Media Monday: ABC’s Trump Exposé Fiasco & ESPN Super Bowl Sprawl

Jon Kelly (0:00)

For me, one reality that I saw when I started my career at The New York Times, even the August New York Times, newsrooms are really terribly managed.

Peter Hamby (0:11)

Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Monday, October 19th, which means it's Media Monday. Today, Jon Kelly and I look at how ABC News bungled an erroneous report about the Trump sons enriching themselves off the Pentagon, and what the fiasco says about the journalistic culture inside TV networks and their websites. We also take a look at ESPN planning a series of alt-casts for the Super Bowl next year, with extra coverage from the Manning Bros and Pat McAfee, and why ESPN is going in on their multi-channel coverage of the big game. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.

Happy Monday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. If it's Monday, it's Media Monday. I'm talking to the boss man, Jon Kelly. If you're watching on YouTube, it's not my usual office. I'm here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the People's Republic, doing some Harvard stuff. This is my hotel room. Anyway, Jon, today we're going to talk about ABC News posting and then deleting a controversial report about the Trump sons profiting off of government contracts. It was deleted. ABC News didn't say anything about it. Then they re-reported it and re-posted it. It says a lot, I think, about how TV news operates, and it was just gross mismanagement on ABC News' part, lots to pick apart there. We're also going to talk about ESPN's plans for the Super Bowl next year. They're going all in on the casts, the alternative broadcasts. You got a Manning cast, you got a McAfee cast, you got all kinds of ways for fans to enter us. I know, I would love to have a Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of you and me watching the Super Bowl watch by 10 people. Hey Jimmy, call me, we're available.

We should call our boy Jamie Horowitz. Maybe he can set up for us, he loves us. Jon, let's talk about this ABC News story. Dylan reported a lot of this out. Go read his piece in the room. What happened is ABC reported last week that Don Jr and Eric Trump basically had been profiting off of government and Pentagon contracts as part of the venture capital firm 1789 Capital. They are partners and not founders. ABC reported that they claimed a huge stake in Anderil in June 2025, and then since then Anderil has been getting all of these fancy, expensive government contracts. Now, ABC in their report basically misrepresented how much of a stake the Trumps have in 1789 Capital, how much of a stake that 1789 Capital has in Anderil. And it was this long bombshell report. Look, there is plenty of examples. There are plenty of examples of the Trump family getting rich off of the White House. You've got World Liberty Financial Crypto. You've got licensing deals for their hotels and properties in Dubai and many other countries. You can go down the list. And so it needs to be said, that is happening. But this article had all sorts of factual errors.

They deleted it from the website with no explanation. The Trumps came hard at them. 1789 spokesman Alexa Henning, who I know from politics, she was working Republican politics, came hard at ABC. They threatened to sue. The reporter on the piece, Nathan Lee, was at the University of Missouri Journalism School like last year. So there was sort of a junior desk person writing this article. So it was pulled, no explanation. It was re-reported by a more senior figure at ABC. Then they re-posted it with a huge correction at the top saying a previous article misstated this, this, this, this, this. And then they went on to write about this Maryland building contract. I'm not sure what that and a roll got. Anyway.

Jon, I'm curious what you think about this, because my take is, and has been, because I worked in a TV newsroom, and CNN doesn't really have much of these problems anymore. But they kind of used to. You know, before Zucker and Andrew Morris came in, they really hired a bunch of real reporters and editors to make sure that the product on the website...

Was good and well done and rigorous, and they just would go to web with real reporting.

A lot of newsrooms The newsrooms. like didn't always do that on the TV side and ABC in particular, they just look really sloppy here. You can't just put stuff up on the internet and think of the website as, you know, this redheaded stepchild of broadcast. Certainly it makes less money than broadcast. But I do think that there's something in the, in the newsroom culture over there on the digital side that is coming into play here, which is that you just, it's not the New York Times.