--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, August 26th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shumita Basu: On today's show, a week-long mission turns into months stuck in space for two astronauts. Why reality TV is suffering right now. And how one major league baseball player is making history by playing for both teams in one game. But first, Kamala Harris's campaign says it's raised more than half a billion dollars since President Biden dropped out. Forty million of that came in the days since her speech at the Democratic National Convention. And according to the campaign, a lot of the money is coming from first-time donors.
--:-- Maggie Severns: So that means that a lot of people are being drawn into the fold or drawn back into the fold.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You know, in my story, I talked to one person who said that she had been really disillusioned by politics. She's a teacher. She lives in rural Maine. She just had no interest in giving to a politician. And when she saw that Harris was going to likely be the nominee, she just went online and she gave $100 that day. And I think that those stories exist across the country right now.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Politico notes a trend coming out of Harris's home state of California. Over 20 percent of her campaign's fundraising in July, which, remember, her campaign only came into existence in the last few days of the month, came from California donors. And Politico spoke to a number of people in the tech industry who say Silicon Valley is mobilizing in a new way now that Harris is on top of the ticket.
--:-- Maggie Severns: Severins warns not to make too much of the fundraising numbers. Money alone doesn't translate into votes. I think that as you're looking at these things, they're really interesting markers of enthusiasm, but it's also important to kind of look at them with a critical eye when you're trying to figure out what's going to happen.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Meanwhile, former President Trump is hitting the campaign trail to try to slow Harris's momentum. He has events planned this week in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Now, as we've mentioned before, a core part of Trump's strategy is getting young men, particularly black and Hispanic men, to the polls. Earlier this month, Fast Company reported on a voter registration and turnout program by Trump allies that aims to work with young male influencers like UFC fighters to get their followers to come out on Election Day. But the campaign also seems to be broadening its approach to target moderate women, too.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Listen to what happened when Trump's running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, went on Meet the Press, speaking with NBC's Kristen Welker.
--:-- Kristen Welker: Can you commit, Senator, sitting right here with me today, that if you and Donald Trump are elected, that you will not impose a federal ban on abortion?
--:-- Senator J.D. Vance: I can absolutely commit that Kristen Donald Trump has been as clear about that as possible.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In the news, astronauts Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore were only supposed to be at the International Space Station for about eight days, but their mission will now last eight months. NASA says it's too risky to bring them home on the Boeing spaceship that brought them there instead they'll return on a SpaceX capsule, which means they'll have to wait until February of next year to catch a ride back home to Earth.
--:-- Nell Greenfield-Boyce: The two astronauts have been hanging out in space longer because of glitches with the Boeing spacecraft's thrusters. Experts on the ground debated whether it was safe to put the astronauts back on it. The Houston Chronicle reports that ultimately NASA took an internal poll and the final result was unanimous. Boeing's Starliner will return to Earth but with no humans on board.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Here's NASA's administrator, Bill Nelson, announcing the decision.
--:-- Bill Nelson: I have just talked to the new Boeing CEO, Kelly Ortberg. I have expressed this to him. I told him how well Boeing worked with our team to come to this decision. And he expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely.
--:-- Nell Greenfield-Boyce: Boeing says it's focusing on bringing its spacecraft back safely without a crew on board. The company was selected by NASA 10 years ago to develop a spacecraft to take astronauts to the International Space Station. The contract was worth up to $4.2 billion. But NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfield-Boyce says the project had many issues.
--:-- Nell Greenfield-Boyce: I mean, Starliner has just had technical problems for years. Its first flight, without a crew on board, didn't even make it to the station. And now this? I mean, it's a bad look. And it has some people wondering if this is going to be like the end of Starliner.
--:-- Shumita Basu: This all adds to the mounting problems Boeing is facing. The company has already suffered a ton of reputational damage for the deadly crashes of its 737 MAX. More recently, a panel blew off a Boeing plane in mid-flight. The new CEO is less than a month into the job. Still, the Houston Chronicle reports that Boeing and NASA are indicating they will keep working together in the future.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Let's turn now to a surprising trend in television. For years reality TV has been a cash cow for networks. Shows like Hoarders or 90 Day Fiance are cheap to make. They don't involve paying a lot of big-name actors, writers, or directors. And typically there's no elaborate costume departments or costly set designs. Which is why for so long they've been considered an extremely profitable bet for TV execs.
