| Brian Stelter here at 11:31pm ET Sunday with the latest on Raman Pratasevich, Phil Mickelson, Brooke Gladstone, Rick Santorum, "F9," Dan Bongino, "SNL," The Weeknd, and more...
Social media guidelines gone awry?
Emily Wilder, 22, who was fired from The Associated Press after just two weeks on the job, says she is "one victim to the asymmetrical enforcement of rules around objectivity and social media that has censored so many journalists -- particularly Palestinian journalists and other journalists of color -- before me."
Before joining The AP, Wilder was an active member of pro-Palestinian groups at her college. She was a proponent of Palestinian human rights and a critic of the Israeli government. She is Jewish. And she is a believer in journalism. She joined the Phoenix bureau of The AP after ten months at The Arizona Republic. "I was proud to land a job at The AP," she said on Saturday.
Wilder's statement has been retweeted more than 50,000 times. Former colleagues at the Republic and the AP have rallied to her defense. "Broadly, the coverage of this story has come down on the side of the young reporter," Claire Atkinson pointed out on Sunday's "Reliable Sources."
So why was Wilder fired? And what does it say about modern newsrooms and social media policies?
The AP is being opaque
Like many institutions, The AP would rather not comment on "personnel matters" at all. But when Wilder went public, the newswire confirmed that she was dismissed "for violations of AP's social media policies during her time at AP."
Which of her tweets were violations? The outlet won't say. The phrase "during her time at AP" was an implicit denial that The AP caved to bad-faith conservative complaints about her college-age tweets and activism. But that's certainly what it looked like, to lots of observers, especially in the wake of the Israeli airstrike on the building housing The AP's bureau in Gaza. The Stanford College Republicans group called out Wilder while Israeli officials were asserting that Hamas was operating in the building, and while The AP was denying knowledge of any Hamas presence. "Amidst all the controversy, the Stanford College Republicans saw an opportunity to settle some old scores," Matthew Petti of Responsible Statecraft wrote.
Janine Zacharia, one of Wilder's instructors at Stanford and a veteran Middle East correspondent, said The AP failed to "identify a disinformation campaign and react accordingly."
Wilder told WaPo's Jeremy Barr that her firing "was a result of the campaign against me... It feels like AP folded to the ridiculous demands and cheap bullying of organizations and individuals."
AP: We "cannot take sides in public forums"
Wilder says her managers wouldn't say which of her posts were policy violations. You can read a version of The AP's social media guidelines for yourself here.
An AP spokeswoman told me that "we have this policy so the comments of one person cannot jeopardize our journalists covering the story. Every AP journalist is responsible for safeguarding our ability to report with fairness and credibility, and cannot take sides in public forums."
Okay, but Wilder was working in Phoenix, with no connection to coverage of the Middle East. As Atkinson said on "Reliable Sources," there's "mass confusion" about the "rules" governing social media use by members of the media, and "no journalistic entity has a good handle on it..."  Optics over all else?
Oliver Darcy writes: "Olivia Nuzzi made an intriguing point about this whole episode over the weekend when she argued that 'every time a news organization sacrifices an employee because an online mob demanded it,' they confirm that 'optics outweigh all other concerns and they invite more bad faith campaigns against journalists.' Nuzzi said that news orgs 'promote a myth that members can & should be perfect vessels untainted by complication or belief, rather than human beings' and that 'maintaining this lie means the whole enterprise is highly fragile, and any perceived weak link has got to be removed quickly before the whole place collapses under scrutiny.' In her words: 'It's all PR. It's denial. It's bulls**t.'"
What about The AP's top editor?
VF's Charlotte Klein wrote Sunday: "Multiple journalists have raised the question of what role, if any, executive editor Sally Buzbee had in the decision, which comes just weeks before she departs the AP for the Washington Post, where she'll succeed Marty Baron as executive editor. (Buzbee did not respond to an email seeking comment on the decision.) The AP giving in to right-wing media trolls 'is also a scandal for The Washington Post,' the New Republic's Alex Shephard wrote..." Ten years ago...
