Media

1. Instagram’s convergence
2. DC watches WBD
3. ActBlue’s sponsorships
4. Netflix’s podcast deals
5. Gulf funds’ long game
6. Talk to everybody
7. Digitally archiving history

In the Trump era, conspiracy theories have been powerful fuel for conservative media and politics. Now, they’re causing the right to eat itself.

Earlier this year, I reported that Ben Shapiro planned to call out Tucker Carlson in a major speech at the Turning Point USA conference in Arizona over his flirtation with extremist figures including Nick Fuentes, his interest in revisionist history of World War II, and his dark hints of conspiracy everywhere. We undersold it: In a speech at AmericaFest on Thursday, Shapiro laid into Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly, a longtime friend of Shapiro’s who was partially inspired by him to launch her own successful podcast.

The targets of Shapiro’s criticism shrugged off the substance of his comments. Carlson, following him onstage, described him as “pompous.” Kelly later mocked the size of the Daily Wire’s audience. Owens called him short, among other things.

In a past time, Fox News shaped how conservative media narratives flowed. Now the more aggressive online voices are clearly in the driver’s seat, though Fox has purchased the podcast network powering much of the new discourse.

This is Donald Trump’s movement, but after years channeling conservative media rage and conspiratorial speculation to his political benefit, he’s shown no interest in arbitrating.

That is Vice President JD Vance’s problem. Both sides appealed last week to Vance, who told the TPUSA crowd in Arizona on Sunday that “we have far more important work to do than canceling each other.”

He continued to walk the tightrope in an interview with UnHerd over the weekend, denouncing Fuentes in passing while insisting that affirmative action policies make Democrats worse.

Also today: an interview with the head of Instagram, ActBlue invests in left-leaning media, and the WBD deal makes waves on the Hill.

Adam Mosseri on Instagram’s future

Long gone are the days when Instagram was just a place to post square-cropped photos of food. In a wide-ranging interview for Semafor’s Mixed Signals this week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri laid out Meta’s vision for the platform’s TV app and the path for its next several years of growth.

He was candid about how his company stacks up against its top rivals for eyeballs: TikTok’s algorithm is better at “breaking” new content to users, he said, but he doubts its “super app” aspirations, and YouTube has incentivized longform, highly-produced videos, while Instagram has encouraged a greater variety of content.

In the coming years, he said, Instagram plans to let users proactively shape their feeds in ways that feel “fundamentally different” — a possible point of speciation at a time when podcasts are on Netflix and Spotify is getting into video.

Congress scrutinizes Netflix-WBD

Lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol are preparing possible hearings on Netflix and Paramount’s battle for Warner Bros. Discovery — but a bill to stop or alter any deal is likely out of reach, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reports.

Atop the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said his aides and those of committee Chairman Mike Lee, R-Utah, are “working on” a possible hearing plan. Their House counterpart, Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., said similar conversations are happening in the House with Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and that they’re weighing potential witnesses. “We’ll make a decision on it soon,” Fitzgerald added.

Still, several lawmakers signaled any related legislation is likely a long shot for next year. A White House official told Semafor that Trump “maintains good relationships with both bidders for Warner Brothers, and is neutral in this bidding war.”

ActBlue boosts progressive podcasters

ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s go-to payment platform for online donations, is quietly stepping up its sponsorships of left-leaning online media and content creators. The nonprofit organization has given money to help Tim Fullerton, a former Democratic strategist-turned-podcaster and one of the organizers behind White Dudes For Harris, jumpstart a new podcast network around his show Find Out.

ActBlue has also had conversations about supporting Courier Newsroom, the Democratic-aligned digital media organization that has grown its creator and podcast business in recent years. And ActBlue was one of the major sponsors earlier this year for Crooked Con, the Washington, DC conference hosted by Crooked Media.

One driving factor: the muted response from Democratic Party supporters when Trump threatened to have the Justice Department investigate ActBlue.

Netflix inks podcast video deals

The YouTube-Netflix video podcast wars are heating up, to the delight of podcasters. Netflix is announcing deals for exclusive video podcasts on its platform early next year, people familiar with the plans told Semafor.
In recent months, the company has ramped up talks with most major podcast companies and top talent. It’s expected to roll out more video podcasts in the culture and wellness space, as well as additional shows in categories like sports and crime, which will pair well with Netflix priorities like live sports broadcasts and true crime documentaries.

One example: Last week, Netflix announced that Barstool Sports will put three shows exclusively on Netflix, and iHeartMedia will begin licensing video for popular podcasts including My Favorite Murder, The Breakfast Club, and Dear Chelsea with Chelsea Handler, among others. The shows join a host of Ringer podcasts whose video rights are, as of earlier this year, exclusive to Netflix.

The video rights deals demonstrate that Netflix is serious about sinking at least a little bit of money into cheap, timely content for the platform — though it remains to be seen whether anyone will watch podcasts on Netflix instead of, say, Stranger Things or a movie about a woman who dresses up as Santa to get her daughter discounted snowboarding lessons (one of the top films on the platform for several weeks). At the very least, it’s a convenient time for Netflix to be seen as in competition with YouTube, as the company is expected to make its case to federal regulators that it is not creating a monopoly in streaming by buying Warner Bros. Discovery.

