 "Confused and frustrated"
Let's start with the good news: Vaccination rates in the US are ticking back up. Sunday marked the fifth straight day of the CDC recording more than 700,000 shots in arms across the country.
Now to the bad news, and there's a lot of it. "The Biden administration's handling of the Delta surge has left Americans confused and frustrated, fueling media overreaction and political manipulation," as Mike Allen and Caitlin Owens wrote for Axios. Comms failures by the CDC and other agencies have been at the root of the problem. News outlets' sensational headlines and faulty frames have compounded the problem.
Reason mag senior editor Robby Soave didn't hold back on Sunday's "Reliable Sources." He opined that recent news coverage has been "utterly, shamefully hyperbolic and fear-mongering" and said "it's scaring people unnecessarily" since "the vaccines are extremely effective." The much-talked-about data from a July outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, proves that point once more: Only a few people were hospitalized and no one died. That's what the headline "should have been," Dr. Celine Gounder said.
Meanwhile, unvaccinated Americans keep getting admitted to hospitals and placed onto ventilators. On "Reliable," I showed CNN's graph of hospitalizations in Louisiana, one of the least-vaccinated states of the union, where hospitalizations are rising quickly, and then Vermont, the most-vaccinated state, where hospitalizations are close to zero.
Two very different stories
There is no single national story about Covid-19 right now. There are two very different realities for two different audiences – the vaccinated and the unvaxxed -- and thus two very different stories.
Obviously news outlets shouldn't blindly follow what any White House says, but the points that were made by Biden aides on Friday, as reported by Oliver Darcy in Friday night's newsletter, were reasonable. As one of the aides said, "The biggest problem we have is unvaccinated people getting and spreading the virus." It's not a new story, but it remains the top story. As Jake Tapper said at the beginning of "State of the Union" Sunday morning: "The vaccines work. The vaccines remain the best way to protect yourselves from this virus. Period. Full stop."
To that end, there was an important recap on Page One of Sunday's NYT: The unvaccinated in America "is not a single set of Americans, but in many ways two." One group, skewing rural and conservative, is adamantly opposed to the vaccines, and the other group is hesitant but is much more open to helping. Two very different stories... FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE -- Every day, we see more and more steps in this direction: "We have to say to people, 'Look, there's a consequence if you choose not to get vaccinated, and you can't participate in the public square quite the same way you could otherwise,'" Andy Slavitt told CNN's Phil Mattingly Sunday night... (CNN)
-- Covid will be a fact of life for the foreseeable future, Gounder said: "We have to learn to live with it. And vaccines are how we learn to live with it..." (CNN)
-- Andrew Sullivan's take: "These viruses challenge the psyche, and the trick, it seems to me, is not to deny their power and danger, but to see past them to the real goal: the living of your life..." (The Weekly Dish)
-- In the words of Kendall Ostrow, "the White House has launched the most important influencer marketing campaign of all time." Taylor Lorenz has a preview of the pro-vax effort... (NYT)
-- Key quote from WH aide Rob Flaherty: "If we view disinformation as a negative information effort, this campaign is a positive information effort..." (Twitter) Misinfo watch
In this new post on Substack, James Surowiecki makes the case that "the current news environment is not a neutral news environment. It's an environment in which antivaxxers are working assiduously to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines, and every overhyped, poorly written tweet, every misstatement by a public-health official, quickly becomes fodder for their message." He says "the point isn't that the media should be pro-vaccine. Rather, they should be true to the evidence." So, here's some evidence that this is "not a neutral news environment:"
-- This WaPo story includes a 12-year-old in L.A. who "was unsure she wanted to get the vaccine, largely because of the baseless reports she saw online that it would make her arm magnetic..."
-- For a fresh sampling of other Covid-related lies that are making the rounds right now, the AP's "NOT REAL NEWS" feature will amaze and/or horrify you...
-- The anti-vax nonsense comes in many flavors. As Sheera Frenkel and Tiffany Hsu note in this new NYT story, it's not just spreading via Facebook and Fox. Local websites, stations and podcasts "have also become powerful conduits for anti-vaccine messaging..."
-- There's a new flavor every day: "Apple on Saturday removed Unjected, a dating-and-community app for unvaccinated people, from its App Store, in a move that the app's owners likened to censorship," per Insider...
YouTube suspends Sky News Australia for a week
Sky News Australia, a TV network owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, "has been banned from uploading content to YouTube for seven days after violating its medical misinformation policies by posting numerous videos which denied the existence of Covid-19" or encouraged people to use discredited meds, The Guardian's Amanda Meade reports. "The ban will impact Sky News's revenue stream from Google, which started after News Corp signed a historic multi-year partnership with Google in February under the media bargaining code." Remember that?