Reading and hearing all of this, it is tempting just to say "don't tweet." Or, even better, "never tweet." But that's not a sufficient or realistic solution. And I know it first-hand. Allow me a one-paragraph story. Ten years ago Sunday, I was en route to Chicago to cover Oprah Winfrey's final daytime show. I diverted to Missouri to assist with the NYT's coverage of the horrific tornado in Joplin. It was one of the deadliest tornadoes in American history. My primary mode of communication was Twitter. I could hardly send an email or make a call, since so many phone lines were down, but I could text. So I filed tweets via text and urged my editors in New York to use the string I was tweeting. This technique generated quite a bit of attention.
In Joplin, it felt like the physical world had been flipped upside down and shaken. As wireless service came back, survivors used the digital world -- tweets and photos and forums -- to reconnect and recover. It was a formative experience for me as a journalist. And Twitter was indispensable.
Posting about a calamity while working at the NYT is obviously very different than posting about Israel while leading a college advocacy group. But "don't tweet" is not the answer... FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE -- The ceasefire is holding, "but the frustration of young Palestinians is stronger than ever..." (CNN)
-- Aymann Ismail writes: "Some journalists covering Israel and Palestine say an 'illusive concept of impartiality' led them to face persistent doubts and skewed editing for years. Is that changing now?" (Slate)
-- "Pro-Palestinian activists are running a coordinated campaign to downgrade Facebook's app review ratings to protest the company's alleged censorship of Palestinian accounts and posts," Olivia Solon reports... (NBC News)
-- A BBC journalist, Tala Halawa, is being investigated by the outlet because she tweeted in 2014 that Israel is 'more #Nazi than #Hitler' and used a 'HitlerWasRight' hashtag... (Daily Mail)
-- According to the NYT, some Israeli officials now call the airstrike that leveled AP and Al Jazeera offices in Gaza "a mistake," arguing "that Israel needs the media to be open to hearing its version of events, and the bombing made that harder..." (NYT)
-- Via Mediagazer: Reporter Daniel Levitt "says he left WSJ after being disciplined for violating company policy with his Substack Inside The Newsroom, even after he anonymized subscriber data..." (Inside the Newsroom)
-- Sign of the social media times: Huntington Beach police were overwhelmed on Saturday night "after a man's TikTok video inviting people to his birthday party went viral and the city was overrun with unruly revelers..." (LAT) Bad at good news?
I heard a senior news executive say the other day, "We're not good at good news." There are all sorts of reasons why news coverage tilts toward crisis and chaos – but it's worthwhile to challenge those habits and defaults. Let's get better at good news!
Case in point, Covid-19 is in retreat across the US. That's likely why I barely heard about the pandemic as I flipped around the Sunday shows. (And I only mentioned it in passing on "Reliable Sources.") Former FDA chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb was on "Face the Nation," and he said declining #'s of hospitalizations show decreasing vulnerability to the virus.
Sometimes it's advantageous to lean into the "good news" framing, the way José Díaz-Balart did at the top of Saturday's "Nightly News" on NBC. "Every Saturday we end our broadcast by telling you 'there's good news tonight.' But this evening, that's where we begin," he said. "Fifteen months into the pandemic, there is good news tonight about case counts and deaths, now the lowest they've been in a year. There's good news tonight about hospitalizations – one city's largest hospital has zero, yes, zero, Covid patients. And there's good news tonight about the country reopening."
"This pandemic is still far from over -- hundreds are dying each day in the US and not enough people are getting vaccinated," Diaz-Balart added. "But tonight, tonight, there's good news about where we stand right now." Embrace the good news! At the same time, recognize the trauma of "pandemic life." This Ed Yong piece about "the pandemic's mental wounds" is excellent... Media week ahead calendar
News outlets are rolling out special coverage on the one-year mark since George Floyd's murder...
Tuesday: New nonfiction titles include Edward-Isaac Dovere's "Battle for the Soul" and Jordan Ellenberg's "Shape..."
Tuesday night: The "This is Us" season finale on NBC...
