Media

1. Epstein’s image management
2. Live Nation antitrust drama
3. ‘We the People’
4. Mixed Signals
5. File explorers
6. Reality testing
7. TikToker’s e-commerce deal

The Jeffrey Epstein saga has been a major story for years. But over the past several weeks, the Epstein files have truly swallowed every part of the media.

From Dubai, London, and San Francisco to New York and Washington, power brokers around the world are being confronted with unearthed, embarrassing correspondence with Epstein.

We’ve previously written about how Epstein brought out the worst traits in journalists and in audiences, who would fill in reporting gaps with wild theories that flatter their prejudices. That’s still true in some cases: The emails haven’t yet revealed new elements of criminal wrongdoing in the media class. But they’ve become a toxic sludge seeping into various corners of public life, creating an embarrassing paper trail for the many people who interacted with Epstein, regardless of how close they actually were.

The extent of Epstein’s connections to countless people in numerous corridors of power, including media, certainly gives credence to the feeling shared by some Epstein obsessives that everything is just one big backdoor conspiracy. The sheer number of notable (and frankly less notable) public figures who interacted amicably with Epstein after his conviction also suggests that many powerful people either disregarded his actions or were simply too complacent to perform a quick Google search.

Also today: The Washington Post’s aborted ad campaign and a Chinese company’s influencer experiment.

How Epstein used his media connections

Epstein’s correspondence with media leaders often had one goal: cleaning up his image. In 2013, for example, Business Insider had recently published an online story featuring Epstein’s sordid-looking mugshot. In an email to BI founder Henry Blodget, a representative for Epstein’s philanthropic foundation said it was hoping to remove the mugshot because doing so would help its research efforts. “Removing old negative press is extremely difficult and undermines the foundation’s work which funds critical science and medical research,” they said. Business Insider swapped out the mugshot and worked to ensure it did not appear in Google search.

Strains over Live Nation settlement talks

Settlement talks between ticketing giant Live Nation and the Justice Department are deepening fractures inside the Trump administration over antitrust enforcement, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami, Liz Hoffman, and Ben Smith report. Executives and lobbyists have been negotiating with senior DOJ officials outside the antitrust division to avert a trial over whether the company is operating an illegal monopoly that has driven up concert ticket prices, according to people familiar with the matter.

Tensions have been simmering for months between the Trump administration’s largely business-friendly approach and antitrust chief Gail Slater’s skepticism toward corporate mergers. That skepticism has put her at odds with more accommodative Trump DOJ officials, who prefer a light regulatory touch, and her authority has been challenged in several high-profile cases.

Last year, HPE and Juniper avoided an antitrust challenge to a $16 billion merger by appealing directly to top Trump DOJ officials over Slater’s objections, Semafor reported. A large merger of real-estate brokerages similarly was greenlit by higher-ups over the objections of Slater and antitrust staffers.

The Washington Post’s marketing mishap

Late last year, before The Washington Post slashed its staff and ousted its CEO, the paper was looking to juice its brand. So it had prepared a new brand campaign, with a tagline meant to convey its connection to America: “We the People.”

But as the Post was about to debut the campaign, it ran into a major snag. As part of its rebranding as MS NOW, MSNBC announced that it was launching a $20 million brand campaign that would play across television, podcasts, and in physical spaces like airports. The tagline: “We the People.”

MS NOW’s campaign and its massive budget forced the Post to stop what would’ve been its second marketing campaign in about a year, after it ran ads with the tagline “Switch On.” Neither slogan was meant to replace “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” but the paper found that hadn’t been testing as well.

A timely game day episode

What should you make of this year’s Super Bowl ads? On this week’s Mixed Signals, Ben and Max sit down with former McDonald’s CMO Tariq Hassan to discuss what goes into a good celebrity Super Bowl ad, as well as how he handled Trump’s campaign stop at the Golden Arches.

Consider the source

The Epstein files are a trove of unconfirmed claims from questionable sources. One of the particularly incendiary threads comes from a serious-sounding “confidential source” recorded in a formal FBI document claiming that Donald Trump was “compromised by Israel” and that the Chabad Lubavitch network was seeking to “co-opt the Trump presidency.” The document blew up on X, as such documents now do: Aggregator DiscloseTV’s post about the file got 11 million impressions, was picked up credulously by Glenn Greenwald and the comic Dave Smith, and was reshared by popular streamers Cr1TiKaL and Hasan Piker. A Times of London article suggesting Epstein worked for Mossad relied heavily on the same material.

