Media

1. The flooded zone
2. Halperin staffs up
3. WaPo recovers
4. USAID media fallout
5. Khanna on Friedland
6. New York Mag podcast

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we, too, just want to watch the Super Bowl in peace.

I was catching up with Steve Bannon’s War Room on Spotify on my way over to see him last week, and mentioned it when I got there. He was surprised: He’d been tossed off that platform in 2020, after musing about “heads on pikes,” and nobody had notified him he was available again on the Real America’s Voice feed. (Spotify also hadn’t noticed, and took it back down.)

That’s the media now: You can be deplatformed, re-platformed, and deplatformed again, and not even know it. (When I sheepishly told Bannon we’d inadvertently gotten him tossed again, he replied: “I want that to happen — f*** those Swedes.“) Big US media spent this week over a Trumpian barrel, getting a firsthand sense of 2025 news cycles. Politico tried politely to defend itself against ludicrous charges that paid subscriptions were secret government funding. CBS won no new friends when it grudgingly released a transcript of a Kamala Harris interview that revealed nothing at all.

Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal wrote this week about how our video-centric, fragmented environment is part of a return to “pre-literate oral communication,” a swirl of rumor and metaphor in which nobody ever looks anything up. He argues it’s going to “rewire the logic engine of the human brain.” That’s a pretty strong version of this argument in a particularly noisy moment, and other US administrations have imagined they could shape reality. But one thing that’s clear is that this environment gives a remarkably free hand to those with power — if they can keep the volume set to 11.

In this edition: Bannon talks to me about how well his “flood the zone” media strategy is working for Trump; New York Magazine’s collaboration with anti-psychedelic activists; and California Rep. Ro Khanna sits down with a popular lefty comedian.

Read Principals for all the DOGE scoops. And for a glimpse of the US through the looking glass, sign up for Semafor Africa, where our team is reporting on how governments, business, and the Chinese see the rapid pullback of American foreign aid.

Steve Bannon’s ‘Days of Thunder’

President Donald Trump’s dizzying three weeks have prompted many in the media to revisit a famous Steve Bannon line: To win, the Right needs to “flood the zone” with political action — or, more pungently, with “bullsh**.” Is that what’s going on right now, Ben asked the MAGA movement’s media guru in a long interview this week? “Of course. It’s worked,” he said. “The media is a complete total meltdown.” MSNBC, he said, keeps pushing outrages to the C block of programming. When things start going wrong, Trump merely has to turn to standup: “He goes all Mort Sahl on you, and he triggered you guys and they never went back to the hearings.” It all comes back to Marshall McLuhan: “Everything is media. Media is the massage, and Trump understands that,” Bannon said. “That’s why the Cabinet is all TV guys.”

Mark Halperin’s startup adds talent

2WAY is bringing aboard Meghan McCain and Michael Moynihan to join its growing roster of ongoing bipartisan conversations curated by the veteran journalist Mark Halperin, Semafor has learned. The media startup, which told Semafor it raised a $4 million seed round that closed in December, has also hired former Free Press audio and video chief Alex Chitty to head up its strategy and operations.

It’s “just a start,” Halperin told Semafor: “Throughout 2025, 2WAY will bring on other exciting content creators and organizational partners to expand our content verticals, our distribution channels, and the reach of 2WAY.”

The new venture marks a return to influence for the journalist, whose career imploded in 2017 following allegations of sexual harassment. Semafor wrote in April 2023 that Halperin’s tipsheet, Wide World of News, had gained a following among some members of Washington’s elite. In recent years, Halperin has also broken several stories, reemerged as a pundit on Newsmax, and was a regular on the 2024 campaign trail. 2WAY hosts panel videos and does live events built around political pundits, including former White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

Washington Post on an upswing

The Washington Post’s reporting on chaos inside the federal government has driven a recovery in online traffic that could help ease the blow of last year’s massive subscription loss. The week of Jan. 27 saw the organization’s biggest audience since the election, the Post’s audience team said in an internal email first shared with Semafor. That included 15 million unique visitors on the Post’s platforms, as well as 76.9 million uniques off-platform (largely Apple News), according to the internal Slack message sent last week. A story following the response to the sudden funding freeze was the Post’s biggest hit since August 2022, the Slack message also said.

