Archives for July 2017

“Our hypothesis was that maybe it’s more nuanced than that,” Mr. Grayson said. “People have said, ‘I don’t trust advertising.’ The truth is, there is a lot of advertising that they do trust.”

Certain tactics, such as offering to match a competitor’s low prices, reporting a high rating on a site like Amazon or Yelp or mentioning a recent ranking by a third-party source like U.S. News World Report, received the most positive reactions from participants. Others, like using paid actors instead of real people, or even hiring celebrity endorsers to express their affinity for a product, came off as “deceptive” or “manipulative,” according to those surveyed.

Jake Sorofman, who analyzes marketing trends as a vice president and chief of research for Gartner for Marketers, a research and consulting firm, said brands should already be recognizing that the “persuasion by way of manipulation” approaches of the past were not going to work on modern consumers.

“Consumers are certainly becoming more savvy, more skeptical, more discriminating,” Mr. Sorofman said. “They expect a lot more, and that’s putting pressure on marketers to do better.”

Chris Raih’s conclusion is that consumers are willing to play along, as long as brands play fairly. Mr. Raih, the founder and president of Zambezi, a Los Angeles ad agency, wrote an essay for AdWeek in January about combating the “atmosphere of disbelief” that he felt had pervaded society. He argued that brands needed to better use their platforms to bridge gaps, communicate and inspire.

“We do see more nuance than what is reported,” Mr. Raih wrote in an email. “Look, today’s audience is more sophisticated than ever before. They know how the machine works. They know why Facebook ads retarget them based on previous searches. They know why brands buy space on certain programming. The mystique is gone.”

Though the study demonstrated that all approaches are not equally unscrupulous in the eyes of consumers, some advertisers are trying to look beyond antiquated tactics for better ways to engage with people.

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“We’re advising our clients on the importance of ‘proving’ over ‘selling’ brand values,” Adam Tucker, president of Ogilvy Mather New York, wrote in an email. “Across the industry, we’re seeing brands evolve their marketing communications to be more engaging, more participatory and, ultimately, more personalized.”

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Mr. Shani said the study reaffirmed his contention that people were looking foremost for authenticity from companies. Establishing that takes time; he compared it to putting money into an individual retirement account, where the dividends do not pay off for years.

“Authenticity is not a metric,” Mr. Shani said. “It’s the feeling you always get when you see a brand.”

The researchers did not distinguish between age groups. Nor did they break down the tactics by presentation — print, digital or television — choosing to keep the formatting ambiguous.

“There’s a lot of marketers out there that are trying to trick people,” Mr. Grayson said. “They’re willing to cheat consumers on the edges, such as by keeping the price the same but decreasing the food that’s in the package by imperceptible amounts. We do have to go around with a certain amount of vigilance.”

An important point, Mr. Isaac said, is that consumer disbelief about certain tactics can also be fluid. Some approaches deemed disreputable a few years ago could become more widely accepted. Product placements and native advertising — packaged to look like journalism — are two examples.

“I think the jury’s out,” Mr. Sorofman said, referring to native ads as manipulative. “But the best practices tend to ensure there’s transparency. As long as there is transparency in the intent.”

Asked what he felt about the “atmosphere of disbelief,” Mr. Shani said he still wanted to double-check the researchers’ work. “Did he mean credible or not credible?” Mr. Shani joked.

But the researchers hope that advertisers can embrace some bit of good news and home in on what they have demonstrated can work.

“I think there’s a lot of bias out there that marketers already think they’re behind the 8-ball a little bit, where consumers already think we’re out to get them,” Mr. Isaac said. “And that may not be the case. They might actually be starting from a greater position of strength than they think.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/business/media/consumers-may-be-more-trusting-of-ads-than-marketers-think.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

That, the newspaper theorized, might be a vehicle through which the hackers release their digital booty ahead of the Sept. 24 election, which will be a referendum on Ms. Merkel, the de facto European Union leader (and, it happens, one of the strongest Continental voices for continued Russian sanctions).

Whatever the case, if the data does leak, Germany will face a test like the one America faced last fall. More specifically, the German media will face a test like the one the American media did.

I had to wonder: Will it do better than we did? And should we have done better in the first place?

