Trump’s latest round of ‘swipes’

“They’re creating a safe space for the president.”

That’s how The Independent’s White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg sizes up the situation.

Feinberg was scheduled to be the print pool reporter on Trump’s trip to Iowa today, but the White House has removed him from the rotation without explanation.

“That is retaliation,” the White House Correspondents’ Association said last night, strongly objecting to “the decision to restrict a journalist’s coverage simply because the president didn’t care for their questioning.”

Excluding Feinberg is just one of Trump’s “new swipes” at the press. The administration barred CNN from Air Force One again the other day. And White House counsel Will Scharf threatened Politico in a highly unusual letter. Trump advisers are now celebrating the fact that Politico published a correction to a story about Susie Wiles.

Then there’s FCC chairman Brendan Carr, who used his bully pulpit to warn broadcasters about airing “fake polls,” without specifying which ones he thinks are bogus.

This morning I asked Feinberg what he perceives happening. He replied, “Obviously the polls aren’t looking great for the president’s party, his approval ratings are in the subbasement and changing the subject isn’t working, so the White House is punishing the press because it’s easy and because they can. They’re creating a safe space for the president.”

Let’s drill into the details…

Correct or face ‘consequences,’ WH says
“The White House counsel’s office warned Politico in a Monday letter that it had 48 hours to retract or correct recent stories about alleged staff drama, or it would suffer unspecified consequences,” Marc Caputo reported for Axios yesterday, just as the 48-hour deadline was hitting.

Scharf said failing to respond would “prompt an immediate review of Politico’s relationship with the White House” — perhaps establishing the due process to remove Politico from the WH again.

Scharf singled out three stories about Wiles: that Trump was considering replacing his chief of staff; that he “blew up” over that report; and that Wiles set up that fateful interview between Sean Hannity and Katie Zacharia.

Politico later corrected the third story, and even rewrote the headline, saying that “follow-up reporting indicates she did not play a direct role in setting up the interview.” Now the story says Wiles “offered positive reinforcement” for Zacharia to go on Hannity’s show.

Trump adviser Jason Miller touted the correction on X this morning: “This is a big, big capitulation here, and it shouldn’t be glossed over.”

Then neither should the fact that Politico hasn’t revised the other two contested stories. Ted Boutrous, who’s representing Politico, CNN and MS NOW in the ongoing press ban lawsuit, wrote back to Scharf yesterday and said this: “Promptly and transparently making corrections, as Politico has done here, is a hallmark of journalistic ethics and integrity, and of the very professionalism your letter falsely claims Politico is lacking.”

Boutrous went on to say that Scharf’s letter “further confirms the unlawful retaliatory and viewpoint discriminatory motives” underlying last month’s ban. He wrote, “Politico will defend its journalism and the right of its reporters to pursue their mission and report fearlessly on the President and other White House officials for the benefit of the American public, notwithstanding the White House’s ongoing attempts to intimidate Politico and chill and punish that reporting.”

I posted a copy of the Boutrous letter on X.

Caputo’s Axios story cited Trump advisers saying “his appetite for launching lawsuits hasn’t diminished.” He also noted that Steven Cheung recently called Politico a “foreign-op,” which invoked parent company Axel Springer, based in Germany.

The FCC’s polling police
Now to the FCC chair’s latest missive: With numerous reputable polls showing Democrats poised to make big gains in the midterms, Brendan Carr is advising broadcasters to beware of “fake polls.”

His warning, which invoked local station licenses even though he has limited power to revoke them, came on the same day that two new, highly respected national polls showed Trump registering another record-low approval rating.

But his warning also came one day after a self-professed polling firm admitted to fabricating data and fooling news outlets.

I called and texted Carr to ask which polls he was warning about, and he didn’t respond, leaving the matter nebulous. And perhaps that was partly the point.

A group of former FCC leaders surmised that Carr was “seizing on reports about fabricated political polling as an excuse to once again try to scare broadcasters into self-censorship.”

They called Carr’s post “part of an accelerating White House strategy to tilt the electoral playing field in the President’s favor and deny election results that don’t go his way. Making news outlets think twice before reporting on public polling is part of that effort.”

About that fake polling group…
This is infuriating. An outfit called “Wedgewood” released more than a dozen election-season polls this year. Poll tracking sites like FiftyPlusOne included the group’s data in polling averages. But when FiftyPlusOne found evidence of fabricated data and asked “Wedgewood” for comment, the group fessed up and said it was a “fictional entity.”

“They are trying to cover up their fraud with the ‘we were doing a social experiment’ excuse,” FiftyPlusOne co-founder G. Elliott Morris charged.

“Experiment” or not, this episode has done real damage. The NYT’s Jess Bidgood has more on that here.

But as Mary Losch, the head of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, said, “Professional polling organizations are transparent, ethical, and work hard to provide critical information to the public and other stakeholders. It is important that we don’t conflate fraudulent activity like this with legitimate election polling.”

New this morning…
>> “Thrust into the role of CBS’s No. 1 NFL game analyst this fall as a fill-in for Tony Romo, J.J. Watt has been installed as the permanent No. 1 analyst in a multi-year deal,” Dan Shanoff reports. (The Athletic)

>> CNN International anchor Bianna Golodryga is leaving the network “for an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.” (X)

>> The NYT announced the launch of a new narrative podcast about New York City, “METRO with Sarah Koenig.” (NYT)

You can see a Holmes boom in everything
The smash success of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s “You Can See Everything” is breathing new life into other media about the Elizabeth Holmes saga.

