Jon Ossoff and the art of the viral clip
Sen. Jon Ossoff knew exactly what he was doing by invoking President Trump’s “travel with Natalie” last Sunday.
Google searches for Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp spiked by 5,000%. News outlets hurried to meet the demand for info by publishing new stories about Harp.
Liberal commentators cheered Ossoff while conservative commentators condemned him. Yesterday on Fox News, a bemused Jesse Watters remarked, “This is the first time we have covered Ossoff on this show in six years.”
That’s hard to believe, but it amounts to a victory for Ossoff. His “travel with Natalie” line — part of a broader but still just TikTok-length argument that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of president — showed a sophisticated understanding of the social media environment. It titillated, provoked and enraged different audiences simultaneously.
When the clip first made the rounds, “Pod Save America” co-host Tommy Vietor wrote that Ossoff was “winking” at the subject, and “the question now is whether this will kick up a round of actual reporting by news outlets.”
It did, in part because audiences were hungry for more info, and in part because of the White House’s aggressive pushback against Ossoff. I wrote more about it here…
Everyone is adapting to the “clipping economy.” Politicians are increasingly thinking in terms of clips when they deliver speeches and appear on TV shows. Politico’s headline about the “travel with Natalie” line was “Ossoff just went viral again. That was probably the point.”
Vietor told me that Ossoff’s campaign “is doing a great job of peppering his speeches with new lines and attacks on Trump that are designed to get clipped and go viral.”
“In the old days, we called that putting a topper on a stump speech, which was designed to give the press something new and topical to write about,” Vietor said. “What’s odd is how few candidates seem to be executing what was once the most basic campaign tactic!”
CNN’s Kristen Holmes and Adam Cancryn have a remarkable new story about Harp that starts with this never-before-reported detail:
“It was October 2023, and Donald Trump was due at a New York City courthouse to fight his latest set of legal troubles. But as the motorcade idled outside his Trump Tower residence, staffers confronted a more immediate problem: There wasn’t room for Harp, the hyper-loyal aide whose devotion to Trump had quickly entrenched her within his orbit.
“A screaming match in the lobby ensued, with Harp insisting that Trump had personally asked her to attend the court appearance, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Denied a seat but determined not to be left behind, Harp jumped into an SUV trunk, according to the two sources and confirmed by a photo obtained by CNN.”
A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that “X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it,” 404 Media’s Matthew Gault reports.
The study “found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page. It also showed that X serves more ragebait to people who say they are Democrats, although the exact reason for that is unclear.”
CNN’s Whitney Wild reports: A federal judge in Minnesota is ordering a closed-door judicial review of grand jury materials related to the indictment of former CNN anchor Don Lemon, independent journalist Georgia Fort and several co-defendants accused of disrupting a church service in January.
The short but extraordinary order compels the Justice Department to provide Judge Laura Provinzino with the presentations the DOJ made to the grand jury on January 29 and February 26 that resulted in Lemon’s indictment and subsequent superseding indictment.
In her order, the judge wrote that she was seeking to balance secrecy surrounding grand jury proceedings with the possibility she could find grounds to dismiss the indictment because of a matter that occurred before the grand jury.
“The materials should comprise any introduction, legal instruction for the two counts, witness testimony, and closing, including answers to questions from the grand jurors,” the judge wrote.
Brendan Carr’s alleged “weaponization” of the FCC has been in the news all year long. A broad coalition — from Democratic lawmakers to libertarian writers to former FCC officials — has been speaking out for months. Now it’s all laid out in Disney’s First Amendment lawsuit against Carr et al.
Yesterday, US District Judge Loren AliKhan responded to Disney’s request for a temporary restraining order against the FCC by directing the parties to propose a timeline by noon on Thursday.
