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In this edition: Will Paramount settle?͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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February 3, 2025
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Media

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Media Landscape
  1. CBS braces for Trump settlement
  2. Breaker breaks into NYC
  3. MAGA media figure tapped
  4. BuzzFeed’s social media plans
  5. Fox News declines ad
  6. Local news startup in Maine
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First Word

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we value transparency.

You can see why David Ellison, poised to buy Paramount, would want to stay well away from Shari Redstone’s apparent eagerness to write a check for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.

Redstone is reportedly in talks to settle the silliest of the Trump lawsuits — a fraud case against Paramount’s CBS and its 60 Minutes show that found a friendly judge in Texas — in hopes of placating regulators, pushing her sale through, and getting paid.

While other billionaires, including his dad, are rushing to align publicly with Trump, Ellison’s name has been nowhere near this story. That may partly be because he doesn’t own the company yet, and is using that convention to stay out of the decision. Let Redstone take the heat (or glory), the thinking goes. He’s not buying the company for CBS News.

But there’s little chance Paramount would make a move this momentous without a sense of where its savior stands. And recent history suggests that it can get messy for billionaire news proprietors who try to finesse these things. David Zaslav spent a year consumed by scandals at CNN. Jeff Bezos saw the Post turn from a prestigious bauble to a serious burden.

CBS’ journalists are seething at the planned settlement, Max reports. They perceive Ellison’s current silence as support for tarnishing their brand. His posture may feel savvy, but it could well wind up looking more like weakness to his new employees — and, of course, to Trump.

Also today: A State Department scoop, new news ventures in New York and Maine, and the Democratic ad on Fox News that wasn’t. (Scoop count: 7)

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1

CBS staffers dread Trump settlement

Screenshot of CBS interview with Kamala Harris
Screenshot

CBS News staff are bracing for an all-but-inevitable concession by the network’s parent company to President Donald Trump over a broadcast that virtually no one at the network actually believes was flawed.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Paramount is in discussions with Trump’s legal team to settle its consumer fraud lawsuit over an interview on 60 Minutes that Trump said was deceptively edited to make Kamala Harris, by then the Democratic nominee, look good. The settlement talks are part of Paramount’s effort to clear the path to close its ongoing merger with entertainment company Skydance. New Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr said that conservative complaints of bias against CBS could be a factor in the agency’s review of the merger.

The reports that Paramount executives are even weighing a settlement has highlighted a deepening divide between CBS News staff and its parent company. Network staff Semafor spoke with last week are almost universally against settling the lawsuit, particularly if the settlement comes with a mandated apology.

Read more on the potential settlement. →

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Semafor Exclusive
2

Breaker aims to roil New York media

Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya
Courtesy of Breaker

Two prominent New York journalists are launching a scoopy new media venture aimed at storming the city’s interlocking scenes of media, culture, and power.

Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya’s new Breaker Media will be rooted in “downtown New York, where all the best stories break,” said Cartwright, an Australian who has done tours of duty at the New York Post, Daily Beast, and Hollywood Reporter, and recently wrote a confessional of his time at the National Enquirer during President Donald Trump’s rise.

Breaker will launch as a $12/month weekly newsletter and podcast to start, and will also put on the occasional play (why not). The outlet intends to be local to Downtown Manhattan, where both men live, the way the Southern District of New York is a local prosecutor’s office.

“There’s more stories per square foot than anywhere else in the world,” said Somaiya, a former New York Times reporter and Vice News Tonight correspondent who more recently was senior digital editor for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Read more on Breaker’s launch. →

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Semafor Exclusive
3

MAGA media figure tapped for State post

Darren Beattie
Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will appoint Darren Beattie as acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, two people briefed on the plans told Semafor. Beattie, a speechwriter in Trump’s first term who founded Revolver News, was fired in 2018 for attending a conference with white nationalists. (He wasn’t quoted saying anything notable there, and was later appointed to a federal commission by Trump.) He’s a far cry from the brand of pre-Trump conservatism Rubio once embodied, and marks the ascendancy of MAGA intellectuals within the bureaucracy.

“Darren personifies the America First Right — smart, tough, relentless — with a ‘take no prisoners’ attitude,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said in a text message. Beattie would need to be confirmed by the Senate to keep the post indefinitely. A State Department spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry, and Beattie declined to comment.

