobb writes...

Viewing guide

By Brian Lowry:

>> Hulu might have this year's "Booksmart" with "Plan B," a raunchy teen comedy with a message, as two girls in South Dakota go on a quest to find a "morning after" pill after an impulsive sexual encounter...

>> "The Kominsky Method," meanwhile, concludes with a shortened final season, adding Morgan Freeman and Kathleen Turner to the cast (the latter in a "Romancing the Stone" reunion with Michael Douglas) to offset the exit of Alan Arkin...

>> HBO's "Oslo" doesn't need any promotion to seem timely, adapting the stage play about the back-channel negotiations to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s. Ruth Wilson and Andrew Scott play the Norwegian couple behind the effort, in a movie that follows HBO's pattern of premiering a prestige made-for close to the Emmy-eligibility deadline...

>> Memorial Day also brings the usual assortment of commemorative fare, from a war-movie marathon on Turner Classic Movies to "Apocalypse '45," a documentary that premiered last summer, landing on Discovery+. The film draws upon lost World War II footage chronicling the war in the Pacific...

Holiday weekend calendar

Saturday: "Oslo" drops on HBO Max...

Sunday afternoon: The Indy 500 airs on NBC...

Sunday evening: "Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Massacre" airs on the History Channel at 8pm...

Sunday night: The series finale of "Mare of Easttown" airs at 10pm on HBO...

Monday: CNN premieres "DREAMLAND: The Burning of Black Wall Street" at 9pm... PBS will air "Tulsa: The Fire and The Forgotten" at the same time...

📚 Summer Reading Lists

Kerry Flynn writes: "It's not officially summer yet, but news outlets are putting out their own summer reading lists. Personally, I'm most excited to read Ashley C. Ford's memoir, "Somebody's Daughter," which publishes June 1. Admittedly, I'm still catching up on last year's lists. Here are some 2021 lists:

>> "Cultish," "Dirt," and "Empire of Pain" in The Atlantic...

>> "The Others," "Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid," and "Sorrowland" in the NYT...

>> "28 Summers" and "Dandelion Wine" in the WSJ...

>> "We Are What We Eat" and "Something New Under the Sun" in Time...

This Sunday on "Reliable"

Brian Stelter writes: "This Sunday I'll be joined by Brian Carovillano, VP and managing editor at The Associated Press, for an interview about the recent firestorm around Emily Wilder's exit. Plus: 'How Democracies Die' co-author Daniel Ziblatt, NYT senior writer David Leonhardt, CNN co-anchors Alisyn Camerota and Victor Blackwell, NewsGuard's Matt Skibinski, and CNN's Kyung Lah. See you Sunday at 11am ET..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE

-- Friday's top headline: "Senate Republicans block January 6 commission..." (CNN)

-- The NYT's lede: "Republicans on Friday blocked the creation of an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, using their filibuster power in the Senate for the first time this year to doom a full accounting for the deadliest attack on Congress in centuries..." (NYT)

-- The headline on David Graham's piece for The Atlantic: "Democracy Defeated, 35-54..." (The Atlantic)

-- Dan Balz writes that the blocking of the commission was "another reflection of democracy under stress..." (WaPo)

-- Jake Tapper: Republicans acted out of "naked political fear..." (Mediaite)

-- Tom Nichols: "Their spines crushed by years of obedience to Donald Trump, the members of the GOP have once again retreated from civic responsibility..." (The Atlantic)

Contextualizing this moment

Sometimes it is important to zoom out and show how individual stories are connected to each other. That is especially true in this pivotal moment when democracy and truth are facing persistent attacks on different fronts. The CNN Digital programming editors brought this reality multi-pronged attack on democracy into focus on Friday, spotlighting three stories under one banner headline: "Democracy at risk..."

What commission?

The blocking of an independent commission to probe the January 6 insurrection was the top story Friday across mainstream news sources. But in the right-wing media world, it received far less attention. In fact, if you were to scan the top right-wing sites on Friday, you might not have even been aware there was a vote that took place at all. For instance, throughout most of the day, the Fox News homepage barely mentioned news the GOP had killed the proposed commission...

