| Brian Stelter here at 9:50pm ET on Sunday, October 3, hitting send during halftime in the Buccaneers-Patriots game. Scroll down for the latest on the Pandora Papers, Stephanie Grisham, IATSE, James Austin Johnson, SCOTUS, Jeff Bezos, "Venom," and much more...
 Frances Haugen was Facebook's lead product manager on the civic misinformation team. "During her time at Facebook," her bio says, "Frances became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety — putting people's lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, Frances made the courageous act to blow the whistle."
Haugen now identifies herself as "an advocate for public oversight of social media." She rolled out a new website, Twitter profile and online identity in the minutes before her blockbuster "60 Minutes" interview aired on CBS.
The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Haugen was the key source for last month's "Facebook Files" project. Reporter Jeff Horwitz said he had been calling her "Sean" for "the past ten months." He added, "Frances will be speaking for herself from here on out." Horwitz also published a profile of Haugen at the same time as Scott Pelley's sit-down with her aired on the "60" broadcast.
"If people just hate Facebook more because of what I've done, then I've failed," she told the WSJ. She said she's trying to save FB, not destroy it. "I believe in truth and reconciliation — we need to admit reality," she said. "The first step of that is documentation." The question, as always, is: Will advertisers and investors care about any of this?
Standout quotes from "60"
-- "The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world." She cited Myanmar as an example.
-- "There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money."
-- "Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money."
-- "No one at Facebook is malevolent, but the incentives are misaligned."
Spend some time with the full CBS segment via video or text. Clare Duffy has a full recap for CNN here...
Facebook's topline response to Haugen
Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch said this on Sunday night: "Every day our teams have to balance protecting the ability of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true."
NOW LET'S ZOOM OUT...
What's different about this scandal?
Donie O'Sullivan writes: "Facebook has had more than its fair share of major scandals: Being used by Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, and major security breaches. But this scandal hits different. Some of the most damning revelations are about children, teenagers — some of the most vulnerable people in our society. It's emotive and unfortunately extremely relatable for many. That's what makes this time unique..."
Facebook's prebuttal  Facebook VP Nick Clegg agreed to my "Reliable Sources" interview request in a clear effort to get ahead of the "60 Minutes" broadcast. Clegg made a few main points. First, that the company can't possibly control all of the content posted to its platforms. Second, that "our job is to mitigate the bad, reduce it -- and amplify the good." And third, that FB is actually doing a rather fine job of reduction and amplification, despite the popular narrative in the press. Here's the interview transcript.
>> When I commented that "a part of me feels like I'm interviewing the head of a tobacco company right now," or the head of a giant casino, Clegg responded that the comparison is "profoundly false." A third of the world's population "enjoys using these apps," he said. "They do it because they like exchanging their views, their feelings, and their experiences..."
>> Clegg also said the social media firm will continue conducting internal research to understand the effects of its platforms...
An area of agreement?
Pelley's report about Haugen ended on this note: "She believes the federal government should impose regulations." Haugen said, "I'm hoping that this will have had a big enough impact on the world that they get the fortitude and the motivation to actually go put those regulations into place. That's my hope."
I doubt Haugen sees eye to eye with Clegg about how exactly those regulations should be written or what they should say. But FB has been calling for DC to step in -- and spending lots of $$ to campaign for regulation -- for months and months. "I think regulation would really help," Clegg said when I brought this up. "Regulations," a source in FB's DC operation texted me just now – "THIS is in part how this story moves forward..."
Coming up next...
-- "Last month," Pelley reported, "Haugen's lawyers filed at least eight complaints with the SEC, which enforces the law in financial markets," charging FB with lying to investors...
-- In related news, Facebook's response to the FTC's antitrust lawsuit is due on Monday...
-- And Haugen will testify at a Senate hearing titled "Protecting Kids Online" on Tuesday... FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE -- The WSJ and Gimlet are out with a new Spotify podcast episode with Haugen in her own words...
-- Sen. Amy Klobuchar just issued a statement to thank Haugen "for coming forward with her brave testimony..."
-- Kara Swisher's Sunday night comment about FB execs: "They need to stop playing endless word games with the public and start to look in the mirror..."
-- Dave Pell tweeted: "I'm glad there's another Facebook whistleblower. But we all already know the truth. The question, as always, is will anyone care..."