Paying the piper

Journalists in Eastern Europe and elsewhere have long been ambivalent about the outsize role USAID plays in funding international journalism — and the fallout from its pullback is already dramatic. International financing may be the only option when the government in Moscow, Budapest, or Belgrade (at best) scares away your advertisers and attacks your business. But taking US money leaves you open to obvious questions about your independence from US interests, even before the surprise attack from a Washington whose interests seem to have shifted.

The underlying question, one veteran of the independent media space mused to me Sunday, is whether you think the US and its allies share a “fundamental orientation” toward independent journalism that reveals uncomfortable truths about power — or whether, more cynically, you merely believe that whoever pays the piper calls the tune. It’s a rehearsal of a deep Cold War argument, one side of which was captured by the great 1999 Frances Stonor Saunders book Who Paid the Piper.

A current case study is the Amsterdam-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, under attack in the US for taking a lot of USAID money — but also, if you read them, an evidently unguided missile whose targets have spanned Rudy Giuliani (the spark for DC outrage), Latin American drug traffickers, Uighur-made COVID PPE manufacturers, and, days before the 2020 election, Hunter Biden. Says OCCRP’s Aubrey Belford: “We’re still going to do the same work even if we don’t have US funding any more. It doesn’t change our editorial direction one bit.”

— Ben Smith

Ro on the loose

California Rep. Ro Khanna recorded an interview with comedian Adam Friedland on Saturday, becoming the first sitting congressman to sit in the same chair as Chet Hanks, Dave Portnoy, and Rob Schneider. A cult hit among online comedy fans, the show gained notoriety for an interview with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, where he laughed along with Friedland and co-host Nick Mullen (formerly of the “Cum Town” podcast) as they joked about concentration camps. Democrats, said Khanna, need to go everywhere.

“I think that the lesson that we needed to learn from 2024 is not going on Joe Rogan — though we should,” Khanna told Semafor. “It was, let’s go in a lot of these forums and talk to conservatives, comedians, liberals, influencers, and take the same strategy to this that we do with the rest of the media.”

New York Magazine worked with anti-psychedelic activists on podcast

In 2022, New York Magazine produced a podcast about the dangers of MDMA-assisted treatment for people dealing with post-traumatic stress, sharing production credits with two leaders of an activist group that tried to stop a recent push to legalize the practice. Now, a recent report from The New York Times has raised questions about why an activist duo had a direct editorial role in a major publication’s podcast.

The Times story, about a broader effort to derail MDMA’s approval as a PTSD drug, noted that two of the former primary figures in the group, David Nickles and Lily Kay Ross, had campaigned for years against a major effort to gain FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy.

The limited series podcast, Cover Story, covered the dark side of psychedelic-assisted therapy in its first season and quoted Ross heavily as a source. But in an unusual arrangement, it also made her and Nickels co-producers on the show. (Psymposia said on its website that the group itself was a co-producer.)

In a statement, a Vox Media spokesperson told Semafor that although they were producers on the show, Ross and Nickles were two members of a larger production team that included others with editorial oversight.

The Super Bowl, the biggest single media event in the US, is upon us. And the Chiefs and the Eagles aren’t the only ones with a lot on the line: Advertisers have staked their reputations — and Instacart’s Laura Jones has staked her job — on 30 seconds of airtime this Sunday. This week, Ben and Max bring on the Instacart CMO to talk about what it takes to make a Super Bowl ad, the thinking behind their Marvel-style approach, and her high-stakes bet on one of the only remaining mass audience moments in media. They also talk about how she got nine other brands to participate in the ad, why she avoided celebrities, and the vibe shift from “purpose” to escapism.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Ken Calwell is the CEO of Come Near, the nonprofit entity that produces the “He Gets Us” Christian ad campaign.

