Media

1. Trump’s suit vs. the Pulitzers
2. What Ozy’s fall says about the media
3. The need for local news
4. NYT vs. critics
5. Partisan media’s long history

Welcome to Semafor Media, where your Christmas present is a trip back to 2017.

I spent the week exploring Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes, the strangest and most interesting among his spree of lawsuits against the press.

I spoke to media lawyers who are trying to understand a landscape that has been shifting for years against them. Some of this comes from Trump, who sued CBS News for $10 billion in Amarillo for interview edits and is going after an Iowa pollster who got the election wrong. Some of Trump’s allies like to talk about reshaping American law. Others see these lawsuits as a mere round of score-settling and brushback pitches. As is often the case with Trump, the answer may be a bit of both.

Another major source of pressure on the press comes from the dramatic inflation of defamation verdicts: The $787.5 million Dominion settlement, the $148 million defamation for Rudy Giuliani’s lies about two poll workers. Many liberals and some journalists celebrated these verdicts, but First Amendment lawyers shuddered. If Giuliani had backed his car over the defendants and killed them, one prominent media lawyer noted ruefully, the wrongful death verdict would have been a fraction of that sum. And people close to ABC’s decision to settle with Trump for $15 million say it had less to do with buying peace with the new administration, and more with the risk of going to a trial in which George Stephanopoulos’s relationships with old friends from the Clinton years could make the case messy and expensive.

Fabio Bertoni, the New Yorker general counsel, has held two meetings with the counsels for media organizations at Conde Nast’s Manhattan headquarters to discuss this changed world. The consensus, said one top media lawyer, is that “we are entering a new era with new rules.” There are wide open questions, including whether the Justice Department will preserve guidelines that protect journalists from subpoenas. Their next meeting, which also includes the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, will feature leaders of the Florida bar, there to give their New York colleagues insight into Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Pam Bondi.

Also today: Ozy, local news, Times vs. Journal, The Atlantic snubs Biden, and a historian’s reminder. (Scoop count: 4)

And some Semafor news: The New York Times reported last week on publishers’ “battle for the C-suite” and the launch of CEO Signal from Semafor Business. It’s our exclusive, invitation-only membership for what Liz Hoffman refers to as global bosses. Request an invitation here.

Relitigating the Pulitzers and Russia “collusion”

There’s an unusual tradition in Florida courts: a judge deciding on a motion will sometimes ask each party to submit their own version of the ruling. Then, the judge will simply sign one. That’s how Judge Robert Pegg’s July ruling against 20 of America’s leading journalists imported the unusual capitalization that is part of the House Style of Trump lawsuits, in this case repeated, deadpan references to the “Russia Collusion Hoax.”

In the three years since it was filed, the defamation lawsuit has gone from a curiosity to a source of real concern in some of the country’s top newsrooms. On September 30, 2021, President Donald Trump wrote to the Pulitzer Prize Board with an unusual demand. The former president asked the board to “strip” the 2018 national reporting prize from the Washington Post and New York Times, which had been honored for their “relentlessly reported coverage” of “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration,” according to the citation at the time of the award.

The then-former president added in black Sharpie under his signature: “P.S. Our country has been hurt so badly by this criminal scam. Please do the right thing.”

It wasn’t the first complaint about that award. In 2019, the Pulitzer board, a volunteer body of 20 of America’s best-regarded journalists, had quietly commissioned a review of the coverage, which concluded the reporting was fine. But the stakes felt higher this time.

“Because of his standing in America and the likelihood of this could turn to litigation, we thought we should, with an open mind, look at it all again,” a board member, the veteran AP editor John Daniszewski, later said, according to the transcript of his deposition.

The board launched a second review whose author and substance, like the first one, remain confidential. But it, likewise, found no flaws in reporting which preceded and then covered Robert Mueller’s investigation of those subjects, stories on subjects like Trump aide Michael Flynn’s conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions, and Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton.

In November 2021, the board drafted a statement responding to Trump, according to Katherine Boo, the board member and investigative journalist who, with Daniszewski, took the lead on the project. (Daniszewski, Boo, and other board members declined to speak about the lawsuit, and their views and correspondence are drawn from depositions.) They sent the draft to the lawyers for Columbia University, which houses but does not run the Pulitzers, and then waited.