The Clinton campaign, its supporters and even some in the media itself have complained since last summer that American news organizations were all too ready to make themselves the weapons of a hostile foreign power, by happily reprinting emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton adviser John Podesta, which intelligence officials say were the fruit of Russian hacking. The charge has taken on still more potency with the investigations into whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. (They say they didn’t; Russia denies involvement in the hacks.)

The view has its adherents here, including the chief editor of the influential German magazine Der Spiegel, Klaus Brinkbäumer.

“I wouldn’t say the American media failed, but I actually do agree when somebody says that they’d been weaponized and used, it’s sad to say,” he told me over the telephone from his headquarters in Hamburg.

“It was out there very quickly, and very, very soon, and of course there was a plan behind it,” he said, “and I’m not sure every journalist who used this material understood what was behind it.”

Should similarly stolen emails drop into the decidedly tamer media here, Mr. Brinkbäumer told me, Der Spiegel would not use any information it couldn’t independently verify.

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“We want to be not as quick as possible but as honest as possible and as sincere as possible — that means there will be no rush,” he said.

The editors at Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, plan to go further.

“We will have a special teaser, and in the teaser we will have a banner saying ‘Hacked,’ because ‘Hacked’ is more known than ‘Leaked’ in Germany,” Julian Röpcke, the Bild political editor, told me at the paper’s offices in the headquarters of its corporate parent, Axel Springer.

“And then we will have every paragraph where we use leaked information in red,” he said. “So we will have black and red paragraphs, and under it we will write something like, ‘The information in red was leaked to manipulate your opinion about this person.’”

Mr. Röpcke said Bild’s decisions were partly informed by what had taken place in the United States, though he said he wasn’t being judgmental about his overseas colleagues.

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“I think we would have made the same mistakes, because it was so early and you didn’t really know what was happening,” he said as we spoke over Cokes in the Axel Springer Journalists Club, a throwback to a bygone newspaper era featuring original wood paneling from The London Times and sweeping views of Berlin.

Then again, United States intelligence officials suspected Russian involvement in the hacking early on. At the time, though, editors at major media outlets — including this one — said that if the contents of the emails were newsworthy, they had no choice but to report them.

Hillary Clinton’s aides argue that they were covered excessively. The much bigger story, they say, was that the emails were allegedly the fruit of a Russian attempt to undermine the American political process.

“There were not commensurate journalistic resources committed to investigating the chain of custody of the hacked materials compared with the easy task of just regurgitating what was in them,” Brian Fallon, Mrs. Clinton’s former press secretary, told me over the phone.

Sensitive to charges of excuse-making, Mr. Fallon added: “I’m not saying the media is solely to blame. The Clinton campaign made plenty of mistakes.” But that, he said, “shouldn’t free the media from looking at itself if this is going to be the norm — where foreign governments are going to interfere in elections.”

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Mr. Fallon acknowledged that there had been some newsworthy material in the stolen emails. If there hadn’t been, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, would not have had to resign (over emails showing she favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primary season), and CNN would not have broken its contributors’ contract with Ms. Wasserman-Schultz’s interim successor, Donna Brazile (over emails showing she shared with the Clinton campaign a question proposed for a CNN/TVOne candidates’ town hall-style forum).

Mr. Fallon directed his criticism at less consequential tidbits, like gossipy quips captured in the email exchanges of Mr. Podesta and the prominent Clinton supporter Neera Tanden. They fed a stream of blog items and social media posts, he said, that allowed “the Russians to manipulate the news media’s attention.”

They also fed the American media’s voracious appetite for bite-size, traffic-driving tidbits that are the opiates of the nation’s new information addiction.

Several people I spoke with here said they were optimistic that news of the hack-and-leak operation in the United States had helped prepare Europe for similar efforts. They pointed to France, where leaks of stolen emails from Emmanuel Macron’s political movement, En Marche, failed to sway the electorate there.

The French newspaper Le Monde, for instance, declared that it would not allow itself to be “manipulated by the publishing agenda of anonymous actors.”

But the leaks also hit just hours before a legal blackout that forbids candidates and media to share “electoral propaganda” 44 hours ahead of voting. And, as Le Monde wrote, it was not enough time to verify any newsworthy material, anyway.

It was never clear that there was much newsworthy in the leaked files to begin with.

