The Jan. 6 committee has shown numerous videos of rioters breaking in. One captured a member of the Proud Boys, Dominic Pezzola, using a police shield to smash through a window, allowing dozens of rioters to storm the building.

On Tucker Carlson’s Friday program on Fox News he mocked the testimony of an anonymous former White House security official who said that Secret Service agents had called their families to say goodbye in case they were killed. Then Mr. Carlson played video in which Capitol Police officers, vastly outnumbered, stand by passively as rioters stream through barricades.

“We can’t know why police are on video letting people into the Capitol complex,” he said, calling the hearings a “show trial” and saying he was proud of his network for not broadcasting them in prime time.

As Capitol Police officers are portrayed as something less than heroic, new heroes emerge. One story that went viral on the right in the last week was about a 69-year-old woman, Pam Hemphill, who recently began a 60-day prison sentence after pleading guilty to trespassing in the Capitol on Jan. 6. The way Ms. Hemphill was portrayed on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, which replaced Rush Limbaugh’s program in many markets, was typical of the sympathetic messages conservatives heard about her. The hosts described her as a victim — a grandmother and a cancer patient who was given an unreasonably harsh sentence.

“Think about months of B.L.M. protests all over this country,” said Clay Travis, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement. “How many of those actual rioters are doing 60 days in prison for what they caused? This is absolutely indefensible.”

Even the biggest revelations from the committee have fallen flat in right-wing media. When Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, described Mr. Trump’s violent reaction after the Secret Service agents refused to escort him to the Capitol, some right-wing commentators insisted that the former president’s fans would be heartened to hear that he was enraged about not being able to go.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/business/media/trump-conservative-media.html

Archived footage shows Mr. Jones, pugnacious and prone to pontificating, broadcasting dire claims about the dollar’s inevitable demise before introducing Mr. Anderson, bespectacled and generally mild, to deliver extended pitches for safe haven metals like gold. Sometimes, Mr. Jones would interrupt the pitches with rants, like the time in 2013 when he cut off Mr. Anderson more than 20 times in 30 seconds to yell “racist.”

Genesis’s roster has also included a gay comedian; a former lawyer for the A.C.L.U.; the Hollywood actor Stephen Baldwin; the long-running call-in psychologist Dr. Joy Browne; a home improvement expert known as the “Cajun Contractor”; and a group of self-described “normal guys with normal views” talking about sports.

But eventually, the network developed a reputation for a certain type of programming, promoting its “conspiracy” content on its website and telling the MinnPost in 2011 that its advertisers “specialize in preparedness and survival.”

Several shows were headed by firearms aficionados. There was a Christian rocker who opposed gay rights and a politician who embraced unfounded theories about crisis actors and President Obama’s nationality. One program promoted lessons on how to “store food, learn the importance of precious metals, or even survive a gunfight.” Jason Lewis, a Republican politician in Minnesota who faced blowback during the 2018 election season after his misogynistic on-air remarks resurfaced, had a syndication deal with Genesis and a campaign office at Genesis’ address.

The ties between Mr. Jones and Genesis began loosening about a decade ago, when Mr. Jones reached a deal to have Genesis handle only about one-third of his syndication deals. Now, about 30 stations include Mr. Jones on their schedules, according to a review by Dan Friesen, one of the hosts of the podcast Knowledge Fight, which he and a friend created to analyze and chronicle Mr. Jones’s career. Of those, more than a third relegated him to late night and early morning. Several stations replaced Mr. Jones with conservative hosts such as Sean Hannity or Dan Bongino.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/business/media/alex-jones-misinformation-genesis.html

Some details of the negotiations have been previously reported by the SportsBusiness Journal.

Fans will still be able to access all the games on Sunday, regardless of who wins the rights, but they will probably pay a premium to add the service to their Apple, Amazon, ESPN+ or YouTube service, some of the dozen people said. It is not yet clear if that premium would be more or less than the $294 that DirecTV charges for a year, they added.

Apple and Amazon are trying to position themselves for a future without cable. Since 2015, traditional pay television has lost a quarter of its subscribers — about 25 million homes — as people traded cable packages for apps like Netflix and Hulu, according to MoffettNathanson, an investment firm that tracks the industry.

But the price of live sports rights is only projected to increase. The biggest media companies, including Disney, Comcast, Paramount and Fox, are expected to spend a combined $24.2 billion for rights in 2024, according to data from MoffettNathanson, nearly double what they spent a decade earlier.

The fragmenting of a decades-old distribution model has created an opportunity for Apple and Amazon. The companies want to expand deeper into media by selling subscriptions to Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime. Besides containing their own exclusive shows and sports, those services double as portals selling additional streaming offerings like Starz and HBO Max, which pay Apple and Amazon 15 percent or more of each subscription sold.

Amazon generates more than $3 billion annually from third-party subscription sales, according to estimates by the investment bank BMO Capital Markets. To make the business model work, Apple and Amazon must attract more viewers, and sports are the most powerful draw in media. The companies may be willing to lose money on Sunday Ticket to expose new customers to other parts of their business, the same calculation that DirecTV historically made.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/technology/sports-streaming-rights.html

The hearings gave us both the tragedy of Jan. 6 and the absurdity, the terror and the irony, the blood and the ketchup.

