A little housekeeping to start today’s newsletter. There will be no Poynter Report on Monday in observance of Memorial Day. We will return on Tuesday.
Today, we start with my imitation of the first 25 minutes of Ron DeSantis’ big presidential announcement on Twitter on Wednesday night. Ready?
(…)
That’s it. It was a 25-minute ellipsis.
DeSantis was supposed to make his big presidential nomination announcement at 6 p.m. But he and the rest of us had to wait nearly a half hour because Elon Musk’s $44 billion toy was on the fritz. The initial number of listeners went from half a million at the scheduled start to about half that size when DeSantis finally said he was running for president.
It’s being called a DeSaster.
The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman put it perfectly: “The delay was longer than some campaign speeches.”
They added, “A presidential announcement is the rarest of opportunities. It is the moment when a candidate can draw all the attention on themselves and their vision. Instead, Mr. DeSantis wound up almost as a panelist at his own event, sharing the stage with Elon Musk and his malfunctioning social media site.”
What were others saying about Twitter’s, um, interesting night?
Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri wrote, “This was the funniest thing Elon Musk has ever done. Imagine that you are transported to the most awkward telemeeting of your life. And then imagine it is being broadcast to a half-million or so people, a number that keeps causing the meeting app to implode, until the crowd finally dwindles and gives up, and when the meeting finally restarts in another spot, you are left with a fraction of the original attendees.”
Petri added, “Calling Wednesday night’s event ‘the most awkward telemeeting of your life’ does not do the awkwardness justice. It was one of those calls where you both keep talking at the same time and then stopping. It was a butt dial from your mother.”
Also in the Post, George Will wrote, “Wednesday evening’s overthought and underprepared glitch festival on Twitter Spaces was at least a fitting coda to the preceding months. If Ron DeSantis does not win his party’s presidential nomination, his pre-announcement campaign will be remembered for making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.”
Will added, “Speaking not for attribution, a Republican who might join the nomination scramble has compared DeSantis to New Coke, with Donald Trump as the original. In 1985, people who liked Coke as it was had no interest in a substitute, and people who did not like the original did not crave a tweaked imitation.”
The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg questioned DeSantis teaming up with Musk, writing, “It might seem strange for a presidential candidate who is arguing that Republicans should not tie their fortunes to an impulsive, internet-poisoned millionaire to announce his campaign by wedding it to an impulsive, internet-poisoned billionaire. But DeSantis’s choice of venue makes sense in context: It is the latest in a series of appeals to his party’s most online activists, who idolize individuals such as Musk and monopolize Twitter, the social-media site that Musk owns.”
Ryan Mac, who covers tech for The New York Times, wrote, “Since Mr. Musk bought Twitter last year for $44 billion, he has reshaped it by cutting more than 75 percent of its work force, changing the platform’s speech rules and reinstating suspended users. Outages have been on the rise, as have bugs that have made Twitter less usable. The technical problems on Wednesday showed how Twitter is operating far from seamlessly, turning what was supposed to be a crowning event for Mr. Musk into something of an embarrassment.”
Apparently there were fears that Wednesday’s problems were coming. Mac wrote, “Inside Twitter, employees had been alarmed by Mr. Musk’s turn into politics and whether the social media site could handle the influx of traffic, three employees said. There was no planning for what are known as ‘site reliability issues’ for the event with Mr. DeSantis, two of the people said, and workers were prepared to do whatever they could to keep the social network running.”
And, for the last thoughts on this particular topic, there’s Politico’s Calder McHugh and Stephen Heuser comparing the initial presidential campaign launches of DeSantis and Donald Trump in “Trump Had an Escalator. DeSantis Had a Meltdown.” Good headline, right?
Finally, Poynter’s PolitiFact with “Fact-checking Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign kickoff on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk.”
Now for the rest of today’s newsletter with links, tidbits and news for your weekend review …
- CNN has lined up yet another Republican presidential candidate town hall. The network will do a town hall with former Vice President Mike Pence on June 7 in Des Moines, Iowa. It will be moderated by CNN anchor and chief political correspondent Dana Bash. The network announced earlier this week that it would host former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in a town hall on June 4. Jake Tapper will moderate that one.
- Speaking of town halls, Donald Trump is going to have another one. This one with Fox News on June 1 in Iowa. Sean Hannity will moderate. But check it out: It will be pre-taped earlier in the day and aired at 9 p.m. Eastern. Maybe it’s Fox News’ way of making sure anything that Trump falsely says about the 2020 election doesn’t get the network in trouble in the wake of writing that $787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems.
- This is exclusive for Los Angeles Times subscribers. It’s Summer Lin and Erin B. Logan with “He faked an investigation. Then the ‘detective’ killed her family and abducted her niece.”
- The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Toonkel and Amol Sharma with “Inside Disney and Comcast’s Fight Over the Future of Hulu.”
- It’s Deadline with “Cannes Film Festival 2023: All Of Deadline’s Movie Reviews.”
- For The New York Times, Chris Colin with “How Sexist Is Hollywood? Check Out Geena Davis’s Spreadsheet.”
- Good stuff from Esquire’s Ben Mack about the one-person team behind Antarctica’s longest-running newspaper, the Antarctic Sun, in “Breaking News at the End of the Earth.”
- Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay writes about ultramarathoner Candice Burt: “She Ran 6,400 Miles Over 200 Days. Then She Cooled Off With a Marathon.”
- The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh gets us ready for Sunday night’s series finale of HBO’s “Succession” with the importance (or lack thereof) of a series finale in “Against the Cult of ‘Sticking the Landing.’”
- The New York Times’ Victor Mather with “Why Do They Euthanize Racehorses Who Break Their Legs?”
- Finally, today, we at Poynter are sending our best wishes to one of our colleagues and his family. Ferdi Ozsoy is the interim director of the International Fact-Checking Network. Earlier this week, his wife Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy was badly injured when a stranger pushed her in front of a speeding subway train in New York City. Here’s the latest from The New York Times’ Hurubie Meko: “The Precarious, Terrifying Hours After a Woman Was Shoved Into a Train.”
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