As Marcel Rosenbach, a cybersecurity reporter for Der Spiegel, told me, “If there’s actually something in the material that amounts to something — if there is a scandal to be reported on — that’s the most important question.”

In that case, the German media’s fervent hopes for dealing with stolen data will face their true test.

If history, and what I know about reporters everywhere, are a guide, they will publish. That, after all, is the imperative of a free press. But getting the story right means getting the whole story, including when the leaks are part of a suspected state action aimed at swaying opinion.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

If we’ve learned anything so far, it’s that the answer to information as a weapon is more information, as a path to the truth. And, yes, we can handle it.

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/business/media/as-election-nears-german-media-braces-for-devious-hacks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

That, the newspaper theorized, might be a vehicle through which the hackers release their digital booty ahead of the Sept. 24 election, which will be a referendum on Ms. Merkel, the de facto European Union leader (and, it happens, one of the strongest Continental voices for continued Russian sanctions).

Whatever the case, if the data does leak, Germany will face a test like the one America faced last fall. More specifically, the German media will face a test like the one the American media did.

I had to wonder: Will it do better than we did? And should we have done better in the first place?

The Clinton campaign, its supporters and even some in the media itself have complained since last summer that American news organizations were all too ready to make themselves the weapons of a hostile foreign power, by happily reprinting emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton adviser John Podesta, which intelligence officials say were the fruit of Russian hacking. The charge has taken on still more potency with the investigations into whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. (They say they didn’t; Russia denies involvement in the hacks.)

The view has its adherents here, including the chief editor of the influential German magazine Der Spiegel, Klaus Brinkbäumer.

“I wouldn’t say the American media failed, but I actually do agree when somebody says that they’d been weaponized and used, it’s sad to say,” he told me over the telephone from his headquarters in Hamburg.

“It was out there very quickly, and very, very soon, and of course there was a plan behind it,” he said, “and I’m not sure every journalist who used this material understood what was behind it.”

Should similarly stolen emails drop into the decidedly tamer media here, Mr. Brinkbäumer told me, Der Spiegel would not use any information it couldn’t independently verify.

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“We want to be not as quick as possible but as honest as possible and as sincere as possible — that means there will be no rush,” he said.

The editors at Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, plan to go further.

“We will have a special teaser, and in the teaser we will have a banner saying ‘Hacked,’ because ‘Hacked’ is more known than ‘Leaked’ in Germany,” Julian Röpcke, the Bild political editor, told me at the paper’s offices in the headquarters of its corporate parent, Axel Springer.

“And then we will have every paragraph where we use leaked information in red,” he said. “So we will have black and red paragraphs, and under it we will write something like, ‘The information in red was leaked to manipulate your opinion about this person.’”

Mr. Röpcke said Bild’s decisions were partly informed by what had taken place in the United States, though he said he wasn’t being judgmental about his overseas colleagues.

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“I think we would have made the same mistakes, because it was so early and you didn’t really know what was happening,” he said as we spoke over Cokes in the Axel Springer Journalists Club, a throwback to a bygone newspaper era featuring original wood paneling from The London Times and sweeping views of Berlin.

Then again, United States intelligence officials suspected Russian involvement in the hacking early on. At the time, though, editors at major media outlets — including this one — said that if the contents of the emails were newsworthy, they had no choice but to report them.

Hillary Clinton’s aides argue that they were covered excessively. The much bigger story, they say, was that the emails were allegedly the fruit of a Russian attempt to undermine the American political process.

“There were not commensurate journalistic resources committed to investigating the chain of custody of the hacked materials compared with the easy task of just regurgitating what was in them,” Brian Fallon, Mrs. Clinton’s former press secretary, told me over the phone.

Sensitive to charges of excuse-making, Mr. Fallon added: “I’m not saying the media is solely to blame. The Clinton campaign made plenty of mistakes.” But that, he said, “shouldn’t free the media from looking at itself if this is going to be the norm — where foreign governments are going to interfere in elections.”

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Mr. Fallon acknowledged that there had been some newsworthy material in the stolen emails. If there hadn’t been, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, would not have had to resign (over emails showing she favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primary season), and CNN would not have broken its contributors’ contract with Ms. Wasserman-Schultz’s interim successor, Donna Brazile (over emails showing she shared with the Clinton campaign a question proposed for a CNN/TVOne candidates’ town hall-style forum).