On May 31, 2022, Daniszewski sent then-Columbia President Lee Bollinger an impatient email: “We have a statement we wish to release, saying we have investigated his grievance thoroughly and we are denying his request to rescind the prizes,” he wrote. “We have held off with our answer because the counsel for Columbia wanted to review it. But we have not heard from them in some time despite repeated inquiries.”

Finally, on July 18, the Pulitzer Board released its statement: “The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.” they wrote. “The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”

That statement is now the cause of action for the strangest and most interesting piece of litigation in President Donald Trump’s effort to literally relitigate the journalism of the last decade.

Revisiting Ozy Media

Scams and con artists are fascinating because they hold up a mirror to their victims, telling them what they want to hear. Ozy’s Carlos Watson sold Silicon Valley investors a version of a new media that was bipartisan and focused on the future. He sold advertisers an illusion of scale. Then, amid the social justice moment of 2020, he sold social justice to big marketers and wealthy financiers.

He got caught when, as I reported in the New York Times in 2021, he and his co-founder impersonated a YouTube official on a phone call delivering Goldman Sachs — sophisticated investors who were on the cusp of putting in $40 million — the endorsement they were looking for.

On Mixed Signals this week, we revisited that story in the wake of Watson’s sentence of nearly 10 years. And we spoke to the advertising analyst Brian Wieser about what this kind of deception says about our gullible industry, about the techniques of measurement scrambling to catch up, and about how the new age of influencer marketing is going to produce a new generation of scams.

— Ben Smith

Local news’ crisis and opportunity

Local news is both the most troubled part of the journalism business and, in some ways, the one best suited to address its crisis of trust, as the new editor in chief of the Civic News Company, Shani Hilton, argued last week at an event at New York’s Century Club last week.

“Local is the place where we can break down polarization and partisanship — because it’s in schools and community meetings that people need good facts to make good decisions. And those are the places where people are most likely to want information we provide and trust our reporting regardless of politics,” she said. Civic has 15 bureaus, and publishes Chalkbeat, Votebeat, and Healthbeat in cities around the US, a model that she argued the future requires.

“This organization pulls together the best of both national media and local – you need both. It’s really difficult for local to work financially without scale, and national media can’t create great journalism without grounding in the local level.”

The Times pushes back

The New York Times lobbied The Wall Street Journal to correct a recent op-ed column criticizing the Times’ coverage of immigration, part of an aggressive new posture toward critics, also including the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America.

Journal columnist Jason L. Riley published a December 17 column claiming that the Times waited until after the presidential election to cover the wave of migration to the US: “This is what happens when the press is more interested in shaping public opinion than in reporting the facts.”

In an email earlier this week to opinion editor Paul Gigot viewed by Semafor, a Times spokesperson for the paper listed 24 different Times stories published before the election that focused specifically on the rise in asylum seekers and unlawful migration to the US over the past several years, and asked the Gigot to update the piece.

“The Times has shown commitment to covering all aspects of this issue throughout President Biden’s term, and will continue to do so in the administration to come,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said. “Jason is of course free to disagree with The Times’s coverage, and we’re not asking for an Opinion columnist to shift their perspective. We’re simply asking for factual accuracy in journalism, which I know is something you value in your own report.”

The Journal seemingly was unmoved by the request. As of December 21, the paper did not appear to have updated its piece.

— Max Tani

Analysis: Media’s return to the past

Christopher McKnight Nichols is Hayes Chair in National Security Studies and a Professor of History at The Ohio State University.

Here’s the good news, and the bad news, for journalists troubled by the decline in trust in your profession: “Trust in media” is a relatively new phenomenon, dating to the rise of survey data in the 1930s. The media’s devotion to the idea of the “public interest” and its associated impartiality also roughly dates to the mid-20th Century. Trust in the media has been declining for decades.

Meanwhile, taking a longer view of our collective past shows us that the current landscape of a partisan and deeply divided American media – coarsening and polarizing politics, spreading unreliable information and propaganda — is in many ways just a return to business as usual.

For most of U.S. history journalists and the press were overtly, often sensationally partisan. Citizens expected as much. So did politicians. Historians of journalism have well documented that readers supported and trusted “their” media — Republican or Whig or Know Nothing or Jacksonian or Populist or Socialist publications — and turned a blind eye to much of the rest. To put it differently, “echo chambers” once existed in the world of print as much as they do today in the world of social media.

