THE DAILY NEWSLETTER - THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 2022

Media Winners & Losers

MEDIA WINNER:
Dean Baquet,  A.G. Sulzberger

 A.G. Sulzberger, Dean Baquet and the New York Times have pulled off quite a coup. After a lengthy negotiation, the New York Times Co has agreed to acquire The Athletic for nearly $550 million.

The deal will help the New York Times reach its goal of hitting 10 million digital subscribers by 2025.

As of Sept. 30, the Times reported 7.6 million digital subscribers, while The Athletic boasted a following of avid sports fans that totals 1.2 million consumers.

Launched in 2016, The Athletic quickly began to pillage the newspaper industry, stockpiling talent at a rapid and expensive rate. Receiving pressure from investors to start delivering a return, The Athletic originally sought a sale closer to $800 million.

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” co-founder of The Athletic, Alex Mather said in 2017. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

Less than five years later, The Athletic has yet to see a profit and is being bought out by one of those local papers they sought to “bleed” to death.

The acquisition is a win for the New York Times, which started the week out with a loss: Ben Smith announcing he was leaving the paper, where he served as its buzzy media columnist, to start his own media venture.

You win some, you lose some.

MEDIA LOSER:
BlazeTV's Elijah Schaffer

BlazeTV host Elijah Schaffer decried foreign influence in U.S. politics while calling out the nonexistent “Zionist Movement of America” for sponsoring the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), in addition to blaming Israel and other countries for exploiting “the greed of Americans.”

During Tuesday’s episode of The Blaze’s You Are Here, Schaffer called out countries – including Qatar, China, Russia – for influencing U.S. politics, but echoed the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish and Israeli control of U.S. policy as he went on.

Schaffer said these countries "took the greed of Americans and they’re selling out our country for the interests of foreign nations."

Organizations similar to Schaffer's nonexistent one that actually do exist include the American Zionist Movement and the Zionist Organization of America, with the former being a group that works with both sides of the political aisle and the latter being on the right.

Neither organization has been a sponsor at CPAC.

The only Zionist organization to be a sponsor at the conference was the right-wing Chovevei Zion a few years ago. Chovevei Zion is now Amariah, which also supports conservative policies in line with the conference.

Anti-Semitic tropes, couched as they were in mentions of other countries, stand out nevertheless when your example is a Zionist group that doesn't exist being a sponsor of an event even the ones that do exist didn't sponsor. Schaffer was wrong on the facts and the spirit.

The A-Block

A Year Later

On January 6, 2021, pro-Donald Trump rioters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., in a display that gripped the nation, leaving five dead and more than a hundred wounded. Yet one year later, a large portion of Americans, particularly Republicans, do not recall the attack as very violent.

Americans watched the violence unfold in real-time: it was aired on cable news networks and streamed on social media. Gruesome footage of police being beaten with their own weapons, maced, and crushed in doorways circulated not only nationally, but globally.

However, one year later, partisan division in the perception of the events of January 6 remains high.

According to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, only 39% of Republicans recall the attack as extremely or very violent, starkly contrasted with the 87% of Democrats.

The poll also found that 32% of Republicans recall the event as somewhat violent, whereas 29% continue to believe it was not violent at all.

Meanwhile, only 11% of Democrats recall the event as somewhat violent and only 1% argue that it was not a violent attack.

These findings demonstrate the remnants of political polarization stemming from the 2020 presidential election, and the success of the effort by Trump supporters to downplay the violence and the impact of the riot.

And there's the question of Trump's culpability.


January 6

Biden Gives Blistering Condemnation of Trump for 'Doing Nothing for Hours' as Capitol Was Attacked

'Biden Slams 'Defeated' Trump, Details Litany of Big Lie Failures in Jan. 6 Speech

Trump Blasts Biden Speech: Using Attack to 'Stoke Fears and Divide America'

One Year After Condemning Trump, Lindsey Graham Trashes Biden's Jan. 6 Speech as 'Brazen Politicization'


In Other News...

Joy Reid Suggests Republicans Hate Biden Because He Was VP to 'The Black President'

GOP Lawmaker Apologizes for Trying to Pull Down Basketball Ref's Pants: 'Totally Lost My Junk'

Jake Tapper Calls Out Ron Klain, Joe Biden for Failing to Deliver Campaign Promises on Covid Testing

RATINGS: Cable News Ratings, Monday January 3rd: Fox News Scores 9 of the Top 10 Shows in Key Demo

Must See Clip

"Jackasses!"

Former D.C. Metro Police Officer and current CNN analyst Michael Fanone lashed out at Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election even after pro-Trump forces violently attacked the Capitol.

On Thursday’s New Day, co-anchors Brianna Keilar and John Berman marked the anniversary of the attack with live coverage from the Capitol that included interviewing Fanone and Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, both of whom endured the assault that day.

They had plenty to say.

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