THE DAILY NEWSLETTER  - TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2020 

Media Winners & Losers

MEDIA WINNER:
Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton is playing a major role in combating the coronavirus. Because of COURSE she is!!

The singer donated $1 million to help fund Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, which early results have shown to be 94.5 percent effective in preventing infection. The news was confirmed by The New England Journal of Medicine.

The Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund donated $1 million to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center back in April. The university was integral to Moderna’s vaccine trial and clinical. In April, Parton had shared on Instagram that she donated $1 million to research being done at Vanderbilt University.

“I am making a donation of $1 million to Vanderbilt toward that research and to encourage people that can afford it to make donations," she said at the time.

It’s now been confirmed that Parton’s donation helped directly lead to Moderna announcing it had produced a coronavirus vaccine.

“I’m just happy that anything I do can help somebody else, and when I donated the money to the Covid fund, I just wanted it to do good,” Parton said on the Today show on Tuesday. “Evidently, it is. Let’s just hope we find a cure real soon.”

Dolly Parton is a winner every day of the week. Today she's a media winner, too. And a hero.

MEDIA LOSER:
Twitter/Jack Dorsey

Twitter introduced a new feature called “Fleets” on Tuesday, which is a way of sharing tweets that disappear after 24 hours.

If the horrified/angry/confused reactions are any indication, it seems many Twitter users would rather they disappear now.

Politicians, media figures, celebrities, and other verified Twitter users had some thoughts, not many of them positive. In fact the feature was dragged to pieces.

That mockery falls on the same day that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, along with the other tech overlords, appeared before the Senate for another round of "why are you mean to me and not so-and-so" from both Democrats and Republicans.

Dorsey again had to admit that they messed up in censoring the New York Post. Not that the admission stopped any of the grilling over the move.

And just yesterday an "army" of Twitter bot accounts continuing to operate unimpeded were exposed.

It has been, to put it into just a few characters, an inauspicious start to Twitter's week all around.

The A-Block

7. Acceptance

President Donald Trump may still not be ready to concede defeat to President-elect Joe Biden, but Biden’s victory got clear — if tacit — validation from namesake First Son Donald Trump Jr. via a Senate campaign text message.

It was supposed to be about the special election in Georgia but it said more than that.

Maria Bartiromo conceded that, if the allegations of a stolen election put forth by Trump and Rudy Giuliani are false, then they are undermining democracy.

Dr. Anthony Fauci dropped some cues and clues, too, Tuesday.

Seven. It's the hardest of the stages.

JUST IN

Biden Announces Members of White House Senior Staff


"I regret any pain my statement may have caused"

CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour apologized on Monday for comparing President Donald Trump’s four years in office to the Nazi Kristallnacht which led to the murder of Jews.

“A comment on my program at the end of last week. I observed the 82nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, as I often do,” Amanpour declared at the end of her show. “It is the event that began the horrors of the Holocaust.”

“Hitler and his evil stand alone, of course, in history," she said in the on-air apology.

$1 Million Each

In 2017, George Clooney’s friend and business partner, Rande Gerber, said on MSNBC that the actor gave 14 of his closest friends $1 million each in a suitcase. In a new interview, Clooney finally confirmed the story and explained how it all went down.

Don't be dumb.

Brad Raffensperger warned on Fox News Tuesday that if you are thinking of moving to Georgia just to vote in the state’s Senate runoff elections, that would be an illegal act of voter fraud.

CNN, Fox News Split Ratings Victories

Former President Barack Obama’s Sunday night interview with 60 Minutes led to a surge in ratings, according to Nielsen data — with the venerable prime time newsmagazine racking up a viewership of 12.38 million.



The interview was the most-watched event on broadcast Sunday night, aside from sporting events, but still did not match the Oct. 25 broadcast which included...



‘You Embarrassing Quack!’

The View unanimously condemned Dr. Scott Atlas for endorsing large holiday gatherings by saying no one should be denied a “final Thanksgiving.” In fact, they really brutalized him.

Typhoid Mary

Sen. Tom Cotton said he can’t imagine a Republican Senate confirming former Obama administration official Susan Rice to any position in Biden's administration, comparing her to Typhoid Mary.

A dire warning

Former President Barack Obama warned that social media companies and the Internet have unleashed a phenomenon of rampant misinformation in America, and it is “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”

Lovefest

Fox News’ Bill Hemmer took some shots at the press questions to Joe Biden at his Monday press conference on the economy and the coronavirus.

In particular, Hemmer picked up on some of the questions Biden was asked regarding his reaction to Trump’s tweets about the election and the delayed transition that former administration officials have flagged as concerning.

“You’ve been watching what amounts to a bit of a lovefest here,” Hemmer said.

 



CNN Polling Expert Harry Enten Breaks Down What Went Wrong and What's in Store
for the Future of Political Polling on the latest The Interview

Must See Clip

100,000,000¢

During an appearance on The Breakfast Club Tuesday, 50 Cent claimed he was offered $1 million to attend President Donald Trump’s inauguration — predicting that other Trump-endorsing rappers received similar proposals.

“I’ve come to y’all to talk about them offering me $1 million to go to Trump’s inauguration,” he said of the president’s team, roughly 37 minutes into the interview. “$500,000, and it went up to a million while I was still confused about what to do.”

“He was needing it for the same reasons you see now”

Links We Like

Littlest Prince: Trump will leave in a blaze of truthless tweets and hapless coup attempts.
- David Roth, via The New Republic
Alito is right: The pandemic brought an assault on our basic rights
- Jonathan S. Tobin, via New York Post

Is ‘Trumpism Without Trump’ the GOP’s Future?
- Scott Lincicome, via The Dispatch

America’s Shockingly Moderate Electorate
- Mark Penn, via Wall Street journal
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