Media Bytes #39
Featuring Al Jazeera is banned in Israel, the media ignores the supposed child death toll in Gaza cut by half, and the partisan Pulitzers are still partisan. Jen Psaki needs to make edits to her book, God(win) is out at ABC, and WaPo apologizes to reporter as Gannet fires one for leaking. There will be a new chief at BI in the coming months, and a new conservative Washington media outlet pops up. The Daily Wire muzzles Candace, NPR boss ignores Congress, Rudy gets fired, and Indy sports journo get suspended for uncomfortable WNBA moment. Streamers combine to get more affordable, The Office (?) is back, ex-Nickelodeon exec sues for defamation, Mr. Beast fires his manager and TikTok court battle officially launches. All that, and more, in Media Bytes #39!
The Media and the Israel-Hamas War
The Holocaust denying, Qatar-funded, propaganda TV network Al Jazeera has been banned in Israel for “ harming national security”. Police seized Al Jazeera’s broadcasting equipment from its Jerusalem offices shortly after the decision was announced, while the channel and its websites were made unavailable on Israel’s two biggest TV providers and internet providers. Israel was self-righteously criticized for “muzzling the press”, even though Al Jazeera is already banned in several Arab states for the same reasons. Not surprisingly, the New York Times responded to the news by writing a fawning feature about how Al Jazeera is the news source of choice for campus rioters and protestors. Because, obviously it is.
Despite media outlets breathlessly repeating Hamas’s talking points that 14,000 children have been killed in the war, many of these same outlets ignored a United Nations agencies (OCHA) May 9 update that stated under 8,000 children have been proven to have been killed, a difference of -42%. READ MORE / READ MEDIA APLOGETICS HERE
To sum up the Pulitzer Prizes: The New York Times, whose coverage of the Israel-Hamas war hasn’t impressed anyone on both sides, received the Pulitzer for International Reporting for its “comprehensive coverage of the Hamas attack on October 7”, while Reuters was awarded the Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography for their impactful [read: horrific] images of the same day, despite them having being taken by people who participated in Hamas’s attack. A Special Citation was awarded to journalists in Gaza for “their brave reporting under extreme conditions” despite a large percentage of the over 100 journalists said to have been reported killed in the conflict proving to have been terrorists.
The Washington Post won an award on “national reporting” for a “scientifically illiterate, error-ridden, propagandistic, and willfully misleading” series on AR-15 style rifles, and ProPublica won the Pulitzer for Public Service for their highly selective and biased reporting on the relationships between U.S. Supreme Court justices and billionaires. The rest of the awards were meh-fine, but the absurdity of the winners list only continues to prove the Prize’s complete irrelevance and detachment from people on the ground.
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Items of Interest
As South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem ends her disastrous and political-career killing book tour, where she made up stories and admitted to being a serial animal killer, former White House Press Secretary and MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki has a book scandal of her own. In her new book, she claims President Joe Biden only checked his watch once after a 2021 ceremony honoring Marines killed in Afghanistan, despite it being proven he did so three times during the service. Psaki added that Biden’s critics pointed to the image to make the president appear “insensitive, concerned only about how much time had passed.” After major outlets called Psaki out, she said that “detail in a few lines of the book about the exact number of times he looked at his watch will be removed in future reprints and the ebook.”
Long embattled ABC News president Kim Godwin abruptly stepped down from the network and announced her retirement from broadcast journalism, ending a tumultuous three-year run at the outlet after staffers said her polarizing leadership and poor decisions led to plummeting employee morale. Her Disney appointed overseer, Debra OConnell, will run the network for the time being.
Former Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi won a long running battle with the paper, after they suspended him for 5 days without pay in 2022 for posting a tweet about the Post’s plans to remove bylines from reporters in Russia to protect their safety. Hardly a critical story, and common fodder for a media reporter that often broke internal news.
Newspaper chain Gannet fired Sarah Leach, an experienced editor overseeing 26 Gannett community papers in four states, for talking to Poynter, a media owner and industry watchdog.
In a move scooped by Max Tani of Semafor, Nick Carlson will be stepping down from his role as editor-in-chief of Business Insider.