Semafor will be on the ground in Davos next month for the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering where the world’s most powerful come together to strike deals, tout their good deeds, and navigate the snow — sometimes getting stuck long enough to share a scoop or two with us.

We’ll deliver exclusives on the high-stakes conversations shaping the world. Expect original reporting, scoops, and insights on all the deal-making, gossip, and lofty ambitions — with a touch of the pretentious grandeur Davos is famous for.

Gulf cash comes for Hollywood

Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari funds powered (and may have derailed) Paramount’s bid for WBD, and Saudi investment led a mammoth $50 billion bailout for video game studio EA. Why? The pitch, Semafor’s Matthew Martin writes, hinges on utopian ideas about the revolutionary capacity of AI.

As the technology is adopted, the pitch goes, “workers become more productive and richer, the working week gets shorter, and we all get healthier and live longer. That will leave us with more leisure time — and more money to spend enjoying ourselves.”

Talk to everybody

Here’s some holiday cheer for our embattled profession: Successful modern political figures don’t hide from journalists. “They may not like us; they may recognize the reality that legacy media doesn’t have the power it once did. But they retreat into friendly bubbles at their peril,” Ben writes in his column this week, out early for Semafor Media readers.

“That was true of Joe Biden. And if anyone was in doubt about this, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is proving it again. 

“He’s a fluent communicator and former TV host in what’s usually a fairly popular role, and he still seems to have the president’s support. He has some ideas that many Americans might welcome, from his controversial efforts to masculinize the military to his deputy Stephen Feinberg’s attempts to modernize the gear.

But he’s only figured out half of Trump’s media strategy — the public conflict — without realizing that Trump is in on the joke. Hegseth blamed journalists for Signalgate, theatrically tossed beat reporters out of his building, and managed to make himself among the least popular members of Trump’s Cabinet.”

Preserving Russian media

Independent media around the world risks sliding into “digital oblivion” as its records and archives are erased by authoritarian governments, says the Russian journalist Anna Nemzer, whose new platform, Kronika, aims to reverse that trend. The project includes the Russian Independent Media Archive, but the organization has added newsrooms from Central America and is looking further afield, including in Belarus, Hungary, and Afghanistan. When the archive launched in 2022 to preserve the work of newsrooms endangered by Moscow’s censorship about its war in Ukraine, its co-founders didn’t think they’d need to worry about US-funded Radio Liberty. But it recently added the US outlet’s Russia bureau to its list of newsrooms whose archives it ingests, processes, and maintains.

— Gina Chua

• CBS’  60 Minutes  abruptly pulled  a segment on people deported by the Trump administration and held in a notorious Salvadoran prison. New Editor in Chief Bari Weiss had serious concerns about the piece, Semafor has learned. The network decided to hold the segment, which was to air Sunday night, pending comment or an interview with White House officials next year.
• On Friday, The Wall Street Journal built on our previous reporting that Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner wants to make his next major acquisition in the US media space. In addition to exploring The Free Press and musing about CNN, Bloomberg, and the Journal itself, Döpfner has reportedly looked into purchasing TED Conferences and what the Journal described as “a podcast network” (the network was Lemonada, Semafor has learned).
• In a feature this week in Forbes, Charlamagne tha God announced this week that he had reupped his deal with iHeartMedia for a whopping $200 million. While the announcement made headlines, it was one of many recent podcast and radio deal announcements in which the public number was far above the amount that the host is likely to be paid. The actual deal, Semafor is told, is generous but much lower, netting the host around $70 million.
• NPR has issued a mandate for the new year: No more quotes from University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias. In an email to staff this week shared with Semafor, NPR’s standards chief, Tony Cavin, noted that Tobias appears 77 times on NPR’s website, and seems to be a dial-a-quote for NPR and numerous other media outlets on a very wide range of topics. If Tobias’ name “sounds familiar, it’s because Professor Tobias’ hobby seems to be getting himself quoted about anything and everything in news stories,” Cavin wrote. “Professor Tobias often emails reporters offering his expert opinion on stories of the day and while I don’t presume to judge his expertise in legal matters, the professor is certainly an expert at getting himself quoted. In many of these quotes he’s described as an ‘expert’ in whatever the story happens to be about. As with other claims, I think we should exercise a healthy skepticism and do our best to find alternate sources going forward…I propose that as a collective New Year’s resolution we give the professor some (well deserved) time off.”
• The New York Times rolled out a “wrapped” feature for its games that did not include the Times’ crossword, prompting some frustration on the paper’s fairly active Reddit page. A Times spokesperson shared that the paper had tech concerns about overloading with too many games in the feature’s first year, so it “only focused on those few games.” The spokesperson said the paper hoped to include the crossword next year.
• The mood was celebratory this week at Vanity Fair following its bombshell interview series with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and striking photos of other top officials. The feature resulted in a bump in subscriptions and was a win for new Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Mark Guiducci.
• Whit Stillman says Metropolitan, his cult 1990 film about the end of the preppie age in the late 1960s, is, in fact, a Christmas movie. Asked at New York’s Metrograph on Friday whether the film’s core theme — the decline of WASP culture — has borne out, he said: “The idea that elite WASP groups have lost all influence is a myth. They’re still out there doing their thing.”