Sky has, predictably, gone on the warpath against YouTube...
'Breakthrough' is probably the wrong word
In the context of Covid-19, "breakthrough" implies rare and problematic, like something went wrong with the vaccine so the virus "broke" through. But mild cases of Covid among the vaccinated were always expected. Some people who get the flu shot still get the flu, too. The real "breakthrough," so to speak, is the development of multiple vaccines that almost eliminate the risk of hospitalization and death from Covid-19. Soave made this point first-hand on Sunday's "Reliable Sources:" He just recovered from his own mild case of Covid after being vaccinated. He said, "I feel completely fine today" and credited the vaccine with that...
>> Yes, but: The CDC's decision not to track so-called "breakthrough" cases, except those supremely rare cases that result in hospitalization or death, is contributing to the confusion. People keep hearing about folks in their own lives like Soave... who are vaccinated, yet still became infected... and they wonder if they're being snookered by the government. Data could clarify this murky picture, if it existed...
Local reporters face backlash for covering Covid  To understand what it's like for local reporters in some of the least-vaccinated states, I was joined by Leada Gore in Alabama, Keisha Rowe in Mississippi, and Emily Woodruff in Louisiana. "I could have a story that shows you we added a thousand cases and I will receive 20 e-mails saying that the numbers are made up," Gore told me. The solution, she said, is for info to come "from the ground up as opposed to the top down." Local outlets are working hard to connect readers with trusted community sources rather than White House or CDC experts.
Woodruff said she sometimes shares her own personal account of getting the vaccine when she's interviewing reluctant neighbors. The stress of the seemingly never-ending assignment clearly takes a toll. "It's a lot tougher of a job than I ever imagined," Rowe said. "Trying to inform the public and just having so much backlash -- it sometimes makes you question a lot of things." But it also makes her "hungrier to get the information out there."
Alexis Benveniste has more from the interviews in her story...
Frustrated by your neighbors? Buy an ad!
A resident in Port St. Lucie took matters into his own hands and bought a print ad across the top of Sunday's St. Lucie News Tribune: In giant letters, the ad said, "Former President Trump Got His Covid-19 Vaccines. Now It's Your Turn." A reader sent me a picture of the front page. Hey, whatever works... FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO -- What the right is hearing: Jeanine Pirro attacking Biden and VP Kamala Harris, saying "now you want to mask us because you clearly failed in your effort to get us vaccinated, because the totalitarian impulse within you is so strong..." (Mediaite)
-- Back to reality now, and Chris Cuomo's interview with an exhausted wife in Jackson, Mississippi who just wants her hospitalized husband to get better. "It's real. It's devastating... I wouldn't want my worst enemy to go through this..." (CNN)
-- Here's Benjamin Wallace-Wells on why this moment is different: Everyone has to "recalibrate for different risks, the dimensions of which are not yet fully known..." (The New Yorker)
-- Soave's warning to me: "The media has to be more responsible," otherwise officials will put in place "permanent restrictions and security measures" that amount to "Covid theater..." (CNN) Media week ahead calendar
Monday: David Faber is this week's "Jeopardy!" host...
Tuesday: Discovery reports earnings before the bell; Activision Blizzard, after the close...
Tuesday: Timed to the former president's 60th birthday this week, "Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union" kicks off a three-night run on HBO...
Wednesday: NYT Co releases earnings before the bell; Fox Corp, IAC, Electronic Arts, and Roku all report after the close...
Wednesday: "Pass Over" opens in previews, becoming "the first play returning to Broadway..."
Thursday: ViacomCBS reports earnings before the bell; News Corp, after the close...
Thursday: The NFL Hall of Fame Game kicks off at 8pm...
Friday: The fringe, the "largest arts festival in the world," begins in Edinburgh and online...
Friday: "The Suicide Squad" opens wide (and on HBO Max), while the musical "Annette" hits theaters exclusively in advance of a date on Amazon...
Sunday: Tokyo Olympics closing ceremony... Vindman's memoir comes out Tuesday
"Here, Right Matters," retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman's coming-to-America story with an incredible impeachment ending, comes out on Tuesday from HarperCollins. David Martin had the first TV interview with Vindman on "CBS Sunday Morning." Susan Page has the first print interview for USA Today. And The Atlantic has the first adaptation from the book...
