Processing the pain in Surfside; 'please pray for miracles;' Capital Gazette anniversary; week ahead calendar; 'cinema is back'

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Brian Stelter here at 10:07pm ET Sunday with a look at the workweek ahead, featuring notes and quotes from Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Bari Weiss, Vin Diesel, Mitt Romney, Bill Barr, Cardi B, and more...

SEARCHING

All day long on Sunday, the Miami Herald homepage was dominated by a single all-caps word: "SEARCHING."

The searching continued around the clock at the site of the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida. But Sunday's news coverage reflected the fact that there's very little actual news to report. The cause of Thursday's collapse is still unknown. The confirmed death toll is still relatively low and the catalog of missing persons is still gut-wrenchingly high. So "SEARCHING" is the current status, as families search for some reason, any reason, to hold onto hope.

"First we offer our condolences to the families and victims impacted by this unimaginable tragedy," Miami Herald exec editor Monica Richardson said when I checked in with her on Sunday. She said the English-language Herald and Spanish-language el Nuevo staffs are working to cover the disaster through "words, images, video, interactives and with data."

"This is our South Florida community and we have a responsibility to keep the community informed," Richardson said. "It is our responsibility and our mission. This is a newsroom that went through coverage of Pulse and Parkland so they understand the pain. It's hard work and exhausting work but we are here for the long haul. This is a historical moment for the country and we are digging to find answers and provide coverage like only a local news organization can."

Latest updates

-- The latest #'s from Sunday evening's news conference: "A total of 134 people have been accounted for while 152 remain unaccounted for..." (CNN)

-- Some family members were able to visit the debris site on Sunday. Relatives of missing resident Nicole Langsfeld "took turns screaming out her name, hoping she'd hear them beneath the rubble," CNN's Faith Kamiri reports... (Twitter)

-- "Some engineers are now focusing near the bottom of the 13-story condo tower, where an initial failure could have triggered a structural avalanche..." (NYT)

-- Senator Marco Rubio: "Please pray for miracles here in Surfside..." (Twitter)

-- Some family members are "angry and frustrated," Miami-Dade County mayor Daniella Levine Cava told Wolf Blitzer Sunday evening. Some still have hope while "others are recognizing the chances are closing..."

Heroism gives hope in dark moments

"Every Sunday, when I walk to this studio, I pass a firehouse," John Dickerson said at the end of "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "It is quiet that early in the morning; the firemen and women pass the time in easy conversation or preparing their equipment. It is nearly as peaceful as it was in the middle of the night Thursday at Champlain Towers South, just before the building collapsed."

"That nightmare -- coming at the hour where we risk feeling safest, asleep in our beds -- summoned police, EMTs and firemen, like the ones I pass on the way to work each Sunday," he said. "In an instant, that community of protection rushed to endanger their lives in the hope of saving the lives of others. Their heroism, in falling rubble and live electrical wires, gives hope in dark moments to the families, and to the rest of us, staggered by what we see. It is all too big, all the anguish and the loss, and the reminder, even after a year and a half of a pandemic, of how thin the membrane is that separates any of us from tragedy.

"It makes me think about those morning walks by the firehouse," Dickerson said, "not because those moments are peaceful, but because even when the sirens are not blaring, those men and women are still dedicated every day to life's preciousness, to rescuing people they don't know simply because they are human. The rest of us may never face an acute moment of danger where we can be a hero, but we are all surrounded by humans every day to whom we can be generous, compassionate, and true. In these tragic moments, we feel our common human connection. We can honor those feelings by being like the first responders who recognize that human connection even after the tragedy passes."

SUNDAY NIGHT NOTES:

-- At the time I'm hitting send, The BET Awards are airing across BET and many other ViacomCBS channels. Cardi B debuted her baby bump during a performance early in the show... (BET)

-- CNN Films' "Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story" premiered on CNN at 9pm ET, and will be available on-demand... (CNN)

-- The excruciating heat wave in the Pacific Northwest continues to warrant national attention. The Oregonian's headline right now is "Portland records all-time high temperature of 111, shattering record set Saturday..." (Oregonian)

-- And this alert just crossed from CBC: British Columbia heat wave "shatters Canadian record for highest temperature ever recorded" in the country... (CBC)

"Guardians of the First Amendment"

Monday is the three-year anniversary of the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom. Monday is also the official opening of the "Guardians of the First Amendment" memorial near the City Dock in Annapolis. Local dignitaries will be on hand for the unveiling. The next day, Tuesday, the trial of the shooter will begin. The jury was seated last week.