Dodging a bullet

Opting to offer only scant coverage of the 1/6 commission makes sense for these outlets when you consider that they helped set the stage for the insurrection by feeding their audiences the Big Lie for weeks and weeks after the election. No honest independent commission could have avoided pointing that out. Which is to say that in some ways, these outlets and their owners were also big winners in Friday's vote. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch should be quite pleased...

Kyung Lah on this week's Reliable podcast

Brian Stelter writes: "Kyung Lah's interview with the president of the Arizona state Senate, Karen Fann, went viral earlier this week, in part because Fann asserted that conspiracy-laden OAN is a credible news source. It was a surreal illustration of the US media divide. I asked Lah to join me on this week's 'Reliable' podcast to discuss her reporting on the bogus Arizona audit; the role of OAN in it; and the local coverage of the effort. 'This is not about right versus left,' she says. 'This is about truth and lies, and we cannot be afraid to call it a lie.' Lah says she feels like a 'canary in the coalmine,' as Maricopa County is 'the next page of the Big Lie playbook.' Listen in via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your favorite app..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO

-- "Most Americans reject QAnon-linked conspiracy theories and believe that Donald Trump lost legitimately in 2020, a set of new polling finds. But a substantial minority within the Republican party endorses some of those theories," Ariel Edwards-Levy writes... (CNN)

-- "When plagiarism was reported to Voice of America, managers delayed action for months," Paul Farhi reports... (WaPo)

-- Maxwell Tani looks at how Frank Luntz "created a mess inside the Los Angeles Times..." (Daily Beast)

-- Speaking of which: Hunter Walker tweets about how, when he was politics editor of Business Insider, Frank Luntz turned a sit-down interview into a "sales pitch into a massive ask..." (Twitter)

Brazile parts ways with Fox

After roughly two years at Fox News, Donna Brazile is no longer with the right-wing channel. The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona and Maxwell Tani scooped Friday that Brazile had quietly departed the network, returning to ABC News as a contributor. "When my contract expired, they offered me an additional 2-4 years," Brazile told The Beast. "But I decided to return to ABC."

"Trumpward"

Over at the NYT, Michael Grynbaum sized up the big picture: "Onscreen and off, in ways subtle and overt, Fox News has adapted to the post-Trump era by moving in a single direction: Trumpward," he wrote. Grynbaum pointed out that pro-Trump pundits have been rewarded with more air time while right-wing newscasts have been replaced with further-right-wing talk shows. And he noted that under the late Roger Ailes, liberals held more prominent roles than today. "Roger's view was you had to have some unpredictability and you had to challenge the audience; you couldn't just be reading Republican talking points every night," Ailes' friend Susan R. Estrich told him. The entire story reads like a preview of the paperback edition of Stelter's book "HOAX," which comes out June 8...

FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE

-- Facebook, WhatsApp, Google and other tech companies have complied with India's new IT rules, Manish Singh reports. Twitter has not – yet... (TechCrunch)

-- "Facebook's AI treats Palestinian activists like it treats American Black activists. It blocks them," Elizabeth Dwoskin and Gerrit De Vynck report... (WaPo)

-- WSJ's editorial board on Facebook's lab leak reversal: "Question: When does 'misinformation' stop being misinformation on social media? Answer: When Democratic government authorities give permission..." (WSJ)

-- "Twitter has listed a new paid-for 'Twitter Blue' service on app stores, suggesting the social media company may launch its long-rumoured subscription service soon," Jasper Jolly writes... (Guardian)

"The story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has to be told"

The Tulsa World will on Sunday publish an Archive Edition marking 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre. The special edition will include "stories printed in the past and all of the stories in the '100 Years Later' series leading up to the 100th anniversary," the paper said. The paper added that it will donate 10,000 copies of the paper to Tulsa Public Schools. "The story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has to be told," the paper says in the intro. "For decades it wasn't. Not in this city. Not in the classroom. Not at the dinner table."