The source offers no evidence, and their name is redacted in the document. But you can find the same case number (the redactions are incredibly sloppy!) in a related document, and it reveals that the source is Charles C. Johnson, a famous troll and occasional Holocaust denier recently found liable in a fraud scheme that involved impersonating an intelligence agent. Johnson was recently released from jail on unrelated contempt charges and said in a statement he doesn’t have access to email or a phone; an inquiry sent to an email he identified as his father’s email account also bounced.

— Ben Smith

Americans fall for viral hoaxes

About half of Americans believed at least one of the top false claims that were circulating online during the last seven months of 2025. That’s according to fake news watchdog NewsGuard, which works with YouGov to poll Americans on viral hoaxes, such as the notion that Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp was surrounded by a moat of actual gators.

The “Reality Gap Index” found that people across party lines can be fairly easily duped. Only 13% of Democrats correctly identified all false claims shown to them, compared with 7% of independents and 6% of Republicans. Respondents especially struggled with identifying manipulated or synthetic photos, audio, and video, the survey found.

One caveat: NewsGuard’s test is good for measuring the travel of specific, black-and-white falsehoods, but it may be an imperfect measure of how many people fall for conspiracy theories and wild extrapolations that emanate from kernels of truth. Meanwhile, the memes will continue.

— Graph Massara

Chinese company strikes deal for Khaby Lame’s AI avatar

A Chinese firm will control the commercial activities of the world’s most popular TikToker in a deal that will test whether China’s massive livestream e-commerce model can be transplanted to Western markets using global influencers. Documents suggest that Three Sheep, a Hebei-based influencer agency, will be in charge of Senegalese Italian creator Khaby Lame’s AI avatar, which could eventually be deployed to sell products over livestreams. Three Sheep itself is led by a top influencer on Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese equivalent) who helped turn China’s streaming-based e-commerce sector into a huge moneymaker, Semafor’s J.D. Capelouto reported.

The financial structure of the deal has attracted scrutiny, but the larger story lies in the growing heft of the global creator economy and what its future could look like, thanks to new AI capabilities and the muscle of China’s export engine. A press release touted the deal as “designed not merely to monetize attention, but to industrialize it.”

• Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show was one of the best-choreographed and most unique halftime spectacles in recent years. But the show’s all-Spanish lineup is sure to dominate Fox News programming all week (the TPUSA alternate halftime show featuring Kid Rock in cutoff denim shorts notched millions of viewers).
• Meta is pushing back against New Mexico’s attorney general as the company prepares for a jury trial over whether the social media company knowingly allowed predators to use its platforms to exploit children. Meta argued the investigation was “ethically compromised,” and said the attorney general “opted for a self-promotional political victory over child safety.”
• A wealth tax protest billed as a “March for Billionaires” in San Francisco drew a crowd of around 40-50 people on Saturday, with journalists outnumbering both the marchers and hecklers. Semafor counted at least 15 local, national, and international media outlets in attendance, plus an assortment of freelancers. One called it a “panopticonference.”
• Don Lemon’s arrest has supercharged his YouTube channel. The former CNN host has gained over 100,000 subscribers on the platform since his arrest, and has moved up the booking ladder from guests like me (Max) to higher-profile figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Mark Kelly, and many others.
• Some Washington media figures are stepping up to fill the editorial hole left by the Post’s major cuts. As we noted earlier this week, a group of newly laid-off Washington Post tech reporters have told people they have prospective financial backing for a Verge-like publication that could launch on Substack. David Plotz, the CEO of City Cast, told Semafor that the local podcast network was expanding its coverage of Washington as a direct result of the Post’s pullback. The Baltimore Banner similarly said it was expanding its coverage of the DC suburbs as a result of the cuts.
• Condé Nast is locked in a legal battle with the publisher of Dogue, a dog publication that the Vogue publisher said has engaged in trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and unfair competition, per Air Mail.
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new memoir details a feud the onetime San Francisco mayor had with former SF Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein. One of Bronstein’s contemporaries couldn’t corroborate one anecdote, about a reporter digging through Newsom’s trash to confirm he was abiding by the city’s composting rules, but told Politico the animosity was “two-sided.”
• MS NOW is in “advanced” talks to license Crooked Media’s content, particularly Pod Save America, for broadcast during the weekends, Status reported. (Max first reported rumblings of this deal.)