Media

Power jamborees

A new novella by an old Davos hand offers a savage portrayal of the traveling circus of power pioneered by the World Economic Forum. Deaths at Davos is a slim volume by economist Thierry Malleret, a former WEF executive and geopolitical analyst who also co-authored with WEF founder Klaus Schwab the conspiracy-theorist favorite COVID-19: The Great Reset.

The self-published thriller centers on The Circle, a WEF-like institution consumed by self-interest whose cardinal rule is that “money always has the last word.” The Circle is “a handsomely sophisticated comfort zone for people who had already changed the world, not necessarily for the better, and wanted to cover their tracks.”

Malleret insisted in an interview, not entirely convincingly, that the novel wasn’t intended particularly to skewer WEF: “It could be Aspen, Milken, or Bilderberg,” he said. He said he hadn’t talked to Schwab about the book.

His core critique of this set of power gatherings, he said, is that they are “Western jamborees, incredibly Western-dominated.” There’s “a strange dissonance between the people at the [top] and the way the world is evolving.”

WEF spokesman Yann Zopf said he hadn’t read the novel, and asked if it was good. It’s pretty good! Malleret says he’ll have a sequel out before the next gathering in January.

Scale without influence

One of the striking features of contemporary political media is the gap in the reach of unmeasurable TikTok audiences and popular YouTube channels — even as smaller legacy institutions still have outsized influence, much to the irritation of anti-institutional figures like Elon Musk.

This is particularly true on the right, and the veteran conservative media operator Bubba Atkinson — he was editor-in-chief of Independent Journal Review before helping to found Axios, and now runs Bubba News — offered this observation in response to Max’s piece on cable news star-turned-YouTuber Megyn Kelly’s success:

“The interesting thing in right-wing world is there are plenty of examples of individuals or organizations attaining massive distribution — Tucker, Megyn, the Daily Wire boys. But what’s interesting is that when they do this, it’s almost like the prestige is gone. … No one outside of their echo chamber pays attention to them. In effect, they’re just entertainment at that point because they don’t affect the national conversation.”

The failure of these successful right-wing media figures to break out of their lane is a reason more traditional media institutions, plagued with self-doubt, should stop selling themselves short. Alternately, maybe we are just midway through a vast shift in power and the other shoe hasn’t yet dropped.

What do you think?

Random Twitter people 1, Bloomberg 0

Bloomberg quietly killed a splashy PR rollout of Olivia Nuzzi’s new show, Working Capital, in response to a small Twitter campaign against the journalist by Democrats.

The interview show, announced with great fanfare in July, wound up being unceremoniously released on Bloomberg’s television network and is available online. But Max reports (and Nuzzi confirms) that plans for a higher-profile rollout of the Bloomberg Originals bet were abruptly scotched after a Nuzzi article about the “conspiracy of silence” around President Joe Biden’s age.

Her article prompted a group of Democrats on Twitter to call her a racist and tweet at Bloomberg demanding she be fired. They based their claims on some tweets from the Obama years which, if you had no sense of humor or hadn’t been following United States politics at the time, could be understood out of context as being expressions of furious anti-Obama sentiment. (They were, in fact, Twitter jokes. This is too dumb to explain in detail, but here’s a representative sample.)

A Bloomberg spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s reaction, but the episode is a microcosm of one of the real struggles for corporate media right now, which is looking for a new generation of stars with social media followings, big personalities, and clear identities. People who have built that kind of following and reputation over the last decade have probably made out-of-context jokes, or even said actually regrettable things, through the years. Their corporate employers prefer ciphers — or at least careful television professionals. It’s hard to have it both ways.

Nuzzi reflected on the situation in a text exchange last week:

“When I write something that agitates the right, I am accused of being a liberal activist. When I write something that agitates the left, I am accused of being a conservative activist.

“The difference is that mainstream media organizations tend to ignore bad-faith campaigns against reporters led by the right. I have no illusions about massive corporate media entities and their tolerance for even the faintest murmurs of a PR crisis, so I can’t say I was surprised, but I was disappointed.

“I know a lot of reporters who long ago made the shrewd decision to delete all of their old posts to protect themselves. I would never judge anyone for doing that. But a large part of my project as a journalist is to meet people where they live in gray areas and to run toward complication and nuance, and to understand context as it is or as it was, and I see an effort to conceal jokes I made in the context of the internet of five or 10 or 15 years ago as a kind of dishonesty that I am not comfortable engaging in.

“I really believe that if you want to live in a world that is forgiving and where people hold even those they disagree with to the same standards they wish to be held, you can’t cave to mob pressure as a means to protect yourself even when it would be a lot easier to do so. That’s how this type of culture is formed and maintained and as individuals we get to decide if we think it’s worth enduring a little pain to fight against it.”

Market of ideas

Did a progressive foundation capture Democratic media and drive the party to the left? That’s the theory Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Chait have advanced recently, suggesting that the Hewlett Foundation’s grants — to publications including the Washington Monthly and The American Prospect, along with writers like the economic historian Zach Carter — pushed the Democratic Party away from Obama-era economic management and toward a more populist approach.

I asked Larry Kramer, who led Hewlett at the time and is now the president of the London School of Economics, about the claim, which he rejected as “ridiculous.” The goal, he says, was never to help or hurt the Democratic Party — but to shift both parties’ thinking on the approach Hewlett attacks as “neoliberalism.”