Word of mouth

The strongest story in the world means nothing if no one is paying attention. The hearings were made — and, unusually for a congressional broadcast, promoted — with a keen instinct for how audiences today become interested in TV and how they talk about it.

The committee and its members posted teaser video clips on social media to spike interest. They offered recaps and previews, like the “Previously” and “Next week on” trailers that bracket prime-time dramas. They promised video that was “never before seen,” three magic words to excite media interest.

And the proceedings were stacked with clips and anecdotes perfect for late-show monologues and social media sharing, which generate a secondary audience and free advertising. Within minutes of the Hawley clips’ airing, social accounts screen-grabbed them for jokes and scored them to “Yakety Sax” and the “Chariots of Fire” theme. (The images aired just before a break, as if, as the pop-culture critic Linda Holmes noted on Twitter, to give the internet time to go to work.)

To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, it was the continuation of politics by other memes.

Trust in the audience

Ultimately, the hearings had the same job as that of any ambitious TV drama: to make a complex story coherent. But they also needed to tell a complete story in detail — Thursday’s broadcast, like many a season finale, ran longer than usual — and have faith that, given signposts and a strong voice, viewers would stick it out.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/arts/television/jan-6-hearings-tv.html

But Mr. Carney’s team got a black eye during Amazon’s search for a second headquarters, when in 2018 it underestimated the progressive backlash it would face in potentially building a major presence in New York. Amazon reversed course and chose another location.

Mr. Carney’s team also faced criticism after an official Amazon Twitter account dismissed a congressman’s concern last year that workers had to urinate in bottles while on the job. The company apologized.

More recently, Mr. Carney’s team has mounted a vigorous response to the antitrust legislation, which Amazon has said would make it difficult to offer its signature fast shipping of its Prime subscription service. The company spent roughly $9.1 million on federal lobbying in 2015. Last year, it spent $19.3 million.

Drew Herdener, who heads public relations under Mr. Carney, was promoted to senior vice president on Thursday, according to four people with knowledge of the internal announcement. The communications team has grown from 10 people to “several hundred,” Mr. Herdener said in an interview last fall, adding that Amazon had hired 200 communications professionals in the previous year alone.

As the company searches for a new head of global affairs, Mr. Herdener will report directly to Mr. Jassy, and the policy teams will report to David Zapolsky, the general counsel, according to the email.

Airbnb has been looking for its own head of policy and communications after Chris Lehane, a former aide to former President Bill Clinton, left for a cryptocurrency venture capital fund earlier this year.

Erin Griffith contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/technology/jay-carney-amazon-airbnb.html

“We’ve tried to be clear that it’s both reasons,” Jack McGovern, a spokesman for U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch, said in an interview. “We did not intend to give a value judgment about which reason was more important than the other.”

Quidditch matches frequently appeared as scenes in the Harry Potter books and movies. The real-life version of it includes many elements taken from Ms. Rowling’s imagination of the game: the riding of brooms, hurling balls through hoops and the need to evade bludgers, and eventually catch the Golden Snitch. In real life a bludger is a rubber dodgeball, rather than a flying ball of iron, and the snitch is a tennis ball attached to a person, as in flag football.

Thousands of people play the game in more than 40 countries, according to the International Quidditch Association.

After her comments about transgender issues on Twitter drew widespread attention, Ms. Rowling published an essay in 2020 that raised concerns about “pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender” and the rise in gender transition among young people.

Many advocates for transgender rights have called Ms. Rowling’s comments transphobic, and some fans have struggled to reconcile their love of “Harry Potter” with their objections to her views.Ms. Rowling’s representatives at The Blair Partnership said there would be no comment on the decision but said that the various Quidditch leagues had never been endorsed or licensed by her.

“Quadball,” according to the International Quidditch Association, refers to the number of positions in the sport (a keeper, chaser, beater and seeker) and the number of balls (two bludgers, a quaffle and the snitch).

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/sports/quidditch-quadball-name-jk-rowling.html

“For a city that has so many outlets and is filled with so many reporters, for a while, I feel like there’s been a real lack of, I think, the kind of work that we’ve been doing, which is sometimes irreverent, very voice-y, it’s often fun,” Ms. Wang said. “But also really wants to hold people in power to account, right? And in a way that’s not dry.”

The journalists try to balance the heavy with the light. On Hell Gate, stories criticizing the city’s criminal justice system for wrongfully convicting a man are just as common as a semi-regular column rating public bathrooms across New York City or pointing out the new congressional district’s resemblance to a penis.

“​​We would do stories in my previous life on redistricting, or something like that, and they’d be really good stories,” Mr. Robbins said. “But very few people would read them because it’s an incredibly difficult topic — to sort of grab someone by the lapel and be like, ‘Yo, like your, your representatives just changed!’ And so our way of doing that has been like, ‘Yo, they just redrew the maps, and one of these maps looks like a penis. And you should check that.’

“And now we’ve gotten someone to read about redistricting.”

