Pres. Donald Trump's press conference on Thursday was combative, rambling, hostile and at times incoherent. Some web users wondered if they were watching a Saturday Night Live sketch. Others -- like CNN's Jake Tapper -- said it seemed like "the airing of the grievances" from Seinfeld's made-up holiday Festivus.
The View panel on Thursday bestowed a new nickname on Pres. Donald Trump's spokesman Stephen Miller and extended him an invitation to appear on the show.
During the daily "Hot Topics" segment, the group talked about #ADayWithoutImmigrants protest before moving on to the deceptions and missteps of the TrumpWhite House.
"Who isn't an immigrant?" asked Whoopi Goldberg. Politicians, "all of those senators and the guy who's president," everyone in the U.S. who isn't Native American is an immigrant or is descended from immigrants, she said.
"Including this Rotten Baby Miller," she said. "He is also an immigrant."
"What did you call him?" asked Joy Behar.
"Rotten Baby Miller," Goldberg replied. "Because he kept saying, 'I will talk to anybody!' We've invited him."
She turned to the camera and said, "Hey, Rotten Baby Miller, we're inviting you again. Come on!"
Miller did the rounds of political talk shows last weekend, angrily asserting that Pres. Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer is "100 percent correct" on all issues and that the administration is "just getting started" settling its scores and punishing its critics.
His strident, wooden reading of talking points off a teleprompter and his assertion that the president's power "will not be questioned" earned him nearly universal negative reviews and ridicule. Although, at the end of the day, his boss Pres. Trump tweeted that Miller did "a great job."
Trump has dismissed the reports out of hand, instead tweeting that intelligence agencies are breaking the law by sharing information with the media.
"You know, I was thinking about him today," said Behar, "and how really not-that-bright he is. You make an enemy of the very people who have all the goods on you."
"The people who know everything about you and you pick a fight with them?" she continued. "And you send a valentine to Putin? That's really not that bright. He's dumb."
The Kremlin has ordered Russian media to dial down its effusive coverage of Pres. Donald Trump now that he is proving to be more unpredictable and potentially less pro-Russian than they expected.
Bloomberg Politics spoke with three individuals familiar with the edict who all confirmed that the tide of positive Trump coverage that began during his 2016 campaign is ebbing as Pres. Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin become less confident that Trump will reliably act in their interests.
"The order marks a stark turnaround from just a few weeks ago. Trump’s unexpected triumph over Hillary Clinton in November has been widely hailed in Russia as the beginning of a new era of cooperation between the former Cold War foes. Trump’s campaign was watched with rapture as news anchors gushed over the novelty of hearing an American presidential candidate praise Putin," wrote Bloomberg's Irina Reznik, Stepan Kravchenko, Ilya Arkhipov.
“They won’t pour buckets of criticism on Trump, they just won’t talk about him much,” said Konstantin von Eggert of Russia's only independent TV channel TV Rain to Bloomberg. “The fate of Russia-American relations is much less predictable than it was just a few weeks ago.”
In Washington, U.S. lawmakers are gearing up to thoroughly investigate Trump's relationship with the Russian government, including the nature of the contact between campaign aides and Russian intelligence agencies -- agencies that are now known to have attempted to sway the election in Trump's favor.
Furthermore, the sources said, Putin is unhappy that Trump is cutting into the amount of time Russia state-run media spend praising his administration.
"In January, Trump received more mentions in the media than Putin, relegating the Russian leader to the No. 2 spot for the first time since he returned to the Kremlin in 2012 after four years as premier, according to Interfax data," said Bloomberg.
Trump's national security adviser Gen. Mike Flynn stepped down this week over revelations that he had conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak about lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia before Pres. Trump was inaugurated. Flynn then went on to lie about those conversations to Vice President Mike Pence and the public, which ultimately cost him his position.
The Daily Beast reported Tuesday that Russian officials are furious over Flynn's resignation, saying that it's a sign that Trump has been co-opted by the "Washington establishment."
Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the foreign-affairs committee in the Russian parliament, called this “not just paranoia but something even worse.” On Facebook he wrote: “Either Trump hasn’t found the necessary independence and he’s been driven into a corner... or Russophobia has permeated the new administration from top to bottom.”
Another member of the Russian parliament, Alexei Pushkov, tweeted after the announcement: “It was not Flynn who was targeted but relations with Russia.” And then he really went on a rant:
“Flynn was ‘let go’ not because of his failure, but because of the aggressive ‘Russian for the Exit!’ newspaper noise; paranoia and witch hunt,” Pushkov tweeted. “Kicking out [Flynn] was the first act, the next target will be Trump himself.”