Other new releases
Tuesday's other new nonfiction releases include "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden" by Peter Bergen; "Power Play," Tim Higgins' book about Tesla and Elon Musk; "The Quiet Zone," Stephen Kurczy's look at life in Green Bank, WV, where phones and WiFi are banned; "The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line," about women "who changed the course of World War II," by Mari K. Eder, and "The Family Firm" by Emily Oster, which was adapted into this NYT essay on Sunday... FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE -- Infrastructure week is a top story for Monday morning's newscasts: Bipartisan dealmakers have finalized "legislative text of the infrastructure bill..." (CNN)
-- One of the weekend's most compelling live shots: Progressives camping outside the Capitol to protest the end of a "pandemic freeze on evictions." I saw coverage all across cable, from Fox to MSNBC... (Reuters)
-- Kevin McCarthy's hateful "joke" about hitting Nancy Pelosi is dangerously unfunny. But I can't help but wonder: Will it be any more than a blip by Monday night? (CNN) How MyPillow CEO's delusions endanger democracy
We have reached the month when some Trump mega-fans imagine that he will be "reinstated." Grifters like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell are stoking this fantasy. While Lindell will fail to get Trump reinstated, "what he will help to do is loosen further Americans' sense that their democracy works," Anne Applebaum said on "Reliable."
Jared Holt made the observation that right-wing political content like Lindell's exists in "a parallel media universe" from other news coverage, "and the two lanes don't touch." In that parallel universe, some Americans truly believe that Trump "is still the president," Applebaum warned...
The cult of Trump?
Rep. Jackie Speier has had horrible first-hand experience with cults, as many of you know. Speier was shot by members of the Peoples Temple during the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. So I wondered how she reacts to those who say some support for Trump is cult-like. It turns out, she agrees.
The Democratic congresswoman specifically called out some of her House GOP counterparts for exhibiting cult-like behavior. In this interview on Sunday's show, she talked about "lost souls" looking for "empowerment." And she said the media has done an "extraordinary job" of spotlighting Trump's undemocratic activities. "I think it is more important than ever that the media stand strong," she said... FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR -- Arguably Sunday's biggest story from Tokyo: "Belarusian sprinter says she is being forcibly removed from the Olympics and sent home..." (CNN)
-- Joe Ferullo's latest column in The Hill connects dots between Simone Biles in Tokyo and the 1/6 police officers in DC: "A new kind of hero? Last week's emotional TV may be a sign..." (The Hill)
-- Several stories in the past few days, like "Olympic TikTok is the Best," all suggest that the answer to this WaPo question is yes: "Is TikTok winning the Olympics?" (WaPo) Lisa's incisive analysis
Lisa Respers France writes: "The other day I shared a meme that struck a nerve. In it, there are pictures of three superstar athletes -- tennis player Naomi Osaka, gymnast Simone Biles and track and field sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson -- along with a sign that reads, 'Y'all Not Gone Stress Us Out -- Black Women Everywhere.' The trio have some people up in arms and calling them everything from 'quitters' to 'irresponsible.' Each of them has already put in the work ethic that has gotten them to the top of their fields and they owe none of us their talents at the risk of themselves. They wouldn't, even if they weren't champions. All the Black women in us are tired and those who focus on self care deserve our support, not condemnation..." "Succession Drama Grips Scholastic"
As the headline says, this WSJ story by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Shalini Ramachandran has a "CEO's sudden death, an office romance and a surprise will." When Scholastic boss Richard Robinson Jr. suddenly died in June, he left control of the children's publishing powerhouse to chief strategy officer and apparent "longtime romantic partner" Iole Lucchese. Robinson's family members -- two of whom were with walking with him when he died -- were surprised to say the least. Some are "reviewing their legal options," the WSJ says. Meantime, rivals are eyeing Scholastic "as an attractive acquisition target." Read on... Happy 40th birthday, MTV
Variety's Michael Schneider writes: "MTV turns 40 on Sunday, and it hardly looks its age. Well, that's because it hardly looks like, well, anything anymore. At least that's the depressing state of the linear MTV channel." If you don't believe him, take a look at the schedule. Sunday's birthday party was just a long line of "Ridiculousness" repeats. But "MTV is alive and well" off the cable platform, he notes, with streaming productions and prestige docs and revivals. Here's his pitch: "Give MTV back to the 40-year-olds... ViacomCBS would have nothing to lose at this point in making MTV back into a lifestyle channel for the original MTV Generation..."  FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE -- How did Tim Pool, a "former darling of Occupy Wall Street," become a favorite of the far-right? This wild profile by Robert Silverman is full of answers, including traffic and financial incentives... (Beast)
-- Olivia Solon's latest piece is about Al Jazeera's Ghada Oueiss and other female journalists and activists "who have allegedly been targeted and harassed by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East through hack-and-leak attacks" using Pegasus spyware. A key part of the harassment "is the use of private photos" to shame women... (NBC)
-- "A second person died on Saturday after being shot during a screening of 'The Forever Purge,' a movie about anarchy and murder, at a California theater in what the authorities called a 'random and unprovoked attack...'" (NYT)
-- The second victim, Anthony Barajas, was a "well-known TikTok user" with nearly a million followers... (CNN) Eye on Activision Blizzard...
