Good morning! Barry Diller is coming out with a captivating memoir, literary publishers are feeling the pinch from federal funding cuts, and Google is pursuing a "new film and TV production initiative..." |
Facing a 'funding crisis' |
President Trump's aggressive effort to punish PBS and NPR is prompting a wide array of reactions, including at the local level.
"Leaders of public television and radio stations are scrambling to figure out how to trim their budgets and plan for potentially dramatic future funding cuts," the WSJ's Joe Flint reports in a new story this morning. "From Alabama to Idaho, they are launching donor drives, urging calls to Congress, and rethinking new shows and educational programming."
Yesterday we mentioned that PBS is telling viewers to "contact Congress now." NPR is rolling out a slightly different approach, posting pop-ups on its website that say "public media is under threat" and directing people to donate.
In essence, it seems, PBS is asking supporters to help stop Trump's defunding campaign while NPR is acting as if Trump is going to prevail and moving to the next logical step: asking folks to fill in the federal funding gap by giving money directly. Meantime, both networks are also preparing lawsuits to push back on Trump...
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Local TV outlets scramble |
This public media tug-of-war is not just happening at the federal level. In Indiana, Republicans in the general assembly erased state funding for NPR and PBS affiliates "in the final hours of its budget session last month," giving station advocates no time to respond.
Now "the 17 public media outlets across the state are having talks about how to weather the funding crisis," the Chicago Tribune reports. "Rural areas with fewer viewers and less resources could be hit the hardest."
WFYI, the NPR and PBS brand in Indianapolis, has an excellent and impartial piece about the local impacts here...
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>> MSNBC's Zeeshan Aleem says the defunding effort is "straight out of the authoritarian playbook — and comes at a time of acute distress in the media market."
>> Professor A.J. Bauer says NPR and PBS, "with their journalistic and educational programming," are "even more crucial in a media landscape now full of platforms that aren't committed to facts."
>> NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham, who has been lobbying for this defunding for decades, says both NPR and PBS "have doubled down in their anti-Trump animus." Here are all of his recent pieces.
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Is this where the Alcatraz idea came from? |
Did Trump get his idea to reopen Alcatraz from, of all places, PBS? THR's Benjamin Svetkey thinks so. "Last weekend, WLRN — a
PBS affiliate that services South Florida, including Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago — aired a rerun of Escape From Alcatraz, Clint Eastwood's 1979 classic about the prison's most famous breakout," he writes. "In fact, it aired it not once, but twice: Saturday night, then again Sunday morning — just hours before Trump took to social media and floated his plan to turn the historic island back into a high-security fortress."
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This morning NYMag published the first excerpt from media mogul Barry Diller's forthcoming memoir "Who Knew." In it, he opens up about his sexuality for the first time, addresses his "fear of exposure" decades ago, and describes his "unique and complete" romance with Diane von Fürstenberg.
Diller begins the excerpt this way: "While there have been a good many men in my life, there has only ever been one woman, and she didn’t come into my life until I was 33 years old." Read the rest...
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Today's new nonfiction releases |
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'Confusion, dread and a little hope' |
We're still in questions-not-answers mode about Trump's movie tariffs idea. People are curious about his motives: In this THR column, Steven Zeitchik asks, "Does he believe he’s saving Hollywood or screwing Hollywood?" And people want to know how tariffs on intellectual property would possibly be implemented.
Plus, as one executive remarked to CNN's Jamie Gangel yesterday, "Has anyone told him what this will do to James Bond, Harry Potter, Dune? Where are we supposed to shoot Emily in Paris?" Another source asked her, "Is he trolling us because we didn't vote for him?"
Gangel and I wrote about the baffled reactions in Hollywood here. The L.A. Times reports Hollywood "confusion, dread and a little hope" over the proposal. Trump said "we're going to meet with the industry; I want to make sure they’re happy about it," but there is no specific meeting set yet...
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While Voice of America staffers await any further word about their jobs, Hadas Gold notes that the White House put the mothballed news outlet on the press pool rotation this week, even though "they're being blocked from working."
>> VOA's Patsy Widakuswara wrote, "We would love nothing more than to follow the White House pool rotation schedule and serve as President Trump's radio pooler this week, but sadly USAGM is still banning us from returning to work."
>> Meanwhile, some of the people suing over Trump's silencing of US-funded international media are now pressing the full DC circuit of appeals to intervene in the matter and the court may rule later this week...
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Trumpworld notes and quotes |
>> Cutbacks at the National Endowment for the Arts have impacted dozens of literary publishers like the Paris Review, McSweeney's and n+1. One advocate called it a "tremendous blow for publishing." (WaPo)
>> New from Angela Fu: "Meet the 32 ‘new media’ outlets the White House invited to its press pool." (Poynter)
>> FCC chair Brendan Carr sat down with (appropriately skeptical) CNBC host Sara Eisen at the Milken Institute's annual conference. (CNN)
>> Trump 2.0 has elevated "ever fringier conspiracy theories," Tiffany Hsu wrote: "At every level of government, authority figures are embracing once-extreme ideas, including that the Earth is flat or that the state controls the weather." (NYT)
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Among this year's notable Pulitzer Prize winners:
>> Ann Telnaes, who resigned from The Washington Post in January after the Jeff Bezos-owned paper refused to publish her satirical illustration of Bezos and other billionaires bending the knee to Trump, won the Pulitzer for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. "In a time when the free press is under attack by autocrats in their quest to silence dissent, editorial cartoons and satire are essential for a democracy to survive and thrive," Telnaes said in a statement. "I'm honored to receive this award and encourage everyone to support their local cartoonist."
>> ProPublica "won the award for public service, considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers, for its coverage of the impact of state abortion bans across the country."
>> The Baltimore Banner, which launched less than three years ago, won the Local Reporting prize for an investigative series with the NYT about Baltimore's opioid epidemic. Seeing this photo of the startup staff celebrating made my day yesterday.
>> Poynter's Tom Jones has a handy roundup of the day's other Pulitzer headlines right here.
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