Media

1. Battle of the Bobs
2. Musk and the Ellisons
3. Punching right
4. Mixed Signals
5. Daily News nostalgia
6. Emdash at will

You could, if you’d like, date a particularly progressive, social-media-led era in American journalism from August 2019 until last week, bookended by two irresistible pieces by The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Hannah-Jones has her detractors, but I think the pieces say more about the Times (where I worked in 2020 and 2021). And, as it’s the unchallenged great American newspaper, most of its peers.

The 1619 Project was in the grand tradition of journalists offering provocations about American history. But feeding off the herd behavior of what was then Twitter and the charged environment of the moment, the Times sought to sell it not as an engaging first draft of history but as a kind of capital-T Truth that grew predictably brittle.

The second article seems to mark the end of the ideological moment. The story of Hannah-Jones subjecting her daughter to a bad school is a tough read that again swept through the national conversation. (OK, X.)

On a similar theme, if in a comic vein, The Boston Globe last week found a lesbian bar whose owners — like Japanese soldiers still fighting in the jungle years after World War II — were still mandating masks. (Apparently you can add valves for straws.) This was, as Max reports, good for business — for the Globe’s subscription business.

In any event: Whatever you want to call that era, it seems to be over. I think it may not be a coincidence that this trend in media appears to coincide with a collapse in polling numbers for the anti-woke president.

Also today: Elon Musk could further complicate the Paramount settlement, and Newsmax’s feud with Fox News continues.

Max will be back from Norway next week, so you’re stuck with a couple of my Daily News and Times war stories for this one. Please send him his next scoop.

Revisiting the Battle of the Bobs

Soon after my arrival at The New York Times in March 2020, a source suggested I write about the fact that Bob Iger, who had just handed the reins at Disney over to Bob Chapek, appeared to have thrown himself back into the company amid the developing COVID-19 crisis. Though my title there was media columnist, I’d never covered Hollywood and didn’t know the players. But this was the Times, so Iger responded to my inquiries:

“A crisis of this magnitude, and its impact on Disney, would necessarily result in my actively helping [Chapek] and the company contend with it, particularly since I ran the company for 15 years!” Iger told me back then in a brief email.

The story — and, I think, the perception that Iger had deviously placed it to undermine his successor — turned into one of the industry’s great dramas. My contact with Iger, it turned out, was the last straw: “When he did the interview with Ben Smith where he essentially reasserted himself as CEO — that was as big a sign as possible of an attempt to undermine me,” Chapek told the The Wall Street Journal last week.

As is often true, the reality was dumber than the theories: While the underlying tensions between the Bobs were obviously real, my story wasn’t some devious plant; I was new to the beat and bumbling around. Iger didn’t call me up to do an interview; he shot back a couple short emails. These theories often give everyone too much credit.

Musk’s Paramount disruption

Paramount executives have discussed asking Elon Musk to become part of a syndicate of equity investors as the Warner Bros. Discovery merger is poised to close, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami scooped last week.

Musk and the father of Paramount CEO David Ellison, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, have close financial ties beyond their shared Silicon Valley pasts: Larry Ellison invested $1 billion in Musk’s 2022 deal to take X private, and served on Tesla’s board of directors for years.

A check from Musk or other big financial backers would give Paramount a more diversified investor base and reduce Larry Ellison’s financial burden; the elder Ellison has personally guaranteed more than $40 billion of the equity financing for the WBD takeover, and he has sought to sell Oracle shares to lighten the blow.

But the involvement of the owner of a right-skewed social media platform and prolific Republican donor in a deal covering two news networks would add an additional political dimension to what has already been seen as a partisan fight, Rohan writes, even if it’s unlikely that Musk would have formal input over CNN and CBS’ operations.

Musk’s cash might still be a net negative if he makes the Ellisons’ PR calculus that much worse. And it’s not quite a done deal: The judge overseeing the states’ antitrust case against the merger has yet to rubber-stamp the agreement, and is demanding the parties reply to a letter from a skeptical Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., by tomorrow.

Newsmax punches right

There’s a brewing regulatory rivalry in right-wing media, as Semafor’s Liz Hoffman writes.

Newsmax’s antitrust suit against Fox News, which accused the Murdochs’ juggernaut of using exclusionary carriage deals to strangle its conservative competitors’ reach, fizzled in the courts. But Newsmax chief Chris Ruddy refiled, and his allies in the White House have been pressing the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcers to block Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku, according to people familiar with the matter and communications viewed by Semafor. The DOJ widened its investigation into the deal’s effects on streaming competition.

Ruddy failed to foil the Nexstar-Tegna combination or to get a $250 million compensation fund included in an FTC settlement over the Omnicom-Interpublic merger. But he has a line to the president and has shown he can keep much bigger companies’ lawyers busy.

Fox, for its part, has called Ruddy’s antitrust case an effort by Newsmax to “sue their way out of their own competitive failures.” (Ruddy declined to comment; DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.)

