Manigault talks leaving Clinton campaign for Trump on ‘Brother’
Trump blasts Oprah
LOS ANGELES, Feb 19, (Agencies): The longer Omarosa Manigault is in the “Big Brother” house, the more its audience is learning about her political escapades. Previously, Manigault talked about her loyalty to president Donald Trump but on Sunday’s episode she revealed she was originally pro-Hillary Clinton.
The former White House staffer, and current Head of Household on the CBS reality show, told fellow houseguest Ross Mathews that she thought Clinton as a presidential candidate was “strong” and “sharp” and “smart.”
Manigault also said she had worked with the “Ready for Hillary” organization because she felt Clinton would have made an “exceptional” president. However, some bad blood between Manigault and the organization’s management had her calling the group “a little bit of a scam” and ultimately caused her to switch sides.
“When it was time to roll it over into the ‘Hillary for America’ campaign, they just completely discarded all of the people who had done work,” Manigault said, noting that the action “soured” a lot of people in addition to herself. “It wasn’t hard when called me and said ‘Can you be on board?’ because I had just been used and abused by the ‘Ready for Hillary’ organization. I could go down the list of people who were abused and misused by that organization and decided to go a different direction as a result of it.”
Manigault said working on campaigns is “wonderful but exhausting” and rather than directly answer Mathews’ question about whether or not she’d work on a campaign again, she teased that she had her own story to tell.
“I’m looking forward to telling about my life, when I decide to do it,” Manigault said.
Last week Manigault temporarily left the “Big Brother” house after suffering an asthma attack during one of the competitions. However, she returned a few days later and made it through that week’s eviction. This week, she proved her physical prowess by outlasting the other houseguests, including runner-up James Maslow, in the Head of Household competition, which put her in the power position. Interestingly, she nominated Mathews, who previously called himself the “reporter” of the house and has been the most frequent ear for her political tales, for eviction.
US President Donald Trump blasted media mogul Oprah Winfrey on Twitter on Sunday night over a segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes program and again said he hoped she would face him as an opponent in the 2020 presidential race.
Actress and television host Winfrey, now a contributor to the CBS program, led a panel of 14 Republican, Democrat and Independent voters from Grand Rapids, Michigan in a wide ranging discussion about Trump’s first year in office.
Trump tweeted: “Just watched a very insecure Oprah Winfrey, who at one point I knew very well, interview a panel of people on 60 Minutes. The questions were biased and slanted, the facts incorrect. Hope Oprah runs so she can be exposed and defeated just like all of the others!”
Winfrey has told various media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, that she is not running for president, but has considered it, after there was much recent media speculation.
The panelists ranged from voters who said “I love him more and more every day,” to others questioning Trump’s stability, saying, “All he does is bully people.”
Winfrey made no declarative statements for or against the president in the program. But she did ask questions ranging from whether the country is better off economically to whether respect for the country is eroding around the world.
In a room lined with computer terminals buzzing all night during the Olympics, an intern raises a hand. He’s spotted an amusing piece of film footage of a dropped walkietalkie skittering down a mountain closed to competition because of bad weather, eluding the grasp of a couple of skiers trying to stop it.
A producer edits the film into a brief clip and sends it electronically to a room down the hall, where a social media team posts it on NBC’s Olympic website, Facebook, Twitter and other social media destinations. Within a few days, it has been seen more than 1.6 million times.
Welcome to NBC’s Highlights Factory, responsible for culling the best and oddest moments of the Pyeongchang Olympics and blanketing the world with them.
The network, which paid $963 million for the rights to show the Olympics in the United States, has built a facility for some 2,500 staff members in Pyeongchang. But it also has around 1,000 people working in an office off the Connecticut Turnpike, and for each Olympics it is increasing its domestic workforce, said Tim Canary, vice president of engineering.
The curling and cross-country competitions are called by announcers working in booths in Connecticut, not South Korea. The popular online “Olympic Zone” show is fully staffed here, and the office opened in 2012 is the nexus for everything its cameras collect.
Then there are the sleep-deprived staffers of the Highlight Factory, who are responsible for combing through and cataloguing every piece of footage shot by NBC and the Olympic-run feed for other broadcasters. There are some 778 hours of live competition in the games, said Eric Hamilton, director of digital video production.
“Pretty much every moment is the most important moment in somebody’s life, some athlete’s life,” he said. “It’s the moment that they’ve prepared for years, and they have just a few seconds in which to do it. Our job is to draw the curtain back on that and let everyone see it.”
The staff members produce the typical clips of game-winning goals and gold-medal runs down the mountain. A recent 12-hour shift that ended at 8 am produced some 130 videos for dissemination online.
“We train the interns to note not only the obvious stuff, but to see through things that are hidden in plain sight,” Hamilton said.
Cameras catch the competition, but also the moments before they start and when they’re over. They follow coaches biting their nails in the stands and family members who have followed loved ones across the globe. At the figure skating rink, cameras go into the workout room and the booth where competitors wait for scores. They catch final conversations between coaches and athletes.
Through these backstage moments, Hamilton has found that the young athletes competing in the extreme sports that made traditionalists wince — the halfpipe, the slopestyle races — display some of the best camaraderie and sportsmanship at the Olympics.