Media

1. Republic of Group Chats
2. Klein on media fears
3. MAHA media
4. Marketplace trouble
5. Sarandos’ pitch
6. Daily Wire to DC

Welcome to Semafor Media, where nobody invites us to top secret group chats on purpose or by accident.

I’m writing this on the Amtrak back from DC, where our Semafor World Economy Summit was the city’s biggest gathering of CEOs this year. (It was, I should boast, both a platform for intelligent conversation and a festival of news — the Semafor dream.) Those business leaders are trying to understand what the US government is doing, hungry as everyone else for a clear sense of direction for the global economy.

This was also the weekend of the White House Correspondents Association dinner and its series of parties. On Saturday night, I visited one hosted by War Room and The National Pulse; by the eclectic Substack; by the Establishment NBC. Nobody invited me to David Sacks’ party for Donald Trump’s wealthy supporters, but that was the hottest ticket.

A couple weeks earlier, Sacks had stormed out of another kind of party. Chatham House is a giant Signal group, the culmination of five years of profoundly influential backchannel conversations that, more than anything else, reshaped American intellectual life over the last few years. I got only a few glimpses of these disappearing messages, but a couple dozen participants’ recollections depict a Group Chat Age that some have begun to romanticize.

I hope you’ll check out the story, along with the usual spray of scoops: Max on The Daily Wire’s expansion, Ted Sarandos on the US and China, and Ezra Klein on what journalists have to fear. (Scoop count: 5)

Republic of Group Chats

In a major Semafor piece today, Ben Smith reveals the dark matter shaping much of American media and politics: A sprawling network of private group chats revolving around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The chats began in earnest when he asked an aide, Sriram Krishnan, to set up dozens of WhatsApp groups for tech elites in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as an alternative to progressive-dominated public social media. Another ally, Erik Torenberg, set up some Signal groups with a more political focus. As the pandemic proceeded, Andreessen huddled with a group of liberal intellectuals behind a letter in Harper’s Magazine — then split bitterly with them and moved to a new group organized by the conservative academic Richard Hanania.

Some saw the groups as building trust and community. Others saw a political project: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites,” the conservative activist Chris Rufo said. All agree that ideas and causes seeded in the chats made their way onto Substack, X, and podcasts, and helped shape the current American intellectual moment. “The internet has fragmented,” the Substack author Noah Smith wrote after Semafor’s inquiries for this story spilled into public Saturday. “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.”

Media fears

Much of the early sparring between President Donald Trump and the media has come via the low-stakes theater of White House press briefings. In an interview on Mixed Signals this week, Abundance co-author and New York Times star Ezra Klein reflected on the tension in the Trump administration’s approach to journalists they view as hostile. On one hand, Trump thrives on exposure to traditional broadcast platforms, and he, Vice President JD Vance, and others see value in public confrontation with a media foil. “They understand that there’s an energy being unlocked by that fight. If they stop doing that, they lose the foil and I don’t think they want to do that,” Klein said. “My worries about the way they’ll go after the press, honestly, have more to do with things like FBI surveillance, and things that are darker and more illegal, but are very common around the world — things like going after leaks and trying to throw people into jail. We know how that looks in other countries, and it’s pretty grim.”

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Blaze Media’s new star

Blaze Media is partnering with Nicole Shanahan — a billionaire and now-Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s former presidential running mate — to license and represent her interview podcast Back to the People. Blaze Media will sell ads on the show and promote it across its network.

“I created this podcast because I've spent so much of my life as an entrepreneur and as a philanthropist, and I was having just these conversations with people that I felt other people needed to know about in the general public,” Shanahan told Semafor in an interview. “And so that's really what Back to the People is all about — taking these conversations, which were limited to a very elite and small circle of people, and broadcasting them widely.”

Trouble at Marketplace

Employees at Marketplace, the Los Angeles-based public media organization, were initially annoyed after leadership announced staffing cuts and a new strategy in a LinkedIn post and in the press. But they grew even more frustrated following what some said were tone-deaf comments in a meeting last week by the CEO of Marketplace’s parent company, American Public Media Group.