Mr. Fallon directed his criticism at less consequential tidbits, like gossipy quips captured in the email exchanges of Mr. Podesta and the prominent Clinton supporter Neera Tanden. They fed a stream of blog items and social media posts, he said, that allowed “the Russians to manipulate the news media’s attention.”

They also fed the American media’s voracious appetite for bite-size, traffic-driving tidbits that are the opiates of the nation’s new information addiction.

Several people I spoke with here said they were optimistic that news of the hack-and-leak operation in the United States had helped prepare Europe for similar efforts. They pointed to France, where leaks of stolen emails from Emmanuel Macron’s political movement, En Marche, failed to sway the electorate there.

The French newspaper Le Monde, for instance, declared that it would not allow itself to be “manipulated by the publishing agenda of anonymous actors.”

But the leaks also hit just hours before a legal blackout that forbids candidates and media to share “electoral propaganda” 44 hours ahead of voting. And, as Le Monde wrote, it was not enough time to verify any newsworthy material, anyway.

It was never clear that there was much newsworthy in the leaked files to begin with.

As Marcel Rosenbach, a cybersecurity reporter for Der Spiegel, told me, “If there’s actually something in the material that amounts to something — if there is a scandal to be reported on — that’s the most important question.”

In that case, the German media’s fervent hopes for dealing with stolen data will face their true test.

If history, and what I know about reporters everywhere, are a guide, they will publish. That, after all, is the imperative of a free press. But getting the story right means getting the whole story, including when the leaks are part of a suspected state action aimed at swaying opinion.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

If we’ve learned anything so far, it’s that the answer to information as a weapon is more information, as a path to the truth. And, yes, we can handle it.

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/business/media/as-election-nears-german-media-braces-for-devious-hacks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Rival studios have spent the summer mocking Sony for backing “The Emoji Movie” with a full-throated marketing campaign, including a stunt at the Cannes Film Festival involving a parasailing actor, confetti and people in emoji costumes. Surely, sniffed the film elite, Sony was delusional if it thought it could make something out of such dreck.

But never underestimate two things — the taste of the American public, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, and the nag factor. Sony plastered a handful of cities with “Emoji Movie” posters and billboards starting in May, much earlier than is typical, to position the film as a summer event and get children to start pestering their parents to go see it. Sony also spent months dispatching actors in emoji costumes.

Stop by the Sony booth at #WizardWorldPHL to play @EmojiMovie Plinko plus meet Poop, Gene, Hi-5, and Jailbreak! @WizardWorld #EmojiMovie pic.twitter.com/TtralQ8GxG

— Allied Philadelphia (@AlliedIMPhilly) June 2, 2017

“We focused on giving these characters a personality — make them go from an emoji to something dimensionalized you want go on a journey with,” Josh Greenstein, Sony’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution, said by phone on Sunday.

The weekend’s other new wide-release movie was “Atomic Blonde” (Universal), which starred Charlize Theron as a superspy on a violent mission in East Berlin in 1989. Independently financed by Sierra/Affinity for roughly $30 million, “Atomic Blonde” sold about $18.6 million in tickets. That was a solid start for a quirky period film with a plot that many critics found convoluted.

But “Atomic Blonde” was not an art house endeavor. The reaction to Ms. Theron’s performance in film circles had been so euphoric that Universal and its Focus Features label thought the movie had a shot at becoming a new “Bourne Identity,” which arrived to $37.3 million in ticket sales in 2002, after adjusting for inflation. Universal’s main marketing team spent months working to promote it as a crossover hit, comparing Ms. Theron’s character to James Bond.

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Also notable at the weekend box office was the limited release of “Detroit” (Annapurna), Kathryn Bigelow’s look at the 1967 Detroit riot. It took in $365,455 at 20 theaters in nine cities, a result that Annapurna’s president of distribution, Erik Lomis, called “pretty solid.” He added, “We released it early so that we could start the conversation. We’re pleased.”

While certainly solid, the “Detroit” turnout was not sizzling. Ms. Bigelow’s film has received ecstatic reviews over all, but a large part of the conversation so far has focused on the appropriateness of a mostly white filmmaking team tackling such a painful moment in African-American history. “Detroit,” starring John Boyega and Anthony Mackie, arrives nationwide on Friday.