Thursday: The long-anticipated "Friends" reunion drops on HBO Max...
Thursday: The iHeartAwards air live on Fox...
Friday: The summer box-office kicks off in the US with "Cruella" and "A Quiet Place Part II..." Scroll down for details... Bongino's radio show goes national
Podcaster and Fox yeller Dan Bongino's bid to replace Rush Limbaugh officially starts on Monday. Cumulus Media's Westwood One will launch "The Dan Bongino Show" from noon until 3pm ET, Rush's time slot, with about 115 affiliates. Donald Trump is giving the debut show a boost by calling in to chat during the 1pm hour... FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO -- Epic Games' "courtroom battle against Apple is expected to end Monday with a debate-style format in which the judge will drill each side with questions about their cases... The judge is expected to rule in the coming months..." (WSJ)
-- One week after announcing the WarnerMedia-Discovery deal, AT&T CEO John Stankey will keynote J.P. Morgan's tech and media conference on Monday AM... (AT&T)
-- Here's one of the unpleasant stories AT&T investors have been reading: How Stankey "steered AT&T into multibillion-dollar sinking disaster," by Charlie Gasparino... (NYPost)
-- This coming week may provide answers about Jason Kilar's plan. The WarnerMedia CEO is said to be negotiating his exit, and on Sunday he shared this A+ subtweet of the situation...  Dissident journalist arrested by Belarusian strongman
The most shocking story of the day: "The strongman president of Belarus," Alexander Lukashenko, "sent a fighter jet to intercept a European airliner traveling through the country's airspace on Sunday and ordered the plane to land in the capital, Minsk, where a prominent opposition journalist aboard was then seized," the NYT's Anton Troianovski and Ivan Nechepurenko wrote.
The journalist and activist, Raman Pratasevich, "is the founder of the Telegram channel Nexta, which was broadly used to organize anti-government protests, and another similar channel critical of the government," CNN's Tim Lister and Olga Pavlova reported.
>> I asked CNN senior global affairs analyst Bianna Golodryga for context. She said this is "arguably one of the biggest crises the EU has faced since its inception. An EU-made plane (Ireland), which took off from an EU nation (Greece) bound for another EU nation (Lithuania), was illegally hijacked by a fake bomb threat as it flew over Belarusian airspace. All in an effort to detain an opposition journalist who fled Belarus to live in Lithuania. It's a huge test for the EU as to whether or not it is a paper tiger." She said whatever comes out of Monday's EU summit "will be key."
Blinken's statement
On Sunday night the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the episode and demanded Pratasevich's immediate release. Blinken said US citizens were among those on board the plane. And he called independent media "an essential pillar supporting the rule of law and a vital component of a democratic society..."
>> "The stakes are also higher now that Americans were on the plane," Golodryga told me. "And whether or not Vladimir Putin knew of this ahead of time, no doubt he will be paying close attention to see how far he could go using similar tactics..." Biden breaks with Trump and Obama on leak probes
On Friday POTUS told CNN's Kaitlan Collins that he will not let his Department of Justice seize phone records or emails from reporters. As we noted on Sunday's "Reliable Sources," this means he's breaking with both Donald Trump and Barack Obama. "Until the president's assertion Friday, his administration had not renounced the practice," WaPo noted... From bipartisan to bye-bye?
Plans for a post-9/11 style commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection may die a pitiful death in the Senate as early as this week. The commission "would be the closest we could get to something that may be factual, that may clear away some of the fantasies and the fiction surrounding January 6 and the events preceding it," GOP Rep. Peter Meijer told Dana Bash on "SOTU" Sunday morning.
