Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer “has signed a contract to serve as a special correspondent for syndicated newsmagazine show Extra,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
He “is beginning with a special series that focuses on the personal lives and views of D.C. insiders, including” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday, Kellyanne Conway on Thursday, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday.
Joe Pompeo: “As far as how the talks came about in the first place, it appears that Isgur, as she was preparing to exit the D.O.J., wasn’t only shopping around for a media gig at CNN. Cable-news sources told me that she also passed through 30 Rock to discuss a potential role at MSNBC, where she met with top newsroom management in recent months.”
Said one media source: “She was pitching her intimate knowledge of the Mueller probe as a selling point.”
Washington Post: “One of the networks’ favorite subjects is not a candidate at all but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who is often identified by her initials, AOC. She’s received a greater density of mentions on Fox News than any likely/possible 2020 candidate besides Warren.”
“Her popularity on Fox is in part, like Sanders, a function of the politics she espouses. She’s the face of a brand of politics with which many on Fox News disagree strongly — and she’s a politician who pushes back forcefully against her critics on social media. (Republicans don’t need to worry about her running in 2020 — or 2024, for that matter. She won’t be old enough.)”
NowThis has obtained footage of Fox News host Tucker Carlson calling historian Rutger Bregman a “tiny brain moron” during an interview that the cable channel is now refusing to air.
Carlson added: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.”
Sarah Isgur, Jeff Sessions’s former chief spokeswoman at the Justice Department, will join CNN as a political editor overseeing coverage of the 2020 campaign, Politico reports.
“Isgur joined the administration in 2017 after overcoming resistance from the president, who balked at bringing on a political operative who had trashed him on the campaign trail. As deputy campaign manager for Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, and in the months after Fiorina bowed out of the race, Isgur repeatedly laced into Trump… While it is common for departing administration officials to join cable news networks as analysts or contributors, it is less common for them to oversee news coverage. Isgur has no experience in news but a long history as a political operative.”
Margaret Sullivan: CNN’s hiring of a GOP operative as political editor is even worse than it looks.
President Trump called the New York Times “a true enemy of the people” on Twitter, just a day after an extensive report detailing the ways in which he has sought to derail the investigations into his presidency.
CNN’s town hall last night with former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz finished third in the cable news ratings race, The Hill reports.
Both Fox News and MSNBC drew more viewers.
Columbia Journalism Review: Howard Schultz and the media’s unlearned lesson.
A supporter of President Trump wearing a “Make American Great Again” hat attacked a BBC cameraman at a campaign rally in El Paso, Texas, the BBC reports.
Video of the incident shows the cameraman being shoved off balance before the man is pulled away by security while screaming “Fuck the media.”
“Proud of you for stepping forward in such a difficult situation. Very gutsy and definitely right. This period reminds me of 1972-1974, perhaps Watergate Redux. So many assaults on constitutional government, common sense and privacy. Let’s hope we all get it right — aggressive but careful and fair.”
— Bob Woodward, quoted by Axios, in an email to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
“Federal prosecutors are reviewing the National Enquirer’s handling of its story about Jeff Bezos’ extramarital affair to determine if the company violated an earlier cooperation deal with prosecutors,” Bloomberg reports.
“Prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office were provided with information about key exchanges concerning Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com Inc., who went public in a jaw-dropping public blog post Thursday night.”
According to CNBC, the cooperation agreement required the company to agree to “commit no crimes whatsoever.”
Netflix acquired rights to the award-winning documentary Knock Down the House, about the election campaigns of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and three other women from the Democratic Party, reportedly paying the most ever for such a film, Bloomberg reports.
“The picture, which originally was funded by a Kickstarter campaign online, won the Festival Favorite Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.”
Journalist Ronan Farrow claimed that while reporting on stories about the National Enquirer’s arrangement with Donald Trump, he and another journalist fielded “blackmail efforts” from the publication to “stop digging or we’ll ruin you.”
A reporter at the Washington Post says that an investigator hired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos believes that text messages leaked to the National Enquirer between Bezos and his girlfriend may have been sent to the magazine by someone in government, The Hill reports.
Said Manuel Roig-Franzia: “They have begun to believe, the Bezos camp, that this publication by the National Enquirer might have been politically motivated. Gavin de Becker told us that he does not believe that Jeff Bezos’s phone was hacked, he thinks it’s possible that a government entity might have gotten hold of his text messages.”
Washington Post: “Depending on whom you believe, the Enquirer‘s exposé on Jeff Bezos’s affair was a political hit inspired by President Trump’s allies, an inside job by people seeking to protect Bezos’s marriage, or no conspiracy at all, simply a juicy gossip story.”
A new CNN poll found the television audience for President Trump’s State of the Union speech “had the largest partisan tilt measured in any CNN instant poll following a presidential address to Congress dating back to 2001 — viewers were roughly 17 points more likely than the general public to identify as Republicans, and were largely fans of the President.”
“In pre-speech surveys, 61% of speech-watchers said they approved of the job he was doing as President, compared with 40% in CNN’s latest representative survey of all American adults.”
Wall Street Journal: “The website that broke the story of the racist yearbook photo that is imperiling the governorship of Virginia Democrat Ralph Northam is a scrappy, pro-Trump outfit backed by Republican operatives, part of a growing wave of low-cost, ideologically driven news publishers.”
“On Friday, Big League Politics was the first to post the image of Gov. Northam’s medical school yearbook page showing a photo of a man in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan costume… The site—whose name is a nod to President Trump’s favorite campaign trail adverb, often misinterpreted as ‘bigly’—was founded in early 2017 by journalist Patrick Howley, a veteran of conservative news sites including Breitbart and the Daily Caller.”
A new study found that the steady loss of local newspapers and journalists across the country contributes to the nation’s political polarization, the AP reports.
“With fewer opportunities to find out about local politicians, citizens are more likely to turn to national sources like cable news and apply their feelings about national politics to people running for the town council or state legislature.”
“The result is much less ‘split ticket’ voting, or people whose ballot includes votes for people of different parties. In 1992, 37 percent of states with Senate races elected a senator from a different party than the presidential candidate the state supported. In 2016, for the first time in a century, no state did that, the study found.”
Said professor Johanna Dunaway: “The voting behavior was more polarized, less likely to include split ticket voting, if a newspaper had died in the community.”
CNN’s Town Hall with Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) was the most watched cable news single candidate election town hall ever, CNN reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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