--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Friday, August 9th. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: On today's show, how the pandemic led to a surge in gun sales, why Netflix is facing so many lawsuits, and SNL gets ready for the election. But first, let's check in on the race for the White House.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walls have been met by enthusiastic crowds as they visited swing states this past week. According to their campaign, more than 15,000 people came out to their rally in Detroit and 12,000 to their rally in rural Wisconsin.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The Harris campaign has also brought in $310 million in fundraising in July. That's more than double the Trump campaign in that time. And another 36 million in just the first day after Walls joined the ticket.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now, the mood on the Republican side has been very different. With the exception of one planned stop in Montana, a state that is firmly red, Trump has been mostly off the campaign trail this week.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Instead, his vice presidential pick, Senator J.D. Vance, has been trailing Harris and Walls from state to state, attempting to counter-program their message.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And The Washington Post reports that privately, Trump is growing frustrated.
--:-- Josh Dossie: My big impression is that he is not happy with how this race is going, that he sees Kamala Harris gaining momentum, having larger crowds than Biden ever did, that he sees the polls tightening in a lot of key states, and that he is trying to put himself back at the center of the news.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That's Josh Dossie, who is covering the campaign for The Washington Post. He spoke to me after Trump held a press conference yesterday, where he agreed to a presidential debate to be held by ABC News in September, and also called for two more.
--:-- Josh Dossie: Trump also got upset when a reporter asked him about Harris's large crowds.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Oh, give me a break. Listen, I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn't report it.
--:-- Josh Dossie: Dossie says Republicans and the Trump campaign are in a very different place than they were three weeks ago at the Republican National Convention, when they were virtually taking a victory lap and even talking about what jobs in the administration people would have.
--:-- Josh Dossie: Now Trump is asking some people in his inner circle whether he should make changes to his campaign staff.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He's saying from all sorts of his friends and donors and others that his campaign has sort of lost altitude right now.
--:-- Josh Dossie: So we're in an interesting moment where we're 90 days or so out from the presidency and we have a dissatisfied candidate by almost all accounts.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: As for why Trump has been absent from the campaign trail, Dossie says it's a combination of things.
--:-- Josh Dossie: For one, Trump always planned to have a lighter August, and his schedule has not quite yet adjusted since Harris entered the race.
--:-- Josh Dossie: Also since the assassination attempt on his life the Secret Service has cautioned Trump against holding big events in outdoor spaces.
--:-- Josh Dossie: And rallies cost a lot of money.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So, you know, there's a whole host of reasons why he's not campaigning as much right now.
--:-- Josh Dossie: But I do think you have a lot of allies who want to see him out there more because of Kamala Harris's more aggressive schedule.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: As Dossie reports, Trump is telling friends and allies that the hand he's being dealt isn't fair.
--:-- Josh Dossie: As one Trump ally put it to the Post, Trump felt that he had already beaten Biden.
--:-- Josh Dossie: Now he needs to recalibrate if he wants to beat Harris too.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Let's turn out a story from Vox, which looks at the drastic rise in gun ownership due to the pandemic.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Starting in March 2020, the month the pandemic really took hold in America.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And over the course of the next two years, one in 20 Americans bought a gun for the first time.
--:-- Maren Kogan: And the profile of those first-time gun buyers looked very different from the profile of gun owners that we're used to.
--:-- Maren Kogan: So according to one study, half of them were women, 20% were Black, and 20% were Hispanic.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Vox senior correspondent Maren Kogan asked some of these new gun owners why they got them.
--:-- Maren Kogan: What you saw during the pandemic was that The rise in violent crime and in gun homicide in particular, that violence wasn't felt equally across the U.S.
--:-- Maren Kogan: Different communities had a much harder time and faced much more violence than others.
--:-- Maren Kogan: And so when I spoke to a number of people who bought their first guns, they were people who were living in communities where they could see the violence rising really dramatically in their own neighborhoods, in their own communities.
--:-- Maren Kogan: So a lot of the gun-buying activity researchers think, and certainly this is backed up by the people I spoke to, was driven by the sense of things are really breaking down here.
--:-- Maren Kogan: Crime is on the rise.
--:-- Maren Kogan: And I don't know that I can trust the police to get to me in time or to help out if something goes wrong.
--:-- Maren Kogan: And Kogan also found a vicious cycle.
--:-- Maren Kogan: When you worry that more people in your community have guns, you then feel the need to arm yourself too.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I talked to multiple people about this who said, if everyone else is going to have a gun, which is what it seems like, because so many people there have guns illegally, they said if everyone else is going to have one, then I need to have one too.
--:-- Maren Kogan: She spent time talking to people in a concealed carry class on Chicago's South Side.
--:-- Maren Kogan: What struck Kogan was that these weren't the type of gun owners that often pop up in policy debates.
--:-- Maren Kogan: No one was like a diehard Second Amendment. These are my rights, you know, and you can pry this gun from my cold, dead hands.
--:-- Maren Kogan: No one I spoke to was like that.
--:-- Maren Kogan: They were not choosing to get a gun out of ideological or identitarian reasons.
