1. MONDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2016 SECTION B
USA SNAPSHOTS©
Employees at risk
Due to rising out-of-pocket
medical expenses,
employees avoid
important actions
such as
visiting
a doctor,
having
surgery,
filling a
prescription,
etc.
1in 3
SOURCE Guardian Life Workplace
Benefits Study
JAE YANG AND PAUL TRAP, USA TODAY
INDEX CLOSE CHG
Dow Jones industrials 18,145.71 y 16.64
Dow for the week 0.04% x 7.33
Nasdaq composite 5257.40 x 15.57
S&P 500 2141.16 y 0.18
T-bond, 30-year yield 2.49% y 0.01
T-note, 10-year yield 1.74% y 0.02
Gold, oz. Comex $1265.90 x 0.30
Oil, light sweet crude $50.85 x 0.42
Euro (dollars per euro) $1.0871 y 0.0055
Yen per dollar 103.85 y 0.10
SOURCE USA TODAY RESEARCH, MARKETWATCH.COM
FRIDAY MARKETS
BREXIT COULD MEAN EXIT
FOR LONDON BANKS
A “bank drain” of sorts could
start in London as banks exit
amid uncertainty about the
United Kingdom’s exit from the
European Union’s single market,
the British Bankers’ Association
chief warns. According to the
Associated Press, Anthony
Browne said Sunday in “The
Observer” that banks fear EU
politicians will erect trade barri-
ers in a bid to undermine Lon-
don.
U.S. ECONOMY MAY SEE
2%-PLUS GDP GROWTH
The U.S. economy is seen grow-
ing at its fastest pace in a year
when the government releases
its initial reading on third-quar-
ter GDP Friday, the week’s key
data release. Citigroup esti-
mates growth of 2.5% in the
July-thru-September quarter,
which would mark the first time
the economy has grown by at
least 2% since last year’s third
quarter.
MONEYLINE
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SAN FRANCISCO
O
n Sunday night, Ha-
das Gold, a Politico
media writer, began
receiving threats on
Twitter.
One image superimposed a yel-
low star of David on her shirt and
a bloody bullet hole in her fore-
head. Another Photoshopped her
face on a corpse in a concentra-
tion camp oven. The message:
“Don’t mess with our boy Trump,
or you will be first in line for the
camp.”
Gold, whose grandmother fled
Poland with her family weeks be-
fore Jews from their neighbor-
hood were deported to
concentration camps and whose
grandfather lost about half of his
extended family in the Holocaust,
notified Twitter, which moved
quickly to suspend the accounts.
Gold says these incidents have
become increasingly common
“the more we wrote about
Trump, and the more we wrote
about his rhetoric.”
A report this week from The
Anti-Defamation League docu-
mented the rise in anti-Semitic
tweets targeting journalists who
cover the Republican presidential
candidate. From August 2015 to
July 2016, the ADL found 2.6 mil-
lion tweets with anti-Semitic lan-
guage. Of those, nearly 20,000
tweets were directed at 50,000
journalists in the U.S., with more
than two-thirds of the tweets sent
by 1,600 Twitter accounts. Words
that appear frequently in the pro-
files of these Twitter accounts:
Trump, nationalist, conservative,
white.
“The report is representative
of the bigotry and hatred that we
are seeing play out on a broader
scale,” said Oren Segal, director of
ADL’s Center on Extremism and
an author of the report.
During this turbulent election
season that has fanned the flames
of racism, xenophobia, sexism
and bigotry, hate speech that
typically resides in the dark re-
cesses of the Internet has bub-
bled into the mainstream
and onto Twitter, a popular
online hangout for journal-
ists and politicians such as
Trump, who has millions
of followers there.
Because people
don’t have to use
their real names on
the service, they can
attack people of color,
women, Muslims and other
groups with very little risk.
“This is only a fraction of
what’s happening online right
now as a result of the legitimacy
(that) various extremist ideolo-
gies have been given in this cam-
paign season,” said Ryan Lenz,
editor of the Southern Poverty
Law Center’s Hatewatch blog.
“We have seen a massive rise of
hate speech.”