Read more on Beattie’s selection. →

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Semafor Exclusive
4

BuzzFeed seeks to counter right-wing vibe shift

Jonah Peretti
Ståle Grut/Wikimedia Commons

BuzzFeed is considering building its own social media platform to compete with the big players and better distribute its content — and offer an alternative to the rightward, masculine drift of American public culture. In a Slack message last week shared with Semafor, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said that the company wanted to avoid being at the whim of major tech platforms that have long been the distributor of BuzzFeed’s content.

“It’s clear we can’t rely on the platforms to create a positive environment for content creators like us. I’m beginning to think we need to create our own social media platform to give our audience a place on the internet that reflects their values,” he wrote. “It would be a challenging project but I think there is a huge opening right now that someone needs to fill. Why not us?”

The BuzzFeed founder told staff that he hoped to position the company as an alternative for people who felt alienated by the cultural drift of the country and among tech founders. Peretti suggested that Meta’s recent decision to stop algorithmically suppressing political and news content could be beneficial for political content on BuzzFeed-owned HuffPost. “Big role for us to play as the underdog publisher keeping truth and joy alive, especially for women who are left out of this vibe shift to ‘masculine energy’ from Trump, Musk, Zuck, Rogan, et al.”

Peretti’s musings on Buzzfeed and the future of HuffPost come at a difficult moment for that outlet. As Semafor previously reported, the longtime liberal blog announced in recent weeks that it would be laying off employees and encouraging buyouts for longtime staff. The publication’s editor-in-chief announced in an email that she would be laying herself off to save it from more substantial job cuts.

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Semafor Exclusive
5

Fox News won’t air Democratic ad

A screenshot of the House Majority Forward ad
Screenshot

Fox News won’t air an ad from a Democratic group that had planned to blast Donald Trump’s federal spending freeze.

Last week, House Majority Forward, a nonprofit group aligned with a top super PAC for House Democrats, announced it was buying advertising space on Fox News to air advertisements hitting the Trump administration over its decision to freeze spending on trillions of federal grants and other programs.

While the White House said the initial freeze was only intended to block spending in certain areas, including efforts to increase diversity within the federal workforce, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump’s federal funding-related executive orders “remain in full force.” A federal judge in Rhode Island who blocked the administration’s temporary freeze said “the substantive effect of the directive carries on.”

The ad was initially intended to air beginning Monday morning during Fox & Friends. But the network informed HMF that it would not air the ad after the administration backtracked on the policy.

A Fox spokesperson said it decided not to air the ad because the administration pulled the executive order, thereby rendering the claims in the ad moot.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Fox initially agreed to air the ad.

Read more on why Democrats are looking into Fox News ad buys. →

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Semafor Exclusive
6

NBC’s Seitz-Wald joins local Maine publication

The Midcoast Villager’s logo
The Midcoast Villager

One of NBC’s top political reporters is leaving to help lead a startup in Maine that’s trying out a new local news business model.

Alex Seitz-Wald, the network’s primary reporter on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and Joe Biden’s in 2020, told Semafor he is leaving to help the build the Midcoast Villager, a newly-launched roll-up of four legacy newspapers in Maine.

The organization has ambitious goals to create a new model for local journalism embedded in the community, with help from owner Reade Brower. The publication will work alongside a small book publisher, and will run events and writers retreats out of a hotel and adjacent Villager Cafe, a coffee shop that will operate in conjunction with the newspaper, whose offices sit above the cafe.

The Midcoast Villager will also be the first client of Civic Sunlight, a Maine-based AI startup founded by the former CTO of the Atlantic and a former executive at Fox. The company plans to partner with media companies by using AI to transcribe and summarize local meetings and analyze them for trends.

“It’s this really rare opportunity to have not just the newspaper, but this whole collection of assets that can be totally reinvented and repurposed,” he told Semafor.

For a state of its size, Maine has developed an unusually strong and unique local media landscape, where partisans have battled for influence. As Semafor previously reported, the National Trust for Local News, which bought up many Maine newspapers previously owned by Brower, has worked to prop up Maine’s local media ecosystem largely by helping smaller, traditional newsrooms. On the right, conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo funded a digital outlet in Maine.

