Media

1. Brett Ratner to make Melania Trump documentary
2. Meta taps a Trump administration envoy
3. The Washington Post vs. its staff
4. News from Mixed Signals
5. Impeached Korean president may be a big YouTube fan
6. The Bulwark bulks up its newsletters

Welcome to Semafor Media, where all the stories are pretty much the same story: the scramble to get on Donald Trump’s good side.

In today’s newsletter, we have news of Meta elevating its top Republican, Amazon commissioning a Melania Trump documentary, and the Washington Post having second thoughts about its “Democracy” brand.

This is also about how the American right, long largely shut out of Hollywood and East Coast newsrooms, is being ushered in through the front door — by owners who have bigger corporate fish to fry than mere films, television shows, and news articles.

One thing about Hollywood’s approach to politics: It begins intensely literal, and the first wave of film and TV that comes out in reaction to a political moment tends to be pretty wooden. Some films conceived at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements felt dated by their release. So I suppose MAGA cinema has to start somewhere, and the Melania movie sounds like a delightfully literal point of departure.

Amazon’s studio — still a little unsteady in this brave new MAGA world — reacted to my inquiry about the movie by handing the “exclusive” to Fox News. They then ignored my question on whether Melania Trump is getting paid for her participation.

Also today: YouTube shapes Korean politics, the D.C. media revolving door spins and CNN faces a defamation suit. (Scoop count: 4)

And how are the globalist elites taking it all? Find out in Semafor’s exclusive coverage of Davos, which happens to be the same week as the presidential inauguration. Sign up here.

Ratner to make Melania Trump documentary

So that’s what Brett Ratner was doing in Mar-a-Lago: The director and producer, forced out of Hollywood at the peak of the #MeToo movement, will direct a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump for Amazon, we reported Sunday morning. (Amazon rushed out the news at 3 a.m. PT, after I inquired about it Saturday night.)

The announcement is both a warm embrace for the incoming administration by the e-commerce giant and a dramatic return for Ratner, the director of the Rush Hour movies, whose Hollywood career stopped in 2019 when several women accused him of sexual misconduct, including one who told the Los Angeles Times he’d forced himself on her sexually. (Ratner denied the allegations.)

The documentary and Ratner’s return represent a changed cultural moment, in which the values and icons of Trump’s MAGA movement are making their way “upstream” from politics into mass American culture, as the conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart used to put it. And the culture’s new gatekeepers — the tech platforms like Amazon, first of all — are rejecting progressive judgments on people and content.

— Ben Smith

Meta taps a Trump administration envoy

Meta has elevated Joel Kaplan, its veteran Republican lobbyist, to lead its global public policy team, Semafor first reported. Nick Clegg, his predecessor, was a former UK deputy prime minister, the sort of figure you hire when you think your global company is a nation-state in itself. Kaplan is the sort of figure you hire when you need friends in Trump’s Washington.

And the move is part of an extremely obvious trend, our Liz Hoffman writes: “Executives once on Trump’s enemies list have come to Mar-a-Lago bearing gifts — Zuckerberg brought a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses — and a major attitude adjustment. In part, that’s because they want things out of this administration, and Trump’s 180 on visas for high-skilled workers, a priority for Silicon Valley in particular, was an early win for Musk over rival advisers like immigration hawk Stephen Miller. CEOs are also afraid of MAGA retribution and wary of the conservative shift in their own employee and customer bases.”

The Washington Post vs. its staff

As much as the Washington Post sold subscribers an idea of itself as a #Resistance newspaper, it also sold employees on that mission. That’s part of the story of an exodus of both top talent and behind-the-scenes journalists.

The Post’s former deputy democracy editor, Mary Jo Murphy, quietly quit in response to owner Jeff Bezos killing its presidential endorsement. She wrote about it on a Facebook page for New York Times alumni: “Quislings are inside the house that Grahams and Bradlees, Woodwards and Bernsteins built.” She recalled that CEO Will Lewis had asked a reporter she managed “what the Post could do to attract Trump supporters.” (“I dunno,” she wrote, “lie to them?”)

Puck’s Dylan Byers and I got into more on the Post exodus on his podcast, The Grill Room, last week.

— Ben Smith

Mixed Signals

On Mixed Signals this week, we talked to the chief marketing officer of the dating app Tinder, Melissa Hobley, who is at the leading edge of navigating something facing all digital media: our ambivalent relationship with screens. Hobley’s challenge is marketing the app to young women — because, if they come, the men will follow. And partly as a result, the app’s marketing hasn’t followed the trend away from politics: “If you’re looking, in particular, with Gen Z, they overindex on researching a brand’s stance on issues — if they’re showing up on issues, who are they donating to, all of those things,” she said.