-- The brilliance of "60" in a nutshell: Watched "for the Facebook segment," Dave Lee wrote, "now a blubbering mess watching the story on the miraculous Tony Bennett." Watch Anderson Cooper's report here... Ben Smith's Ozy followup
On Sunday morning, NYT media columnist Ben Smith told me he was shocked by how hard and fast Ozy Media fell after his initial column this time last week. Mediaite has a recap of our conversation here.
On Sunday night, Smith's follow-up column included Carlos Watson's first comments since the collapse of the company. "When he spoke with me over Zoom from a California backyard on Sunday," Smith wrote, "he conceded nothing."
"I put everything I have into this company," Watson said. "We tried to do what we could to hopefully live out a set of values about inclusivity and growth and innovation and change and possibility. Those were real things." Read on... FIRST LOOK
Austin Tice's parents ask for meeting with Biden
Oliver Darcy writes: "Austin Tice's parents say they would 'welcome the opportunity' to meet with President Biden and his family. In an open letter that will run as a full-page ad in the Washington Post on Monday, Debra and Marc Tice write, 'We'd like to tell you more about Austin. A meeting of our loving families would send a strong message across our country and overseas.' The letter comes nine years after Tice was abducted. The Tice family told Biden that they believe 'if Austin were a member of your family, all the Bidens would rally around and come together to bring him home.' They are calling on him to engage on 'that kind of all-in effort' for their son..." Media week ahead calendar
Monday: The New Yorker Festival takes place all week long...
Tuesday: New nonfiction releases include Dr. Sanjay Gupta's "World War C," Drew Magary's "The Night the Lights Went Out," Jen Senko's "The Brainwashing of my Dad," and Dave Grohl's "The Storyteller." New novels include "Crossroads" by Jonathan Franzen and "The Lincoln Highway" by Amor Towles...
Wednesday: "Fauci," the National Geographic documentary, premieres on Disney+.
Thursday: The 25th anniversary of Fox News...
Thursday: "15 Minutes of Shame," a documentary about internet shaming produced by Monica Lewinsky, premieres on HBO Max...
Friday: "No Time to Die" finally arrives in the US, having already opened strongly overseas... Time for Stephanie Grisham to take Q's
The former Trump admin press secretary who abstained from press briefings will start promoting her new book on Monday's "GMA." ABC says George Stephanopoulos has the first live interview with Grisham pegged to Tuesday's release of "I'll Take Your Questions Now." Juju Chang also has an extended interview airing on "Nightline." On release day, Grisham will be on CNN's "New Day" and "The Lead with Jake Tapper." I'm curious to see how much attention Grisham's tell-all will generate. The book is currently #20 on Amazon, while "Peril" remains #3 two plus weeks after launch... All eyes on IATSE
Over the weekend, tens of thousands of IATSE members were "asked to vote on whether to give International president Matthew Loeb authorization to call a strike," Carolyn Giardina wrote for THR. To date, negotiations with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers have "failed to produce a new three-year basic agreement for the 13 locals that work under the contract." The results of the vote should be announced on Monday... SOME OF THIS WEEK'S STORYLINES -- Local officials are warning that this California oil spill could become an "ecological disaster." Here is local coverage from the LA Times...
-- Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to Paris... Andrea Mitchell will be anchoring her MSNBC program from the city...
-- Andrew Yang will be making the TV rounds to tout his new book "Forward" and his vision for a new third party with the same name...
-- Starting Monday, major pharmacies are facing the "first federal trial" over their role in the nation's opioid crisis, WaPo reports...
-- Powerball is ballooning into a record jackpot, and the next drawing is Monday night... The start of a new Supreme Court term
Monday marks the start of the new SCOTUS term, with potentially monumental cases involving abortion rights, the second amendment and religious rights on the docket. I asked CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin to join me on the RS podcast for a preview. We discussed new developments in court access -- specifically, that in-person oral arguments will be live streamed on the court's website for the first time. It's a big step in the right direction: "This is the public's business and the stakes are enormous," Toobin said. "So why shouldn't the government or the public hear how it's all being handled?"
"But there's also a political aspect to it," he theorized: If live audio is available, "the pressure for cameras in the courtroom will really recede," though he said he'd still like the television access. Listen in via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your favorite app... How are we still getting vax mandate stories with this framing?!
