Rough week, tough questions
New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first week has been all about Katie Zacharia, when the role should be about the president and his agenda.
Zacharia has been on the defensive, including in eyebrow-raising interviews with President Trump’s allies on Fox News. Last night Sean Hannity repeatedly challenged her, seemingly doing the kind of vetting that Trump failed to do before offering Zacharia the job a week ago.
The president’s Truth Social post appointing Zacharia called her “an attorney,” but she failed the bar exam, a fact she acknowledged to Hannity.
The issue ultimately comes down to credibility, an essential attribute for any press secretary. Now DC politicos are openly speculating about her fate. “Can Zacharia survive?” was the lead story on the YouTube show co-hosted by Sean Spicer this morning.
“One of the biggest problems with the administration right now is every issue facing Americans is serious and all they do is keep hiring deeply unserious people to represent them,” Meghan McCain wrote on X. “It gives the impression the administration just simply doesn’t care what Americans think and that their problems aren’t worth hiring capable people with real experience.”
I asked Sarah Matthews, who served as a Trump 1.0 deputy press secretary until resigning the night of the January 6, 2021 attack, to assess Zacharia’s standing.
“Between her lying about being an attorney and that humiliating debut, I have to imagine her West Wing colleagues are absolutely livid. And I suspect the knives are already out for her,” Matthews said.
Spicer, who was at the White House this morning to tape an interview with VP JD Vance, said on YouTube that Trump’s opinion is “all that matters.” And at the moment, his true assessment of his new press secretary is unknown.
Obviously, the scrutiny of Zacharia on Fox reflects serious skepticism about her ability to represent the president going forward.
Hannity said her all-too-brief debut press briefing was “widely panned.” She defended herself by admitting she had “very little prep time” since Trump offered her the job during their first in-person meeting about it.
Hannity sounded unimpressed. Zacharia was back on the air this morning, and the “Fox & Friends” co-hosts kept up the scrutiny. Lawrence Jones even asked: “Do you think you still have the confidence of the president?”
“I’m standing here,” Zacharia responded. Afterward, she greeted a crowd of reporters, but declined to answer any questions. Here’s my new analysis piece for CNN.com…
Since many Trump detractors are drawing parallels to Anthony Scaramucci’s infamous 11-day stint as White House communications director in 2017, I texted Scaramucci last night for his take. He predicts Zacharia will last longer than he did.
“She clearly can’t handle the podium, but she doesn’t seem like a bad person,” he said.
Mooch’s theory is that Trump is focused on “bigger things and bigger personnel problems.” Amid widespread expectations of Democratic gains in the midterm elections, he thinks the president is “likely” to remove chief of staff Susie Wiles and defense secretary Pete Hegseth “right after the midterms.” The Washington Post’s lead story right now is about potential shakeups: “Power struggle erupts in Trump’s White House as midterm losses loom…”
The White House TV pool fight continues, even after a federal judge extended his order over White House access the other day. Today it is CNN’s turn to be both the in-town TV pooler and the out-of-town TV pooler on behalf of the other major networks and all the other news outlets that rely on the pool. But the White House’s schedule of events omitted CNN from the out-of-town list, meaning the administration is blocking the network from riding on Air Force One when the president heads to Georgia and Florida later today.
CNN was slated to handle out-of-town pool duties on Saturday and Sunday as well. So, once again, the White House is preventing a TV pool crew from fulfilling its assignment, and once again, there will not be pooled TV coverage of the president’s appearances.
Networks can still attend and cover the events unilaterally. The White House is giving the small pro-Trump streaming channel Real America’s Voice full access to the entire trip. Bottom line: This is yet another example of the president trying to control coverage…
>> This just in: A magistrate judge has “granted the BBC’s request to discuss their motion to compel President Trump to testify,” Jeremy Barr reports. The hearing will take place next Thursday. (X)
>> Pete Hegseth’s “plan for a reality-TV execution imploded” yesterday when Trump called off the Nidal Hasan live-stream. Missy Ryan and Vivian Salama’s takeaway: “Trump is fine with a military execution by firing squad, just not with putting it on YouTube.” (The Atlantic)
>> WaPo’s big scoop yesterday: “Secret documents reveal donors behind $330 million for Trump’s ballroom.” Many donor names were known, but the exact dollar figures were not. Apple gave $25 million, Comcast gave $7.5 million, Amazon gave $5 million. (WaPo)
>> A DC bar seems to have broken the news that two of its regulars, Stephen A. Smith and Bill Maher, had dinner with Trump at the White House this week. (Instagram)
Andrew Kirell writes: We led yesterday’s newsletter with GOP Rep. Andy Harris demanding police “take her camera” as student reporter Cat Murphy recorded him in a public forum. Now he’s offered his side — and his defense amounts to blaming “the liberal media,” of course.
“It’s not very newsworthy that the liberal media badgers a conservative politician; what was newsworthy is that I actually pushed back against it,” Harris told Mikenzie Frost on “FOX45 In Depth.”
