Media

1. CBS, post-Pelley
2. Sponsored election denialism
3. Mixed Signals
4. Epicurean battle
5. Anti-vaccine media diet

Like my fellow media reporters, I spent much of last week talking to people in and around CBS News about the network’s mesmerizing implosion.

The ongoing disagreements at CBS center on important but relatively small differences in how to cover major stories: In an interview on Sunday, Scott Pelley said one of his disputes with Bari Weiss at 60 Minutes — which he said exemplified her putting her “thumb on the scale” for Donald Trump — was over the wording of a description of Renee Good’s driving last year in Minneapolis, shortly before a federal officer shot her.

Those distinctions matter, particularly when delivering information to 9 million viewers. But in some ways, it also struck me as a fairly quaint debate in an information landscape increasingly dominated by people and institutions who feel no need to think through the finer details of the facts.

On Friday, we broke the news that Kalshi and Polymarket had been paying big political influencers who, in turn, were fulfilling their agreement obligations by citing prediction market odds alongside suggestions that the Los Angeles mayoral election had been stolen (more on that below). Polymarket’s CMO sent more than $2.5 million to political commentators, Politico scooped, not all of whom disclosed those payments in their posts lauding Polymarket’s predictive powers.

Which stakes are higher?

Also today: Gourmet vs. Gourmet, Hunter Biden’s Substack, and research on media and vaccine skepticism.

CBS News in the crossfire

Weiss and her team find themselves in an unusual situation in America’s contemporary polarized politics: under siege from both sides. Trump appears uninterested in a modest rightward adjustment, while the most powerful right-wing outlet in America, Fox News, has greeted CBS’ attempt to woo its audience with gleeful hostility. That has left CBS’ leaders taking solace in support from stray voices on X, led by Elon Musk, as they try frantically to damp down a rolling civil war.

CBS News’ most visible longtime star, 60 Minutes’ Pelley, has continued to nuke the network in a series of statements, counter-statements, and a lengthy Interview sitdown with The New York Times that, as of Sunday afternoon, was already among the top 10 conversations on the show’s YouTube page. Pelley accused Weiss of telling him to make changes to a piece about the killing of Good in Minneapolis, saying she was trying to put her “thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events.”

In a feature on the chaos, Max writes about other friction along similar, if less dramatic, lines within CBS News, Weiss’ decision to drop out of a high-powered conference, and whether Paramount is beginning to tire of the drama at its news division.

Kalshi asks paid influencers to delete election posts

Conservative influencers have been spreading election-rigging conspiracy theories — including via posts sponsored by prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, which have enlisted hundreds of paid influencers to promote their betting apps.

“Is CA cheating to get Spencer Pratt out?” MAGA figure Gunther Eagleman wrote in a post, quote-tweeting Kalshi prediction market odds on who would advance in the LA mayoral election.

“Notice how the mail-in ballots that come in last second always end up voting Democrat,” streamer Kangmin Lee said in a post quoting Polymarket and labeled as a paid partnership. “Totally a coincidence, nothing to see here.”

Kalshi, for its part, has started cracking down: In a statement on Friday, the betting company told Semafor it had asked offending users, including Eagleman, to remove posts promoting rumors of purported election fraud. As of Sunday, Eagleman’s post was offline, but Lee’s and similar Polymarket-sponsored musings from influencer Benny Johnson remained up.

‘Popcast’ x ‘Mixed Signals’

They have landed interviews with Taylor Swift, A$AP Rocky, Olivia Rodrigo, and Bad Bunny by offering what most celebrity media won’t: no question approval, no topic restrictions, and years of credibility. On this week’s episode of Mixed Signals, the hosts of The New York Times’ Popcast show join Max and Ben to talk about the evolution of their two-decade-old podcast, killing the written review, and whether literacy is over.

Battle of the Gourmets

Condé Nast, which published Gourmet until the venerable food magazine ceased publication in 2009, initially said nothing when Gourmet relaunched as an online-only worker-owned collective this January. The magazine giant had let the Gourmet trademark expire in 2021, and a new group of writers snatched it up.

