Media

News outlets cave in China

Take a moment to absorb one of the biggest media stories of the year — and a dark sign of things to come.

China has succeeded in using cautious Western news organizations to destroy their own institutions.

Selina Cheng, a Wall Street Journal reporter fired over her desire to serve as the chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association writes angrily in the Columbia Journalism Review of the contrast between the Journal’s pressure on her and its solidarity with her colleague imprisoned in Russia, Evan Gershkovich.

This wasn’t just a troubling one-off. As my colleagues Diego Mendoza and Gina Chua write, a number of top global news organizations are discouraging staff in Hong Kong and mainland China from taking on high-profile roles in press freedom organizations.

Each organization is trying to keep its people safe while still reporting the news. But the result threatens everyone trying to do journalism in difficult countries. In the meantime, the president of the venerable Foreign Correspondents’ Club Hong Kong is the head of branded content at the South China Morning Post.

Rival 2024 forecasters split over polls

Harris is launching her campaign amid a fractious Democratic Party argument about which numbers to trust.

The 538 election model previously showed Biden likely to win in November even as he slipped in the polls. The iconic polling site’s now-departed founder, Nate Silver, had a different view and is now in a bitter feud with its current management, Max Tani reported Thursday. At its heart is how intangible factors — like whether a candidate is with-it enough to campaign — should factor into predictions.

Silver is in a similar dispute with the forecaster Alan Lichtman, who brags that his “keys” don’t turn on “fickle polling.” And, of course, a profusion of models allows campaigns and their supporters to pick the messenger they prefer and shoot the others. Still, by Sunday, even 538 had Trump at a 51% chance of winning.

To debate or not to debate?

Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race raises questions about whether a debate between Trump and the eventual Democratic nominee will still take place.

Earlier this year, Trump and Biden agreed to participate in a presidential debate in June, hosted by CNN, and another in September, hosted by ABC. But following Biden’s decision to drop out on Sunday, Trump seemed to waver on his commitment to participating in ABC’s contest.“

Now that Joe has, not surprisingly, has quit the race, I think the Debate, with whomever the Radical Left Democrats choose, should be held on FoxNews, rather than very biased ABC,” he wrote on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon.

Trump communications adviser Jason Miller also told Semafor that the former president would still debate the Democratic nominee, but suggested that the campaign could push to change who’s hosting it.

Asked Sunday by ABC anchor David Muir whether Trump would commit to a debate on ABC, RNC chair Michael Whatley said he’d “defer to the president in terms of any of the details they want to have with it, but we’ve made it very clear that we’d love to debate.”

Multiple spokespeople for ABC News did not respond to requests for comment about whether the network had been in contact with the Trump campaign about the debate.

A Gen Z pop titan gives Harris a boost

The first sign that Harris may have one advantage over Biden with younger voters came from Charli XCX. In a tweet on Sunday, the pop star tweeted “kamala IS brat,” a reference to her recent hit album of the same name.

The Charli tweet is a manifestation of Harris’ recent meme-ification, which after the debate transformed from an online joke into a type of wishful thinking for Democrats pining for a younger nominee with a different energy. But it also highlights how Harris could be a more digitally potent and savvy candidate.

Over the course of his presidency, Biden’s White House and his campaign have attempted to implement digital media strategies aimed at breaking through in an increasingly fragmented and partisan media landscape. But those tactics often ran up against a candidate more comfortable with a media strategy built around legacy news outlets.

For all of her flaws and mistakes during her 2020 campaign, Harris had a formidable presence online, running a digital-first media strategy that leaned on a vocal “K-Hive” fanbase.

Case in point: Just minutes after Charli tweeted about Harris, the vice president followed her on Instagram and Twitter and was highlighted on the popular celebrity news aggregator Pop Crave.

A Democratic donor’s aide dips into conspiracism

One of the challenges in understanding the crisis of the Democratic Party is how much journalism, in this age of inequality, is fed through the vast webs of courtiers around big donors. These “donor advisers” wield power with the groups they pay, but their core competence is sometimes managing up.

Semafor’s Kadia Goba offered a glimpse of this world when she published an email from one of the most powerful donor advisers, Reid Hoffman aide Dmitri Mehlhorn, that pushed an insane theory about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump being staged. Much of the furor about replacing Biden was driven by rumors and plots among big-money Democrats.

Kadia’s reporting is a reminder not just of the fact that money can’t buy you sense, but that big donors of both parties are often surrounded by courtiers who tell them they’re geniuses — even as they pursue and tolerate ludicrous nonsense, which their advisers then pass on to reporters as wisdom.

It’s raining men

Mixed Signals this week focuses on the media company that won the RNC: mixed martial arts giant Ultimate Fighting Championship. The company’s CEO, Dana White, introduced Trump’s speech accepting the nomination, but only after a shirt-ripping stemwinder by former professional wrestling champ Hulk Hogan.

The primacy of these macho spectacles in today’s GOP politics opens a window on a defining feature of this political moment: the deep currents of gender politics running through the partisan split.

Catch up with the latest episode of Mixed Signals.

So much for that Republican anger

We arrived in Milwaukee expecting angry, even menacing, GOP convention-goers to blame the media for the attempted assassination of their nominee.

The networks, Max reported, even beefed up security around their recognizable talent.

Instead we found a happy, confident, self-consciously blessed and united GOP, and the friendliest media environment we’ve seen in years. The only reporters who had any trouble were the ones assigned to cover protesters, who they couldn’t locate. The only dicey moment came when I made the mistake of getting in the way of an NBC journalist’s security detail.

The MAGA movement, a prominent broadcaster noted in response to my cheerful dispatch, can be magnanimous winners. But this election is far from over, and one thing that nobody in Milwaukee contemplated for a second was the possibility of losing.

Pete Wells, the New York Times’ longtime restaurant critic, announced on Tuesday he would be leaving his post.

Sorkin walkback: Aaron Sorkin suggested an ending to the 2024 season featuring Mitt Romney as the Democratic nominee, then walked it back via the X account of Joshua Malina (Will Bailey on The West Wing): “I take it all back. Harris for America!”

Memetic warfare: X is full of memes praising Times podcasters and Biden campaign skeptics Klein and Astead Herndon.

Fox off (one) hook: Hunter Biden has dropped his lawsuit against Fox News.

The case for public media: The US has never had a serious European-style public broadcaster. Is that our problem? Wes Lowery argues for a big new push into publishing nonpartisan information.

• Joe Manchin might challenge Harris.
• Wall Street donors are getting excited again.
• Global leaders cheer Biden’s choice to drop out.