During the meeting, APM Group CEO Jean Taylor seemed to jump between affirmative language about the organization and dark topics, including the need to reorganize and restructure staff.

Taylor announced that the organization was introducing a new executive-level role called “VP of Friends,” launched the meeting with a trailer for the Splendid Table podcast and asked, “Isn’t it fun to work for a media company?”

The CEO also advised Marketplace staff to take care of themselves in an unstable world, and explained how she, personally, was prioritizing joy. Employees expressed disbelief.

Buy American

The entertainment industry doesn’t get enough credit for its place in the US economy, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Ben at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, DC on Wednesday. Entertainment “gets overlooked as an industry,” and gets “kind of thrown under the bus in trade deals occasionally,” he said. He said since 2020, the streaming giant has contributed some $125 billion in value, created more than 100,000 jobs, and produced content in all 50 US states.

Sarandos also said he was pleased that Netflix had given up on any attempt to crack the Chinese market, in which the company at one point had a licensing arrangement: “One part of the deal was the content had to clear the censorship board to make it to the air, and in three years not a single episode of a single Netflix show cleared the censorship — not one.” Now “we’re one of the rare companies in the US that has no exposure to China. I mean, no exposure to China’s censorship, taxes, tariffs, anything. There’s a big business in the rest of the world that is happy to host Netflix.”

Daily Wire to the District

The conservative digital media powerhouse The Daily Wire is making a push to have a bigger presence in Donald Trump’s Washington, opening a DC office led by deputy managing editor Tim Rice and promoting Brent Scher to serve as editor-in-chief, a spokesperson said.

“We have cemented ourselves as a mainstay in the ‘new media’ revolution and this physical expansion into D.C. will open new opportunities for both our reporting and content,” the spokesperson said. And while its videos and podcasts remain the most visible part of its media business, the outlet has increasingly broken news about the new administration since Trump’s return in January. White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan has regularly gotten the jump on Trump’s moves around topics The Daily Wire often focuses on, including immigration and gender identity. She also become a visible figure in the White House briefing room.

Jacqui Heinrich is Fox News’ senior White House correspondent.

⁛ News

• The Atlantic is publishing its cover story on Monday featuring several interviews with Trump, including one conducted with editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was unwittingly added to a secret war-planning Signal group chat with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials earlier this year. According to the magazine, the reporting shows that “Trump’s time in the political wilderness following his loss in 2020 is crucial to understanding the way he’s exercising power now.”
• Max reported Tuesday that Shari Redstone was keeping tabs on 60 Minutes’ coverage of Trump — leading to the resignation of the legendary producer Bill Owens. Correspondent Scott Pelley sided with Owens in an extraordinary on-air segment Sunday, suggesting that parent Paramount is soiling the best brand left in TV News.

⁜ Tech

• Frank McCourt, the former Los Angeles Dodgers owner who has mounted a public bid for TikTok, said onstage in an interview with Semafor last week that Trump’s trade war with China has slowed the sale process. “The TikTok issue, just amongst the array of issues, is lower down at the moment,” McCourt said, though he noted that the biggest hurdle remained whether the deal would comply with last year’s law mandating a sale.

☊ Audio

• The New York Times is making sure its readers know all about the bros of podcasting and streaming. The paper interviewed Hasan Piker about being swole while also being a socialist, and went deep on how Theo Von’s interview style breaks the mold.

⁌ TV

• CBS showed how Bill Belichick’s girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, who is 48 years his junior, stood guard behind the scenes during a recent interview, and even cut off anchor Tony Dokoupil’s questions about their relationship.

FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam likes to say that his company connects 99% of the world’s GDP, giving it “a catbird’s seat” perspective on the global flow of goods amid an escalating trade war. But that view is increasingly cloudy, he cautioned.

“So far, things are okay, but I can’t tell you what happens next week,” Subramaniam told Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson at Semafor’s World Economy Summit. But the FedEx boss said he’s confident the shipping giant will “manage through” these “increasing operational complexities.”