Disney has cut ties with YouTube's most watched blogger PewDiePie for posting several videos containing anti-Semitic remarks and Nazi references, the Wall Street Journal said Tuesday.
The 27-year-old Swede, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is known for posting humorous clips to his more than 53 million followers on YouTube.
"Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent, he clearly went too far in this case and the resulting videos are inappropriate," a spokeswoman for Maker Studios, the Disney division that had partnered with PewDiePie, told the Journal.
PewDiePie, who had editorial independence under the terms of the arrangement with Disney, reportedly paid two Indian men five dollars to hold the banner reading "Death to all Jews" while they laugh and dance in the January 11 video.
"I was trying to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online," Kjellberg said in a Tumblr blog post on February 12.
"I picked something that seemed absurd to me -- that people on Fiverr would say anything for 5 dollars," referring to a website that helps freelancers receive part time work.
The Journal said PewDiePie had posted nine videos that display anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi references since August.
One of them shows a man dressed as Jesus Christ, saying "Hitler did absolutely nothing wrong".
"I think it's important to say something and I want to make one thing clear: I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes," the YouTube star said in the blog post.
"Though this was not my intention, I understand that these jokes were ultimately offensive," he added.
Kjellberg is a top earner on YouTube, making roughly $14.5 million (13.6 million euros) last year, according to reported estimates from social media data firm NeoReach.
That amount includes splitting ad revenue with YouTube, as well as sponsorships and appearance fees.
In December, PewDiePie accused YouTube of trying to "kill" his channel and has threatened to shut it down once he reaches 50 million subscribers, a move that turned out to be a publicity stunt.
Pres. Donald Trump took another pot shot at the media on Sunday as he left his Florida resort, claiming that the hundreds of protesters who greeted his motorcade were "big crowds of enthusiastic supporters" that the press won't cover, TheHill.com reported.
“Just leaving Florida. Big crowds of enthusiastic supporters lining the road that the FAKE NEWS media refuses to mention. Very dishonest!” he said on Twitter.
However, The Hill's Mallory Shelbourne wrote, "Trump didn't offer evidence of crowds seen 'lining the roads.'"
Palm Beach Post reporter George Bennett said there were "a few" Trump supporters along the road from Mar-a-Lago, but that they were vastly outnumbered by the hundreds of protesters.
Sebastian Gorka -- the aide to Pres. Donald Trump who was recently outed as having -- told TheHill.com in an interview that Kellyanne Conway's disastrous appearance on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper last Tuesday was all due to Tapper's sexism and the desire to "treat a woman as a punching bag."
Gorka, a former editor for white nationalist and neo-Nazi online hub Breitbart.com, said that his interview on Tapper's program The Lead was relatively smooth sailing, although he definitely felt that Tapper had an agenda.
On the other hand, when dealing with Conway, Gorka told The Hill’s Joe Concha, "The tone was very disappointing. It was trying to treat a woman as a punching bag, really. It was clear.”
On Sunday, CNN released a statement saying that Gorka is off-base.
"If Gorka or anyone else from the administration had been on The Lead that day they would have received the same interview. It's disappointing to see any administration retreat into false claims of addressing the issues at hand," the statement said.
Unlike Gorka, Conway's appearance on The Lead came after weeks of tussling between the network and the Trump administration over her habit of stating obvious falsehoods during her interviews.
At one point, Conway announced that the Trump White House would be shutting CNN out, calling the network "fake news." Gorka's appearance came the day after it was announced that the administration was freezing out CNN.
Gorka is a self-proclaimed expert on Islamic extremism. He claimed for years to have been an expert witness in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, when in fact he never took the stand at any point during the trial and the materials he submitted for the prosecution's review were never consulted or used in any way.
The U.S. Attorney's office in Massachusetts told Fusion.com, “Gorka never testified at the trial and prosecutors didn’t rely on his expertise in preparing or presenting their case.”
earlier this week, "Gorka has maintained his false role as an expert witness of the Tsarnaev trial on various platforms, for instance here, where he claims to have 'served as an expert witness in the Boston Marathon bombing trial,' here, and here in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson."
Author J. K. Rowling joined in on the thrashing that former CNN host and U.K. tabloid editor Piers Morgan received from Australian comedian Jim Jefferies on Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher regarding Pres. Donald Trump's Muslim ban.
"Yes, watching Piers Morgan being told to f*ck off on live TV is *exactly* as satisfying as I'd always imagined," the Harry Potter author tweeted Saturday.
