Media

1. What’s next for Paramount-WBD
2. Steve Hilton’s balancing act
3. CBS News’ new podcast boss
4. Maryland’s intensifying media feud
5. Institutional distrust

What comes after America’s summer of sports?

Tens of millions of Americans have spent much of June and July — typically the slow season in the media world, when people tune out for a few weeks — screaming at their television sets. (Spain in the 106th minute! What a game!)

Sports are filling the void in the US in an era of cultural fragmentation and embittered public life. Success is spectacle — see also The Odyssey, which looks poised to make hundreds of millions of dollars in its opening weekend. But live sports are the last best hope of an American television industry disrupted by streaming. Media companies are already publicly jostling for the rights to the next World Cup.

So as I was watching the game, I wrote to Mark Lazarus, one of the great sports media executives and now CEO of Versant, which just announced a $100 million deal this week for the broadcast rights for the German Bundesliga. Lazarus’ bet, and the bet of many major US media executives, is that sports and live events will come to absorb more and more of our lives and marketers’ dollars. But the leagues and media companies have to keep the games interesting and the stakes high to maintain viewers’ attention.

“The action has been very compelling and that brings in new fans,” Lazarus told Semafor of the last few months, from the World Cup to Knicks-mania. “Live news and sports, as well as live events, are the most exciting forms of media and spectator interaction. We are bullish on all the above. Fans want consequences. Finals, Championship games, etc., a Game 7, or any win-or-go-home event will always be big and getting bigger.”

Also today: CBS News’ new podcast chief, and how Steve Hilton balances being a California critic and booster.

Next steps for Paramount-WBD

A federal judge will decide Wednesday whether to issue a temporary restraining order preventing Paramount from consummating its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. For those not steeped in the intricacies of merger litigation (and who can blame you!): Even if Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín doesn’t grant that restraining order, the states will still seek to secure a preliminary injunction that would tie up the merger. Paramount is on the hook for roughly $625 million payable to shareholders, quarterly, by the end of September, so it has many reasons to stave that off.

The company has hired antitrust and Supreme Court counsel, and has already argued that the states have a flawed definition of the competitive markets in which Paramount operates. The states say the merger inflicts varying degrees of anticompetitive harm on blockbuster movies, the wider movie market, and cable TV.

Looming over it all is some risk that, if Paramount doesn’t win this fight, it will pick up at least part of its business and leave California, as Semafor reported last Sunday. Asked about our reporting, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said it “seemed like a last-ditch effort to blackmail my office.”

Some signs suggest this isn’t a completely idle threat. Tennessee’s economic development chief has been courting Paramount for most of July; the company could follow the footsteps of conservative podcasters and country music stars that have made Nashville a mini-media hub for the center-right. But as we noted in our original report, the odds are slim that Paramount’s David Ellison, who has deep roots in California, would be happy to leave town.

— Rohan Goswami

Hilton’s optimistic-pessimistic pitch

Steve Hilton made some news on Mixed Signals this week: The Republican candidate for California governor told us he doesn’t buy Paramount’s suggestion it would leave California if the merger with Warner Bros. Discovery doesn’t go its way. Hilton also hinted that he’s got Spencer Pratt-style AI ads coming. But I was most eager to ask the former Fox News anchor about one of my own obsessions: conservative media’s insistence that my gorgeous (if flawed) home state is a dystopian hellhole.

Hilton attempted to thread the needle. He pointed to real problems with the state’s Democratic leadership while acknowledging that the dystopia narrative is reductive, citing the Golden State’s natural beauty, top-tier universities, strong economy, and “rebel spirit.”

“Both things can be true: Even now with all these things going wrong, there’s nowhere better than California,” he said. “At the same time, as Gavin keeps pointing out: We are the world’s fourth-biggest economy. But it’s an economy that isn’t working for the people who live here.”

Pesca to be CBS News’ new podcast chief

CBS News is hiring Mike Pesca, former host of the long-running daily podcast The Gist, as the network’s new editorial director for podcasting, Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss told network staff on Friday.

Pesca’s hire represents the continued Free Press-ization of CBS in two ways: He’s a man who spent much of his career in radio and podcasting, but left Slate in 2021 amid an internal clash over workplace-appropriate language in the wake of the 2020 racial reckoning. He has since written for The Free Press, and he’s just the latest Free Press contributor to score a role in Free Press founder Weiss’ CBS newsroom.

Pesca’s hire is the latest move the network has made into podcasting as the network hopes to catch up to rivals in the space. Since Weiss joined the network, CBS News has launched a personal finance advice podcast with business personality Jill Schlesinger, and it is launching a podcast next week on women’s health from former Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell.

CBS and its peers, which have lagged behind their audio-first and digital-native competitors in podcasting, are pouring resources into trying to figure it out: NBC News has built its Dateline franchise into one of the biggest true crime podcasts in the country, while ABC News and CBS News have found some audience success with their respective true crime podcasts, 20/20 and 48 Hours.