Playing in just four locations over the weekend was the documentary “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” (Paramount), which revisits Al Gore’s environmental movement. It took in $130,000. “An Inconvenient Truth,” collected $347,520 upon its May 2006 arrival in four theaters, after adjusting for inflation.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/movies/the-emoji-movie-starts-strong-as-dunkirk-stays-at-no-1.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“If we’re going to come back and reinvent MTV, the studio is a given,” he said. “It is the centerpiece.”

It is also the centerpiece in what Mr. McCarthy believes is the beginning of MTV’s comeback. Though many observers say that is a long shot, there have been encouraging signs in recent weeks.

Ratings for MTV’s core audience — 18- to 34-year-olds — went up in June and July, the first time the network has experienced back-to-back months of ratings growth in four years.

So far, those gains have come courtesy of re-engineered reality shows like “Fear Factor” and “Wild ’n Out,” a sketch comedy show.

A new slate shepherded by Mr. McCarthy will have live shows (including “TRL” and late-night programs) and familiar-looking reality fare, including a show reminiscent of “Laguna Beach” called “Siesta Key,” which premieres Monday.

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The latest strategic pivot at MTV is vital to the fortunes of Viacom, which also owns other cable channels like Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.

The company, which has experienced a chaotic year and a half, has tried to stabilize itself with a strategy targeting six core cable channels, MTV included. Viacom was also in the hunt to buy Scripps, the company that owns networks like HGTV and Food Network, before pulling out of the negotiations late last week.

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But no matter what, it’s going to be an uphill climb.

Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson Research, said MTV had several challenges, including a fickle audience that is preoccupied with social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

“Looking at it month to month, week to week, you could see some early winds, but there’s heavy skepticism of a multiyear recovery,” he said.

Mr. McCarthy, who oversaw turnaround projects at MTV’s sister cable channels VH1, Logo and MTV2, is not lacking in confidence, saying that he and his team have already “totally turned the business around after five years of decline.”

“I see that math, I see the shows we are about to green-light, I see that landscape for the next few months — we’re stable,” he said. “How do I know that? I could be wrong, but I haven’t missed an estimate in the 12 years I’ve been doing TV.”

Robert Bakish, Viacom’s chief executive, said he was heartened by MTV’s recent results and credited Mr. McCarthy, who took over in late 2016.

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“When Chris got in, he analyzed the situation, we talked about it and he quickly arrived at the conclusion that the programming direction was wrong,” Mr. Bakish said. “He reset the brand filter, cleaned out the pipeline and began building a new MTV that’s much more based on reality, unscripted and music content.”

There have been many strategic shifts at the network in the last five years: heavy investments in scripted programming, a hiring spree for MTV News, and a seemingly endless stream of dark and dreary reality series.

When Mr. McCarthy came aboard, he quickly killed more than 100 projects in development.

He regarded the decision in 2015 to pour resources into MTV News — which hired, among others, several prominent journalists from Bill Simmons’s old website, Grantland — as misaligned with the network’s mission and pulled the plug.

“MTV at its best — whether it’s news, whether it’s a show, whether it’s a docu-series — is about amplifying young people’s voices,” he said. “We put young people on the screen, and we let the world hear their voices. We shouldn’t be writing 6,000-word articles on telling people how to feel.”

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Mr. McCarthy also incorporated TV into the annual movie awards and made the acting categories gender neutral. Likewise, when the Video Music Awards are handed out next month, winners will walk away with a trophy that will now be called the Moon Person — not the Moonman.

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“Why should it be a man?” Mr. McCarthy said. “It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be transgender, it could be nonconformist.”

Mr. McCarthy is also developing a show called “We Are They,” a seemingly by-the-numbers reality show that will focus on young people’s coming-of-age moments (going to college, first relationships) with a twist that all of those featured will be gender-nonconforming.

Whether these moves come off as pandering or connect with young people remains to be seen.

Then in October, MTV will unveil the revival of “TRL.” The original iteration — which featured a countdown of music videos, a studio audience and frequent appearances from star musicians — was, in a way, a throwback itself, an updated version of “American Bandstand.”