"This appeared to get under Morgan’s notoriously thin skin," said The Daily Beast's Marlow Stern, because Morgan tweeted back, "This is why I've never read a single word of Harry Potter."
Rowling -- known for her deft handling of Twitter trolls -- clapped back, writing, "Because you had a premonition that one day the author would roar with laughter at seeing you called out for your bullsh*t on live TV?"
She kept at him, asking, "Would you like a couple of hours to mock up some pictures of refugees carrying explosives to substantiate your position?" and then saying, "The fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologism of celebrity toady Piers Morgan is, of course, why it's so delicious to see him told to fuck off."
The billion-selling author is currently , one under her own name and a new detective thriller under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
UPDATE: In another Saturday tweet, Rowling said Morgan is probably still upset that she beat him out for 2005's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.
CNN's public relations office has apparently had enough of Pres. Donald Trump impugning the network and the quality of its journalism.
In the wake of Trump's attack on New Day co-host Chris Cuomo, CNN Communications (@CNNPR) clapped back, writing, "@ChrisCuomo did address that point at the start of his interview. https://t.co/JWJEAshv1y Those are the facts."
Early Thursday morning, Trump tweeted that Cuomo hadn't asked Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D) about his credibility issues regarding his purported service in Vietnam. In fact, it was part of Cuomo's first question to Blumenthal.
Blumenthal's 2010 campaign for U.S. Senate was nearly derailed after it came to light that he was lying when he said that he's served in the Vietnam War.
Trump initially attacked Blumenthal over the senator's revelation that the president's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch confided to him that the judge finds Trump's attacks on judges who oppose him "demoralizing" and "disheartening."
Trump, enraged, insisted that Gorsuch never said any such thing. However, a spokesman for Gorsuch confirmed on Thursday that the nominee did in fact made the remarks.
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo blasted Pres. Donald Trump for falsely maligning him on Twitter, saying the president is "off on the facts" and that once again, Trump is digging in and doubling down on a topic where he's just plain wrong.
The current kerfuffle revolves around remarks made by Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, who expressed misgivings about the new chief executive's attacks on federal judges who oppose him.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said on Wednesday that he'd spoken to Gorsuch, who told the Democratic senator that he finds Trump's attacks on Washington federal Judge James Robarts and New York federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel "demoralizing" and "disheartening."
Trump responded by attacking Blumenthal and accusing him of lying. In a Twitter rampage on Thursday morning, Trump jabbed Blumenthal for lying about his service in Vietnam, a story that nearly sank Blumenthal's 2010 campaign for the U.S. Senate.
CNN's Cuomo spoke with Blumenthal, who stood by his assertions and has since been backed up by a spokesman for Gorsuch, who released a statement on Thursday confirming that he'd made the remarks.
Nonetheless, Trump attacked Cuomo on Twitter while the anchor was on the air, saying Cuomo never asked Blumenthal about his false claim of serving in Vietnam.
"Chris Cuomo, in his interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave 'service' in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!" Trump wrote.
"Fake news," Cuomo said, "is the worst thing you can call a journalist. It's like an ethnic disparagement."
"Let's just please show the top of the interview," Cuomo said, rolling video.
"The president of the United States said you are not to be believed because you misrepresented your military record in the past," he said in the clip.
"The president, with all due respect, is -- once again -- off on the facts," Cuomo said. "He just keeps doubling down when the facts don't favor his position."
"Once again," he said, "he doubles down when he's wrong."
These events raise questions about the ethics and responsibilities of social media. They also point to a key media shift: Broadcasting live video used to be a complex technical feat, requiring television cameras, trucks and satellites. Today, the ubiquity of smartphones and social media has made “going live” as simple as tapping an app. The result has been a new world of live video – documenting society’s good, bad and ugly – that challenges how we think about visual information made public in an eyewitness, even journalistic fashion.
Here are five considerations for understanding how live-streaming services like Facebook Live and Periscope challenge journalism today.
1. ‘Liveness’ and bearing witness
Photos and videos have an inherent realism, which audiences associate with greater authenticity. Media philosopher John Durham Peters has shown how the “liveness” of audiovisual media can accentuate that sense of authenticity, by providing a means of collective witnessing. Journalists, for example, act as witnesses to events, and audiences bear witness to news broadcasts and reports.
In July 2016, Facebook Live exposed the police killing of Philando Castile. The video served to bear witness and added to the public discussion of police brutality.
But the Castile video also illustrated the equal parts “compelling and challenging” aspects of bearing witness to live events: Videos can improve public awareness, while in some cases including material that is graphic, pornographic or pirated.