Asked whether he’d apologize to Murphy for threatening her, Harris suggested he’d lecture her instead: “Uh, you know, if she called me and asked, I would tell her what bothered me.” His complaint? Murphy “criticized the way I was conducting the news conference,” which he said was “not the role of a journalist.”
Tonight’s edition of “Washington Week with The Atlantic,” subtitled “The Fight to Control Congress,” will be taped in Austin, Texas, where one of the country’s most intriguing Senate races is taking place. “This is the first time in a decade the show has gone on the road, and is a rare show in front of a studio audience,” per a spokesperson. Moderated by Jeffrey Goldberg, the program airs on PBS stations at 8 p.m. Eastern.
Deeply disturbing news: Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine “was hospitalized after Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank attacked her and a group of Palestinians during the annual olive harvest,” CNN’s Abeer Salman, Ibrahim Dahman and Oren Liebermann report.
The video of her attack and subsequent rescue is really harrowing. In the Post’s coverage of the attack, Suheir Hashimeh and Steve Hendrix wrote that “after Palestinian medics took Levine away, the attackers charged again and hit several journalists with rocks.” An IDF rep told them the military is looking into the attack.
>> WaPo executive editor Matt Murray said in a statement that Levine “was wearing visible markings clearly identifying her as a journalist.” The Post is “outraged by this unwarranted attack on a journalist doing her job” and is urging “a thorough investigation and follow-through from authorities…”
Google pays up to license CNN content
CNN and Google have struck “a multiyear partnership to embrace generative AI,” as this Variety headline states.
Allow me to translate: Google is cutting a big fat check for the rights to use CNN’s journalism while deploying AI summaries and other services.
This is part of Google’s growing “News AI pilot program.” Each deal is unique, but Google says 400 publications around the world are now involved.
“Through this licensing program, we pay participating news publications for the delivery and use of enhanced content to develop new AI features,” Google said in a blog post yesterday. “For example, these experiences include in-depth article overviews on Google News publisher pages offering people helpful context before they click and customizable audio briefings for listeners.”
CNN’s press release said the Google agreement “is in line with CNN’s AI strategy that ensures the safeguarding of its intellectual property.” Allow me to translate that, too: CNN is still suing Perplexity for illegally copying and distributing its content while negotiating deals with “responsible industry players.”
>> Meta’s new commercial terms of use, which go into effect on October 30, “will allow the scraping of news sites,” legal experts tell Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez. (NiemanLab)
>> New this morning: On his “Power Lines” podcast, Oliver Darcy has shared audio from CBS News foreign editor Shayndi Raice’s confrontational meeting with staffers earlier this week. Darcy said she was “responding in a way that you don’t expect a manager to behave.” (YouTube)
>> Byron Allen “is in talks to bring ‘Comics Unleashed’ and ‘Funny You Should Ask’… to a major streaming platform,” Jed Rosenzweig reports. (LateNighter)
Liam Reilly writes: Nobel laureate Maria Ressa thinks tech leaders enabling the silencing of media and Trump’s ban of CNN, Politico and MS NOW are “absolutely related.”
Ressa appeared with Brian Lehrer at WNYC’s new live event series, Democracy Dialogues, last night. “Let me just say the three sentences I’ve said over and over and over,” Ressa said. “Without facts you can’t have truth. Without truth you can’t have trust. Without these three you don’t have a shared reality, you can’t have journalism, you can’t have democracy.”
Lehrer and Ressa’s conversation about understanding, defending and rebuilding democracy in the age of AI can be streamed here…
Puck’s Matt Belloni broke this big news last night: Netflix’s chief content officer Bela Bajaria is out, and former Disney TV chairman Peter Rice is replacing her.
Some outlets are calling it a “brutal firing.” And others are asking why. Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters “really seem to be grasping at what to do here, and, as often is the case at stalled media companies, they’ve decided to change the content leadership,” Belloni wrote.
“Despite Netflix’s recent stock struggles, many considered Bajaria too big to fail,” Variety’s Matt Donnelly and Michael Schneider wrote, relaying that she’s being called a “scapegoat” because “Netflix is obviously against the ropes again.”
“Now all eyes turn to Rice’s plans for Netflix, and whether those plans will include some of Bajaria’s lieutenants, such as U.S./Canada head of scripted series Jinny Howe and film lead Dan Lin,” the pair added…
>> Netflix is due to report earnings on Tuesday. An insider told The Ankler’s Lesley Goldberg and Elaine Low that this “is probably going to be the worst quarter in the last five years for Netflix…”
Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes doc “You Can See Everything” hits theaters today. It “absolutely lives up to the hype,” CNN’s David Mack writes in a new curtain-raiser piece.
“Fielder’s movie is a wholly unique and revolutionary one,” Mack writes, describing it as “a bold, perhaps impossible, quest for truth about someone whom Fielder compares to a magician.”
“Rarely, if ever, has a documentarian and subject been so perfectly matched,” Mack adds. Note to my wife Jamie: Can we carve out three hours to go see this tomorrow?!
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.