October 29, 2018 | Hollywood

Good morning, and welcome to the inaugural edition of Byers Market, a daily newsletter on the business, politics and culture of American media...

The Big Picture: America's Homegrown Misinformation Campaign: With one week to go til the start of the 2020 presidential campaign, the United States is beset by a politics of division, outrage and misinformation that is fueled not by Russian operatives or fringe political groups but by some of the most influential members of the U.S. political media establishment:

In Washington... President Donald Trump demonizes the media and his political opponents while refusing to tamp down his supporters' most hateful beliefs and conspiracy theories. His tepid call for "unity" in the wake of last week's pipe bomb attacks quickly gave way to the familiar divisive playbook.

In New York... Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's "New Fox" serves as a megaphone for pro-Trump talking points, misinformation and anti-liberal conspiracies. Fox News personalities have suggested that the pipe bombs were a "false flag," while Fox Business host Lou Dobbs implied that George Soros and "the Radical Left" were behind the migrant caravan.

In Silicon Valley... the leaders of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks continue to take a reactive, ad-hoc approach to misinformation and hate speech on their platforms. Tweets falsely implying that Soros is a Nazi remain on Twitter, while Instagram initially refused to remove a post by a right-wing provocateur lamenting the fact that the pipe bombs didn't detonate.

The Upshot: Divisive political rhetoric coupled with the dissemination of conspiracy theories and hate speech is a societal problem that has taken on real-world ramifications with pipe bomb attacks and mass shootings.

The issue is likely to get worse over the course of the next two years, in part because no one seems willing to take responsibility for their role in exacerbating the problem:

Amy Walter of Cook Political Report, on Meet The Press: "Our country has a long history of division. ... But the time we're in right now, no one is taking responsibility for any of this. ... No one is raising their hand to say, we played some role in this and it's our responsibility to fix this. It’s always somebody else’s fault. When that’s the world we live in, it’s never going to get better.”

But ... If it ain't broke, it can't be fixed: BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel argues that "the collision of toxic hyperpartisanship, sensationalized media and a mature online ecosystem" is actually just "the product of a well-oiled machine, where all participants seem to know their specific roles."

New this A.M.: @realDonaldTrump: "There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame..."

The Market Week:

Tuesday: Mark Zuckerberg reports Facebook's third-quarter earnings amid concerns over growth.

Wednesday: Halloween ... then we're on the red-eye to New York for...

Thursday: Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook Conference, with Sundar Pichai, Lachlan Murdoch, Evan Spiegel, etc. ... plus Apple and CBS earnings.

Friday: Last jobs report before the midterm elections.

Sign of the Times: "The Surreal World: TV Delves Into Paranoia, Anxiety and Misinformation," via WSJ's John Jurgensen: "A batch of new television dramas are exploring the issues unsettling society today—from technological unease to pervasive surveillance to the questioning of truth—with characters who struggle to maintain a grip on reality."

Talk of the Valley: Larry Page Under Fire: Google employees remain irate with the Google co-founder over his company's decision to quietly give multi-million-dollar exit packages to male executives who were accused of sexual misconduct, as revealed last week by the New York Times.

NYT's Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger report that "condemnation of the internet giant’s actions" has been most pointed "among its own employees," where the rebuke has played out "in company meetings and on internal message boards and social networks, as well as on Twitter."

The Big Picture: The Times' investigation has thrust the usually reclusive Page into the spotlight, a place he has avoided like the plague despite the myriad controversies surrounding his company of late:

Page skipped congressional testimony in September over foreign meddling on social media, even as Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey attended.

A recent Bloomberg Businessweek investigation portrayed Page "as an executive who’s more withdrawn than ever, bordering on emeritus, invisible to wide swaths of the company."

Page did not comment for the Times' original investigation and he has not publicly commented since, leaving his feelings on the matter to leak out from internal meetings. But the frustration inside Google may force him to do more: Liz Fong-Jones, a Google engineer, recently tweeted that "the decision maker must have been Larry Page. The buck stops there.”

Meanwhile... Apple is celebrating (and competitors are grimacing) over the extremely positive New York Times profile of Apple News editor-in-chief Lauren Kern, who is spearheading the company's efforts to distinguish itself as a reliable news aggregator in an age of misinformation.

Top graf, via NYT's Jack Nicas:

"While Google, Facebook and Twitter have come under intense scrutiny for their disproportionate — and sometimes harmful — influence over the spread of information, Apple has so far avoided controversy. One big reason is that while its Silicon Valley peers rely on machines and algorithms to pick headlines, Apple uses humans like Ms. Kern."

One weird thing about that profile ... it quotes "Ms. Kern’s deputy, a former editor for The New York Times whom Apple requested not be named for privacy reasons."

Talk of Tinseltown: Netflix and Chill: Reed Hastings and his fellow Netflix execs have emerged largely unscathed from a recent Wall Street Journal expose on the company's cutthroat culture, largely because the revelations about "radical transparency" and "blunt firings" don't change the fact that people want to work there.

Variety's Todd Spangler:

"Yes, Netflix’s practice of quickly terminating employees viewed as not pulling their weight... comes to a shock to some new hires. ... But data shows that Netflix employees are, overall, as satisfied as those at other media companies -- and on some factors, like pay, they’re happier."

"Netflix has long been up front about its policy of letting go employees who are deemed only 'adequate' and says in its official corporate-culture statement that it expects staffers to give maximum effort even with the knowledge 'you may not be on the team forever.'"

& Bloomberg's Joe Nocera:

"I guess I would be more sympathetic to the plight of these employees if these were factory workers whose jobs were being sent to Mexico. But they’re elites — highly-paid Silicon Valley elites who have probably been through three or four jobs, and are working at a place where they know that someday they’ll fired, at which point they’ll be handed a big severance and find another job within days. Although the Journal didn’t mention it, former Netflix employees are in high demand. Why? Because they’re grown-ups."

The Upshot: Parts of the Netflix culture are a bit much, most notably that more than 500 executives have access to employees' salary information. But by and large, the portrait WSJ paints of Netflix is that of an aggressively performance-based culture, which is something every company should strive for.

Bonus: Hastings, in a recent speech: "Yes we have deep relationships, yes we care about each other, but ultimately you’ve got a certain number of players on the field and you need extraordinary performance in every position to achieve the team’s goals."

So long, Summer ... What Burbank is Reading: "Did the Dodgers’ World Series Window Just Close?" by The Ringer's Michael Baumann: "Clayton Kershaw imploded. Manny Machado didn’t matter. Dave Roberts got booed. And L.A. lost consecutive Fall Classics. Is Big Blue’s 11-year run of dominance over, or can they evolve as the victorious Red Sox have?"

See you tomorrow.