Glenn Greenwald reported that The Daily Wire obtained a gag order from a private arbitrator against their former host Candace Owens, accusing her of violating the non-disparagement clause of her agreement with the company. It’s reasonable to assume Owens is Greenwald’s source, considering his support of her throughout her descent into anti-Israel and antisemitic conspiracy lunacy.
Conservative businesspeople and political activists are investing in a new conservative leaning publication focusing on Congress, in the vein of Punchbowl News and Politico. The new outlet will be called Washington Reporter, and will be led by Republican political consultants and former Hill staffers Garrett Ventry and Brian Colas. Matthew Foldi, a longtime reporter and former Republican congressional candidate, will be in charge of the sites editorial site, which has the some of the same funders of Tucker Carlson. The outlet will launch its first product, an email newsletter about congressional news called the Washington Reporter Brief, on June 3.
Embattled NPR CEO Katherine Maher skipped an appearance before Congress on May 8, instead sending a platitude filled written statement. She was called after now-former senior editor Uri Berliner wrote a bombshell piece confirming the public broadcaster of left-wing bias, and her own tweets were expunged, exposing her own widely left-of-center views.
Rudy Giuliani was suspended by WABC and had his radio talk show canceled after the disgraced former New York City mayor flagrantly and repeatedly ignored directives to avoid promoting false 2020 election conspiracy theories, station owner and Republican billionaire John Catsimatidis announced.
Famed pollster and statistician Nate Silver is launching a podcast with Malcolm Gladwell’s media company, Pushkin Industries.
IndyStar reporter Gregg Doyel, the Indianapolis reporter who went viral for an uncomfortable exchange with Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, has been suspended for the incident and will not cover Fever games in person going forward.
Apple TV+ bosses Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg are under the pump, and were summoned to Apple’s HQ in Cupertino last month for a meeting to discuss budgets, movies, TV shows and deals with theatres with CEO Tim Cook and Eddy Cue.
NBCUniversal's Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+ will be combining for a new bundling service called “StreamSaver” in the upcoming months, while Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery will launch a streaming bundle combining Disney+, Hulu and Max in the same timeframe. The Streaming Wars ended when users couldn’t afford to pay for 10+ subscription services. Now platforms need to join with bigger ones to remain relevant.
The Office has been readapted and picked up for NBC’s Peacock streaming platform. From the official synopsis: “The documentary crew that immortalized Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch is in search of a new subject when they discover a dying historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it with volunteer reporters.” Domhnall Gleeson and Sabrina Impacciatore will lead the new ensemble cast, while Steve Carrell has said he will be not be making any appearances in the new show. I’m sure its going to be amazing, and not (just) a unwanted bad cash grab hijacking an iconic show’s name, premise and legacy.
Dan Schneider in a hot tub with Nickelodeon child star Amanda Bynes
Dan Schneider, the formerly powerful executive at Nickelodeon, has filed a defamation lawsuit against the “Quiet on Set” documentary producers and creators for implying he sexually abused Nickelodeon child stars. While he definitely fostered a toxic workplace and was personally abusive, Schneider has not been accused of sexual assault.
YouTube superstar Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson has stunningly parted ways with Night Media, his long time talent management company. Mr. Beast began working with Night Media founder Reed Duchscher since 2018, and grown into one of the world’s biggest channels, entertainers and entrepreneurs in that time. Duchscher has also leveraged his relationship with Mr. Beast to grow his own profile, client base and opportunities significantly. Mr. Beast plans to work with a range of talent agencies on a non-exclusive basis—including Night Media— but some firms are privately reluctant to work with the creator, who has a reputation for being a tough client.
Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has left the board of X competitor Bluesky, saying the left-wing favored platform (before the…rise…of Threads) was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter.
TikTok has officially sued to challenge the law forcing ByteDance to sell it. The petition filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit claims the law violates the First Amendment rights of its 170 million American users, and says the law shuts down the platform based on ‘speculative and analytically flawed concerns about data security and content manipulation.’
TikTok and Universal Music Group have reached a new licensing deal, ending a three-month stalemate that had blocked songs from some of pop’s biggest stars from the world’s leading social media platform.
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