-- George Will on ABC's "This Week:" "I would like to see January 6th burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11 because it was that scale of a shock to the system..." (RCP)
-- "Here's a revelation: This is going to the 2022 midterms anyway, particularly if us as Republicans don't take ownership for what happened, if every other day there's a new conspiracy theory about what happened at the Capitol," Rep. Adam Kinzinger said on "Fox News Sunday..." (The Hill)
-- Re: those conspiracy theories, a new Ipsos poll shows more than half of Republican respondents agreeing with the ludicrous notion that left-wingers led the riot to make Trump look bad... (Ipsos) FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE -- The WaPo editorial board has a timely reminder that the riot isn't the only American shame that needs a real examination: "The largest public health disaster in a century deserves an independent, nonpartisan commission to find the answers. President Biden and Congress should step up to the plate." (WaPo)
-- Have you noticed? "Biden, whose verbal missteps and chronic foot-in-mouth disease have been the stuff of legend for much of his political career, has stayed surprisingly on message since moving into the Oval Office," Michael Collins writes... (USA Today)
-- Biden, who is known to pay close attention to Thomas Friedman's columns, will surely come across this new one. Friedman tells Biden, "You may not be interested in Middle East peacemaking, but Middle East peacemaking is interested in you..." (NYT)
-- Jennifer Rubin's latest critique of DC coverage: The Biden WH's "future success will depend, in large part, on its continued ability to ignore the noise — of which there is an abundance..." (WaPo) "Bob Garfield is out..."
"On the Media" host Brooke Gladstone addressed the firing of her longtime co-host Bob Garfield in this weekend's introduction. "Bob Garfield is out this week, and, as many of you know by now, every week, having been fired after a warning and other efforts at amelioration, for a pattern of bullying behavior," she said. "The entire staff agreed with that decision. The problem was not over-passionate discourse -- we don't fear that, we've even put some of our own on the radio -- nor was it merely about yelling. But there's not much more I can say."
"Look, you know how this works," Gladstone continued. "One side as an individual is free to present their case however they see it, or wish to see it. They may describe their conduct in ways the other side might not even recognize. But that other side cannot engage because they're part of a bigger enterprise that balances many concerns, including legal ones." With that admission, she said it comes down to trust, and said "on with the show..."
>> Garfield's latest: "News coming soon about my next gig. Meantime, here's a show I've been working on in support of the Purple Project for Democracy..."
>> Ben Smith's Monday NYT column is about "the media's 'mean-too' moment." He writes: "Depending on whom you ask, WNYC is experiencing either an epidemic of bullying or an epidemic of whining..." Rick Santorum is out
HuffPost's Jennifer Bendery had the scoop on Saturday: "CNN has terminated its contract with senior political commentator Rick Santorum after racist, inaccurate remarks he made about Native Americans." A CNN rep confirmed that the network had "parted ways" with Santorum. And Santorum said on Twitter that he appreciated the CNN platform.
Get rid of paid politicians?
Brian Lowry writes: "On Twitter, Roll Call columnist Walter Shapiro argued that the Santorum interlude makes a case to get rid of paid politicians on cable 'and replace them with journalists and columnists. Go back to the old era when reporters questioned former senators and didn't see them as cable news colleagues.' While I'd generally agree, the sports analogy applies here, particularly as it pertains to coaches/managers, who often see opining via the broadcast booth/studio team as a stopover before returning to the sidelines. The problem is that networks see value in presenting that insider 'played the game' experience – the extent to which viewers do could be another matter -- hence the revolving door..." FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR -- "You never really stop preparing for the next show:" Andy Meek spoke with CNN's Ana Cabrera about her new weekday hour and the state of journalism... (Forbes)
-- Margaret Sullivan's Monday media column is about a new podcast called "70 Over 70." It's from the co-founder of Longform and features accomplished seniors delivering "wisdom bombs." Forthcoming interviews include Dionne Warwick, Dan Rather, Alice Waters, James E. Clyburn, and Maira Kalman... (WaPo)
-- After Phil Mickelson made PGA history on Sunday evening, Matt Viser tweeted: "This year has seen the oldest president take office (Joe Biden), the oldest quarterback win a Super Bowl (Tom Brady), and the oldest golfer to win a major PGA championship..." (Twitter)
-- Rich Lerner's remark about Mickelson on the Golf Channel: "Old age? Hell no. Just well-aged..."  Five key stories from Sunday's "Reliable"
-- When a CNN anchor is also the governor's brother, where's the line? I asked Nicole Hemmer and Perry Bacon Jr. about the Chris Cuomo controversy...