But in February, Condé Nast filed a lawsuit against the new Gourmet, alleging it was suffering “damage to the GOURMET mark.” The company said it was still funneling the old Gourmet’s audience into Gourmet-branded content on the Epicurious site and on YouTube, and it still owns the copyright to Gourmet’s puzzles. The new Gourmet group has countered by pointing to that fact as evidence that Condé willingly let its Gourmet trademarks lapse.

In a statement to Semafor, Condé said: “Along with Bon Appétit, Epicurious and La Cucina Italiana, Gourmet remains an active Condé Nast brand, with decades of recipes, articles and videos available on our digital platforms.”

“We are an independent co-op of five part-time writers and editors with no investors and fewer than ten thousand subscribers,” the new Gourmet team said in a statement. “What we lack in resources, we hope to make up for with a great deal of affection for good food and good writing.”

Right to the source

Americans who consume right-wing news media are more skeptical of the measles vaccine, according to a new study out this spring — but how far to the right makes a big difference. A team of Johns Hopkins researchers surveyed about 3,000 Americans about how they keep up with the news and where they look for reliable information on health-related topics.

The strongest predictor for a respondent believing that measles vaccines do more harm than good was consuming populist sources like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit for general news, and seeking out medical information from less reliable sources like influencers and YouTube, rather than physicians or health agencies. That combination was more correlated with vaccine hesitancy, the study found, than any single factor, like partisanship or affiliation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine-critical MAHA movement.

Consuming establishment conservative news sources, like Fox News and the New York Post, was not tied to an increase in vaccine hesitancy, per the study. That’s partly because these still garner a significant crossover audience with their center-left and left-wing competitors, as Fox itself has noted. The key isn’t exposure to conservative content, study co-author Lauren Gardner told Semafor, but may be pro-vaccine Americans’ “selective avoidance” of far-right outlets (and thus, far-right anti-vaccine narratives). Vaccination remains overwhelmingly popular, including among Republicans.

— Graph Massara

The social media landscape changes every week. Most people find out a month later. Geekout is the weekly newsletter keeping social media managers and marketers at major brands ahead of platform shifts, algorithm updates, and what’s gaining traction — before it becomes common knowledge.

• NBC: Trump walked out of a Meet The Press interview after clashing with host Kristen Welker about the integrity of various elections, but according to NBC News, he has agreed to a future interview.
• NYT: Murdoch chronicler Jim Rutenberg details James Murdoch’s acquisition of Vox Media, “the equivalent of fighting a destroyer with a speedboat.”
• AP: NBA finals ratings have been massive this year, with Game 1 averaging more than 17 million viewers, the highest ratings since 2019.
• Bloomberg: Spotify has approached concert promoters about licensing the rights to live footage of festivals as it looks to capitalize on music superfans, Lucas Shaw reports.

• iHeartMedia has been quietly slimming down its podcast slate, canceling some upcoming shows as it tries to shed $50 million in costs amid scuttled merger talks with SiriusXM. Over the past few weeks, several podcast teams were told that the company would not be moving forward with their planned projects. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment, but a company source told Semafor that the moves were normal programming decisions, not layoffs or significant cost reductions.
• Left-leaning influencers were in Washington last week for the Trending Up conference, one of the growing number of annual gatherings intended to bring together creators and political figures and activists shaping policy on the left. The conference was sadly off-the-record to journalists, but we’re told some political influencers who attended last year weren’t invited back this year, as the organization hoped to focus on “cultural creators” with a political valence.
• Earlier this week, Joe Biden said his book was expected to be released in September — setting off some groans from Democrats, who fear the former president could distract the political media from its focus on the midterm elections. But one person familiar clarified that the former president was joking, and the book would likely not arrive until after the midterms.
• Anyone disappointed about not getting to hear the former president’s take on the last few years can settle for another Biden family member’s perspective: Hunter Biden recently launched an X account, and said in a video on Sunday that he’s launching a Substack.