The newer version of “TRL” will initially run an hour a day, and Mr. McCarthy said that might grow to two to three hours a day as the show developed. (There will also be unique daily content for Instagram, Snapchat and other social media channels.)

MTV is hoping the “TRL” name is enough of a star. Mr. Daly will not return as host, and the network instead will rely on five co-hosts who are relatively unknown, including DC Young Fly, a rapper and comedian, and Erik Zachary, a Chicago radio host.

Mr. McCarthy hopes that the pedestrian plaza outside the Times Square studio will be open to concerts, along with an alleyway behind the Viacom building.

Charlie Walk, the president of Republic Records, which has musicians like Drake and Lorde on its talent roster, said that in recent years MTV had abandoned the music business and that bringing “TRL” back was a big step in the right direction.

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“Who’s not going to support a platform that’s covering all of the buckets of social media and cable to allow your artist to go on, play a video, perform a song and to talk about their new music that just got released?” he said. “How do you say no to that? We’re going to give it a shot, a big shot.”

There will be plenty, of course, who roll their eyes.

Mr. McCarthy does not care.

“It’s the right route,” he said. “When you talk to artists and they say to you, unaware of what we’re doing, can you bring back ‘TRL’? We’d be crazy not to reinvent that.”

“MTV’s reinvention,” he continued, “is coming by harnessing its heritage.”

At least, that’s the latest game plan.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/business/media/mtv-total-request-live-revival.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

An Irish lawyer, Aoife Carroll, wrote: “I’d love to know how many editors that article got through before being published. I’ll take a wild guess that none were women.”

Lionel Barber, the editor of The Financial Times, also denounced the article on Twitter.

Undiluted anti-semitism and misogyny in one paragraph in a newspaper…#Britain 2017 https://t.co/9aSsqPVyFg

— Lionel Barber (@lionelbarber) July 30, 2017

A good start to apologise for the antisemitism, but where is the apology for the odious misogyny of that piece?

— Karolina Sutton (@KarolinaSutton) July 30, 2017

By midmorning local time, the article had been removed from the website, which The Sunday Times shares with The Times of London, both part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Shortly afterward, Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, apologized on Twitter:

“The comments in a column by Kevin Myers in today’s Irish edition of The Sunday Times were unacceptable and should not have been published. It has been taken down, and we sincerely apologize both for the remarks and the error of judgment that led to publication.”

A separate statement from Frank Fitzgibbon, the editor of the paper’s Irish edition in Dublin, said in part:

“As the editor of the Ireland edition I take full responsibility for this error of judgment. This newspaper abhors anti-Semitism and did not intend to cause offense to Jewish people.”

That statement, however, was criticized for not addressing what many saw as Mr. Myers’s misogyny.

Calls to Mr. Myers’s cellphone and home numbers went unanswered on Sunday. He also did not immediately respond to a voice mail message and email.

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On Sunday afternoon, the paper confirmed that Mr. Myers was let go. A spokesperson said: “We can confirm that Kevin Myers will not write again for The Sunday Times Ireland. A printed apology will appear in next week’s paper.

“The Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens has also apologized personally to Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz for these unacceptable comments both to Jewish people and to women in the workplace.”

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The condemnation of the article comes amid a wider discussion in Britain about the need to confront anti-Semitism, in particular on the far left. The issue came into sharp relief last year, after the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was attacked and accused of not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism.

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A party member, Naseem Shah, was suspended for endorsing anti-Israel posts on social media in 2014, before becoming a member of Parliament. Ms. Shah had endorsed a Facebook post showing a graphic of Israel’s outline superimposed on a map of the United States under the headline “Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict — relocate Israel into United States.”

In another post, Ms. Shah compared Israeli policies to those of Hitler.

After the posts were publicized last year, Ms. Shah apologized, in an article for Jewish News: “I understand that referring to Israel and Hitler as I did is deeply offensive to Jewish people for which I apologize.”

While debate about anti-Semitism has flared in recent years, so, too, has discussion about sexism at a time when Britain has a female prime minister, Theresa May. In December, when Mrs. May was photographed wearing a $1,250 pair of “desert khaki” leather pants, some critics accused her of showing elitism during a period of austerity — a criticism that some her defenders attributed to ageism and sexism.