-- Lachlan Murdoch "intends to be at Fox for decades," Claire Atkinson said, recapping her recent interview with Murdoch...
-- The aforementioned Edward-Isaac Dovere talked Trump v. Biden, saying, "If you're looking for tabloid drama, the Biden White House is not the place to go." I commented that this is a Washington Post presidency, not a New York Post presidency...
-- Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt analyzed mayor Lori Lightfoot's decision to limit interviews to journalists of color. CNN's Allison Morrow wrote about the issue here...
-- Pratt, who doubles as the president of the Chicago Tribune's guild, also spoke with me about Alden's looming takeover of Tribune Publishing. He said his colleagues will continue to advocate for local ownership and civic minded journalism... A "terrible mistake" but an "aberration"
BBC "Panorama" reporter John Ware talked with me about his own in-depth reporting on the Martin Bashir mess. "This is a terrible mistake by the BBC," Ware said, "but it is in my view an aberration." Ware said he doesn't believe it could happen again, thanks to the BBC's standards. And he suggested that the broadcaster's enemies are trying to use this scandal for their own purposes...  'F9' nabs biggest opening of the pandemic so far
Frank Pallotta writes: "'F9,' the ninth installment in the popular Fast & Furious franchise, doesn't open in US theaters until June 25, but it's already off to a hot start at the box office, taking in $162.4 million internationally this weekend. Of that total, $135.6 million came from China — the biggest movie market in the world. It marks the biggest opening for a Hollywood film during the pandemic so far." Read on... Testing the movie-going appetite...
Brian Lowry writes: "The summer box-office kicks off in the US with 'Cruella' and 'A Quiet Place Part II,' which should test the movie-going appetite after a spate of not-so-impressive openings since restrictions began to loosen up. Still, the actual financial picture will be incomplete on 'Cruella,' which is receiving a simultaneous release for a premium fee via Disney+, so its revenue won't be limited to just ticket sales. Indeed, the lack of data about numbers for movies that simultaneously stream while hitting theaters (see Disney's earlier 'Mulan' experiment as well as the Warner Bros.-HBO Max model) has left everyone pretty well guessing about the number of eyeballs catching those movies at home, and what the tradeoff is in terms of box office."
>> WSJ on "Hollywood's odd reality" these days: "It both wants people to rush back to the movies and watch them at home via streaming services..." FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE -- The Kennedy Center Honors, reimagined: "Singer Joan Baez, country musician Garth Brooks, dancer-choreographer-actor Debbie Allen, violinist Midori and actor Dick Van Dyke" were in DC for five days of tapings and celebrations. It was a "week-long party..." (WaPo)
-- The Weeknd and BTS were among the biggest winners at the Billboard Music Awards on Sunday night... (EW)
-- "A car driven by actor Paul Walker in the first installment of the 'Fast and Furious' film franchise is up for auction in Las Vegas next month..." (CNN) A poignant 'SNL' season finale
"SNL" ended "one of its strangest years — a season in which the show had to do episodes with coronavirus protocols during a pandemic — by explaining to audiences what a wild year it really was," Frank Pallotta wrote overnight.
The cold open ended with an emotional Kate McKinnon "saying that this was the year when the cast realized that they 'we're more than just a cast, we're a family.'"
"And like a true family, we are kind of sick of each other," Aidy Bryant said. "And we need a little break."
Cecily Strong thanked the audience for sticking with the show through "an election, an insurrection, and objection that there was an insurrection."
Now the question is: Which cast members will return in the fall? Deadline sizes up the speculation here... SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST...
Pet of the day!
Barbara Moriello emails: "This is Yourie. As you can see he is a very handsome boy! His favorite things are doing things he's not supposed to be doing, going places he's not supposed to be going and reading the Reliable Sources newsletter every morning!"  You are receiving this message because you subscribed to CNN's Reliable Sources newsletter.
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