Northland Television tells a judge that Donald J. Trump for President has now lost standing to pursue its libel suit against its WJFW Wausau, Wis., over a “hoax.”
As he faces expulsion from the White House, Trump has vowed revenge on the network that propelled his political career, according to close White House aides — perhaps by publicly attacking Fox or undermining its business model by endorsing a competitor.
A Flawed Media May Have Saved Democracy
Over the past four or five years, I’ve been sharply critical of the media, including that subset I like to call the “reality-based press.” My continuing complaint has been that mainstream journalism never quite figured out how to cover President Trump, the master of distraction and insult who craved media attention and knew exactly how to get it, regardless of what it meant for the good of the nation. The mainstream media, however flawed, has managed to tell us who Trump is. And although I’ve had my doubts at times about the effectiveness of fact-checking, that exhausting work has been invaluable, too. Without the reality-based press, whatever its flaws and shortcomings, we would be utterly lost.
Even Fox & Friends, a warm venue for the president, sounded doubts about his talk of a stolen election. CNN and MSNBC dismissed the claims.
Exclusives
With Donald Trump’s path to reelection narrowing, he and his campaign have taken aim at the director of Fox News’ Decision Desk, which called Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night. The Trump campaign sent out a press release attacking Arnon Mishkin, who has since made multiple appearances on the air defending the call and declining to retract it.
ABC, CBS and NBC all cut away from President Donald Trump on Thursday as he spoke from the White House to make an unfounded accusation that the presidential election was being stolen from him. Trump had tried to commandeer the nation’s airwaves at a time when the evening newscasts are shown on the East Coast, after a day when the slow drip of vote counting revealed his leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia dwindling.
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remained on alert as the lack of a clear election result kept the online misinformation flowing.
Adweek editors checked in with observers across a variety of business segments to get a sense of what impact a reelected Trump or incoming Biden administration would have on the regulatory and cultural environment of companies and consumers.
One week before election day, President Trump tweeted: “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA”—a claim he used to call for the dismissal of some of those ballots and for a definitive result on November 3 regardless of outstanding votes. CJR spoke with reporters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota, and New Jersey about their efforts to reassure local readers about the integrity of the electoral process, even as national figures spun stories about their coverage areas.
Talking to beat reporters who spent months covering the campaigns of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden is like hearing about journeys to two completely different planets.
With reporters and supporters gathered at the White House at 2:20 a.m. ET, the president said it was “a major fraud on our nation” that he hadn’t been declared the winner. “As far as I’m concerned, we already have won this,” he said. The words were barely out of his mouth before television anchors rushed to refute him.
Trump made the legacy media great again. Here’s what’s next for them.
The man who helped create Fox News as the most influential platform for conservative politics in America fully expects that Biden will win — and frankly isn’t too bothered by that.
Biden’s campaign will spend $51 million on television and digital advertising over the final week of the preelection sprint, according to data maintained by the nonpartisan firm Advertising Analytics. Outside groups are set to spend another $36 million on his behalf. Trump’s campaign has blocked off about half that amount.
Ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics expects Trump and Biden spending in Philadelphia alone to exceed $150 million. Compared with the 2012 race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, presidential ad volume is up 87%, according to an October report from the Wesleyan Media Project. It’s up a whopping 145% from the 2016 battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Lesley Stahl told President Trump up front: “You know, this is 60 Minutes. And we can’t put on things we can’t verify.” On Sunday night, the show remained true to its word. The venerable CBS newsmagazine aired significant portions of the interview it conducted with President Trump earlier this week, even though the White House broke an agreement that a tape it made of the proceedings would only be used for archival material.
President Trump’s campaign had its best-ever online fundraising day and plans to invest heavily on the airwaves in Minnesota in the closing days before the election. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said the online haul on Thursday, when Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden squared off for the final presidential debate, was better than any online fundraising day in the 2016 or 2020 presidential cycles.
Lesley Stahl’s interview with President Donald Trump will air Sunday on 60 Minutes, despite the White House’s decision to air unedited footage of it on Facebook, CBS News said Thursday.
The footage, posted by the president on Facebook ahead of its scheduled Sunday broadcast, shows Trump growing increasingly prickly as CBS anchor Lesley Stahl presses him on a host of topics, including his response to the coronavirus pandemic, his slipping support among suburban women, the lack of masks at his rallies, and the “Obamacare” replacement plan he has long promised but failed to unveil.
Media CEOs: Biden Win Would Stop Press-Bashing
Panelists at TVNewsCheck’s virtual TV2025 conference this afternoon said a change in the presidency could help temper the anti-press sentiment that’s grown over the past four years. Allen Media CEO Byron Allen said a Biden administration would be “great for broadcasting. Anything to stop the craziness we are all experiencing now. I don’t think we have ever seen this kind of attack against journalists. This is an all-out war.”
