Media

Russia’s Alexei Navalny embodied the contemporary convergence of politics and media. He was a lawyer and activist, but also a blogger and YouTuber to the end. His exposés of Putin’s corruption, and his confrontation with his own would-be assassin — headline: “I called my killer. He confessed.” — are gripping and hilarious modern media. A generation of Russian-American and Russian exiled journalists, like Masha Gessen, Julia Ioffe, Miriam Elder, and Mikhail Zygar, this weekend mourned a man they knew well. Ioffe shared this picture of the two at her 2012 Moscow going-away party, at which he tried to persuade her to stay because he thought things were just getting interesting. Particularly loathsome and revealing are the American populist media figures making excuses for Navalny’s persecution. He was what they pretend to be: A fearless, optimistic patriot using digital media to expose grotesque corruption. The Americans who pretend to that role are building fandoms and speaking to Gulf investors. Navalny is dead in a prison colony.

— Ben Smith

Pro-Israel group targets Post reporter

Pro-Israel groups, deeply critical of American news outlets such as the Washington Post over their coverage of the war in Gaza, have been working in public and behind-the-scenes to discredit specific journalists seen as biased against Israel.

SKDK, the Washington, D.C. public relations firm with close ties to President Joe Biden’s White House, has been running communications for the 10/7 Project, a consortium of five Jewish organizations founded last year to promote “continued US support for Israel and counter misinformation about the Israel/Hamas war.” Over the past several months, that work has largely consisted of sharing daily memos to journalists pointing out what the group sees as flaws in coverage, such as what it sees as under-coverage of Hamas’ sexual assaults of Israeli hostages taken on 10/7 and failures to acknowledge the US government’s assessment that Hamas had a military presence at the Al-Shifa hospital.

But it also has been keeping tabs on reporters that it felt were reporting and tweeting unfairly about Israel, and putting pressure on major national news organizations to punish or remove these reporters from the beat. In particular, the group has singled out the Washington Post and its foreign correspondent Louisa Loveluck, who has covered the war in Gaza with an emphasis on Palestinian civilians impacted by the violence.

In one five-page document shared with Semafor, the group included a list of grievances about Loveluck’s coverage of Gaza and tweets about the conflict. It included recent corrections and editor’s notes on her stories that it said demonstrated her “erroneous or biased reporting,” including one story an editor’s note conceded “mischaracterized some aspects of Israeli rules for permits that allowed some Palestinian women,” and a story that suggested “Doctors Without Borders accused Israeli forces of deliberately firing on a convoy carrying employees of the organization,” when the group had condemned the attack but not named a perpetrator. Loveluck also won the group’s ire by failing at times to note that Gaza’s health ministry is controlled by Hamas.

But the group went further into Loveluck’s past before her time as a journalist. The document also contained a deep dive of her tweets, going all the way back to 2009 when she was a student in college.

“For many years, Loveluck’s online presence was that of a far-left activist: she has voiced negative opinions about pro-Israel American leaders and Israeli leadership, has been a proponent of the anti-Israel Qatar-owned Al-Jazeera TV, and took part in the Cambridge University occupation in 2010, which protested against proposed tuition fee rises, where she attended university,” the group wrote in a memo.

Can a machine mimic a human trying to mimic a machine better than a human can? Semafor Executive Editor Gina Chua built a bot to try and answer that question — one that could unlock real value, but also bring real challenges, to journalism.

The experiment involved trying to see if a bot could sift through local crime stories to see which referred to hate crimes, as defined by the Department of Justice, and which didn’t. One of the most common ways to attack this problem is by using a Mechanical Turk — basically, hiring a lot of people to read the stories and score them according to how closely they seemed to hew to the definition. Gina’s bot did the same thing, except without the humans; she used a large language model to read the stories and make those assessments instead.

The machine performed surprisingly well; it inferred that a woman coming from a synagogue service was likely Jewish, and that attackers that had torn down posters of Israeli hostages might be prompted by anti-Jewish sentiment. It figured out that anti-Trump protestors who attacked someone wearing a MAGA hat may have been motivated by bias, but noted that political beliefs don’t fall under the DOJ definition of hate crimes.

What does this mean? One possibility is that some more complex work of cataloging and categorizing information — content moderation, for example, or finding violations of a given policy in a sea of complaints — could be usefully outsourced to a AI system, speeding up work and freeing up journalists for other tasks.

But it also opens up questions about how robust those answers will be, and more importantly, how much readers and policymakers will trust what comes out of what is largely a black box. 