On Sunday's "Reliable," I spoke with Rick Hutzell, who recently stepped down as editor of the Capital Gazette, about the aftermath of the attack; his decision to leave; and how a new hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital, is treating the remaining journalists. A new buyout round is shrinking the Capital Gazette and other Tribune newsrooms. Alexis Benveniste has a recap here...

>> Speaking of Tribune... WaPo's Paul Farhi has a new look at what's being lost through the company's buyouts, focusing on veteran Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich...

Week ahead calendar

The Aspen Ideas Festival takes place virtually all week long...

Monday: Mobile World Congress begins in Barcelona...

Tuesday: WarnerMedia (CNN's parent) will launch HBO Max across Latin America and the Caribbean...

Thursday: Prince William and Prince Harry will mark Diana's birthday by unveiling a statue they commissioned at Kensington Palace...

Friday morning: The June jobs report...

Sunday: The Fourth of July 🎆

Entertainments and sports calendar

Monday: The Wimbledon Championships begin, but "without two of tennis' biggest stars..."

Monday night: The Canadiens and the Lightning play in Game 1 of the NHL Stanley Cup finals...

Thursday: The publishing-world drama "The Bold Type" has its series finale on Freeform...

Friday: "The Forever Purge," the fifth entry in that series, hits theaters, and "The Tomorrow War," a sci-fi movie starring Chris Pratt that's being marketed like a theatrical blockbuster, streams on Amazon...

Four of this week's political storylines

-- President Biden and a big priority: "Biden's walk-back appears to put infrastructure back on rails, even as deal's durability is tested," Kevin Liptak reports... (CNN)

-- Narrative Watch: "Biden fights to win the narrative," Ben White writes, framing it as "inflation summer vs. recovery summer..." (Politico)

-- Criminal charges against the Trump Organization are looming. Here is CNN's latest reporting... (CNN)

-- "J.D. Vance — whose raw bestseller 'Hillbilly Elegy' helped elites process the Trump upset — plans to announce at a factory in Ohio this week that he's seeking the Republican nomination for Senate." The event is scheduled for Thursday... (Axios)

FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE

-- I said on CNN that Donald Trump's Saturday night rally in Ohio was barely newsworthy. It was a "winding but largely familiar speech," Meridith McGraw wrote for Politico. She said rallygoers "clamored for selfies with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell" beforehand... (Politico)

-- Notably, none of the major cable news networks carried the rally live. But Newsmax and OAN did... (Deadline)

-- The rallygoers were quite vocal when Trump griped about Fox. When you see Fox running further to the right, the crowd's groans are the reason why... (Twitter)

-- Of course, Trump continued to lie about the election outcome. In this incisive opinion piece, Lee McIntyre and Jonathan Rauch say the Big Lie is a "massive and devastatingly effective deployment of Russian-style information warfare," akin to an "epistemic 9/11..." (WaPo)

-- Senator Mitt Romney made lots of news in his interview with Jake Tapper on Sunday, including by "equating the former president's return to rally-style events to wrestling entertainment..." (CNN)

-- Shane Goldmacher's blood-boiling story on Page One of Sunday's NYT: "Online Trickery in Fund-Raising Entraps Seniors..." (NYT)

"The Cruelty is the Point" comes out Tuesday

"The Cruelty is the Point" is a collection of Adam Serwer's Trump-era essays, buttressed by new assessments of the past, present and future of American politics. On Sunday's "Reliable," I set up my conversation with Serwer by ticking through some searing examples of Sean Hannity's vicious language. What Hannity does, I asserted, is not "opinion" the way Fox claims it is. "Let's expand universal pre-K" is an opinion. What Hannity spouts is something else – it's poison. From calling reporters "stalkers" to calling cities "hell holes," Hannity sows division. What he does is fundamentally authoritarian. That was the argument – here's the video – and here's the discussion with Serwer. And for a further preview of his book, read Serwer's guest essay for the NYT...

Jon Karl gets Bill Barr on the record

"In a series of interviews with me this spring, Barr spoke, for the first time, about the events surrounding his break with Trump," ABC's Jon Karl wrote in a Sunday article for The Atlantic. It's a preview of Karl's book "Disloyal," which will come out in November, and it shows how Barr was a truth-teller in the face of Trump's post-election rage.

