Media

1. Nexstar dodges a Trump lawsuit
2. Bloomberg’s travel advisory
3. WaPo’s op-ed editor search
4. Meta vs. MAGA
5. Norton deletes Díaz
6. NYC schools to blame?
7. Formats are back
8. Moniify’s money

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we’d intended to do a light issue for Easter but got carried away.

The conservative writer Julius Krein observed recently in American Affairs that the Trump White House is “drifting toward Bush-era attempts to bend reality simply by force of will and aggressive unilateralism.”

Indeed, one way of seeing the abrupt shift in the media landscape since a bit before “Liberation Day” is that the media matters just a little less than we all like to think. Political campaigns have long been media phenomena, and of course sparring in the White House press room is a media moment.

But every modern president learns in the spring that governing is different. The markets can’t be bullied into rising. Even the most submissive Congress can’t always deliver. And last week’s disastrous purge of Pete Hegseth’s close allies from the Defense Department reflects, a close observer texted me, the fact that the “Pentagon is a different animal than White House. Real rules.”

Still: Today’s newsletter is about media institutions — from The Washington Post to Nexstar — bending to Trump’s will. (Scoop count: 5)

We hope to see you this week, in person or remotely, at the World Economy Summit, which has grown faster than we could have imagined. We’ll have key US and European leaders and top CEOs, including Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi, and GM’s Mary Barra. Get more details here.

How The Hill’s corporate parent dodged a Trump lawsuit

Since 2023, Truth Social has relentlessly pursued a defamation case against 19 media companies that all flubbed the same story about its earnings. But one outlet that got it wrong — The Hill, owned by the broadcast giant Nexstar — managed to quietly convince the owners of Trump’s conservative Twitter clone to drop it from the lawsuit. The concession Nexstar offered, Semafor’s Max Tani reports: firing The Hill staffer who’d written the story.

A spokesperson for Nexstar, Gary Weitman, denied the quid pro quo. But there’s good reasons for Nexstar to stay out of Trump’s line of fire, as the TV company attempts to grow its business and cut costs. Founder Perry Sook believes the Trump administration’s deregulatory bent could fundamentally transform its operations and allow it to hoover up more TV stations and the ad dollars that come with them. But to do that, Nexstar will need to stay on Trump’s good side.

The result has been that Nexstar’s executives have tightened their grip over its properties. Some of their moves have been simple corporate cost-cutting aimed at improving the company’s margins. But they have also pursued editorial changes — especially at The Hill.

Bloomberg issues travel warning to staff

Some media organizations are advising their employees to take extra precautions when traveling to the US. On Wednesday, Bloomberg held a virtual meeting attended by hundreds of staffers that included guidance on how employees should prepare to deal with US immigration authorities. Outside legal counsel for the company told employees to bring more documents than expected to demonstrate their ties to the United States, including bank statements and lease agreements. The company’s lawyers also reminded foreign staff to make sure their I-94 paperwork was present, and to be prepared for additional questions and a more thorough/longer visa application and renewal process. While the company said it is not broadly concerned with travel in and out of the US for Bloomberg staff, it advised any staffers who have a criminal record of any kind to speak with the company before attempting to enter.

Tina Brown has shaped the culture and captured the zeitgeist since she reinvented Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in the 1980s and 1990s. But now, she’s moved on to the digital media space with her Substack, Fresh Hell. This week, Ben and Max ask the magazine icon about what she makes of the state of print media today, whether we still need editors in a world filled with influencers, and what she thinks the future holds for her former employer, Condé Nast. They also talk about her gripes with our current “uncouth” culture, how we’ve all become “scavengers of info,” and today’s big story: “The Rise of the Randos.”

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Bezos hunts for new Post opinion chief

The Washington Post is inching closer to finding an editor for its rebooted opinion section. In recent weeks, staff at the paper owned by Jeff Bezos have begun speaking with candidates, including Reason editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. In an email, Mangu-Ward told Semafor she couldn’t comment on Bezos or the Post’s hiring process, but said she was “excited about the prospect of a Washington Post opinion page anchored in the principles of personal and economic freedom.” One person familiar with the situation said the paper isn’t close to making a decision, but has begun conversations with several candidates. The Post has been without a top opinion editor for months following Bezos’ decision to narrow the section’s focus to the promotion of free markets and civil liberties. The move prompted former opinion editor David Shipley to resign abruptly in February.

Correction: An earlier version of this item mischaracterized who was meeting with job candidates.

Trump allies hold the line against Meta

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to talk the Trump administration out of pursuing the ongoing antitrust case against his company have faced some countermeasures from Trump allies — measures that proved successful last week, as the case proceeded to trial. The FTC probe into Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp began during President Donald Trump’s first term and continued through Joe Biden’s, but Zuckerberg had hoped to make a deal with Trump this time around; he donated $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee and another $25 million to his presidential foundation in order to settle a lawsuit over the post-Jan. 6 suspension of Trump’s accounts. But FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson and Gail Slater, the Justice Department’s antitrust head, met with the president privately earlier this month and convinced him not to make concessions, Semafor scooped — along with Mike Davis, a legal activist who’s helped Trump wage a campaign of retribution against his enemies. As other tech and industry titans hope to curry favor with a notoriously transactional president, the episode is an example of what money can’t buy.