News organizations and social media platforms are well aware of these effects. Facebook, like other social media providers, designs its interface to emphasize visuals. Amid phenomenal growth in video – YouTube has more than a billion users – news and social media sites are adapting their formats and tools to capitalize, hence the development of Facebook Live.
While news content is still largely dominated by media organizations acting as gatekeepers, the do-it-yourself information environment of social sharing means that the the press is not necessarily the last “gate.” Audience-led forms of journalism – such as posting videos from breaking news events – are by no means new, but the widespread use of smartphone cameras and one-touch publishing has made citizen journalism an almost taken-for-granted mode of the contemporary media environment.
Indeed, as seen in the women’s march and airport protests against the Trump administration, to protest these days is to live-document it at the same time – extending one’s reach beyond the protest space.
Protesters at JFK Airport in New York, Jan. 28, 2017.
What’s particularly new is this: Social networking sites – even ones like Facebook that tend to have a more private, friends-and-family orientation – increasingly are the platform for creating and sharing user-generated news, bypassing news organizations altogether. What matters more is the “spreadability” of user-created content.
4. Live video driving news
If they get enough traffic, Facebook Live videos can become objects of more formal news coverage. In effect, the social circulation itself leads to the issue being “picked up” by news organizations; that, in turn, leads to further social conversation, as in the case of Castile’s death, shot live and preserved for others to see.
Facebook Live videos can get an official response, and even professional news coverage.
This is not to say that all Facebook Live videos lead to front-page news; precious few ever will. Rather, Facebook Live videos can create a cycle in which social media videos lead to mainstream media coverage of an event or issue, generating heightened public awareness – which means more people are likely to post new live videos on that topic.
5. Ethics
Journalistic codes of ethics emphasize seeking truth and minimizing harm. Facebook, of course, doesn’t adhere to these same ethical considerations, and, in fact, we have seen numerous ethical lapses from the social media giant. What’s more, everyday folks creating Facebook Live videos do not fashion themselves as journalists – nor should they be expected to have journalistic responsibilities in mind.
But it’s worth reflecting for a moment on our collective responsibilities as Facebook users, live-streamers or not: What value are we deriving? How many thousands of people watched, reacted to and even commented on the live-streamed suicide of a 12-year-old? Are we really so desensitized?
Facebook begs us to become voyeurs. And while live-streamed videos can serve to enrich the human experience and educate the public, they mostly tend to trade in the ugly and profane. Are we, as the late media scholar Neil Postman famously suggested about another video medium, merely “amusing ourselves to death” with the mundane?
Final considerations
Live-streamed video muddies the intersection of Facebook and journalism. Facebook has more than a billion daily active users, with 66 percent of its users getting news from the site. That makes it, by some accounts, the leading news gatekeeper in the world.
What’s clear is that live-streaming video via social media forces us to consider how we think about news – its speed, spread and defining influence in bearing witness to public life.
President Donald Trump, who's every utterance has been a rating boost for the cable networks, failed to bring in big numbers for the Fox network, drawing only 55 percent of the viewers who tuned in to see ex-President Barack Obama after he was first elected in 2008.
According to the Huffington Post, Trump's interview with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly drew a paltry 12.2 million viewers, down 45 percent from the 21.9 million viewers who watched Obama's first interview as president in 2009.
In fact, Obama also drew higher numbers than Trump during his later interviews in 2014 (18 million), 2015 (16.4 million) and 14.9 million in 2016.
Trump's low numbers come after his interview was heavily hyped by the Trump-friendly Fox Network that teased the interview with clips of the president discussing his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, where Trump defended the Russian strongman after O'Reilly called him a "killer."
According to USA Today, preliminary numbers indicate Super Bowl LI was in the top five of most viewed championship games.
"The Dr. Oz Show," which has come under fire from physicians and politicians for promoting "miracle" cures with no evidence, will launch a new weekly segment on the connections between spirituality and health that veers, once again, into the territory of miracles. Christian author and motivational speaker Priscilla Shirer and several pastors will join Oz for…
Lady Gaga's Super Bowl halftime show did not feature any direct shots at Pres. Donald Trump, but her opening choices of "American the Beautiful" and "This Land is Your Land" indirectly conveyed a counter-Trump message of welcome and inclusivity.
She then went on to deliver a powerhouse performance that featured flying, pyrotechnics, piano playing and tightly choreographed dancing with what looked like at least a million, a million-and-a-half backup dancers, as Pres. Trump would say.
