‘Take her camera’
“From the White House grounds to town halls across the country, politicians and candidates have been attempting to block members of the media from covering them — and advocates say it’s raising serious press freedom concerns,” Jenna Monnin wrote in this new story for The Washington Sun.
The newest example is a doozy. A video of GOP Rep. Andy Harris has gone viral because the congressman freaked out and falsely accused student journalist Cat Murphy of illegally recording him on Tuesday night.
Harris had just appeared at a campaign forum with his Democratic challenger in Cambridge, Maryland. He bristled at questions from several reporters, including Murphy, who was covering the event for the Capital News Service, the newswire staffed by students at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
“You cannot film me,” Harris said to Murphy, 22, who knew her rights and said, “Yes, I can.”
It went on for a while, with Harris threatening to call the authorities and have her phone seized. “Take her camera,” he demanded. “Get an officer in here,” he said a moment later. He then bolted out of the room.
The Baltimore Banner and other outlets published the unflattering footage. By yesterday afternoon, the grad student was on CNN’s “The Lead,” where Jake Tapper noted that most journalists reach retirement without such a confrontation with an elected official. (True!)
“I won’t lie, it’s been a lot,” Murphy said. “But I was focused on doing my job.”
Murphy said she hadn’t heard from Harris’ office and won’t be deterred from continuing to cover him. Tapper’s parting words to her: “Hopefully we can get you to come work at CNN after you graduate in December.” Amen.
Now Harris’s challenger is trying to capitalize on the episode. As the Sun story noted, there have been other dust-ups between Republican candidates and reporters this campaign season. Although the hostility more often comes from the right, “multiple Democratic candidates have also denied media access across primary and general election campaign events,” Monnin added.
Let’s just call it what it is: Loser behavior. We’re liable to see even more of it as the midterms approach…
I suspect President Trump will have something to say about the latest Fox News poll, released last night, which registered Trump’s job approval at 36%, a record low in the network’s polling.
Dana Blanton wrote in her recap: “The top five voter concerns are government corruption (60% extremely concerned), inflation (58%), gas prices (50%), government leadership (49%), and healthcare (48%). And double digits more trust the Democrats than the Republicans to handle each of those.”
Good luck finding the poll on Fox’s home page; the editors decided to bury the bad-for-Trump news. But you can read the full findings here…
👆🏻James Talarico has used that term a lot in past interviews. Last night, at the CNN and Jubilee town hall, he had a high-profile chance to explain it to viewers who might not have heard from him before.
Talarico said the lies about his recent absence from the campaign trail show how the “rage economy” functions: “Conspiracy theorists can post anything they want on the internet. They get clicks. The billionaires who own these platforms get rich. We all get angry, and nobody’s life gets any better. Conspiracy theories don’t put food on the table. They don’t put gas in the tank.”
If you missed the broadcast, here were the top takeaways…
Andrew Kirell writes: Some pretty outrageous comments from Trump last night during his Arizona rally: “In my opinion, leakers should be shot. In the old days, we used to shoot leakers, you know?”
The remark came right after Trump complained about supposed leaks about a US “raid” to the NYT and CNN.
His tirade wasn’t just reserved for leakers. He later said the “fake news media” is “almost as bad a leaker as they leak, they leak false information, that makes them a leaker, oftentimes without a source. I think they make up a lot of the sources.” (By transitive property, is he also suggesting journalists should be shot?)
“Even for a president known for his lack of tolerance for those willing to express dissent or question his power,” the NYT’s Zolan Kanno-Youngs wrote, “Trump’s endorsement of having government sources shot marked an extraordinary escalation of his attacks on news gathering and those willing to speak to the press…”
As expected, Trump’s Justice Department has appealed Judge Timothy Kelly’s ruling requiring the White House to maintain access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. A WH official called the ruling “misguided” and framed the fight this way: “The Fake News has no place demanding a spot in the President’s Oval Office. The lies they smear are a disservice to the American public and tear at the very fabric of our Democracy.”
Three things stand out about that statement: One, the official insisted on anonymity, even though the government has criticized the banned news outlets for using anonymous sources. Two, the official focused on access to the Oval Office, but the original ban applied to the entire White House complex. And three, the official made no claim about “national security,” the DOJ’s top justification for the ban…
>> My big-picture look for CNN: News outlets win a round against Trump’s press ban — but the fight is far from over.
