Media

An open letter to Jeff Bezos

I’ve spent over 30 years building news media companies and leading some of the world’s most respected mastheads — from The Atlantic and The Economist to Bloomberg. For the past two years, my partner Ben Smith and I have been building Semafor, a new media company with a clear mission: restoring trust in news through transparency and impartiality.

I wanted to reach out with some thoughts on your recent decision to end The Washington Post’s tradition of presidential endorsements. I appreciate your candor and take you at your word that this was a “principled” decision. But I’m writing with a sense of urgency, because as leaders responsible for protecting one of democracy’s core pillars, I believe there’s a lot more we can do. And I hope this letter inspires you to step forward, accelerate your efforts, and join me, my colleagues at Semafor, and other industry leaders in tackling the urgent mission of restoring trust in news.

The New York Times wrestles with its political role

With the 2024 presidential election a few weeks away, one question was top of mind for staff at The New York Times: Had the paper’s leadership noticed how many Democrats had become furious at it over its coverage of Donald Trump?

The Times, and the American media at large, absorb endless vitriol from the right. At a rally Sunday, Donald Trump joked that he wouldn’t mind if another would-be assassin had to “shoot through” the press pen to get to him.

But when the country’s most influential newsroom assembled at the paper’s New York headquarters for a nearly 90-minute-long off-the-record Q&A with the paper’s top editors on Oct. 24, some of its journalists voiced a different set of concerns about the 2024 election and how its outcome might shape the paper’s future.

Semafor obtained a recording of the meeting, which offers extraordinary insight into a key American institution under intense external scrutiny and internal pressure. It is, Executive Editor Joe Kahn said, “the most partisan, polarized time probably that any of us can remember, and we have the largest audience that we’ve ever had in our history.”

Moderators Astead Herndon and Jodi Kantor and other newsroom questioners repeatedly pressed Kahn and managing editor Carolyn Ryan about whether the paper’s coverage of Trump adequately reflected his authoritarian impulses, and whether the paper had deliberately grown more aggressive in the final weeks of the campaign.

Truth in advertising?

Semafor’s Dave Weigel, one of America’s great political journalists and the author of our Americana newsletter, joined us on Mixed Signals this week to talk about political advertising — which is, in some sense, the real campaign, the arena in which candidates put their money where their mouths are. And for all the talk of the damage social media has done to American politics, what about TV ads?

“I sometimes will step back and say, everything today that we covered is basically, ‘Is this lie effective?’ … A lot of the political discourse is really, ‘Will people believe this BS because there’s a lot of money behind it?’ I do think it just has gotten worse in every cycle that I’ve covered. That clearly is having a deranging effect.”

Sign up for Mixed Signals here to hear our conversation.

Michael Wolff’s Trump-Epstein bombshell

They call it an October Surprise for a reason: November is too late! Michael Wolff’s release on his podcast and in the Daily Beast of tapes of Jeffrey Epstein saying he was Donald Trump’s “best friend” — and adding explicit detail of what that meant — is a genuine shocker, but no major outlet will feel they have the time to fairly arbitrate it by Tuesday.

The Epstein story is dark and troubling, but the pedophile also made a lot of it up himself, and a lot of the most lurid theories have little evidence to them — which hasn’t stopped Trump, or many others, from slinging conspiracies.

I asked Wolff — who has had the Epstein tapes for years — why he waited so long. “Over the years, I hawked it to every major media outlet and they all ‘passed.’ I shelved it and didn’t think much about it until that model, Stacey Williams, linked Epstein and Trump last week. Then we did a podcast about it and it blew up and we rushed to pull it together. Life.”

What to make of that Iowa poll

A shocking Des Moines Register poll has Harris leading Trump in Iowa. Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin writes that while there’s reason to be skeptical about a single poll — which Trump’s pollster dismissed as a “clear outlier” — it nevertheless carries warning signs for the Republican’s campaign because Iowa’s electorate has similarities to Wisconsin’s and Michigan’s.

J. Ann Selzer, who conducted the Register poll, has long been seen as the gold-standard pollster for predicting results in her state. And even as others, after underestimating Trump in key states in 2016 and 2020, adopted new techniques like weighting to how respondents say they voted in the last election, Selzer’s polls — and some other high-quality polls like the New York Times/Siena survey — don’t employ these methods, on the grounds that they do not have a proven track record of success. Elections guru Nate Silver has also accused certain pollsters, especially less-established ones, of “herding” their results toward a close race using subtle methodological decisions out of fear of getting things wildly wrong in either direction.

John Ellis is the founder and editor of the influential newsletter News Items and a veteran of several news networks, including Fox News and NBC.

⁌ TV

Singing the blues: CBS keeps letting broadcast rights to major television events walk out the door. Last month, ABC won the broadcast rights to the Grammys, while NBC just got the rights to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which had been owned by CBS since 1971, according to Variety’s Brian Steinberg. Are these shrewd cost-saving measures, a sign of Paramount’s instability while it waits for the sale to close, or both?

Tangled cables: Comcast’s suggestion this week that it might spin off its cable assets is just the latest sign that the legacy media players want to be out of the business of traditional linear television in the near future. But as Disney found out last year when it moved away from a plan to sell ABC, the big conglomerates are still struggling to figure out how to disentangle those assets from their broadcast networks, or hold on to the valuable stuff while discarding the rest.

⁛ News

Subscribed: Just six months after former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan launched the progressive outlet Zeteo, it has racked up 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. The publication, which primarily runs on Substack, also shared that last month it added over 100 “founding members,” subscribers willing to pay $500 a month for its content.

Shining armor: The Knight Foundation is offering support and legal tools to smaller newsrooms to cover the election and any challenges to election results in its aftermath.

Hot take: This week, Semafor spoke with the Economist’s US news editor about the value of presidential endorsements, and how the Economist’s nod differs from endorsements by other news outlets.

⁜ Tech

X’d out: Changes that Elon Musk has made to X incentivizing engagement at all costs have created a proliferation of outlandish political fanfiction. Sam Stein noted that in particular, a class of blue-check pro-Trump posters have gone viral claiming to have sources inside Harris’ campaign sharing damning info about her treatment of staffers. The claims don’t stand up to scrutiny, but show the way in which Musk has actually helped people on his platform monetize misinformation about American politics.

☊ Audio

Ripple effect: Though his meandering interviews with Trump and JD Vance got more attention, Rogan, the Austin-based podcaster, was also responsible for helping to elevate Tony Hinchcliffe, the roast comic whose racist joke about Puerto Rico could end up being the last real moment that mattered in the election.

Germany is gaming out what a Donald Trump victory would mean for Berlin, with diplomats and politicians racing to build relationships with Republicans, German lawmakers and officials told Semafor. Berlin did little to prepare for Trump’s victory in 2016, and some worry that Trump would withdraw US troops from Germany, something he tried to do before Joe Biden reversed the decision.

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