Pesca left The Gist earlier this month with an acknowledgment that podcasting is merely “the cousin of video.” Still, Pesca told his listeners that he believes there’s a major audience for audio-only podcasts. “There’s more than a market for it, there’s a human need for it,” he said on his final broadcast.

Moore/Sun rivalry deepens with legal threats

The owner of The Baltimore Sun is threatening to sue Maryland Gov. Wes Moore over comments the Democratic governor made linking him to Jeffrey Epstein. During an appearance on MS NOW last month, Moore was asked about the newspaper’s recent critical reporting on his administration and military record. The governor dismissed those reports as political hit pieces and tried to tie Sinclair’s executive chairman, David Smith, to the disgraced financier.

In a letter sent in June and seen by Semafor, a lawyer for Smith argued that Moore’s claims were potentially defamatory and made a list of demands: The governor should issue a “clear, unequivocal public retraction and correction,” the letter said, and “identify, at least at a high level, the factual basis (if any) on which you relied in making the statement.”

Moore so far hasn’t backed down. In a note sent on Tuesday, a personal attorney for the governor said that Epstein’s funds had owned several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of investments in Sinclair when Smith was chairman and CEO, and brushed off the case as “meritless.”

The exchange is the latest flare-up in tensions between the owners of Maryland’s most famous legacy news outlet and its governor. And their rivalry has intensified in recent months, as the Sun and Sinclair have dedicated more and more ink to probing Moore’s military record, which the paper reported has “gaps and discrepancies.” Moore’s team has said the investigations are politically motivated, noting Smith’s personal involvement.

Crisis of confidence

Americans’ confidence in US institutions continues to slide, and few have fared worse than the press. Gallup updated its annual survey last week of Americans’ feelings about more than a dozen governmental bodies and industries. The poll found that in 2026, confidence in newspapers fell to a near-record low of 17%, while confidence in TV news ticked up to 14%, from 11%. (That’s still second-from-worst on the list — just ahead of Congress, with 9% confidence.) Gallup has only polled respondents about technology companies for a few years, but the trend so far suggests Americans are growing more skeptical of Silicon Valley, too; one in five said they’re confident in Big Tech in 2026, down from a 2020 high of 32%.

— Graph Massara

New York Magazine: “When you’re Netflix, even a few sniffles can seem like pneumonia,” Josef Adalian writes of the streamer’s anxiety over declining viewership (despite strong profits).

Bloomberg: Miles Surrey has a prescription for studios nervous about overspending on blockbusters that flop, like the recent Moana remake: Stop paying expensive A-list talent “as if success is guaranteed and start rewarding them when they actually deliver it.”

The Guardian: Andy Beckett chronicles how a diaspora of Daily Mail alumni pushed the UK’s conservative papers toward right-wing tabloid coverage.

NYT: Superagent Ari Emanuel’s pan-ideological connections in the entertainment world may prove especially useful for his brother Rahm, a potential 2028 presidential contender, Andrew Zucker writes.

WSJ: Kara Voght profiles Emily Austin, the MAGA-connected influencer who leveraged her White House ties to cover the FIFA World Cup at close range.

ProPublica: FCC commissioners have accepted tickets to the Kennedy Center’s swanky honors gala from Paramount, Corey G. Johnson reports.

The Verge: Charles Pulliam-Moore pens a scathing review of an AI startup’s “direct-to-video” knockoff of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

AFP: Reporters for the wire service witnessed Hong Kong officials raiding and arresting workers at a bookstore run by former journalists.

• Substack is preparing to announce new features on Tuesday to take on AI slop that will, per one source’s description, “restore readers’ trust in the content they consume,” Semafor has learned.
• The New York Times updated several pieces written by columnist Nick Kristof, after Semafor first reported earlier this summer that the paper failed to include disclosures of ties to previous donors to his scuttled Oregon gubernatorial campaign.
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been fairly mum on his attorney general’s lawsuit to stop Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. The normally outspoken governor’s silence on the suit has prompted some speculation within the media industry that he isn’t as enthusiastic about the lawsuit as others within the Democratic Party; several dozen Democratic members of Congress immediately praised the suit, as did New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Puck’s Matt Belloni reported last month that Newsom had recently met privately with Ellison. When Semafor asked Newsom in March about whether California would move to stop the deal, he said he had “no personal animus” against Ellison, and the state was simply “doing its job” by taking a look at the merger; Newsom said his greater concern was the debt Paramount was taking on to complete the deal.
• One upside of creator-led media: True subject-matter experts now have the space and platform to just cook. Semafor Media has been particularly fond of chef (and recent Mixed Signals guest) Flynn McGarry’s Substack, which offers an in-depth description of the New York City produce he uses and how he gets it. This week’s edition walks readers through the quality of waves of tomatoes and when they arrive at the Union Square farmers market.
• Disruption has come for what has long been one of the most reliable funding models in global news: the BBC’s TV license fee. Katie Razzall breaks down a new BBC report charting the increasing decline of licenses as more British viewers cut the cord.
• Feed Me’s online store relaunched this week, with help from former New York Times digital designer Shannon Lin. The NeXT-inspired logo hat has been the hottest item, author Emily Sundberg tells us.