Some asked if anyone would have questioned her taste in fashion or the hefty cost of her trousers if she were a man.

Born in England to Irish parents, Mr. Myers has long been a strident and at times deeply controversial voice in the Irish news media, first as a columnist for The Irish Times (which is not connected to The Sunday Times of London), and then later The Irish Independent group.

In 2009, he wrote a column for The Belfast Telegraph, part of the Irish Independent group, which said, “There was no Holocaust, and six million Jews were not murdered by the Third Reich.” The article accepted that there had been a deliberate mass genocide against the Jews of Europe, but said that the term “holocaust” was inaccurate and that the exact number of dead could not be known.

According to the Irish Independent group’s website, that article was also taken down from archives on Sunday.

In 2005, Mr. Myers was widely criticized for a column in The Irish Times in which he referred to the children of single parents as “bastards.” Writing about foreign aid to Africa in The Irish Independent in 2008, he said that in contrast, “Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/world/europe/uk-sunday-times-kevin-myers-anti-semitic.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The executives in the book tell anchors to lay off presidential candidates, a message that Ms. Camerota said she received in real life from management because Roger Ailes, the late Fox News titan, did not want on-air talk about the accusations of sexual harassment against the Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain during the 2012 campaign.

As the plot unfolds, copious airtime is devoted to a television star turned politician named Victor Fluke (hmm!) whose immunity to shame generates big ratings. Amanda, who struggles to balance ethics and ratings, is told by a producer that Walter Cronkite would never get hired today because “he’d be bad for the demo.”

“There were just some bizarre things that were happening,” Ms. Camerota said, explaining why she started taking notes on her experiences and wondered if it could make for a book. “It was easier to assign whatever ethical challenge I was facing to a fictional character and let her figure it out.”

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Ms. Camerota, 51, is the rare Fox News anchor whose career has thrived after leaving the network: She is now co-host of CNN’s “New Day,” alongside Chris Cuomo, where she has scored viral hits by pressing supporters of President Trump about his false claims.

Since leaving Fox News, Ms. Camerota has also gone public about the darker side of life at the network. In April, she said on-air that she was sexually and emotionally harassed by Mr. Ailes, who was forced to step down as the network’s chairman and chief executive after a sexual harassment scandal last summer.

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In her account, Ms. Camerota said that when she approached Mr. Ailes about her career, seeking more opportunities at the network, he told her: “Well, I would have to work with you — I would have to work with you really closely — and it may require us getting to know each other better, and that might have to happen away from here. And it might have to happen at a hotel. Do you know what I am saying?”

After rejecting him, Ms. Camerota said that Mr. Ailes questioned her on-air demeanor, saying, “You could be a real role model and a real star if only you could sound conservative.” (Mr. Ailes, who died in May, denied Ms. Camerota’s allegations in a statement by his lawyer Susan Estrich.)

“I think that on every level, silence generally isn’t the right way to go,” Ms. Camerota said in an interview last week from her home in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and three children. “I’m happy that I was able to break the cone.”

Harassment is not an issue in “Amanda Wakes Up,” although there are on-set romances and rumors of the on-air talent sleeping with “the third floor,” the nickname for FAIR News’s executive suites. In real life, Fox News employees use the term “the second floor” the same way.

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Ms. Camerota grew up in Shrewsbury, N.J., where, at 15, she decided to become a television reporter after watching Phil Donahue. She later won a scholarship to study broadcasting at American University. “Amanda Wakes Up” is her first novel. She said she wanted the book to encompass the good and bad of her years in the business.

“There are moments in there from my time at ‘America’s Most Wanted,’ ABC, NBC,” she said, ticking off the local network affiliates and shows where she toiled before national cable came calling.

The novel takes pains to pierce the bubble of liberals who dismiss Fox News and condescend to its viewers.

“I resented being put in a partisan box,” Ms. Camerota said. “‘Oh, you work at Fox News, so you’re obviously an archconservative.’ No, I’m a journalist, and I’m trying to cover the news.”

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The book’s protagonist finds herself in an affair with her co-anchor, Rob Lahr, a tall, handsome frat-boy type with a hint of Ron Burgundy. It’s the kind of detail that may set off a guessing game in the incestuous TV world, but Ms. Camerota is not naming names.

