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The Week Ahead: 8.24.2020

🇺🇸 BIG IN THE BELTWAY

• The Republican convention kicks off today. President Donald Trump has enlisted former 'Apprentice' producers to help him make his pitch to the nation. Meanwhile, the GOP is forgoing their own platform and pledging unequivocal support to the president's agenda, even amid concerns about his embrace of conspiracy theories.

• Kellyanne Conway is leaving the White House. Her husband George is leaving the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Their departures come as their 15-year-old daughter has been openly feuding with them on Twitter, and both cited the need to focus on their family.

• TikTok is planning to sue the White House as early as today over the president’s executive order banning TikTok and its Chinese parent ByteDance from the U.S., claiming a lack of due process, Reuters reports and a company spokesperson confirmed.

• And speaking of TikTok, WSJ reports that Mark Zuckerberg sought to persuade U.S. officials and lawmakers last year that Chinese tech firms posed a threat to the U.S. It's an argument Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs have been making publicly for over a year, and one many U.S. officials have been making for at least as long.

🌁 BIG IN THE BAY

• The legal battle between Apple and Epic Games continues today in U.S. District Court. After effectively forcing Apple to ban "Fortnite" from the App Store, Epic is now seeking a temporary restraining order to force Apple to reinstall the game. Apple has asked the judge to block the request when she hears Epic's motion today at 3 p.m. PT.

• Microsoft is backing Epic, arguing in a court declaration that Apple’s move will place Epic's Unreal Engine software and the game developers who use it "at a substantial disadvantage." Epic argues that Apple is holding Unreal Engine hostage.

• Facebook is "laying out contingency plans" in the event Trump or his campaign "use the platform to delegitimize the results," NYT's Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel report.

• Twitter yesterday placed a warning label on one of President Trump's tweets about mail-in voting, saying the post violated the company's 'election integrity' rules.

• And in Seattle, Jeff Wilke, chief of Amazon's consumer business, and one of Jeff Bezos' longest-serving lieutenants, is retiring.

🗽 MOVING MANHATTAN

• Rupert Murdoch's Fox News is the subject of a new book by CNN's Brian Stelter, out Tuesday. NYT's David Enrich says it's a "thorough and damning exploration" of the network's "incestuous relationship" with Trump, but lacks nuance, "resorts to name-calling" and "glosses over" CNN's own "partisan pandering."

• David Pecker is stepping down as chief executive of American Media, the National Enquirer's parent company. The company is being taken over by Accelerate360, a logistics firm based in Smyrna, Georgia, and will be headed by Accelerate chief David Parry.

• And NYT's Ben Smith profiles Zeynep Tufekci, the Twitter-famous computer programmer-cum-sociologist who has "quietly made a habit of being right on the big things." Her success, he says, "represents a kind of revenge of the nerds."

🌴 TALK OF TINSELTOWN

• Disney’s ABC is "in an increasingly strong position to score its first live NFL game package in 15 years," Front Office Sports' Michael McCarthy reports. "Disney is making a strong push to bring ABC back to the NFL TV lineup. ... As an added bonus, Disney’s ABC/ESPN could also break into the lucrative Super Bowl rotation."

• "Peter Micelli, a former TV lit agent at CAA [and] chief strategy officer of television, film and digital at Entertainment One, is launching a new management-production company," THR reports. Joining him are several agents from CAA, WME and UTA.

• And at the box office, Solstice Studios' "Unhinged," the first major theatrical premiere since March, took in more than $4 million over the weekend, "a promising result given the challenging environment," says Variety's Rebecca Rubin.

🔥 What's next: More 2020. The California fires are getting worse. Not one but two tornadoes are headed for the South. And on the COVID-19 front, cases are rising at colleges and universities as students return to class.

• Meanwhile, they're partying in Wuhan.

See you tomorrow.