Alex Ward is a national security reporter at Politico and the author of the new book The Internationalists, focusing on Biden’s foreign policy team.

What do David Zaslav, Maureen Dowd, and Bowen Yang have in common? They subscribe to The Ankler – hailed by The New York Times as ‘Hollywood’s hit newsletter’, where Janice Min, Richard Rushfield, and company deliver smart, razor-sharp reporting, offering an insider’s view into what’s happening behind closed sets. Check it out here.

✦ Marketing

An ad tech company is launching a new platform with a mission of persuading advertisers to return to news, Max Tani reports.

Ad Fontes Media told Semafor that earlier this month, it launched a partnership with The Trade Desk with the aim of directing more advertising dollars to news by proving to advertisers that quality journalism was where they can find the highest quality news advertising inventory. In a statement to Semafor, the company said it believed that the new capability inside the ad tech platform could help advertisers find the most reliable, unbiased news sources, which in turn could deliver higher returns than other advertising vertical.

Ad Fontes Media is most well known for its media bias charts, which attempt to illustrate source reliability and political bias. The company said that it could help flagging advertising revenue for news media companies, which has declined significantly as Facebook and Google have gobbled up digital advertising dollars. In particular, the platform was designed to help advertisers find sites with reliable news and high advertising return categories, including sports, entertainment, and lifestyle news.

“The Trade Desk believes in the power of trusted journalism and the role of advertising in funding it,” Samantha Jacobson, the company’s chief strategy officer, told Semafor. “We are pleased that our customers will now have access to Ad Fontes’ media ratings data so that they can have as much confidence as possible that they are advertising against premium journalism content.”

“It’s never been more important to support responsible journalism and broad consumer access to trustworthy news and information. GroupM is committed to championing journalism through our Responsible Investment Framework and our Back to News Initiative. We applaud Ad Fontes Media and the Trade Desk for their work to support advertiser investment in news and reach high quality audiences in trustworthy environments.” Andrew Meaden, GroupM’s global head of investment, said.

Paid media: Biden’s re-election will depend on old-fashioned, and new-fangled, advertising. Our colleague Shelby Talcott took a look at what that paid media campaign will look like.

⁛ News

Carlson in the Gulf: A source spotted Tucker Carlson at the “Tuscan bistro” Il Burro in Dubai’s Jumeirah Al Naseem hotel complex Thursday evening, evidently sticking around the media-investment friendly Emirates for a few days after a talk Monday.

Modi’s “vice is tightening”: The veteran French correspondent Vanessa Dougnac left India after an expulsion threat. “​​With two months to go to the general elections, the vice is tightening on foreign correspondents,” says Reporters Without borders.

Et tu, Ezra: Don’t underestimate the influence of the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, who used his platform last week to press named Biden advisers to suggest he not seek re-election. Klein cites the same things we’ve noticed here: That Biden can’t seem to manage some campaign basics. He also saw declining the Super Bowl interview as a particular red flag.

Keep it in the group chat: The New York Times deleted internal Slack messages critical of a recent column on detransitioners with a note that says criticizing colleagues and coverage on Slack violates HR policies, a rule it’s also been applying to Gaza coverage. A post reminding staff in the “Times Out” group Slack of that rule got 19 thumbs down emojis, the last redoubt of Slack dissent.

✰ Hollywood

It’s all happening: The shotgun wedding media mergers that everyone anticipates and nobody is excited about are continuing apace: Who isn’t excited for Paramount Peacock Plus??

The business of LeBron: A tidbit from Jessica Toonkel’s profile of the superstar and his much-imitated production company, Springhill: “The majority of SpringHill’s roughly $200 million in revenue comes from its studio business and advertisers hiring the company to create sponsored short videos meant to be shared on social media.”

Redbird rollup: The Emirates-funded, Jeff Zucker-led Redbird IMI picked up the largest TV producer in the UK.

⁜ Tech

Dead to Musk: That’s Matt Taibbi, who was the billionaire’s favorite journalist until he chose to stay on Substack instead of switching to an X subscription product.

Reddit.ai: The last good social platform, which is a public company despite feeling like an eccentric community, sold the rights to training data to an undisclosed AI partner for $60 million ahead of a planned IPO, a move that will help set market prices for huge bodies of text.

Robots RIP: The age of AI is sapping the power of the great hex of the search era, robots.txt. Only The Verge would nerd out on this topic with this much gusto.

⁋ Publishing

Not science fiction: The organizers of the Hugo Awards vetted nominees for writing, or social media posts, of a “sensitive political nature” that might offend the awards’ Chinese hosts.

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