Elie Honig, who has a book about Barr titled "Hatchet Man" coming out next month, reacted this way: "Bill Barr's self-image rehab tour has begun. Don't buy it." He called Karl's reporting "excellent" but said "Barr omits that he pushed the big lie repeatedly to Congress and media *before* the election..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO

-- "There is really only one story on Fox: politics is war and the enemy cheats. It's their Big Lie," rhetoric professor Jennifer Mercieca says. "Every other story is merely an elaboration or example, another anecdote that proves the Big Lie." (Twitter)

-- Nick Kristof's latest column: "There's a reason we try to solve even intractable wars by getting the parties to sit in the same room: It beats war. If we believe in engagement with North Koreans and Iranians, then why not with fellow Americans?" (NYT)

-- ICYMI: Read Alyssa Rosenberg's compelling interview with Ken Burns... (WaPo)

New revelations from "Nightmare Scenario"

The book, subtitled "Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History," comes out Tuesday. This excerpt by WaPo reporters Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb ran on the front page of Sunday's paper. In a reconstruct of last October, they wrote that "Trump's brush with severe illness and the prospect of death caught the White House so unprepared that they had not even briefed Vice President Mike Pence's team on a plan to swear him in if Trump became incapacitated."

Elsewhere in Sunday's paper, reviewer William Hanage wrote that "we will be examining the mistakes and missteps of 2020 for decades, probably centuries," and this book "will be one of the places future historians will start..."

CDC's failure to communicate

Oliver Darcy writes: "As the Delta variant spreads, there are questions about whether Johnson & Johnson vaccine recipients should get a booster shot. Reuters' Michael Erman published a story on this, quoting experts who said they've gone ahead and gotten a dose of an mRNA vaccine for added protection. But thus far the CDC has remained silent, a move Dr. Jonathan Reiner called 'increasingly irresponsible' over the weekend. 'Most Americans,' Reiner pointed out, 'don't have access to multiple experts and they therefore rely on official recommendations which is why [the CDC's] silence about the J&J vaccine and Delta is deafening..."

Hotez to Fox on network's attacks on him: "Dial it down"

Oliver Darcy writes: "Dr. Peter Hotez, a frequent guest on cable news, has a request for Fox News: Tone down the rhetoric. Hotez turned to Twitter over the weekend to say he was 'dealing with the fallout' of a 'Fox News aggression' campaign against him. 'I'm not a government employee and not contracted with cable news networks: when they go after me, it's just me, Ann, my adult kids, including Rach with special needs, and the cat,' Hotez wrote, adding that each time Fox attacks him he deals with death threats. He asked Fox to 'dial it down' and said he'd be happy to explain vaccines on the network's shows..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE

-- Can anyone else in the US be persuaded to get a Covid vaccine? Team Biden thinks so: They're "sending A-list officials across the country, devising ads for niche markets and enlisting community organizers to persuade unvaccinated people to get a shot," aiming for the so-called "movable middle..." (AP)

-- Jackson Ryan writes: "Inside Wikipedia's endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory..." (CNET)

-- Don't miss Karen Fischer's remarkable story about Navajo Nation, FM radio, and the hosts who countered Covid misinformation on the airwaves... (The Verge)

What the loss of Apple Daily represents

CNN's Nectar Gan writes: "For a large, supposedly all-powerful authoritarian state, a tabloid newspaper with a daily circulation of just 100,000 copies most likely wouldn't pose any serious challenge to its rule. But for China's ruling Communist Party, even that is seen as too much of a threat." So Hong Kong's Apple Daily "was shuttered under pressure from the government — the latest target of the party's crusade against the city's opposition voices and rapidly shrinking freedoms since the imposition of a national security law a year ago." Read on...

>> More: Bari Weiss makes the case that the suffocation of Apple Daily was "the most important news event of this past week." She spoke with an anonymous journalist from the paper...

>> Developing right now: Hong Kong police arrested a former Apple Daily journalist at the international airport on Sunday night, per media reports...