“Just to remind everybody, I was single in this business for 10 years,” she said.

The bombastic candidate Victor Fluke, who favors FAIR News over other networks, dominates the book’s plotline. Ms. Camerota said she set out to capture numerous politicians with big egos, not just the one named Trump.

“Victor Fluke is an amalgam of all sorts of candidates that I’ve met,” she said. “These guys are one way on TV and one way off TV. They have a different set of personalities when they’re not on camera.”

The book evokes the intensity of television news: long hours, pressure for scoops and ratings, the coarse humor that goes along with covering massacres and tragedies. Amanda is besieged by cruel and threatening tweets from viewers, something Ms. Camerota knows well. She deleted her Twitter account this month, saying she was tired of the abuse.

“Roger liked competition, so he would pit us against each other to see who got the best ratings,” she said of the hosts at Fox News. “It bred more tension than I’ve felt anywhere else.”

Ms. Camerota recalled a moment at Fox News when a hairdresser frantically ran onto the set because management had objected to the part in her hair; a whirl of combs, brushes and curling irons descended.

“Some of that I thought, perhaps, was overkill,” she said.

And the leg bronzer? Ms. Camerota laughed.

“That was something that was only true at Fox,” she said. “I have never had anyone at CNN or NBC or ABC ever say that I should have bronzer on my legs.” (A Fox News spokeswoman said that anchors were not told to wear leg bronzer.)

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Despite her defection to CNN, Ms. Camerota still has fans at her old network. At a recent book party at Atlantic Grill near Lincoln Center, the Fox News anchors Shepard Smith and Brian Kilmeade were among the guests.

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“Thank you everybody for coming to this Fox News party,” said Jeffrey A. Zucker, the president of CNN. Ms. Camerota, in a fire-engine-red Carmen Marc Valvo dress, laughed and covered her face.

“People on television, as people in this room know, are a strange breed,” Mr. Zucker continued, surveying a crowd that was filled, “This Is Your Life”-style, with Ms. Camerota’s producers and co-hosts from more than 25 years. “But there’s nobody more normal and more real than this one.”

It was Ms. Camerota’s turn to speak. “Jeff Zucker needs a book that satirizes cable news like a hole in the head right now,” she said, as the room cracked up. Turning to the Fox News contingent, she said, “I’m so grateful that you guys are still my friends.”

Mr. Zucker piped up. “They haven’t read the book yet,” he said.

Mr. Smith said after he greeted Ms. Camerota with a hug: “I’ve known her since before we were at Fox together. Once we’re off camera and no one’s paying attention, we all love each other.”

A few days later, Ms. Camerota said she felt touched that the Fox crowd had shown up.

“It was brave of them to come,” she said. “Journalism can feel under siege right now, and we do remind each other that we are all in this together.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/style/alisyn-camerota-fox-news-roger-ailes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The drawing itself is a simple one, showing a skyline behind a ribbon of road.

New York City’s most famous landmarks, like the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the Statue of Liberty, are not visible. But Trump Tower stands in the middle. The future president used vertical lines and a jagged roof to illustrate its famous stepped facade.

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And he signed the sketch at the bottom, in his golden ink.

The auction house had described the drawing as 11.5 by 9 inches, “and very rare, with only a handful of such drawings known.”

It was sketched by Mr. Trump as part of a charity event benefiting the fight against illiteracy in September 2005. According to a news release for the event, other participants included the racecar driver Jeff Gordon, the actress Charlize Theron and — oddly enough — the Republican senator from Arizona, John McCain, who has found himself at odds with Mr. Trump, most recently on Friday morning, when he voted to block the latest effort to repeal Obamacare.

Despite Mr. Trump’s controversial early months in office, there’s a reason a small memento of ink on paper was able to fetch such a high price just 12 years after its creation.

“People will bid a lot of money for controversial political leaders’ artwork,” said Sam Heller, the public relations director at Nate D. Sanders. “So the auction house is very pleased that it tripled the original bidding price.”

The drawing did not command the highest price at this auction, which had more than 200 pieces of history for sale. A signed photograph of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue sold for $125,000, and the original artwork for a “Prince Valiant” comic strip from 1939 was sold for $70,461.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/us/trump-manhattan-skyline-drawing-auction.html?partner=rss&emc=rss