If last month's discrimination lawsuit against Activision Blizzard "had been delivered against any film, television or streaming media company — take your pick — it would be the dominant entertainment story of the year," the LA Times games critic Todd Martens argued in a recent column. "Outside the gaming media and a handful of news outlets... this story is by and large being overlooked, a mistake that again underestimates the most relevant industry in this town," he wrote.
Rishi Iyengar has been all over the scandal for CNN Business, I'm happy to say. But I think Martens is directionally right. Since the lawsuit was filed, "the fallout has been widespread," as documented by Kotaku here. There's more to come this week, with the company reporting quarterly earnings on Tuesday... Fox star Seth MarFarlane rages against Fox News (again)
He always comes up with creative new ways to make his case via Twitter. The "Family Guy" creator's latest was on Sunday: "Tucker Carlson's latest opinion piece once again makes me wish Family Guy was on any other network. Look, Fox, we both know this marriage isn't working anymore. The sex is only once a year, I don't get along with your mother, and well… I've been having an affair with NBC." That's a reference to his production house move from Fox to NBC last year... FOR THE RECORD, PART SIX -- Lollapalooza dropped DaBaby from its Sunday lineup "after comments he made during a July performance were widely condemned as homophobic..." (CNN)
-- Dolly Parton revealed this on Andy Cohen's Bravo show, and it's still making headlines days later: Parton "invested royalties from Whitney Houston's version of 'I Will Always Love You' in Black community..." (WaPo)
-- "Comcast and Disney are seeking new PR news heads after management shakeups." Claire Atkinson sums up the replacement speculation here... (Insider)
-- Peacock "is close to a deal for a Magic Johnson docuseries, aka Magic's Last Dance. The streamer would pay about $25M, on par with the prices of some big recent music docs/docuseries," Lucas Shaw reports... (Bloomberg)  Competing "Jungle Cruise" storylines
Frank Pallotta writes: "Hey, look at that, Disney is still giving out Disney+ numbers. 'Jungle Cruise,' which had a production budget around $200 million, opened to an estimated $61.8 million at the worldwide box office, and the company says the film brought in more than $30 million globally on Disney+. So what does it mean? Well, you could look at these totals and conclude that those watching at home on Disney+ really ate into the film's theater ticket sales. You could also laud Disney for being able to bring in $30 million more by offering the film on streaming. And both of those takeaways could be correct." More here...
>> NYT's Brooks Barnes wrote: "Disney's pun-filled 'Jungle Cruise' showed that moviegoing remains severely disrupted. Any other takeaway would be de-Nile..."
Streaming has clouded the profit picture
Brian Lowry writes: "One of the points in our follow-up story about the Scarlett Johansson lawsuit against Disney is that shifting business models historically trigger clashes between studios and talent that wind up in court. What's happening in streaming, in fact, somewhat parallels vertical integration of the TV industry in the 1990s – as networks and studios were allowed to align – which produced a number of major lawsuits, related to shows like 'Home Improvement' and 'The X-Files,' over whether talent was fully sharing in revenue as studios and networks sat across the bargaining table from themselves. A similar dynamic is happening in regard to streaming, which has clouded the profit picture and created unease that stars/directors are being or will be shortchanged."
>> Lowry adds: "Given that, I was somewhat surprised to see Disney again tout the combined 'consumer spend' on 'Jungle Cruise' this weekend, which obviously makes the movie look more successful overall, while inviting questions from talent and their reps about what they might be sacrificing to benefit Disney+/streaming. And as the WSJ noted, it's still not clear whether any of these movies will actually turn a profit, with the split between streaming revenue/subscriptions further clouding the scorecard..." CBS pays big for "our future"
Nicole Sperling's Sunday AM profile of "Star Trek" chief Alex Kurtzman broke the news that he has signed a new deal with CBS Studios worth $160 million over five and a half years. The story also contained this priceless quote from George Cheeks: "From the first meeting I had with Alex, it was so obvious to me that he's our future." Cheeks' comment about the mega-deal $$: "When you make these investments, you need to know that this talent can actually deliver multiple projects at the same time across multiple platforms."
>> THR's Lesley Goldberg says Kurtzman "asked to renegotiate his deal more than a year ago after seeing the overall deals market explode..." LAST BUT NOT LEAST...
Pet of the day!
Reader Marie Lobo emails: "Brutus missed Reliable Sources [last weekend] for a grooming appointment. But he says he feels clean and looks great. (Yes he is a Tripawd)..."   Thank you for reading, watching, listening, etc. Email us your feedback anytime... Share this newsletter:
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