Liquid Death will make others’ ads

The water brand Liquid Death is one of the purest marketing stories of the moment: a billion-dollar company that sells the ultimate commodity through edgy comedy. CEO Mike Cessario told Liz and me on last week’s Mixed Signals that his company’s in-house agency, Death Machine, has also taken on a “few select brands” as external clients. But they’ll need to understand LD’s hardcore sense of humor.

“We don’t need” the money, Cessario said, noting the brand will do some $5 million in merch sales alone this year. “It’s like, hey, if you want the Liquid Death magic, we can do that … [but] if you want us to just go make something that’s not good and it’s going to take a lot of our time, it’s like, hey, that’s probably not interesting to us.”

Remembering the people’s paper

When I was displeased with my editor at Politico in 2007, I churlishly told him that I hadn’t left one of the biggest newspapers in America to work for Roll Call. The “paper” in question was the New York Daily News, even then a powerhouse. In his new history, The People’s Paper, Matthew Pressman invokes the power of a great 20th-century tabloid that “would tell it like it is without making a zoo out of it.” Popular, trusted and trustworthy, the non-ideological Daily News is something “Americans will likely never see again,” Pressman writes.

It was also often, as my old colleague Helen Kennedy told Pressman, “a miserable place” — particularly compared to the manic fun of the New York Post, as depicted in another recent history, Paper of Wreckage.

Emdash users vindicated!

Journalists rejoice: Emdash abuse isn’t an indicator of AI writing — it’s a human failing. Top large language models now use emdashes less often than human writers do, according to new data this month from AI research firm Graphite.

There’s some variation between the three chatbot families the firm analyzed. Anthropic’s Claude Opus uses emdashes at a slightly below-human rate, while ChatGPT’s Astra deploys only one-tenth as many as can be found in human-written text, and Google’s Gemini Pro almost never uses them.

Other linguistic “tells” (antithesis constructions like “it’s not X, it’s Y,” for example) are also on the decline. The newest models are using them less frequently overall and relative to their predecessors — which could reflect “deliberate efforts by AI companies” to correct these tics now that people know to look for them, Graphite observes. But simply cracking down on “delve” and “crucial” hasn’t raised the three models’ scores on two other measures of human-ness; all of the models’ outputs are still more similar to each other than to what human hands have banged out.

(Apropos bang: Human writing’s “tells” include the use of very casual language, contractions, and exclamation marks. AI doesn’t like to yell!)

— Graph Massara

NYT: The major TV networks are set to resume pool duty today, despite the White House’s ongoing exclusion of CNN, Michael Grynbaum and Erik Wemple report; each time it’s CNN’s turn, the remaining networks will decide whether to sub in.

ABC: Attorney General Todd Blanche justified barring CNN on national security grounds despite a judge’s order reinstating the network’s access, telling Martha Raddatz, “The president has every right to decide who gets to fly on his plane.”

AP: The federal government has spent about half a million dollars and counting on ads promoting President Donald Trump and denouncing “communism,” Ali Swenson reported last week, before the latest spots aired on Fox earlier today. The ads have proven controversial even with (non-retiring) Republicans.

WSJ: The pro-MAGA podcast manosphere is mentioning Trump less and less, an analysis from Neil Mehta, Brian Whitton, and Sabrina Rodriguez found.

SF Chronicle: Veteran reporter Carla Marinucci recounts to Hannah Wiley a scuffle between herself and the Obama White House, which the Trump administration cited in kicking out reporters last week.

The Hollywood Reporter: UTA has already been fielding inquiries about adapting that Boston Globe lesbian bar story for a movie, Aaron Couch reports.

WaPo: Drew Harwell chronicles the rise and subsequent disillusionment of a “groypette” content creator formerly in thrall to white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes.

• Kara Swisher says she’s out at CNN post-Paramount takeover, saying she’d “rather work for Rupert Murdoch.”
• Andreessen Horowitz’s TBPN competitor, Monitoring the Situation, is looking for “local correspondents,” no journalism experience required.
• Meanwhile, podcaster Sammi Cohen is launching a women-led TBPN-style show that’s a bit less finance-bro-coded, per La Fronde.
• Potential buyers for Letterboxd are lining up, after Semafor’s Max Tani scooped this year that the cinephile social network is up for sale. The New York Times reported that Sony, indie studio A24, and the Times itself are all interested in the site, which is reportedly valued at more than $300 million.
• The Information is expanding into covering Israel’s tech sector.
• Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell, who wrote one of the op-eds Pangram flagged as AI-generated as part of a Semafor analysis of top newspapers’ opinion sections this year, is under pressure after Dartmouth’s student paper found he’d used AI extensively in his published work.
• The AP Stylebook’s X account’s advice last week that journalists should try not to use “anthropomorphizing” language to refer to AI systems because they are non-human things, “such as animals,” drew an impassioned response from defenders of bots and defenders of pets.