Semafor has announced its critical and timely live journalism program, “Innovating to Restore Trust in News” in Washington, D.C. on February 27. This unprecedented, invitation-only gathering of the most influential minds in journalism aims to address the crisis of trust in media and the role industry leaders play.

Semafor editors and reporters will be joined by various leading voices in media, including: Bret Baier, Chief Political Anchor, Anchor & Executive Editor of Special Report with Bret Baier, FOX News Channel; Cesar Conde, Chairman, NBCUniversal News Group; Joe Kahn, Executive Editor, The New York Times; Megyn Kelly, Host, The Megyn Kelly Show; Mark Thompson, Chairman, CEO, CNN Worldwide; and Mehdi Hasan, Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief, Zeteo.

Feb. 27, 2025 | Washington DC | Request Invitation

⁋ Publishing

Pressing on: Fresh off a recent fundraising round, the Free Press has ambitious goals for growing its business this year, but faces a shifting political environment and the grind of expanding its passionate subscriber base. The digital media startup, defined by its skepticism of the contemporary left, has amassed over 1.1 million subscribers since it began in 2021, including around 150,000 who pay, a person briefed on the numbers told Semafor.

The publication has informally targeted 250,000 paying subscribers as a goal for this year. Reached for comment, founder Bari Weiss did not answer questions about the company’s numbers, but said that Free Press plans to expand this year.

Hiiv mind: New digital publishing platform Beehiiv is changing its terms of service as part of an effort to woo journalists who may otherwise go independent with competitors like Substack. Currently, the company’s terms of service say that content must not cause “annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety or be likely to upset, embarrass, alarm, or annoy any other person.” The inherent nature of adversarial journalism, of course, often causes annoyance and discomfort to its subjects. Asked whether its terms of service were at odds with the journalism on its platform, CEO Tyler Denk said that the company was “currently refreshing our terms to ensure that critical or adversarial reporting can thrive on beehiiv without sacrificing the overall safety of the platform.”

Earned media: They can’t stop writing about Emily Sundberg. Last week alone, she was featured in Air Mail and The New York Times. Not bad!

⁌ TV

Outfoxed: Blue chip advertisers are returning to Fox News. It’s a reversal of the advertiser boycotts that repeatedly hampered the network during the first Trump administration, the result of public outcry from comments made by various Fox News hosts. Not settling for cable dominance, Fox News is also now touting its strong numbers on YouTube. The organization said January was its second-most-watched month ever on the platform.

Actually, TV is good: In a reversal from his comments two years ago, Disney CEO Bob Iger said last week that his linear TV networks were “not a burden at all” and were “actually an asset,” which he seemed to attribute to cost cuts. While Iger could always change his mind, the comments brought some signs of relief to staff at ABC News, who have been skittish since Iger’s suggestion in 2023 that he was looking at potentially selling the network.

Jump ball: The decline of television ratings for the NBA largely aligns with the decrease in television linear viewership broadly. But the Atlantic argues that the NBA’s increasingly byzantine and impossible-to-follow collective bargaining agreement has forced teams to make moves that have hurt viewership and fandom.

✦ Marketing

Hindsight: A conservative former Budweiser executive talked to Dave Weigel about how the company’s marketing shifted after, among other things, it moved its headquarters from St. Louis to New York: “In 2021 and 2022, you couldn’t really push back on brand people who said they wanted to make it more progressive and do more political advertising.”

☊ Audio

Tuned in: Spotify is making a big push into video this year to better compete with YouTube. But some of the biggest podcasts in the country still aren’t uploading their shows to the popular Swedish audio platform.

The Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid funding poses an urgent threat to Ukraine’s energy security and will harm efforts toward it reaching a peace deal with Russia, senior congressional Democrats told Semafor’s Tim McDonnell.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has played a critical role in supporting Kyiv to rebuild its grid. That work is now in jeopardy after Donald Trump abruptly froze aid payments, put thousands of USAID employees globally on leave, and is considering shutting the agency altogether.