This laid-back, insouciant appreciation of the city’s quirkier side has already set Hell Gate apart from the city’s more self-serious news outlets in its first two months of publishing. And it’s this same attitude that some larger news outlets have already taken notice of.

In a newsletter sent early last month, Hell Gate’s writers poked fun at several outlets that they believe published pieces inspired by their own reporting without crediting them.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/style/hellgate-nyc-launch.html

Mr. Stuber pointed to the “Extraction” sequel and a spy film starring Gal Gadot, “Heart of Stone,” both set for release next year, as proof that the company is still taking big swings despite its struggles. He did acknowledge, however, that the recent business realities have forced the company to think harder about the projects it selects.

“We’re not crazily reducing our spend, but we’re reducing volume,” he said. “We’re trying to be more thoughtful.”

He added: “We were a business that was, for a long time, a volume business. And now we’re being very specific about targeting.”

Niija Kuykendall was hired from Warner Bros. late last year to oversee a new division that will focus on making midbudget movies, in the range of $40 million to $50 million, which the traditional studios have all but abandoned because their box office potential is less certain. And Mr. Stuber pointed to two upcoming films — “Pain Hustlers,” a $50 million thriller starring Emily Blunt, and an untitled romantic comedy with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron — as examples of the company’s commitment to films of that size.

In recent months, Netflix has also been criticized by some in the industry for how much — or how little — it spends to market individual films. Its marketing budget has essentially stayed the same for three years, despite a significant rise in competition from services like Disney+ and HBO Max. Creators often wonder whether they are going to get the full Netflix marketing muscle or simply a couple of billboards on Sunset Boulevard.

For “The Gray Man,” which is based on a series of books by Mark Greaney, Netflix has sent the Russos and their cast to Berlin, London and Mumbai, India. Other promotional efforts have included national television ads during National Basketball Association games and the Indianapolis 500 and 3-D billboards in disparate locations like Las Vegas and Krakow, Poland.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/17/business/media/netflix-the-gray-man-subscribers.html

Mr. Stuber pointed to the “Extraction” sequel and a spy film starring Gal Gadot, “Heart of Stone,” both set for release next year, as proof that the company is still taking big swings despite its struggles. He did acknowledge, however, that the recent business realities have forced the company to think harder about the projects it selects.

“We’re not crazily reducing our spend, but we’re reducing volume,” he said. “We’re trying to be more thoughtful.”

He added: “We were a business that was, for a long time, a volume business. And now we’re being very specific about targeting.”

Niija Kuykendall was hired from Warner Bros. late last year to oversee a new division that will focus on making midbudget movies, in the range of $40 million to $50 million, which the traditional studios have all but abandoned because their box office potential is less certain. And Mr. Stuber pointed to two upcoming films — “Pain Hustlers,” a $50 million thriller starring Emily Blunt, and an untitled romantic comedy with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron — as examples of the company’s commitment to films of that size.

In recent months, Netflix has also been criticized by some in the industry for how much — or how little — it spends to market individual films. Its marketing budget has essentially stayed the same for three years, despite a significant rise in competition from services like Disney+ and HBO Max. Creators often wonder whether they are going to get the full Netflix marketing muscle or simply a couple of billboards on Sunset Boulevard.

For “The Gray Man,” Netflix has sent the Russos and their cast to Berlin, London and Mumbai, India. Other promotional efforts have included national television ads during National Basketball Association games and the Indianapolis 500 and 3-D billboards in disparate locations like Las Vegas and Krakow, Poland.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/17/business/media/netflix-the-gray-man-subscribers.html

The Vatican responded by saying that Mr. Scalfari’s article was “the fruit of his reconstruction” and did not represent a “faithful transcription of the Holy Father’s words.”

On Thursday, a Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said the pope had learned “with sorrow of the passing of his friend” and “cherishes with affection the memory of the meetings — and the deep questions on the ultimate questions of humankind — that he had had with him over the years.”

Longtime readers said the tabloid format and combative headlines of La Repubblica, founded in 1976, introduced a new style of journalism suited to an era of change in Italian public life that loosened the hold of its traditional postwar political parties amid a welter of corruption scandals. Ezio Mauro, who succeeded Mr. Scalfari as editor in 1996, said he “revolutionized the mode of being of Italian journalism.”

La Repubblica became the country’s second-largest newspaper after Corriere della Sera — and briefly, in December 1986, the top seller. In the 1990s it vied with rivals to chronicle a series of kickback investigations known as “mani pulite” (“clean hands”), which discredited much of the postwar political elite.

In his youth, according to La Repubblica, Mr. Scalfari had shared the enthusiasms of many young people drawn to the imperial Roman mythology of Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini. But, during World War II, he was repudiated by his fellow Fascists after writing a critical article and veered to the left.

Many years later, when extreme right-wing figures seemed to be re-emerging in the Berlusconi era, he disputed the notion that Fascism could be revived in Italy. “Fascism is unthinkable in Italy today,” he told the British newspaper The Independent in 1994. In Italy, he said, the hard right itself was “not a danger to democracy.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/world/europe/eugenio-scalfari-dead.html