⁛ NewsREUTERS/Rachel MummeyFamily ties: The powerful right-wing talker Mark Levin has described himself as “all in for DeSantis” — but hasn’t disclosed his family connection to the campaign. Levin’s stepson worked on Jewish and pro-Israel outreach for Ron DeSantis’ gubernatorial re-election campaign and presidential campaign, Semafor first reported last week. Sydney is not sending its best: An Australian politician named Nick Adams was seen as “an attention-seeker and a clown” by the time his career ended there, so he moved to Florida and reinvented himself as a sycophantic pro-Trump influencer. Gaza in El Segundo: The Los Angeles Times is prohibiting its journalists from covering the Gaza war for at least three months if they signed a strongly-worded open letter criticizing Israel’s military operations in the region, Max scooped last week. Earlier this month, nearly a dozen staffers at the LA Times signed the open letter, which condemned the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza and said the military operations were harming journalists and threatening newsgathering. The letter also called on newsrooms to use language including “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide” when referring to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Nice work if you can get it: A German journalist famous for his access to — and sympathetic coverage of — Vladimir Putin also collected some €600,000 from sources close to the Russian government, per The Guardian. ⁜ TechYou can’t handle the truth: Former President Donald Trump’s social media company is not pleased with public reports about its financial struggles. Staffers at multiple prominent news outlets told Semafor that over the last several months, they had received threatening legal letters from Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, following reports about its prolonged merger with the company Digital World and reports that it has lost millions of dollars since its launch in 2021. Truth Social has complained publicly about media coverage of the platform, with a spokesperson dubbing it a “relentless mainstream media campaign peddling false information about Truth Social.” ‘In fact negative’: You’ll really never see a prepared quote quite like this in a story about an executive departure, but former BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen is always known for her straight talk. “BuzzFeed Inc. has been, from the beginning, premised on the idea of a large network that is powerful and valuable,” Nguyen told Adweek. “But what has happened in the past two years is that with the fragmentation of audiences, the advertising market challenges and that squeeze from the big tech platforms, the network’s value, and specifically the value of distributed-only audiences, has been rapidly diminishing, and now it’s approaching zero, and some might argue that its value is in fact negative.” Bad Apple: Surveys continue to show that a large segment of Americans remain wary of large tech companies that own both media properties and nascent AI programs. In a new poll from the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute shared with Semafor, 50% of survey respondents said they disapproved of Apple ending Jon Stewart’s show because he’d chosen to cover China and artificial intelligence. Only 19% of respondents approved of canceling the show. Cost of privacy: The nonprofit encrypted messaging app Signal opened its books to illustrate the costs of running a service without selling your eyeballs or information — $50 million a year. ☊ AudioRadio days: Radio giant Audacy, which swallowed the former CBS Radio in 2017 and has been in talks with creditors over the past several months to refinance its debt, is weighing declaring bankruptcy in the coming days, according to two people familiar with the plans. As Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman reported this week, the company has been crippled by a decline in advertising and a rapidly aging audience, and has struggled to compete in podcasting with streaming competitors like Spotify. ✰ HollywoodNo Zaz love lost: The honeymoon is truly over for Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. This week’s 8,000-word Mahler-Stewart-Mullin New York Times obituary explores a Big Media world in which nobody is having any fun (aside possibly from the good people at Mattel). A companion piece (2 bylines, 2,600 words) explains that Zaslav also has no friends anymore. Climate changes: Earth Alliance, launched in 2019 by Laurene Powell Jobs and Leonardo DiCaprio to fight climate change with media, is being folded into the biodiversity group Re:wild, one of its original partners, a spokeswoman for Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective said. ⁌ TVTense in Doral: A Univision founder tells Adrian Carrasquillo that the network’s new, Trump-friendlier direction is “an absolute embarrassment and goes against what I believe and what I created.” ⁋ PublishingThe Agent: The elusive, powerful book agent Andrew Wylie helped shape his business, and his approach is totally singular. “Authority is one of Wylie’s watchwords; it signifies the degree to which his agency can set the terms of book deals for the maximum benefit of its clients,” the Guardian writes in a must-read profile. |