Oliver Darcy writes: "NBC News faced some criticism over the weekend when it tweeted a headline that read, 'North Carolina hospital network fires around 175 staffers for not getting vaccinated.' As WaPo's David Weigel — and many others — pointed out, that amounted to 0.5% of the hospital network's entire staff. I don't mean to pick on NBC, since many other outlets have continued to publish stories with similar framing. But it is, at this point, quite baffling. Stories on the small sliver of those who refuse to comply with vaccine mandates must be put into the larger context, which is that most people are choosing to immunize themselves against the virus..." Five highlights from Sunday's "Reliable"
-- Why are MAGA media stars siding with anti-vaxxers and vaccine mandate opponents? Juliette Kayyem weighed in...
-- What explains Donald Trump's continued legal push to get back on Twitter? It's psychological, Susan Glasser said: "Attention is an intoxicant for him..."
-- Is the media missing the forest for the legislative trees? Jonathan Cohn said some news outlets have "overreacted" to DC's budget battles. It looks like "a pretty normal process of negotiation," he added...
-- Charlotte Alter said the big story is about the potential impact of these investments, not the sausage-making. She offered a much more appealing analogy, cake-baking...
-- At the start of National Breast Cancer Awareness month, AP reporter Meg Kinnard shared her cancer journey and her advice to other women... Thank you, Marina di Marzo
Every TV news show has a producer that serves as the glue, the indispensable person who seems to know everyone and everything and bind the broadcast together. For the past few years that person at "Reliable Sources" has been Marina di Marzo. Sunday was her final day -- she is off to CNN+ later this month -- so let me just say: Thank you Marina! FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO -- From the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the group that brought you the FinCEN Files and the Panama Papers, these are the Pandora Papers: "A trove of more than 11.9 million confidential files" showing the "offshore havens and hidden riches of world leaders and billionaires..." (ICIJ)
-- The consortium says Pandora is its biggest collaboration to date, involving "600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries..." (AP)
-- CNN's Pamela Brown interviewed WaPo's Greg Miller about the deep dive... (CNN)
-- "When Kabul fell to the Taliban, Afghan journalist Fatema Hosseini had only bad options. As a female reporter who'd worked for USA Today, she could stay and likely be killed or taken by the Taliban, or she could try to run." She recounted her escape on Sunday's episode of this podcast... (USA Today) Minimal coverage of Women's March?
The Mary Sue's Chelsea Steiner writes: "Reproductive rights led the charge in this year's Women's March... but where was the media?"
"While over 120,000 people marched in protest across the country," Steiner writes, "the mainstream media was largely absent... Coverage of the march was absent even on left-leaning MSM sites like HuffPost, which ran four different articles on last night's 'SNL' in their 'What's Happening' section but nothing on the Women's March.'" But let's give credit where it's due: CNN and MSNBC covered the marches extensively on Saturday... Headbands are in
One more sighting on TV, and we'll have a full-blown trend piece. Sunday's pair already spurred stories by Mediaite and TheWrap. The WSJ's Jeff Horwitz, one of the leaders of the "Facebook Files" coverage, has been sporting a headband during his live shots as of late. He says it's been a consistent part of his Covid-era wardrobe. When he donned the accessory on Sunday's "Meet the Press," Twitter lit up. The aforementioned Ben Smith was inspired to try it out on "Reliable." If you were confused, read Dessi Gomez's Wrap story here... FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE -- "University of Colorado athletic director Rick George apologized on behalf of Buffaloes football coach Karl Dorrell, who shoved a photojournalist's camera while trotting off Folsom Field following a blowout loss" on Saturday... (AP)
-- "NBC NASCAR reporter Kelli Stavast is either hard of hearing, or a very, very quick thinker," Bruce Haring writes, referencing how she dealt with a profanity-laced anti-Biden chant that broke out at the Xfinity Series race... (Deadline)
-- "YouTube TV and NBCUniversal have kissed and made up..." (Gizmodo) A new Joe Biden
New "SNL" cast member James Austin Johnson opened the show's 47th season as the new President Biden, as Frank Pallotta wrote here. So how did he do? Reviews, as always, were mixed. The Daily Beast's Matt Wilstein said he was spot-on: The show's "best Biden since Jason Sudeikis." VF's Karen Valby called it a "swing and a miss," dubbing the impersonation "iffy." Over at Fox, Joseph A. Wulfsohn observed that "it took SNL a total of 255 days to mock President Biden in the cold open. Never has this show gone 8+ months into a new presidency without satirizing the president." Here's the entire cold open so you can judge for yourself...  Hannity bemoans "toxic" Twitter, says he lives "like a Marine"
Oliver Darcy writes: "Sean Hannity, who regularly uses his platform to name call and bully, bemoaned how 'toxic' Twitter has 'gotten' in an interview with the NY Post. In the interview, which Hannity granted as Fox celebrates its 25th anniversary, he also claimed to 'live like a Marine all week long,' boasting about his martial arts training and little sleep. 'It's really intense,' the talk-show host said of his life style. Hannity, who is notoriously thin-skinned, also claimed he doesn't give a 's**t what people say' about him. He added of his critics, 'They can dish it out, but they can't take it.' One might argue that, in fact, the opposite is true..." FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR -- Congratulations to CNN's Michael Smerconish, who just became a grandfather! Welcome to the world, Finn Gracen Wire... (CNN)
-- Something to make you smile: "When 16-year-old Luke Stevens missed a history test to hang out with Lin Manuel Miranda, he enlisted the Hamilton star's help in recording a video message for his teacher..." (CNN)
-- Matt Amodio is chasing Ken Jennings' "Jeopardy!" win streak. How far will he go? Claire McNear interviewed him here... (The Ringer) How many will watch Bucs-Pats?