When I caught up with Carr by phone, he called Disney’s lawsuit “meritless.” He said “we haven’t made a final decision on next steps or timing on next steps” regarding ABC yet. “We feel good about where we are, and we’re going to keep moving forward,” Carr said. That suggests the challenge to ABC’s station licenses and the probe of Disney’s DEI intiai
One of his regular right-wing critics, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, weighed in overnight and said Disney “has a good case in its lawsuit against Brendan Carr’s harassment on free-speech grounds.”
Speaking of political entities pushing companies for partisan gain…
Years ago, the Republican National Committee sued Google and claimed the company was unfairly “throttling” its fundraising appeals and thereby aiding Democrats. A federal judge dismissed the suit, calling it “pure speculation” on the part of the RNC. But Republicans kept pushing, and the pressure evidently worked.
This week Google “quietly rolled out a new program” that “will allow candidates, political parties and political action committees to more easily bypass Gmail’s spam filter,” Shane Goldmacher reports for the NYT. He quotes a Democratic strategist saying Google is placating “a false, bad faith narrative from Republicans claiming partisan spam bias…”
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín will hold a case management conference today at 1 p.m. Eastern, where she’ll likely hash out the nitty-gritty of how the case will proceed to trial, including deadlines for discovery and other pretrial matters. Paramount’s demand that the states post a $1.9 billion bond isn’t scheduled to be decided today.
Meanwhile, “as Paramount continues battling state AGs to close its merger with Warner Bros Discovery, Cinemark, the nation’s third-largest chain, has joined the top two circuits in supporting the $111 billion deal,” Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro and Jill Goldsmith reported yesterday. More here…
Penguin Random House “has suspended promotion and public sales” of his forthcoming book about Zohran Mamdani “following allegations of extensive plagiarism in political columns he wrote as a freelancer for New York magazine,” Scott Nover reports.
Barkan has been writing for The Nation recently, and indicated to Semafor that he’d be writing a new column for the publication, but a spokesperson said Barkan “is not under contract to write a column for The Nation. We are conducting an internal review in the wake of New York’s announcement.”
I reached out to Barkan last night and haven’t heard back.
Meta and the state AGs head back to court today for day two of the latest social-media addiction trial. Arturo Béjar, a former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower, will be back on the stand. Yesterday, he testified that “he struggled to prevent his teen daughter from encountering inappropriate content and solicitations from strangers on Instagram,” CNN’s Clare Duffy reported.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California is providing an audio-only live stream of the case on YouTube. Listen here…
Robin Williams’ kids have revived his Instagram account, which had been inactive since his 2014 death, to turn it into a “safe, trusted place” where they can share his work and legacy and combat the proliferation of unauthorized AI-generated social media videos with his likeness.
“Making that space into one where people can find authentic clips and photos of him is one of the best ways we’ve now found to fight back against rampant AI abuse of his voice and likeness on here,” Zak, Zelda and Cody Williams wrote in a post on Robin’s account…
With the Trump-controlled Kennedy Center moving ahead with a two-year renovation, the National Symphony Orchestra is finding new places to perform.
It will put on “60 concerts in six halls scattered across the Washington area” and “embark on its first national tour in years, taking in seven cities in five states,” the NYT’s Adam Nagourney reports.
CNN’s Natasha Chen checked out D23 last weekend, talked with Disney superfans and interviewed Disney Experiences chairman Thomas Mazloum.
The moments at D23 “that evoked huge cheers and applause were details true Disney nerds care about: retheming classic attractions, fixing a long-broken Audio-Animatronic figure, and redesigning a land at the heart of Walt Disney’s first theme park,” Chen writes. Read all about the nostalgia play here…
Bill Rasmussen, who co-founded ESPN in 1979 and ushered in the era of 24/7 sports on TV, has died. He was 93.
“Quite simply, none of us would be here today if it wasn’t for Bill’s passion and all the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit he put into building ESPN in the late 1970s — key aspects of our company culture that still carry on to this day,” Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN’s chairman, said in a statement. Check out ESPN’s obituary for Rasmussen here…
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.