Media

How Democrats are helping restore Fox News to cable dominance

Just hours after being offered a debate by Fox News on Oct. 9, Donald Trump rejected the overture from the conservative television news network that has for a generation been the voice of his party’s base in the US media.

That was inconvenient, most of all, for Kamala Harris’ campaign, which had not replied to the network and was seriously considering accepting the invitation. But while Trump denied Fox in the moment, that role reversal was a sign of the network’s unexpected strength in 2024.

Fox — trapped in the declining cable business, reeling from massive 2020 defamation lawsuits, and despised by American Democrats — has despite it all emerged as a preeminent broadcaster in the final stretch of the presidential campaign. The network has continued to top cable news ratings, averaging 1,571,000 total-day viewers and 2,641,000 primetime viewers last quarter, which the network boasts surpassed ratings for traditional broadcasters ABC and CBS. The top 13 cable news shows among the key 25-54 age group were all on Fox.

And Fox expects this to be great for business: “We do expect a very robust political cycle, and we think a record political cycle, [excluding] the Georgia runoff four years ago,” CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on an earnings call in August, responding to a question about television advertising.

The clearest evidence of that robustness: Fox was the only major television outlet to interview all four people on the presidential ticket this week.

How Donald Trump’s campaign sees the media

The Trump campaign is betting the future of media has arrived: “There has been an emergence of an entirely new landscape and media. It’s gotten beyond a tipping point,” a senior Trump adviser, Brian Hughes, told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott in an unusual, candid joint interview about the campaign’s media strategy.

“There’s a method to everything that we’re doing on media, and they know that’s working for us. That’s why I would argue they’re attacking us as a threat to democracy. While she’s saying that, Trump is talking about Wally Pipp and Lou Gehrig on Bussin’ With The Boys,” said another senior Trump adviser, Alex Bruesewitz.

Meanwhile, they welcome the new social media landscape: X, Instagram, and Facebook are more open to Trump than they were in 2020, and despite policy worries, TikTok has “been good for us this campaign cycle.”

Twitter troll sued for ‘falsely presenting’ as government agent

A startling new lawsuit alleges that conservative media figure and notorious Twitter troll Chuck Johnson and a partner “falsely present themselves as intelligence agents or assets of U.S. government agencies” to pressure companies into doing business with them, Max reported last week.

Point Bridge Capital filed the civil racketeering lawsuit in federal district court in Texas against Johnson and a partner, alleging that after Johnson invested in one of Point Bridge’s companies, the two began pressuring Point Bridge founder Hal Lambert to take a side in a dispute between Johnson and the facial recognition company Clearview AI, which Point Bridge invests in.

The lawsuit alleges that Johnson and his partner said they would convince intelligence agencies to retaliate against Point Bridge and Clearview. Johnson said in an email that he looks forward to discovery if the lawsuit proceeds.

Semafor turns 2

“When we announced on January 1 of 2022 that we planned to launch a new global news organization, it sounded a bit crazy — even to us. Skeptics, reasonably, questioned our grandiose goals: To fight polarization in a divided era and to bring a global lens to a splintering world — not to mention building a thriving business in a gloomy industry,” Ben and Justin wrote in an email to readers this week.

“Now, on the second anniversary of Semafor’s launch, we’re proud to say that, even amid global conflicts and harsh domestic politics, we’ve held our ground on the core issue of political polarization. We’ve earned the trust of sophisticated people in leadership roles around the world by focusing on what you need to know — not just what you want to hear. We’ve separated news from opinion in our Semaform, brought room for civil disagreement across our products, and pulled in views from all over the world.”

Katherine Bell is the executive editor of the newly-launched Bloomberg Weekend Edition.

Sergio Ermotti, CEO, UBS; Vincent Van Peteghem, Belgian deputy prime minister and minister of finance; Ali Zaidi, White House climate adviser; Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council; and Amos Hochstein, senior adviser to the president for energy and investments will join the Fall Edition of Semafor’s World Economy Summit.

Hosted in the Gallup Great Hall and spanning four sessions over two days – Oct. 24 and 25 – Semafor will feature on-the-record interviews on the state of global finance, the future of technology, digital payment infrastructure, and sustainability. RSVP for the World Economy Summit here.

⁛ News

Switching on: The Washington Post believes its new marketing campaign will have better luck convincing readers to switch their subscriptions back on than when it rolled out its old slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” As Semafor first reported this summer, the Post has been looking to reshape its brand following a post-Trump slump in subscriptions and audience numbers. The company discussed bringing on legendary ad maker David Droga to help develop a new marketing campaign that could broaden the Post’s appeal beyond politics, and it later rolled out a new marketing campaign: “Switch On.”

At an internal employee meeting on Tuesday, the paper presented survey data for its slogan showing responses suggesting how audiences responded. And though the company emphasized that it is not abandoning its Trump-era slogan, the company noted that dying in darkness did not test as well with readers.

Correction: A previous version of this item incorrectly stated that the Post hired admaker David Droga to work on a new marketing campaign. This item has also been updated to clarify that the “Switch On” campaign is a new Post marketing campaign, not the paper’s official slogan.

Standards Dept.: Popbitch picks up on a Times of London interview with The Cure’s Robert Smith that begins, “The first thing you notice about Robert Smith is that uniform of his.” It was, in fact, “pre-recorded and shopped around to no other takers. And yet it looked to an outsider like an exclusive with the music legend.” The disclosure appears in paragraph 5.

Illegal: A fantastic read in The Guardian explores the doubts about whether a freelance Spanish journalist, a familiar kind of off-kilter, inexplicable media character, was a Russian spy — at least, up until his tarmac greeting by Vladimir Putin.

✰ Hollywood

Doc pulled: A documentary on U.K. extremism titled “Undercover: Exposing the Far Right” has been pulled from the BFI London Film Festival over safety concerns.

✦ Marketing

Coffeehouse vibe: The Chipotle-to-Starbucks pipeline continues with the hire of a chief brand officer, Tressie Lieberman, to “restore the company’s coffeehouse vibe.” She writes on LinkedIn that she will, unlike her boss Brian Niccol, move to Seattle.

Ad (agency) wars: Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun told Campaign that advertisers shouldn’t worry that his vertically-integrated company is jamming their money into a “black box,” a suggestion made by WPP CEO Mark Read. “We have zero tolerance for garbage media,” Sadoun said.

⁋ Publishing

Elite opinion: New York magazine’s Media Elites List is out tomorrow morning. The list features dozens of current and former media heavy-hitters (also, Ben) who sat for portraits and shared frank assessments about the state of the media business.

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