Media

Moscow calling: When Max broke the news last month that Tucker Carlson met Edward Snowden in Moscow, Carlson first denied it flatly — “totally false,” he texted — then told the podcaster Lex Fridman that it was true, sure, but that Semafor was “reporting information they got from the U.S. intel agencies, leaking against me, using my money, in my name, in a supposedly free country.”

Without violating our source’s trust, we can tell you they had nothing to do with intelligence agencies! Carlson provided no evidence for his claim, nor did Fridman ask for any. So I emailed the podcaster Saturday — at his special email address for “official high-profile individuals,” I hope I qualify! — to ask whether he felt any obligation to ask for or show evidence of the claim. And I’m curious whether new forces in journalism like Fridman, who is widely listened to in right-ish tech spaces, will at some point feel obliged to adopt old-school broadcast standards around facts. — Ben

How the Times stumbled on a sensitive Israel story

There are about 1,700 journalists at The New York Times. But its editors, to their great frustration, are always running out of them.

That is at its most true when a crisis hits and Bigfoot correspondents and columnists from all over the globe descend on a bureau and demand translators, drivers, stringers, security guards, assistants and all-around fixers to support the fact-gathering that undergirds the sort of evocative and sweeping narratives that have been their stock and trade.

The Jerusalem Bureau is one of the Times’ better-staffed even in calmer times, with a few full-time journalists and an extended team of contractors. But by the time Jeffrey Gettleman arrived from London, it was already straining to keep up with the demands of editors in Washington, Bigfeet in Jerusalem, and the chaos of war reporting.

So Gettleman had no chance of getting one of the experienced regulars to help him. He is a lesser Bigfoot. He has the coveted “international correspondent” title and has told moving stories of suffering from Ukraine to Rwanda. But he’s also a divisive character inside the paper who — to the horror of his peers — won his Pulitzer in 2012 by nominating his own work on war and famine in Somalia after the Times declined to include it in its official package for consideration.

Bureau chief Patrick Kingsley referred him to an ambitious recent Harvard graduate in Tel Aviv, Adam Sella. Sella in turn referred Gettleman to his uncle’s partner, Anat Schwartz, a filmmaker who had worked on complex documentaries, including the 2007 animated film “Waltz With Bashir.”

The story they produced, under the sweeping headline: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” has since become a target of internal and external criticism. Some of that has focused on Schwartz’s social media presence: Before she worked for the Times, she liked three offensive anti-Palestinian tweets. But critics on X, in The Intercept and elsewhere, also raised questions about details of some of the allegations made by Times sources. The Times has stood by both the details in the story and its broader claims, though it is reviewing Schwartz’s tweets.

Ben’s View

Like many of the Times’ critics and fans, I have not reported on the ground in Israel, and I don’t have new reporting on the details of Oct. 7. Nor will I attempt to answer the unspoken questions that have made this story and many others so gut-wrenching, in a conflict in which each party believes the other is trying to wipe them from the face of the earth — and is looking to the media to confirm those intentions.

But I believe I can shed some light on what is, to me, a mind-boggling fact: The Times turned crucial elements of its reporting on one of the most difficult and sensitive stories it has ever published to amateurs, one of whose social media posts would make reasonable people question her ability to be fair.

That sounds insane when you say it out loud. Why would you do that?

(The Times denies that’s what happened in this case: “We did not turn over crucial elements of reporting to researchers. Adam and Anat made valuable contributions. Jeffrey supervised their work closely and conducted dozens of interviews alongside them,” a spokesperson, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said.)

This is, in fact, how great American newspapers have always worked, particularly in moments of crisis. Many of their biggest names are able reporters, but the very top tier is often occupied by journalists who are also brilliant storytellers who synthesize large quantities of information into sparkling narratives. And they rely on teams — at best, trusted and experienced local reporters, at worst, whoever they can grab in a hurry — to do more of the original reporting than they used to admit.

John Berman is a co-anchor on CNN News Central.

⁜ Tech

Burn Book: Our Semaforum Q&A this week is with Kara Swisher, who has a new book out.