As Andrew Marchand said, "this is one of the great sports TV days of the year." It is concluding with one of the biggest "Sunday Night Football" games... ever? Adam Schefter reported that the Patriots "issued 506 media credentials" for Tom Brady's return to Gillette Stadium, "including 262 to NBC. For perspective, Patriots issued 206 total media credentials for the team's season opener vs. Miami, with 70 going to CBS." So how high will the ratings be? Sports Media Watch is predicting 23.9 million...
Kerry's live report from Gillette!
Kerry Flynn writes: "Bud Light. Hot dogs. #12 jerseys. A sign reading 'The Goat has returned.' As a lifelong Patriots fan until 2020 when I switched my allegiance to the Bucs, I'm thrilled to be back at Gillette Stadium and happy to welcome home Tom Brady. Life feels almost normal — other than masks which are required for unvaccinated attendees. This is my fiancé Mike's first ever NFL game. He's a bit overwhelmed and unsure who to root for even though I think the answer is obvious..."  "Venom" becomes biggest opening of the pandemic
Frank Pallotta writes: "Sony's 'Venom: Let There Be Carnage' blew past expectations at the ticket booth this weekend. The film notched an estimated $90.1 million at the North American box office -- the biggest total of the pandemic era and second biggest ever for the month of October, according to Comscore. It's also incredibly good news for theaters owners who are hoping that October can string together multiple hit weekends at the box office." Read on...
Tepid start for "Many Saints"
Brian Lowry writes: "'Venom' is the big headline out of the weekend box office, but the more fascinating one is 'The Many Saints of Newark,' which opened to a tepid $5 million in the US. 'The Sopranos' creator David Chase groused to Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. last month about his movie premiering simultaneously on HBO Max, and we'll never know how much bigger that number might have been had the prequel been available exclusively in theaters. But 14 years after the HBO show ended, I suspect Chase made what was always going to be a project destined to appeal to an older audience that would be content to watch at home on TV, which might suggest that some talent needs a reality check about what qualifies as a 'movie' in their eyes – an issue with which the studios (in this case CNN sibling Warner Bros.) and awards organizations have already been wrestling."
Lowry adds: "As a footnote, consider how many advance stories you saw about 'Many Saints' (and I plead guilty to writing one of those think pieces) as compared to 'The Addams Family 2,' which like 'Venom' exceeded expectations with an $18 million opening. One could argue there was a separate media echo chamber regarding Cannes winner 'Titane,' a darling of Film Twitter that made only modest ripples in its US debut over the weekend..." FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE -- Britney Spears' newest message to her fans via Instagram: "Although there is change and things to celebrate in my life, I still have a lot of healing to do..." (CNN)
-- Dasl Yoon and Timothy W. Martin write about "Squid Game" and its success, noting that "for a decade, local studios rejected the fictionalized show's pitch as too grotesque and too unrealistic..." (WSJ)
-- Jeff Bezos gave a big shoutout to a big rival over the weekend: "@ReedHastings and Ted Sarandos and the team at @Netflix get it right so often," he wrote, citing "Squid Game" as the latest example. "Their internationalization strategy isn't easy, and they're making it work. Impressive and inspiring..." (Twitter)
-- Franklin Leonard replied and said "something's up," and Bezos responded, "No, just simple admiration..." (Twitter) SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST...
Pet of the day!
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