Honoring Rich Meislin

The death of Richard Meislin, a pioneering journalist at The New York Times, continues to reverberate in journalism circles. After we shared a link to the NYT obituary for Meislen on Friday, CNN Digital EIC and SVP Meredith Artley shared this heartfelt remembrance, which we can all learn from:

"Rich was the person who listened, who asked smart questions and introduced new ideas even in the most chaotic of circumstances... from breaking stories to high stakes meetings about boundary-pushing advertising formats or major redesigns. He was the rare combination of being extremely smart and extremely kind. He gave people the benefit of the doubt. He was openly curious and creative."

Artley added: "I got to tell him a few years ago that in the many years since we worked together, I still sometimes ask myself in tense situations, 'What Would Meislin Do?' Listen. Ask. Speak when it counts. Inject levity as needed. He was truly a pioneer. So many journalists who work in or around digital (which is pretty much everyone these days, isn't it?) are standing on his shoulders..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR

-- "Once upon a time," Timothy Egan writes, "the crackpots could mostly talk only to themselves on barstools; now they have an enormous community in the dark reaches of the web." And, I would add, on television. Egan's column is titled "America is getting meaner..." (NYT)

-- Jack Shafer's reaction to the right-to-be-forgotten concept that is transforming local crime coverage: "We should not be so eager to unring history's bell..." (Politico)

-- Author Walter Isaacson "is in preliminary talks with Elon Musk" to write a biography, Charlie Gasparino and Eleanor Terrett report... (Fox Business)

The secrets of a 'Jeopardy!' guest host

For the next two weeks, starting Monday, Dr. Sanjay Gupta will be guest hosting "Jeopardy!" And "it is the honor of a lifetime," he explains in this outstanding CNN.com essay. His parents, both engineers, inspired his "early love" of the show. "Decades later, I can still recall the look of pride my dad had when he came up with the correct response," Gupta writes. "I later realized he was even more proud when his young son did the same."

And now Gupta has experienced the show from the other side -- from the hosting lectern. Read his all-inclusive behind-the-scenes dispatch here...

'F9' nabs the biggest box office opening since 2019

Frank Pallotta writes: "The latest Fast & Furious film has our heroes rocket a Pontiac Fiero into outer space. But that was merely the second most impressive feat the film pulled off this weekend. The first was opening to the biggest box office numbers since the pandemic began. 'F9: The Fast Saga,' the ninth film from the action franchise starring Vin Diesel, brought in an estimated $70 million in its North America opening this weekend, according to the film's studio, Universal. That number not only exceeded expectations, it is the largest debut at the box office since 2019's 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.'" Frank has more here...

"Cinema is back!"

At a benefit for Charlize Theron's Africa Outreach Project on Saturday night, Variety's Marc Malkin talked with Vin Diesel about the "F9" box office performance. "I think what feels best is just the idea that people are returning to the theatrical experience," Diesel said. "It feels good to say, 'Cinema is back!'"

Lowry is wondering...

Brian Lowry writes: "Seeing those 'F9' numbers, it's hard not to wonder if Disney might be having second thoughts about its day-of premium-streaming plans for 'Black Widow,' which, coming on the heels of Universal's bounty, would make a strong statement about the perceived health of movie-going. Glass half full, I suppose, is that if the Marvel film does score impressive numbers, it will reinforce the sense that streaming doesn't have to cannibalize business when it comes to certain titles, the problem being that it's so hard to clearly quantify how much money is being left on the table..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE

-- "Max Rosenthal, father of 'Everybody Loves Raymond' creator Phil Rosenthal, has died. He was 95 years old. The senior Rosenthal had a recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond and also appeared on his son's Netflix reality series Somebody Feed Phil..." (Deadline)

-- "John Langley, creator of the long-running TV series 'Cops,' has died during a road race in Mexico, a family spokeswoman said..." (AP)

-- "It's a house. Get over it:" "Police tell 'Mare of Easttown' fans to stop trespassing where the series was filmed," Rachel Trent reports... (CNN)

Springsteen's emotional return

"Every week brings fresh evidence of life resuming in entertainment following a 15-month COVID-19 pause," and Bruce Springsteen's return to Broadway is the latest example, the AP's David Bauder wrote Sunday. "The tough rock 'n' roller was clearly emotional," Bauder wrote. "He wiped away tears toward the end of his show, which mixes personal remembrances with performances of his song."

For more, check out Nick Corasaniti's first-person piece for the NYT -- "I have seen the return of Broadway, and its name is Bruce Springsteen" -- and Peter Marks' review for WaPo. He said the energy in the St. James Theatre "could have electrified a Con Ed substation..."