Media

1. Breitbart’s bright spot
2. YouTube TV trouble
3. Audacy switch-up
4. Newsmax and FCC
5. F1’s media strategy

Welcome to Semafor Media, which seems to revolve around Washington these days.

The Trump administration took the wrecking ball to another 20th century American institution this weekend: the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, among other properties.

As with many of the White House’s cost-cutting initiatives, reasonable talk of government efficiency blends with raw ideology. These venerable tools of soft power stand accused of being too hard on America’s old friends in Hungary, our new friends in Moscow, and our debatable Chinese friend Guo Wengui.

Yet these institutions, electrifying as they were during the Cold War, had been hollowed out by technology and politics years ago, and had already lost much of their relevance. Trump may have pushed the final brick out of the wall, but he’s not the reason that the acronym city of Washington, from USAID to the WHCA, is so vulnerable to his attacks. A 21st century approach to media soft power might look more like Russia’s or the early CIA’s, backing a spray of destabilizing new media voices — Encounter Magazine in the 1950s, money-hungry YouTubers today. The fight over how and whether to rebuild that kind of soft power in Washington will likely extend well beyond Kari Lake’s tenure at VOA.

Legacy media, like all legacy institutions, is vulnerable now. That’s even true of relative newcomers — like Breitbart News and its Washington bureau chief, who are now navigating the strange position of being legacy MAGA media. I spent some time with them for a story on their valuable, but sometimes uncomfortable, status as MAGA stalwarts in a world of less reliable influencers.

Also today: A lot more politics, with three scoops on reactions to the Trump FCC: at YouTube, where a Christian broadcaster is talking about carriage; at Audacy, which is losing a key executive; and at Newsmax, which inexplicably removed an interview criticizing the body’s chairman. (Scoop count: 4)

MAGA’s paper of record

Breitbart’s basic offerings — straight writeups of obviously friendly or unfriendly interviews; screaming headlines; a bloggy and sometimes messy style; cheap and hectic display advertising — haven’t changed much. But now they’re a kind of MAGA legacy media, scoring newsmaking interviews and competing with younger, more tech-savvy right-wing influencers with a shakier relationship with the truth. It’s a mandate staff are taking seriously: Breitbart’s editor in chief, Alex Marlow, said “there is a massive hole, in conservative media in particular, for people who are covering things with an eye on being comprehensive and entirely accurate.” Matt Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington bureau chief, may be second only to Fox News’ Bret Baier in his access to the Trump Cabinet. One reason why, Boyle said, is that a writeup in Breitbart is a sure way to reach the president: Trump officials know that White House aides will “print it out and show it to him.”

YouTube in talks with Christian broadcaster after FCC complaint

YouTube’s top executive said it is working to reach an agreement with a Christian broadcaster whose complaint against the streaming giant caught the attention of the FCC. Last week, FCC commissioner Brendan Carr told Newsmax that he believed Great American Family had a “credible” complaint against YouTube TV. The broadcaster alleged that the company’s subscription-based premium service refused to carry its broadcast TV channels because of religious bias against Christians.

In a forthcoming interview with Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan responded that “we don’t discriminate on the basis of that sort of content.”

YouTube, he said, is currently in talks with Great American Family for YouTube TV distribution “based on business considerations, in terms of audience and audience demand and what have you. But we’re having productive conversations. I look forward to having my team explain that to the FCC in detail.”

Mohan also pointed out that Great American Family has a large presence on YouTube.

“From a reach standpoint, the aperture of YouTube, the main app, is orders of magnitude larger than YouTube TV,” he said.

Top Audacy exec departs

Audacy’s chief digital officer is leaving the company, the latest in a series of top-level departures from the radio and podcast giant. In a memo to staff shared with Semafor, JD Crowley said he’s “incredibly proud of the strong and growing businesses we’ve built” over his eight years at the company, which includes what used to be CBS Radio.

Crowley’s departure, which he had signaled to people inside the company for months, comes at a critical time for the radio giant. A majority acquisition by Soros Fund Management helped take it out of bankruptcy late last year, but also put it in the crosshairs of the new administration. Carr has already launched an investigation into one of Audacy’s radio stations over its local broadcast content.

Audacy’s interim CEO, Kelli Turner, is expected to take on the role full-time, and people familiar with Crowley’s departure said there could be more changes at the executive level in the coming months. Over the last several weeks, Audacy has reportedly cut hundreds of jobs, largely focused on its radio business but affecting some digital staff. Audacy did not return a request for comment.

Newsmax takes down story with comments critical of FCC

Newsmax quietly deleted a piece in which a telecommunications executive criticized the FCC, Semafor reported Wednesday.