Ashley Carman covers podcasting, music, and audio for Bloomberg News.

⁛ News

Status update: Several major media companies have expressed interest in investing in Status, the daily media newsletter from former Reliable Sources author Oliver Darcy. In the four months since it launched, Darcy’s newsletter has attracted tens of thousands of subscribers off the back of major scoops, including the Olivia Nuzzi-RFK scandal and the Washington Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate. Evidently that has piqued the interest of several major politics and entertainment industry-focused media organizations. While Darcy declined to comment on the interest and said he was not actively seeking investment, he was intrigued by the possibility of expanding to audio and video products in 2025, and programming live media-focused events.

Biden rejection: President Joe Biden surprised some media watchers last week by engaging with non-traditional left-leaning media outlets, including the American Prospect and the pro-labor digital media outlet More Perfect Union. While the outgoing president has continued to avoid interviews with traditional media outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post, before his team penned an op-ed for the American Prospect touting his successes, they first pitched the op-ed to the Atlantic. Within the magazine, there were some reservations about whether to run the op-ed, considering Biden’s failure to give on record interviews to numerous mainstream legacy news outlets including the Atlantic throughout the course of his four-year term. Still, the magazine had run an op-ed with Biden previously, and accepted a draft from the White House. But when the magazine sent the piece back with edits, revisions, and notes from Gilad Edelman, the White House balked at many of the suggested tweaks. The Atlantic decided not to run the piece.

Despite its small staff, the Prospect has been one of the most tapped-in chroniclers of Biden administration policy and staffing over the course of the president’s term, scoring a number of notable exclusives and scoops. “We consider it a real testament to the work we’ve done that the president would want to speak to our audience,” Prospect editor David Dayen told Semafor in an email last week. 

Mixed messages: A fascinating detail from Jonathan Martin’s conversation with Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and campaign manager Chris LaCivita: “They just didn’t really have a coherent message,” Fabrizio said of the Harris campaign. “One of the untold stories of this race — perfect example, last week of the campaign. They ran 162 different unique creatives on digital, TV.” Trump ran just 50 distinct ads with a similar budget, and basically just two on broadcast TV.

What year is it? It’s the year of the Max Tani scoop, according to the wise heads of LinkedIn. Please continue to help Max cope with the following situation: “Scoops are what I think about every moment of the working day and then some moments of the non-working day. The way I’ve approached the job is to think about my competitive edge, the thing that’s going to put us ahead. And that’s to either say something nobody else is saying, whether it’s a reporting scoop or something that nobody has noticed that’s just sitting there. Or also, reporting something that nobody else has said because nobody knows it. Those are the things I look for when we’re going to pursue a story.”

® Marketing

Slump: The NBA’s ratings have sagged this season, prompting the league’s commentariat and some of its top stars to try to figure out what is fueling the decline, and what to do about it. Last week, Lebron James suggested fans were bored by the number of three point shots teams were making, Magic Johnson suggested that players nowadays were too close of friends and needed more intense rivalries. Coach JJ Redick said that the league hasn’t done a good job marketing interesting basketball narratives, while Bill Simmons suggested cutting down the number of regular season games to give each game more weight. Ultimately, the dip in ratings this year has much more to do with broader user behavioral shifts from television to digital than the wokeness of the league’s stars.

⁋ Publishing

The Obama endorsement: His endorsement may not have made much of a difference in the presidential race, but former President Barack Obama’s recommendations for the year’s best films, songs, and books are becoming a crucial part of the year-end awards cycle. Last week, the marketing team for A Complete Unknown quickly took advantage of Obama’s recent endorsement of the film, listing the Obama stamp among a number of more traditional critical accolades from critics. A few years ago, I asked Obama spokesperson Eric Schultz whether authors, musicians, and Hollywood bigwigs lobbied to get onto Obama’s year-end lists. Schultz told me at the time that he has occasionally gotten inquiries, but the former president puts the lists together himself.

President-elect Donald Trump and his allies are frustrated that the spending bill Congress agreed on late Friday and early Saturday didn’t include his key demand to address the looming expiration of the debt ceiling — and some are putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Semafor’s Shelby Talcott examines Johnson’s prospects for keeping his position in the next Congress.