--:-- Maren Kogan: They were choosing to get a gun because they felt unsafe.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: While owning a weapon may offer some folks peace of mind, data shows that people who have guns in their homes are more than twice as likely to be shot and killed than people who don't.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There's more risk of death by suicides, domestic violence, or accidents.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And we should also say that even before this new rush of buyers, America already had more privately owned firearms than the next 25 countries combined.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Many gun violence experts now worry about the ripple effect of all these new firearms in homes and the danger they'll present to the owners themselves.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: TV and movies based on true crime stories are hotter than ever, but they're also getting much harder and much more expensive to make.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: With the growth in content in this field, we're also having a growth in legal costs and lawsuits.
--:-- Joe Flint: Some of the real people portrayed in Netflix's true crime shows say they aren't being represented fairly.
--:-- Joe Flint: In fact, in the past five years, at least 20 defamation suits have been filed in the U.S. against Netflix and its production partners.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One of them came from a woman in Scotland who says the hit show Baby Reindeer falsely portrayed her as a stalker and sexual predator.
--:-- Joe Flint: She wasn't named in the show, but internet sleuths found her days after it had aired.
--:-- Joe Flint: She's now suing Netflix for more than $170 million in damages.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now, Netflix says that every episode has a disclaimer saying that some details have been dramatized, and it's looking to dismiss the suit.
--:-- Joe Flint: Other streamers like Hulu and Max have faced similar lawsuits.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Flint says that the plaintiffs in these cases face an uphill battle with a high burden of proof.
--:-- Joe Flint: They must prove that they've been harmed by the show and that the creators were negligent in their storytelling.
--:-- Joe Flint: It takes a lot to win one of these cases, especially in the United States.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Netflix has already won several suits.
--:-- Joe Flint: Some were settled or dismissed.
--:-- Joe Flint: And all of this legal stuff is expensive, but Flint says it's still worth it.
--:-- Joe Flint: The settlements and legal costs and also increased insurance are sort of a cost of doing business that still probably pale in comparison to the next season of, you know, a big high-priced sci-fi drama.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Which is why Flint says while all of this is happening behind the scenes, you probably won't notice any difference in content as you're looking through Netflix or other streaming platforms for your next binge watch.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: When Kamala Harris announced Tim Walls as her running mate earlier this week, the domain name, harriswalls.com, had already been taken, and four years ago, no less.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: NPR has the backstory here.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Well before anyone could have ever predicted this ticket, a guy in Brooklyn named Jeremy Green Ecce had the idea to buy the domain name.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He thought up what he called every sort of folksy white man that Harris might pick as a running mate.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: On his list J Pritzker John Fetterman and yes, Tim Walls.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He says that hours after Walls was announced as the pick, he sold HarrisWalls.com for $15,000 to an anonymous Harris supporter.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's really fun to register a domain and then have this kind of payoff where I just hit the jackpot and I get a little news cycle.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's just kind of a good time for me.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In another fun election story, Deadline reports that Maya Rudolph is confirmed to reprise her Emmy-winning role as Vice President Kamala Harris on SNL.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Here she is playing the part a few years ago.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You call that human rights, China? I call it human wrongs.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now, we don't know yet who's going to play Tim Walls, but the LA Times reports that SNL's executive producer, Lorne Michaels, called up Steve Martin earlier this week to make him the offer.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Martin apparently turned Michaels down, saying, I was picked because I have gray hair and glasses, but that he is not an impressionist.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: On the Republican side, James Austin Johnson is expected to return to play Trump, and we don't yet know who will impersonate Vance.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And finally, a couple of Olympic stories.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: First, American track star Noah Lyles competed yesterday in the men's 200 meter and finished with a bronze.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: After the race, he hunched over on the track and needed to be taken away in a wheelchair.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He told NBC he was diagnosed with COVID just two days earlier.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's taken its toll for sure, but I've never been more proud of myself for being able to come out here and getting a bronze medal, where last Olympic I was very disappointed, and this time I couldn't be more proud.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Did you ever consider not running the 200 final?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: No.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: No, I didn't.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I was just saying we We're just going to try and quarantine as much as possible, stay away, not trying to, you know, pass it off.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And just, to be honest, give it my all.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Also, the U.S. men's basketball team survived a scare against Serbia and staged a late game rally to win.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: They will face France for the gold medal this weekend.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And before the Olympics comes to a close, it will debut its newest sport, breakdancing.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The event is totally improvised.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Competitors don't know what music is coming until the DJ plays it.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now, the U.S. is expected to do well in the event.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: After all, hip-hop culture was born in America.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But there's expected to be fierce competition from Japan, the Netherlands, Kazakhstan, and more.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And check out our weekly interview show, In Conversation, where you can hear Shamita's full conversation with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I keep saying to them, take back your party.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: This isn't who you are.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The grand old party doing so much for our country and with great leaders in our country.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And now, toadies to the sky, what's happened to you?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And if you're listening to the Apple News app right now, that episode is queued up to play for you next.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Enjoy the weekend, and we'll be back with the news on Monday.