Documentaries on History, PBS, CNN, and NatGeo

Brian Lowry writes: "NYT's Jamelle Bouie noted that the Tulsa Race Massacre has gone from 'obscure to basically mainstream knowledge in a few short years' – HBO's 'Watchmen' likely played a part – and the next few days bring multiple documentaries marking the 100th anniversary of those events. That roster includes 'Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre' (History), 'Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten' (PBS) and 'Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street' (CNN). Another, 'Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer,' will air June 18 on National Geographic..."

>> "If you want to see how media can help reshape inaccuracies in history and the role some Black athletes are playing in that historical process today, make time this weekend to see at least one of two new powerful prime-time documentaries on the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa," David Zurawik writes for his latest...

Hannah-Jones mulls legal action

Nikole Hannah-Jones says she is mulling legal action after the UNC Board of Trustees denied her tenure. "I had no desire to bring turmoil or a political firestorm to the university that I love, but I am obligated to fight back against a wave of anti-democratic suppression that seeks to prohibit the free exchange of ideas, silence Black voices and chill free speech," Hannah-Jones said in a statement. NYT's Katie Robertson has the details here...

FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR

By Kerry Flynn:

-- Report for America President Steve Walden writes: "Congress should include the proposed $2.4 billion for local news in the bill because local news is, in fact, the civic infrastructure of democracy..." (Poynter)

-- Fortune EIC Clifton Leaf is leaving. Brian O'Keefe is the acting editor... (Talking Biz News)

-- BDG, formerly Bustle Digital Group, shares a case study on TikTok, where it has nearly 17 million followers... (Digiday)

-- Lilia Luciano is joining CBS as an LA-based correspondent... (Deadline)

-- Polygon culture editor Patricia Hernandez "will be video game news site Kotaku's next EIC..." (WaPo)

A sign of normalcy?

"After months of waiting for the COVID-19 crisis to ease, the box office returned to some semblance of normalcy Thursday night as Hollywood event pics 'A Quiet Place Part II' and 'Cruella' opened in advance of the long Memorial Day weekend," THR's Pamela McClintock wrote Friday. "Directed by John Krasinski for Paramount, 'Quiet Place 2' took in a huge $4.8 million from roughly 3,000 locations— ahead of the first film's $4.3 million in previews. Disney's live-action 'Cruella' grossed $1.4 million..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE

-- Paul Mozur reports that the "Friends" reunion was censored in China. "Cameos by Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and the K-pop group BTS mysteriously disappeared from the special when it aired on Chinese streaming sites..." (NYT)

-- Brian Lowry writes: "While it wasn't necessarily the venue for soul-searching, LAT's Greg Braxton makes a good point about another oversight within the 'Friends' reunion – namely, the failure to address the lack of diversity within the show, which has certainly been discussed through the years..." (LAT)

-- "Time to fire up the private jets and saturate Burbank's airport with chauffeured Suburbans — all the major studios are headed back to CinemaCon," Matt Donnelly writes... (Variety)

-- "Netflix has another feature hit on its hands in Zack Snyder's 'Army of the Dead' which is on its way to becoming one of the streamer's top 10 most watched movies," Anthony D'Alessandro reports... (Deadline)

-- The "Gossip Girl" reboot trailer has been released by HBO Max... (THR)

-- Lisa Respers France writes: "Heather Morris says Naya Rivera was the 'only person honest' about Lea Michele's 'Glee' behavior..." (CNN)

-- Another one from Lisa: "Chloe Melas and I talked about the start of summer movie season. Complete with our popcorn!"

SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST....

Pet of the day!

Former ABC'er Judy Isikow emails a photo of her canine companion (who will also star in a children's book she's working on): "I couldn't resist sending this photograph of my 2 1/2 year-old sheepadoodle Baxter, taken on the way to the park in WIlliamsburg, Brooklyn. He may not be a Dalmatian, but I can't begin to count the stream of Cruella comments he's gotten since he came into our lives at four months-old..."