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Mixed Signals
Mixed Signals

Kara Swisher was a top tech journalist and the founder of a media company, Recode, before embarking fully on the business of being Kara Swisher. And business — Pivot, On with Kara Swisher, and her other ventures — is good. In a remarkably candid interview with Ben and Max on Mixed Signals, Swisher talks about how she’s managed to make millions in media — and why journalists should follow her, if they can. She’s also got an update on her hopes to buy the Washington Post, and has unexpectedly kind words for the man she sometimes refers to as “Uncle Satan,” Rupert Murdoch.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

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One Good Text

Marc Stein is the author of the Stein Line, a newsletter about the NBA.

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Live Journalism

Semafor has announced its critical and timely live journalism program, “Innovating to Restore Trust in News” in Washington, D.C. on February 27. This unprecedented, invitation-only gathering of the most influential minds in journalism aims to address the crisis of trust in media and the role industry leaders play.

Semafor editors and reporters will be joined by various leading voices in media, including: Bret Baier, Chief Political Anchor, Anchor & Executive Editor of Special Report with Bret Baier, FOX News Channel; Cesar Conde, Chairman, NBCUniversal News Group; Joe Kahn, Executive Editor, The New York Times; Megyn Kelly, Host, The Megyn Kelly Show; Mark Thompson, Chairman, CEO, CNN Worldwide; and Mehdi Hasan, Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief, Zeteo.

Feb. 27, 2025 | Washington DC | Request Invitation

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Intel

⁌ TV

Todd gone: As Semafor first reported earlier this year, Chuck Todd announced his departure this week from NBC.

⁛ News

Death of print: The congressional press galleries sent out an email to members this week asking whether they should cancel the print subscriptions to the New York Times, Washington Post, and some other publications. According to an email shared with Semafor, the gallery said the print subscriptions were costing the organization $11,000 annually in delivery fees to the Capitol.

Amped-up Ankler: Hollywood-focused news startup The Ankler is beefing up its reporting staff by bringing on Lesley Goldberg, a veteran entertainment journalist who previously oversaw TV coverage at The Hollywood Reporter. As it marks its three year anniversary, the Ankler is also planning to bump the price of its annual subscription by $20 a year.

In recent months, the publication has added staff and contributors to cover Hollywood and the creator economy. Goldberg is the latest addition to the Ankler’s Series Business newsletter team, and will contribute exclusive reporting on TV development and agency moves, plus on-record interviews with major players.

“I am delighted to reunite with Lesley and welcome her to our rapidly growing team,” CEO and Editor-in-Chief Janice Min said in a statement first shared with Semafor. “In our business, along with Elaine [Low] and Manori [Ravindran], Lesley is one of the most respected journalists covering the TV beat and she will be a huge asset at The Ankler.”

Letter to editor: An LA Times opinion contributor is furious that the paper edited a piece he wrote about Health and Human Services chief nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cutting lines that were critical of Kennedy’s nomination.

WSJ vs. White House: The Trump White House is in a pitched battle with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page over the impacts of the president’s new tariffs on Mexico and Canada. The Journal’s editorial board dubbed the recent 25% tariff the “dumbest trade war in history,” while the White House sent out a press release on Sunday saying the op-ed was a reminder that the “WSJ is always wrong when it comes to tariffs and trade.”

What are tariffs? It’s going to be an uphill battle for both parties to explain to America what Trump’s trade war with Canada and Mexico actually means.

According to a survey from DKC Analytics of 1,000 consumers first shared with Semafor, 42% of Americans do not recall hearing about tariffs at all during the last election, and 36% of people could not identify the correct definition of a tariff when presented with several options.

“The media and business leaders have their work cut out for them when it comes to explaining tariffs as we are seeing a perfect storm of confusion, partisan division and mistrust of big business,” DKC CEO Sean Cassidy told Semafor.

Cuts: Abu Dhabi newspaper The National is cutting staff.

✦ Marketing

Ad biz: X appears to slowly be rehabilitating parts of its advertising business. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was increasing its ad spending on the platform. X also saw a rebound in political advertising last year. The platform brought in $25 million in political advertising revenue in 2024, mostly from Republicans.

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Semafor Spotlight
Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

President Donald Trump is taking the Republican Congress on an economic wild ride, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett report.

Some GOP lawmakers are hoping they can still head off the tariffs, and a few complained about the conflicting guidance on government money, but most said they’re feeling little heat for the president’s moves.

Not only is there little evidence that party legislators mind his muscular executive power, there’s plenty of signs that Trump-state Republicans are happy to take the ride with him.

For more on the early moves of the second Trump administration, subscribe to Semafor Principals. →

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