--:-- Meredith Blake: But Meredith Blake with the Los Angeles Times says that might be changing. In past times where the industry has been struggling, reality TV has continued to boom. In fact, it's often been used as kind of a gap filler in previous strikes or other times when things were slow. But what we're seeing now is that reality TV is hurting, that a lot of the places that used to air a ton of reality TV, spend lots of money on it, are slowing down, cutting costs.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Recent numbers show reality TV production in Los Angeles down 57 percent from last year. Blake told us the same factors slowing down film and scripted TV have come for reality television. Over the past couple of years, there's been this massive wave of media consolidation. You're seeing places like Disney gobble up a large part of Fox. You've seen Warner Brothers merge with Discovery. And because of that, you're seeing a lot of streamlining of operations.
--:-- Meredith Blake: So you're seeing a lot of people lose their jobs. Blake told us about one woman she spoke to for the story, who says she worked on reality TV for a long time, including on major shows like The Apprentice. She says she's only worked four months in the last 18 months, and she's had to do things like max out her credit card, borrow money from family members. She's thought about leaving California altogether because the cost of living there is so high.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Now, Blake says TV networks and streamers aren't doing away with unscripted TV, but they're making a different mix of shows, often in different places. We've seen that some networks are really, really leaning into the strategy of making these inexpensive, unscripted shows overseas. One of the biggest examples is Fox, which has really embraced these, what are called in the industry, shiny floor programming. basically like game shows, quiz shows, competition shows that are shot in studio.
--:-- Meredith Blake: And nearly all of them are made overseas in places like Ireland and Australia. You'd have no idea if you're watching the show that it was made overseas. Everyone who's competing on the shows is American, but they're made abroad because it's cheaper. Blake says all of this is a sign that reality TV is not immune from the moment of reckoning that's affected other shows.
--:-- Shumita Basu: They're realizing that, you know, the era of peak TV, as it's been known, really created a massive amount of television that not enough people can watch and certainly not enough people are willing to pay for to sustain it. And so I think with any kind of bubble things have burst a little bit. There's a sort of a massive swing in the other direction right now.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And that while things will probably and hopefully stabilize and kind of return to a brisker pace in the future, that things are never going to be quite as cushy as they were in the past.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Before we let you go, here are some other stories being featured in the Apple News app. Israel and Hezbollah had the heaviest exchange of fire in months over the weekend. Israel bombed southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah fired back with drones and rockets. It's raising new fears of deadly conflict expanding beyond the war in Gaza.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Regional diplomats are trying to lower tensions. They're also keeping Gaza's ceasefire talks going. Top U.S. and Israeli negotiators met yesterday in Egypt.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In the U.S., two viruses spread by mosquitoes are in the news. Plymouth, Massachusetts is shutting down public parks at night to fight Eastern Equine Encephalitis, or Triple E. As the name indicates, it can infect horses. And in very rare cases, it can be fatal to humans.
--:-- Shumita Basu: At the same time, Dr. Anthony Fauci was hospitalized after getting another mosquito-borne disease, West Nile virus. He told Stat that he's recovering.
--:-- Shumita Basu: There's standard safety advice for these and other diseases spread by mosquitoes. Use a repellent with DEET and drain any standing water you can so mosquitoes can't lay their eggs in it.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And finally, Danny Jansen will make MLB history today by playing for both teams in the same game. This is a weird one, and you can blame the weather. Back in June, the catcher was playing for the Toronto Blue Jays, but their game against the Boston Red Sox was suspended in the second inning because of heavy rain.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The teams will finish that game today. But after it got put on hold, Jansen was traded to the Red Sox. So that means he's now suiting up for the opposite team to finish the game. And one detail makes the situation even weirder. Jansen was actually at bat right when the game was paused. So now he'll watch another player finish what he started.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got our latest episode of Apple News in Conversation queued up to play for you next.
--:-- Shumita Basu: I talked to my colleague Gideon Resnick, who spent last week at the Democratic National Convention and spoke with reporters covering the Harris campaign to better understand her strategy to win the election this fall. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News in Conversation to find that episode.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