The White House “played a central role in the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation into major TV networks’ temporary suspension of pooled coverage of the president,” Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Ashley Gold reported yesterday.
One of their sources “described the White House-DOJ interplay as a ‘distinction [without] a difference,’ given how closely the two are intertwined under President Donald Trump’s administration.”
There’s a hearing this morning in the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit against the taxpayer-funded ads. And yesterday, a new development came out of Common Cause’s separate lawsuit against the ads.
Judge Jennifer Rochon extended her order prohibiting the ads until past Election Day — notable given the perception that Trump was using the ads to boost the GOP in the midterms. The judge said she will hear arguments over a possible preliminary injunction on November 4…
Andrew Kirell writes: Questions about why Katie Zacharia has called herself a lawyer for years dogged the new press secretary all day yesterday. It didn’t help that, when asked Tuesday where she’d passed the bar exam, Zacharia replied twice, “When I moved to China.”
The NYT’s Shawn McCreesh got Zacharia on the phone last night, and she blamed the noise from Marine One for her puzzling answer. “I assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school?’” she told him.
Zacharia also told McCreesh that she’d been advised to call herself “lawyer,” though not “attorney” or “esquire.” The WSJ’s Philip Wegmann and Alexandra Bruell scooped last night that she took the California bar exam in 2011 after graduating from Pepperdine’s law school, but failed.
Since Zacharia has never been licensed to practice law in the US, but nevertheless identified herself as “general counsel” for a MAGA-aligned California org, the Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint yesterday asking the state bar to investigate whether she broke the law.
This is all pretty simple: Press secretary “is a job that’s all about credibility,” as McCreesh wrote, and “it’s pretty tough to succeed if the public (let alone the fourth estate) feels that it cannot trust what it is being told.”
Yesterday morning, MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian reported that FBI director Kash Patel had landed in Russia for a meeting. But Patel was actually in Virginia at the time, a fact that FBI officials cited while mocking MS NOW all across social media.
“We regret this error and we are transparent about when we make errors,” Dilanian said on air later in the day.
>> Paul Farhi commented on X: “Nothing good about being wrong. But at least there’s a public admission that it was wrong. How many pols, pundits, ‘influencers,’ and just plain randos are similarly willing to ’fess up?”
>> Skydance’s stock dropped 22% yesterday, largely due to a “technical adjustment,” Ben Dummett writes, explaining the “stock warrants issued as part of the deal.” (WSJ)
>> Without an NFL lead-in to boost “60 Minutes,” Sunday’s episode averaged 6 million viewers, Brian Steinberg reports. (Variety)
>> YouTube “has had discussions with publishers in recent months about developing an audiobook feature,” the aforementioned Alexandra Bruell and Anne Steele report. (WSJ)
>> “Shareholders for both Fox Corp. and Roku voted to approve Fox’s $22 billion acquisition.” (Variety)
>> “NBC’s Dateline, the top-rated true crime series, is getting a Canadian spinoff series.” (THR)
A tech startup that “stress tests generative artificial intelligence tools for copyright infringement” found that “Midjourney v8.1 was the worst offender when it came to reproducing images of copyrighted characters,” Deadline’s Jake Kanter reports.
Midjourney’s AI model “also outranked competitors on so-called ‘brand safety violations,’ meaning characters were placed in a ‘harmful context,’ such as scenes of violence or drug taking,” Kanter writes. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
“This week, a new organization called the American Entertainment Alliance will begin publicly pushing for legislation to force the biggest entertainment and streaming companies… to allocate half of their original content budgets to shows and movies from independent producers in the United States,” the NYT’s John Koblin reports.
What is this all about? Well, in an age of consolidation, talent agencies and producers want to restore the “glory days of indie TV” and “bring back a form of Fin-Syn for the streaming age.” Koblin explains it all here…
>> X says it has “identified and suspended more than 13,000 accounts involved in three suspected foreign influence operations linked to Iran, Russia, and China that targeted US political conversation.” (X)
>> YouTube Music has announced “the rollout of a new labeling system aimed at improving transparency around songs created with the help of generative AI.” (TechCrunch)
>> And speaking of YouTube, ESPN is launching “ESPN JV,” a streaming channel for kids, featuring “interactive challenges and appearances by both familiar Disney characters and top sports figures.” Brilliant! (Variety)
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.