On Monday, the conservative cable news channel published a story on its website headlined, “Telecom Company Urges FCC to Reverse Biden-era Fine,” featuring the CEO of the digital calling company Telnyx, which has become the target of a recent FCC fine for allegedly failing to take adequate action to stop government imposter robocalls used on its service. But the article was scrubbed hours later from Newsmax’s website. A spokesperson for the channel told Semafor that removing the piece was an editorial decision, but did not elaborate. There was no indication the FCC had any impact on Newsmax’s decision to remove the article. The conservative cable news channel published a separate interview with Carr on Wednesday.

F1 enlists a Hollywood A-lister

A trailer for a Formula 1-centric movie starring Brad Pitt is timed to drop as the current season kicks off in Australia. The motorsport has long enjoyed popularity in Europe, but a media marketing push, including a 2019 Netflix docuseries, has helped it find global fans: It has its own production facility in London and a streaming subscription service. The Pitt movie, simply titled F1 and slated for release in June, is aimed at catapulting the sport to international blockbuster status. “Anytime Brad Pitt’s in a movie people pay attention,” the head of Liberty Media, the company that owns F1, told the Financial Times.

How did Snoop Dogg become America’s most marketable star? Partly because when you ask him to show up at an advertising shoot at 10 a.m., he’ll be there at 9:45, says the legendary marketing executive Frank Cooper in a wide-ranging conversation with Ben and Max on Mixed Signals. Cooper, Visa’s CMO, has been at the center of big cultural shifts since his time at Def Jam in the 90s, AOL in the 2000s, and BuzzFeed in the 2010s. Throughout his career, he’s also been seen as the culture translator for big corporations, as the CMO at PepsiCo and now Visa. Ben and Max talk about Frank’s unique career, who and what he thinks still moves people en masse — like Post Malone at the Louvre — and what he makes of this particular moment in the culture. In this era of media fragmentation and amid the rise of niche communities, he makes the case that there are still ways to reach mass audiences.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

⁋ Publishing

Coming soon: A coalition of Democratic groups plan to roll out a new initiative to increase their digital presence this week, Semafor has learned. More on this in the coming days.

High fashion: Maureen Dowd was slightly disappointed by the lack of score-settling in When the Going Was Good, Graydon Carter’s new memoir, she wrote for the Times. But he had some fun things to say about his Condé Nast rival Anna Wintour: The Met Gala “wasn’t my thing. I mean, Halloween-type costumes. They might as well come dressed as SpongeBob.’”

Globe trotting: The Boston Globe has pulled itself back from the brink with a growing subscription business. Its membership team told A Media Operator how the paper retooled its business over the last several years, garnering more than 335,000 subscribers and counting.

Credit where credit is due: Politico’s difficulties in recent years have been well-documented in this newsletter — it continues to struggle to hold on to top talent, and the DC chattering class remains a bit puzzled by the selection of a British journalist to helm its flagship morning newsletter. But none of that has appeared to impact Politico Magazine, which has been on a tear with scoopy, fun pieces. This week alone, it published pieces about Rahm Emanuel’s presidential aspirations, an unreported private meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, the DC press corps’ failure to report on a congresswoman with dementia, an informative, first-person perspective on what’s going on at Columbia written by a recently-graduated student, and a 100% correct list of the five best-dressed members of Congress written by the Menswear Guy.

☊ Audio

Reversed: NPR told host Ari Shapiro that he could not attend a Pride event in an email this week accidentally sent to the wider newsroom. After Semafor inquired about the policy, NPR announced that it had reversed its stance.

Renewed: As Semafor first reported was likely to happen this month, Bill Simmons reupped his contract with Spotify last week.

✦ Marketing

Buzzy: The platform Beehiiv is making a play to be a more advertising-friendly alternative to Substack. The company, which projects that it is on track to do $35 million in revenue this year, introduced a new tool last week that allows authors to “insert ads directly into their newsletters, set rate cards, coordinate inventory, and send invoices.” It’s a major difference from Substack, whose chief writing officer told Semafor last month that the platform still has reservations about turning on advertising on its platform, despite the fact that many of its journalists and creators sell their own ads and sponsorships in their newsletters.

Amazon’s bid to take on Nvidia, leading to the e-commerce giant’s biggest investment ever this year, is also a gamble for artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti reported.

The company’s new five-nanometer Trainium 2 microprocessor is not as powerful as the Nvidia chips coveted by artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, but the e-commerce giant is betting on making AI chips in-house — and is aiming to build the most powerful computer in the world.