“They’re thinking we’re the left trying to beat the right, but what we’re actually looking for is a way in which those things are redefined to meet the 21st-century economy,” he said. “We caught a wave and helped put some momentum behind it. There were a whole lot of heterodox thinkers out there that needed support and needed help to develop their ideas.”

Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris said Hewlett hadn’t changed anyone’s thinking, but that the foundation “gets credit for supporting people working on a particular line of inquiry who didn’t have a lot of other ways of doing their work.”

Free free speech

The 20th-century free speech movement took pride in defending the rights of people whose values it loathed, like the Nazis marching in Skokie. The present-day one seems largely about defending the speech and the views of your most toxic allies, rather than standing up for any real principle. It’s possible, for instance, to say that disgusting antisemites should be allowed to speak on college campuses — and that dangerous election deniers should be allowed to have a platform on X. But more often, you see public figures, right and left, merely making excuses for their own allies’ most offensive speech.

To that point, I’d suggest reading a lawsuit filed by the influential Instagram influencer Jessica Reed Kraus, AKA House Inhabit, who Max profiled in February. A fan of RFK Jr., she’s led her audience to the absolute lunatic fringe in recent weeks. (“Crowdstrike Conspiracy Entangles Blackrock, Clinton, DNC, Assange, WikiLeaks, Seth Rich,” reads one post’s headline.) But you can find her content amusingly, or disturbingly, nuts and still be bothered by the cat-and-mouse game she had to play with Meta to promote her preferred candidate. The issue seems to be that Kennedy’s own lunatic-fringe medical views get downplayed on Meta’s platforms, and so her attempts to share them do, too.

A judge was unimpressed with Kennedy’s own arguments, but seeing the world from people on the wrong side of a platform’s power can still be unsettling. Anyway, these are hard questions, but I think they’re better approached with the old 20th-century framework, in which you aren’t required to pick up a sign and march alongside the Nazis to care about free speech.

The Kremlin’s long arm?

The director of an anti-Putin film told Semafor this week that a last-minute legal action blocking its screening in Venice on copyright grounds is connected to an alleged string of intimidation attempts by the Russian government.

The film, The Antique, tells the story of Georgians who were deported from Russia in 2006 amid a crisis between the two countries. It was scheduled to be screened in Venice last week in the Giornate degli Autori, a film competition hosted during the Venice International Film Festival.

“We are in the middle of Europe, and we are under censorship,” director Rusudan Glurjidze said. She also described a campaign of harassment in St. Petersburg during filming in the run-up to the Ukraine war.

The details of this dispute will be resolved, for now, in an Italian court. But they come after a decade in which it has grown harder and harder to release movies that might anger authoritarian states. The devastating North Korean hack of Sony in 2014 put producers and distributors on notice that criticizing countries with advanced cyberwarfare capacities could be risky. And Hollywood dreams of riches in the Chinese market have for years shaped everything from the subject matter of major films to characters’ dialogue.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D); Scott Gottlieb, Physician; Former Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration (2017-2019) and Samuel Levine, Director, FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection will join Semafor’s editors in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Sept. 4 for discussions at the intersection of youth, social media, age-appropriate marketing and data privacy.

RSVP to watch in-person or livestream.

Amanda Kludt is the former editor-in-chief of Eater, among other titles. She will join The New York Times this month as the new senior editor for projects and initiatives.

⁜ Tech

X’ed out: The Times’ coverage of how Brazil wound up taking the extreme action of blocking X amid an escalating confrontation with Musk includes this thoughtful note from Jameel Jaffer: “The thing that is really disturbing is that increasingly, undemocratic governments can point to democratic ones to justify their actions.”

Big in Brazil: Brazil’s brilliant internet has always played an outsized, oddball role in global digital culture, and the X ban will spill out into global fandom, writes Taylor Lorenz on her Substack.

u/jaredpolis: The Colorado governor introduced himself to the DNC “as a Redditor, gamer, entrepreneur, and Swiftie,” and his profile on the venerable platform is for real. It includes goofy comments about his speech, earnest praise for other users, and discussions of permitting reform in the r/neoliberal subreddit. Sounds like a Redditor!

⁛ News

Cooked: Business Insider’s executive editor for news, John Cook — a longtime investigative editor and veteran of the Gawker wars — is leaving for an undisclosed new gig, two Business Insider insiders say.

California dreaming: The longtime media analyst Ken Doctor, now putting his money where his mouth is with a California news startup, thinks the recent controversial deal for tech companies to provide some support for news organizations is a good start — and a model for other states. But the numbers are still pretty small. “Biggest picture: It’s a reminder that those of us who want a vibrant local press into the 2030s should spend less of our time chasing ‘cavalry to the rescue’ help and more building earned revenue businesses.”

New media paradox: “The journalism business may be tanking, but the practice itself has never been more robust,” writes Mathew Ingram in a reflective Columbia Journalism Review farewell.

⁌ TV

Cable news: C-SPAN’s new CEO, Sam Feist, begins work Tuesday.

Fútbol: Mexican giant Televisa, which owns Univision, is facing a federal investigation over an alleged FIFA rights bribe.

• Democrats are feeling good about the election — but not Florida good.
• Why mosquito-borne diseases are surging.
• How South Africa’s economy could get a $5 billion digital boost.