There's a very good chance Donald Trump wins in November
His campaign has a ton of money, a sophisticated digital strategy, and will clearly do anything to win. And that's before the Russians step in.
This edition was produced with Zach Peterson (@zachprague), who took this picture in a field of trifolium incarnatum in South Bohemia last week.
Scroll down for Read Something, Watch Something, Listen to Something, and my Sunday NYT Readalong last week where we talked politics w/ guests Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) and Steve Schale (@steveschale) with 75K+ viewers. Today’s Readalong is w/ former NYT science editor Cornelia Dean and Dr. Geeta Nayyar. Links below.
The best way to know when I’m on the air, and see all my archived Covid19 shows, is to subscribe to my YouTube channel. We’ve been going for 74 straight days and will keep going till the lockdown ends.
My team is working with companies and nonprofits around the world to create virtual events. We can help you, too. Don’t cancel or postpone that conference - contact us!
***
Every single American needs to see the front page of The New York Times today.
We are quickly approaching 100,000 confirmed deaths as a result of Covid19, and I fear we will be writing about hitting the 150,000 mark before the summer is out. As you discuss the November election around your kitchen table, on Twitter, on your Zoom get-togethers, talk about this image and what we can do better:
On top of the gross mismanagement and abject cruelty the Trump administration has put on full display over the last four months, remember, it’s been three years of this [Adam Serwer’s Atlantic piece, “The Cruelty is the Point” is a seminal article about years 1-3]. Kids in cages on the southern border, “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, blatant corruption and profiteering off of the office of the president - it’s all there, and it’s been there for a long time.
Despite all of this - and “all of this” is doing more work than it’s capable of here - the president still maintains an approval rating around or above 40%. Sure, his disapproval ratings are still over 50% nationally, but it’s worth noting that the number of Americans who say they disapprove of the job he’s doing is actually lower now than it was on January 1, 2020.
A big part of that is the Fox News Extended Universe and the legions of right-wing “activists”, conspiracy theory hucksters, pseudoscience peddlers, and worse [I wrote about FNEU in April]. Jane Lytvynenko (@JaneLytv), Ryan Broderick (@broderick), and Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) put together a great, if depressing, rundown of the people you need to watch for when it comes to online misinformation around the Covid19 crisis that actually goes well beyond the pandemic. It’s a roster of grift all-stars. My advice: go through this piece and block, mute, and report everyone on the list.
Last week, we discussed the Trump presidency, the state of two-party politics in America, the unravelling of the GOP, and a lot more with Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) and Steve Schale (@steveschale), two people who know as much about national Republican politics as anybody.
Candidate Trump boasted in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” President Trump is proving he could kill thousands with mismanagement, lies, misdirection and bad science and not lose voters either.
[Major shoutout to Tom Jolly (@tomjolly), NYT print editor, and team for how they’ve been using making the front page even more dramatic and impactful on a daily basis than it has ever been. In July 2019, he hosted us in his NJ home for my Sunday NYT Readalong; he will be returning - remotely - on June 21, 8:30 am ET on my social feeds. Tune in! Subscribe to my YouTube channel to see all my shows.]
- Sree
Read Something
🦠 For the second Sunday in a row, I’m recommending a piece of reporting by Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf). With Davey Alba (@daveyalba) and Ben Decker, she goes deep on how the “Plandemic” video went viral over the past few weeks, and how Facebook and YouTube in particular simply do not seem able to keep conspiracy theories and misinformation off their platforms. Check out the chart below, and read the story @ The New York Times.
A Note from Muck Rack
My friends Greg Galant (@Gregory) and Lee Semel (@semel) do cool things - founding Muck Rack and the Shorty Awards, eg. And we’ve done cool things together for more than a decade, including judging the Shorty Awards w/ MC Hammer and Alyssa Milano; revealing the most Twittery journalists as of 2012; interviewing DJ Khaled and then walking through Times Square w/ FB Live; interviewing Jerry Stiller (aka Frank Costanza) and his wife Anne Meara in 2011 (so sad to see both have now passed).
I am pleased to announce that I have joined Muck Rack as an adviser to help their mission of building better tools for all comms professionals. And one of the first things we are doing is meant to help thousands of folks around the world raise their social media skills: launching a FREE certification course in social media. My colleague Linda Bernstein (@wordwhacker) and I are prepping it now and launching in early June. But you can sign up now at mrack.co/sreesocial. Please share with your friends and family - all ages, professions, experience, etc, welcome. More than 3,000 folks have already signed up and we have room for plenty more. #MRAsocial
Watch Something
We lost an absolute legend in Jerry Stiller. I interviewed Jerry and Anne Meara (his wife and acting partner who passed away in 2015) backstage at the 2011 Shorty Awards (@shortyawards), and they were, of course, hilarious. Our deepest condolences to the Stiller family.
Listen to Something
There’s arguably no one better-positioned to talk about the business of the news - specifically local news - than McClatchy CEO Craig Forman (@cforman). Traffic is up across digital channels, local markets are not being served by national news, everyone knows it, and yet…the ad revenue just isn’t there. Absolutely a must-listen episode of the Digiday podcast for anyone in news media leadership. Listen here or on every major podcast platform. Also checkout #TheNewsProjectLive, a new weekly webcast series about the future of news hosted by Merrill Brown (@merrillbro) and Alex Leo (@alexmleo) of The News Project, that my Digimentors team is producing. You will learn a lot!
Odds & Ends
🗞 My Sunday #NYTReadalong, executive produced by Neil Parekh (@neilparekh): Every Sunday I read the print edition of the NYT live (and available later). This week, at 8:30 am ET we will be joined by Cornelia Dean, a Distinguished Lecturer and Writer-in-Residence at Brown University and a science writer and former science editor of The New York Times. Her first book, Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches was published by Columbia University Press in 1999 and was a N.Y. Times Notable Book of the year. She is also the author of Making Sense of Science - such a timely book!
At 10am ET, we will be joined by Dr. Geeta Nayyar, M.D., M.B.A., who will answer questions about COVID19.
Watch Live at 8:30am ET / 12:30pm GMT / 6pm IST or Later:
Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube | Twitter
SAVE THE DATE (May 31): We will be joined by Joseph Stiglitz, an American economist, public policy analyst, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (2001) and a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He is also a former member and chairman of the (US president's) Council of Economic Advisers.
The Sunday #NYTReadalong is sponsored by Magic Bus USA, Muck Rack and Strategy Focused Group. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@sreenet and neil@neilparekh.org.
🎧 NEW! Every Saturday, I host a call-in show on WBAI 99.5FM (@wbai) - "Coping with Covid19" - focused on being helpful, hopeful, and focusing on the pandemic's effects on society’s most vulnerable - workers, the poor, the marginalized - and talk to ordinary citizens & experts on how we can emerge stronger.
Listen live Saturdays from 12-2pm ET, or later. And, of course, call in or tweet questions for us using the #wbaisree hashtag! Listen to an early episode here!
📺 A reminder to watch my Daily Global Covid19 Show. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn something every time. We’ve had 60 shows and 120+ guests. See the archive here and please subscribe to my YouTube channel. And/or sign up for my WhatsApp alerts list (it’s not your typical WhatsApp group, just a text when I’m live!). We are now in partnership with Scroll.in.
Recent highlights:
👀 Did we miss anything? Make a mistake? Do you have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let us know! Let’s collaborate.