And a scoop of our own: My cohost for the first season, Nayeema Raza, is moving on to her new show, Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Meanwhile Max, already a big part of the show, will be taking a bigger role. Taniacs (a coinage from the Spotify comments) rejoice!

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Impeached Korean president may be a big YouTube fan

South Korea’s impeached president may have drawn his worldview from conspiracy-minded YouTubers. Yoon Suk Yeol’s claims about a rigged election and left-wing collusion with North Korea mirror those made by popular Korean YouTubers, who have risen in popularity as more South Koreans lose trust in their country’s mainstream media, Korea JoongAng Daily reported. Some analysts suggest their videos may be behind his botched declaration of martial law last month.

“President Yoon watched too much YouTube,” a local columnist wrote last month. One anti-Yoon lawmaker criticized YouTube’s algorithm, saying it “created confirmation bias and hysteria for our president.”

Yoon’s supporters — many of whom also rely on the YouTubers as a news source — have camped out outside the president’s home in a bid to prevent authorities from arresting him. “I am watching your struggle in real time through YouTube livestreaming,” Yoon said in a message to them.

— J.D. Capelouto

The Bulwark bulks up its newsletters

One of the most prominent media organizations on Substack is adding to its always-on newsletters with short-run newsletters built around major political topics.

On Monday, The Bulwark is set to announce Huddled Masses, a twice-weekly, immigration-focused newsletter authored by Adrian Carrasquillo. It will focus on the incoming Trump administration’s mass deportation policies, which the president-elect has said will be a Day 1 priority for the incoming team.

The Never Trump news outlet has seen its paid subscriptions rise and has benefited from a surprising explosion on YouTube, where its subscribers have ballooned from about 50,000 last September to 867,000 this month.

— Max Tani

Michael Wolff is a longtime media reporter and author, most recently of The Fall, about Fox News and the Murdochs.

Where creators get their news — The Publish Press is a free newsletter from longtime YouTubers (and Mixed Signals guests) Colin and Samir. Sent thrice weekly, each issue curates and analyzes the biggest stories in the creator economy, from brand deals to platform updates to media acquisitions. Subscribe for free.

⁌ TV

Score: The National Football League had 70 of the top 100 most-watched live events in 2024 — making it an off-year of sorts, down from 93 of the top 100 live event broadcasts in 2023. The presidential election and the Olympics ate into the league’s ratings dominance last year.

See you in court: CNN will be appearing in a Florida court on Monday, defending its 2021 report about a security contractor that allegedly charged fees to evacuate people from Afghanistan. A contractor named in the report is suing the network for defamation, and while CNN has apologized for the wording of its initial broadcast, it has maintained that its reporting around Afghans’ concerns about the high price of evacuations was solid.

⁛ News

Paid subscriber: Peter Thiel gave $686,500 to the New Right Compact Magazine in 2023, Julia Black noticed in the 990s.

Beltway musical chairs: Washington D.C.’s media talent arms race continued last week as reporters from Politico, The Wall Street Journal, Axios, and the Washington Post all swapped jobs amid shifting priorities and various frustrations in D.C. bureaus.

As Semafor first reported on Thursday, Politico is mulling bringing UK editor Jack Blanchard over from London, hoping to replicate the UK version’s shorter, more politically-neutral tipsheet style. Last week, The Wall Street Journal hired Politico congressional reporter Olivia Beavers and trade reporter Gavin Bade. There they’ll join Politico’s former Trump reporter, Meridith McGraw.

✦ Marketing

Staff change: A key TikTok ad exec, North America head of ad sales Sameer Singh, is on the way out, Adweek reports.

⁜ Tech

Real ID: Don’t sleep on the new pornography laws in a number of mostly Southern US states. Florida’s top lawyer is hinting at legal action against sites that don’t comply with the state’s new ID requirements, though some adult sites have opted to bar access entirely. In India, meanwhile, there’s a new, perhaps flawed draft law aimed at protecting children’s privacy. The internet doesn’t have to be anonymous — China’s, notoriously, isn’t — and increasingly, you can’t be sure nobody knows you’re a dog.

2025 will pose a number of critical tests for the energy transition, as demand for electricity skyrockets while political support for clean energy wavers, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell wrote.

Some of the biggest questions: Is the Inflation Reduction Act Trump-proof? Will tech companies keep making big bets on renewables? How will the fight over climate finance for the Global South play out?