President Donald Trump blasted 60 Minutes and correspondent Lesley Stahl after he abruptly cut short a planned series of appearances on the show. His latest tweets suggest that he did not think the interview went well. Trump wrote on Twitter, “I am pleased to inform you that, for the sake of accuracy in reporting, I am considering posting my interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, PRIOR TO AIRTIME! This will be done so that everybody can get a glimpse of what a FAKE and BIASED interview is all about…”
What Kristen Welker Can Learn From Savannah Guthrie
Margaret Sullivan: “Savannah Guthrie brought her A game to last week’s NBC town hall with President Trump. As Thursday’s final debate between Trump and Joe Biden approaches, Guthrie’s NBC colleague, White House correspondent Kristen Welker, needs to have the best night of her career, too — but in a very different way. To make this debate something that serves the public interest rather than being the disastrous circus that it could be, she needs to be in control.”
Mark Burnett helped turn Donald Trump into a national figure with The Apprentice. But since 2016, his impact “has kind of gone bust.”
The CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes will interview President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden for next week’s edition. Correspondent Lesley Stahl announced the interviews at the end of the newscast Sunday, promising “revealing, provocative conversations with the two major party candidates for president.”
Sinclair Broadcast Group announced Friday that the president would participate in an event on Oct. 21, to be moderated by Eric Bolling, the conservative political commentator and host of America This Week. The event will air on all of Sinclair’s CW and MNT stations in 55 markets, as well as on their websites. Trump will answer questions from Bolling and members of an audience.
NBC was reeling heading into Thursday’s town hall with President Trump, under widespread criticism for scheduling it at the same time as ABC’s town hall with Democratic opponent Joe Biden. NBC was accused of rewarding Trump for rejecting the debate commission’s plan to do the second debate virtually. That was quickly forgotten when the president sat opposite Guthrie, who questioned him specifically on when he last tested positive for COVID-19 (he said he didn’t remember), whether he had pneumonia (didn’t say) and his personal finances.
NBC has been rocked by an internal feud over its decision to host a town hall with Donald Trump at the same time as ABC’s Thursday event with Joe Biden. The internal conflict extends to the highest levels of NBCUniversal, where MSNBC head Phil Griffin strongly disagreed with NBC News President Noah Oppenheim’s decision to unilaterally move forward with the town hall during that time slot, according to three high-ranking sources at the TV media giant.
President Trump’s influential supporter Rupert Murdoch is telling close associates he believes Joe Biden will win the election in a landslide. The Australian-born billionaire is disgusted by Trump’s handling of COVID-19, remarking that the president is his own worst enemy, that he is not listening to advice about how best to handle the pandemic, and that he’s creating a never-ending crisis for his administration, according to three people who have spoken with Murdoch.
NBC News Group chairman Cesar Conde says in a statement that “we share in the frustration that our event will initially air alongside the first half of ABC’s broadcast with Vice President Biden,” adding that “Our decision is motivated only by fairness, not business considerations.”
Following revelations about the outsized role The Apprentice played in Trump’s reinvention, The Hollywood Reporter talked to former NBC insiders who provide new detail on his brazen demands (including large donations to his ill-fated foundation) and the way the network enabled him: “We had to build all kinds of systems to make sure the show stayed on the rails.”
Donald Trump will do a town hall for NBC News on Thursday, after an agreement was reached between the network and his presidential campaign on the details for the event. That means that Trump and Joe Biden will each participate in separate town halls on the same evening, after plans for a presidential debate with a similar format were scrapped.
On Monday before his rally in Sanford, Fla., President Trump ramped up his attacks on Fox News and promoted some competitors including C-SPAN and conservative outlets One America News Network and Newsmax. “@FoxNews allows more negative ads on me than practically all of the other networks combined. Not like the old days, but we will win even bigger than 2016. Roger Ailes was the GREATEST!,” the president tweeted.
An extended back-and-forth between the campaigns threw the presidential debate schedule into chaos Thursday, raising the question: Will there even be another debate? In addition to safety concerns, there is also a political standoff between the two campaigns, with a fight over the dates and settings of the two remaining debates.
For Sept. 24 through Oct. 7, Biden placed 2,621 airings of commercials on national and regional TV (an estimated $21.7 million) with Trump at 946 airings ($6.5 million), according to iSpot.tv. Biden produced more than double the TV impressions, at 2.0 billion, versus 862.9 million for Trump.
Minutes after the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates announced this morning that next week’s second debate would be held virtually, President Trump announced that he would not participate. “I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate,” he told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo in an interview.
Media Must Show Its Bias — For The Truth
Eager to look neutral — and worried about being accused of lefty partisanship — mainstream news organizations across the political spectrum have bent over backward to aid and abet Trump’s disinformation campaign about voting by mail by blasting his false claims out in headlines, tweets and news alerts, according to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Facebook has deleted a post in which President Trump had claimed Covid-19 was “less lethal” than the flu. Twitter hid the same message behind a warning about “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information”.