Trump campaign spokeswom-
an Hope Hicks says the campaign
has “no knowledge of this activ-
ity” and strongly condemns “any
commentary that is
#$%*
Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric
fanning flames of anti-Semitism,
racism on Twitter, observers say
DIVISIVE ELECTION
SPARKS ‘MASSIVE RISE’
IN HATEFUL TWEETS
Never in modern history has
the news media been so united
in its condemnation of a presi-
dential candidate and determi-
nation to use its
influence to help
prevent his elec-
tion. Does that
mean the election
is rigged?
It is certainly a new view of
the media function. The me-
dia’s sense of civic duty, in even
the most high-minded view, is
not about protecting the pub-
lic, but about orchestrating the
claims of people and institu-
tions who think they can pro-
tect it. The natural
competitiveness of the media
business, and market sense
that moralizing makes for a
duller story, have, arguably,
helped pluralism and democra-
cy. The media is not a church.
But now it is. Or, save for a
few outliers, it is like one in its
absolute certainty, and hell and
brimstone warnings, that elect-
ing Donald Trump would
be electing the devil.
Since September,
when the polls
appeared to tighten,
the message from
newspapers, cable sta-
tions, networks and pundits,
and from the social media echo
box, has been as consistent as
it might be from Sunday pul-
pits — or, for that matter, in
Saturday union halls, or Thurs-
day meetings of special interest
groups.
The media, virtually all
forms of it, virtually all aspects
of its ownership, virtually all of
its employees, on an institu-
tional and operational basis,
has come to see itself as a fire-
wall against Donald Trump.
Indeed, in an altogether new
sense of itself, the imperative
quite seems to be to prove it
can be a firewall — that it can
claim a historic role in the
defeat of Trump and the elec-
tion of Hillary Clinton. For a
Media playing firewall
against Donald Trump
Michael Wolff
@MichaelWolffNYC
Michael@burnrate.com
USA TODAY
MEDIA
Response translates
as ‘rigging’ to GOP
Jessica Guynn
@jguynn
USA TODAY
@#$!%@$
%@$
v STORY CONTINUES ON 2B
v STORY CONTINUES ON 2B
Harry Potter, Anthony Bour-
dain, Superman, Bill Simmons
and Charles Barkley are all going
to work for a phone company.
AT&T’s planned $85.4 billion
acquisition of Time Warner, the
New York-based company that
owns HBO, CNN, TNT and War-
ner Bros. film studio, is a huge
domino falling in the content
business. The deal, which comes
with the requisite promises of in-
novation and cost-savings, will
make competitors in the Internet
and media businesses uneasy.
The move could also set off a
new wave of telecommunications
companies and Internet giants,
such as Google and Apple, buying
or making deals with popular
content programmers, further
blurring the boundaries among
the industries. In fact, Apple had
been rumored for months to be a
potential acquirer of Time War-
ner. Google’s interest in buying
premium entertainment content,
such as the right to stream NFL
games, has also been widely re-
ported.
Other cable network operators
that also could be potential take-
over targets, to name a few, in-
clude: AMC Networks,
best-known for its top-rated TV
show The Walking Dead, but
which also owns BBC America
and SundanceTV; and Discovery
Communications, which owns
Discovery Channel, The Learning
Channel and Animal Planet.
The acquisition, which marries
partners in distribution and con-
tent, will trigger multiple layers
of complexity for customers, in-
dustry regulators, investors and
consumer watchdogs as they sort
out revenue possibilities and con-
flicts of interest. But competitors
of Time Warner or AT&T can no
longer afford to stand by idly.
Time Warner’s Chairman and
CEO Jeff Bewkes intimated as
much, saying the deal was partly
to get ahead of competitors.
“You’re going to see all kinds of
distributors following,” he said in
a press conference call with re-
porters Saturday night. “And
you’re going to see a kind of revo-
lution in the TV world.”
Telecom providers have been
shopping for content companies
as their wireless smartphone and
broadband Internet service mar-
AT&T-Time Warner deal could
spur more mergers, scrutiny
$85.4B acquisition
of Time Warner
is a huge domino
Mike Snider and Roger Yu
@mikesnider; @ByRogerYu
USA TODAY
v STORY CONTINUES ON 2B
“Any media
company without
a controlling
shareholder and
other than Disney
could be a
target.”
Brian Wieser, Pivotal Research analyst