Norton deletes Díaz

I wrote last year of the strange case of the novelist Junot Díaz, who was derailed in 2018 by a set of allegations that rested, a Pulitzer Board investigation concluded, on a kiss on the cheek. “Given the fact that we found no reason for the board to take any action against him, therefore it seems wrong that this would have impacted him and his life and his career to the extent that it still has,” lamented The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who chaired the board. Here’s what that means in practice: Díaz’s work has been removed from the Norton Anthology of World Literature, and he has gone “from being hailed by the Norton editors as ‘one of the most distinctive voices of any Latino writing today’ to having his distinctive voice entirely muted,” Rafael Walker writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A Norton spokesperson didn’t respond to an inquiry.

— Ben Smith

Blame the New York private schools

I have a theory that the origin of the American culture wars lies, in no small part, in New York’s hothouse private schools. How did figures like Bill Ackman and Marc Rowan come to believe that they lived amid a literal Maoist cultural revolution? Possibly because their social circles were paying millions of dollars per child for access to the most politicized environments in America, at schools like Dalton and Riverdale. They then — reasonably! — assumed that, as usual, they were paying for the best, and could only imagine the horrors of ordinary American schools. These New York school derangements and resentments can be hard to see from the outside. But they occasionally flicker into view, as in a recent Free Press excoriation of the New York socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, which inexplicably includes the note that “although he describes himself as a ‘graduate of the NYC public school system,’ he didn’t attend any old public high school. His alma mater is the Bronx High School of Science.” As a New Yorker with both private and public school connections… I am sorry that the rest of the country is being subjected to our neuroses!

— Ben Smith

Formats are back

We live, as we are all sick of repeating, in an influencer age. But the television age balanced talent with formats: “Morning shows. The Sunday political roundtable. Formats created durable IP and repeatable systems,” writes The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey in a riff on, in part, our interview with Jubilee Media’s Jason Y. Lee, who has built a brand around elaborately staged conversations and debates. “What we’re seeing now is the hybrid model: personality meets format. The next wave of breakout media won’t just be about charisma. It will be charisma within a smart container.”

The rise and fall of a news startup

Moniify had big ambitions. The UAE-based crypto and tech news startup, backed by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, “hired aggressively, spent prolifically, and made the competition take notice,” Semafor’s Kelsey Warner wrote. But it had burned through a staggering $50 million by its launch in November, and was on track to torch $50 million more, as its leaders struggled to settle on an editorial strategy and as its editors and writers agonized over whether its stories were “Gen Z enough.” In February, Moniify’s CEO and most of its newsroom was axed and the brand pivoted hard to short-form videos optimized for TikTok.

The World Economy Summit 2025 is bringing together the decision-makers who are shaping the future of global economic policy. The three-day summit, taking place from April 23–25, 2025 in Washington, DC, will focus on ways leaders across business, finance, tech, and beyond are navigating the complexities of tariffs, shifting trade dynamics, and evolving policy landscapes.

Featuring on-the-record conversations with Mary Barra, Chair and CEO, General Motors; Scott Kirby, CEO, United Airlines; Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber; Ted Sarandos, Co-CEO, Netflix; Evan Spiegel, CEO, Snap; Kathy Warden, Chair, CEO and President, Northrop Grumman, and more, the summit will facilitate in-depth discussions on how countries are adapting to these challenges and building resilience in a rapidly changing world.

April 23-25 | Washington, DC | Learn More

⁛ News

• What happened at CJR: Now-ex-executive editor Sewell Chan says he was fired for pushing for quality. His critics say he was an awful manager. Give the Pulitzer to whoever figures it out.

✦ Marketing

• How famous people became “cannon fodder”: If you’re in journalism or public relations, a rare News Agents interview with legendary British PR man Matthew Freud is worth the half hour. “The media have as much power as you give them,” he observes.

⁌ TV

• Despite claims that the NBA’s ratings were in the tank due to wokeness, the league’s ratings have rebounded in recent months.

✰ Hollywood

• A Palestinian journalist at the center of a documentary slated to be shown at the Cannes film festival was killed in an airstrike last week.

⁋ Publishing

• WhatsApp has become an unlikely source of traffic for publishers after the platform launched channels, a way to share articles one-way. The tool has driven a significant amount of web traffic to publishers like Yahoo Finance, which has over 2.6 million followers on the platform.

“I don’t remember a time that we didn’t have uncertainty,” Judy Marks said, reflecting on the five years since Otis, the $40 billion elevator and escalator company she leads, became independent.

Since 2020, Otis’ share price has roughly doubled, thanks to the company’s “flywheel” business model, Marks told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: Most of its profits come from maintaining, rather than installing, its elevators. “We’ve fine-tuned the strategy to make sure everyone understands that new equipment is wonderful,” Marks said, “but we are a long-cycle business.”