ABC News says plays of “The Dropout,” hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, surged nearly 400% across Spotify and Apple following the film’s teaser last month, then climbed more than 900% through release weekend. Tuesday marked the true-crime podcast’s biggest day since the movie was first announced — even though the show released its final episode in 2022.

And it’s not alone. Spotify listens to John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood: The Final Chapter” podcast jumped 342% while streams of his “Bad Blood” audiobook soared 715%, according to Forbes. Meanwhile, viewership of Hulu’s 2022 miniseries “The Dropout,” starring Amanda Seyfried, is also way up…

A trio of major earnings reports
A few key takeaways from the latest round of media and tech Q3 earnings reports:

>> Comcast “beat Wall Street’s expectations… thanks to continued strength in its media unit,” CNBC’s Catriona Marangi reports. Peacock “reported a quarterly profit for the second time since its launch in 2020,” earning $261 million on $1.8 billion in revenue. The streamer’s “subscribers grew to 48 million, up 17% year over year.”

>> Spotify’s audience continued to grow, with paying subscribers climbing to 306 million, and monthly active users reaching 788 million, Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman reports. But advertising remains a “challenge” for the streamer: Spotify has “struggled to turn the segment into a meaningful business despite having more free users than paying subscribers.”

>> Meta is “getting creative to fund its massive investments in artificial intelligence,” the WSJ’s Meghan Bobrowsky reports. The company reported record quarterly revenue of $64.6 billion and plans to “create a new class of nonvoting stock” to help finance its AI ambitions without diluting Mark Zuckerberg’s voting control.

Elon has entered the chat
Elon Musk’s X has that Elon-main-character energy for the first time in a while, probably because of the impending midterms, which he’s spending enormous sums to sway.

This week Musk “has focused on James Talarico, the Democratic nominee in the state that he now calls home,” the NYT’s Teddy Schleifer noted yesterday.

Musk also responded to this Politico Playbook dispatch about how he’s facing a “gauntlet of Democratic oversight” and warned people against picking fights with him.

Speaking of Musk…

Malone predicts a Skydance–SpaceX tie-up
Media mogul John Malone made a big prediction yesterday: That Musk’s SpaceX will strike a multibillion-dollar deal with David Ellison’s Skydance.

Speaking at a Paley Center event, Malone pointed to the close financial ties between Musk and David’s father, Larry Ellison, saying the two are “very intertwined.”

As Deadline’s Dade Hayes reported here, Malone explained:

“Who helped Elon finance Twitter when he bought it? Larry Ellison. How did Larry Ellison come up with some of the money to put into the creation of Skydance? Tesla stock. And I would not doubt for a minute that before very long you’re gonna see an announcement. I predict — big prediction — that you’ll see a global output deal for Skydance with SpaceX, and an investment by SpaceX into Skydance, to de-lever Skydance and take a little bit of the burden off David Ellison’s shoulders, because he’s taking on a pretty big pile of debt.”

Guilty until proven human
CNN’s T.M. Brown writes: “For the last few months, I’ve been talking to writers, editors, professors, technologists, and publishing people about AI writing detectors and what it means for the entire writing ecosystem. There seems to be a new controversy every week where someone loads an author’s work into Pangram and gleefully posts a score ‘proving’ that the writer’s work is synthetic.”

But the proof sometimes… isn’t. Brown’s takeaway: “Far from being a tool that reveals the truth, AI detectors are injecting something far more chaotic into the conversation about writing: Doubt.” Read his full story here…

>> Here’s another approach: A new French literary prize, the Prix Pascal de Littérature IA, launched this week, inviting “submissions of manuscripts co-written with AI tools, with the winner promised publication,” Ella Creamer reports. (The Guardian)

>> And while we’re on the subject: Prestigious Canadian publisher Les Éditions du Boréal said “it would not reprint ‘It Was Either That or Die,’ or any other books by the author, Thélyson Orélien, after finding evidence of A.I. use in early versions of the manuscript.” (NYT)

Dopfner made a play for TikTok’s European arm
Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner sought to buy the European arm of TikTok, and raised the idea over lunch with US ambassador to France Charles Kushner earlier this year, the FT’s Laura Pitel, Leila Abboud and Barbara Moens report. The idea was met with little enthusiasm from ByteDance and European officials, and it was dropped.

An Axel spokesperson says Dopfner “has always advocated for a European solution for TikTok along the lines of the American model. Had ​such a solution ​materialized, Axel Springer ⁠would have welcomed the opportunity to be part of it as a major European media player.”

Meta ordered to pay $25 billion
A New Mexico judge has “ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after the company was found to have misled users about its privacy practices in a case related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal,” CNN’s Clare Duffy reports. Wednesday’s ruling “marks one of the largest-ever legal penalties for a tech giant…”

More tech talk
>> OpenAI “is expanding ChatGPT ads to 26 more countries as it tries to turn advertising into a bigger source of revenue to help cover its AI costs,” Alix Coutures reports. A new data point: OpenAI says “more than 100,000 advertisers now use the platform, up from 20,000 in late August.” (The Information)

>> Electronic Arts has laid off 3% of its employees (about 400 jobs), closed game studio BioWare, and canceled the next “Mass Effect” game. (Variety)

>> If you’re seeing headlines about a “cybersecurity flaw affecting 70% of the internet,” here’s what is going on. (CNN)

This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.