Ben: Because you ignored my email the other day to send me a PDF, I had to buy [“Burn Book”] on Kindle. I found it, but I also found “Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley’s Bulldog,” and “Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist,” and “Kara Swisher Biography: Unraveling the Life and Legacy,” by a ‘guy’ who ‘wrote’ four biographies this month.

Kara: There’s a particularly femme-y version of me on the cover, a little porny. These AI versions of me are the way my mother would like me to look, I guess — earrings and too much makeup. I realized this is generative AI. It’s sort of like Gucci, they’re knockoffs — except they’re in the Amazon store, not outside on the street. I wrote [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy and I said, ‘You’re stealing my IP! What is going on?’ [And] now they’ve started taking them down for me, but it’s all over Amazon. And it’s all over Google.

Bad News: Facebook is finally, truly killing the news tab, once an olive branch — and cash sluice — to publishers. But not so fast: Australia may sue.

⁛ News

Who’s watching? New data set to be released tomorrow from Nielsen makes the case that advertisers — particularly political ones — should see TV news as a fruitful target. One interesting note: Women still consume more broadcast news than men, while men consume slightly more cable.

Wong v. Rubenstein: In other New York Times news, the paper is still seeking a correction or clarification from the Atlantic over a section of former opinion staffer Adam Rubenstein’s recent account of perceived ultra-progressive bias at the Times.

The paper disputed various elements of the story, which springs from Rubenstein’s role in a contested 2020 op-ed by Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton. But it took particular issue with a paragraph that singled out diplomatic correspondent Edward Wong. Rubenstein cited an email from Wong in which he said he typically chose not to quote Cotton in his own stories because the senator’s comments “often represent neither a widely held majority opinion nor a well-thought-out minority opinion.”

Wong expressed his frustration on Twitter, saying Rubenstein took his email out of context. A copy of the email reviewed by Semafor shows that Wong has a point, and wasn’t trying to dismiss Cotton simply for having a hawkish position on China. In the email, Wong advised colleagues to consult a different — in his view, better-informed — Republican hawk.

“I was just telling someone earlier today that I often choose not to quote Cotton in stories I write on China b/c his comments are done solely for the purpose of flame-throwing and don’t add anything constructive or add anything that makes you see things in a new light,” he wrote in the email. “They often represent neither a widely held majority opinion nor a well-thought-out minority opinion. By contrast, his Senate colleague [Marco] Rubio, another GOP hawk on China, makes comments on China that are often much more substantial and not purely trollish.”

The Times also sent notes to the Atlantic soliciting a correction or update to include the full context of Wong’s email. The magazine has stood by Rubenstein’s reporting, saying the email was cited accurately.

Biden on the record: Evan Osnos remains one of the only journalists that Joe Biden will speak to at length on the record. During his time as president, Biden has largely declined major longform interviews with print publications and television networks, preferring to answer questions shouted during press gaggles or off-the-record conversations with his favorite New York Times opinion columnists. But New Yorker editor David Remnick teased on Friday that Osnos had recently traveled to the White House for a “rare, frank” talk with the president about his re-election campaign.

Old news: With present-day news organizations dropping like flies, you can console yourself in the graveyard of newsprint: OldNews.com, a new website from genealogy platform MyHeritage that “offers access to thousands of historical newspapers, mainly from the 1800s and 1900s.”

☊ Audio

Losing downloads: Earlier this year, Semafor reported that an update to Apple’s iOS significantly reduced the downloads for almost all major podcasts, particularly those with long back catalogs. Onstage at the Hot Pod Summit last week, “This American Life” host Ira Glass confirmed that his show was among those hit hard. Glass said that the show’s audience shrunk 20% because of the update, and acknowledged that although he was happy to have a more accurate audience number, he was still getting used to telling people that the number of weekly downloads for the show is 3.5 million instead of 4.5 million. “I’m in favor of accuracy,” he said. “I’m not in favor of losing money.”

Making money: Podcasting is increasingly a world of haves and have nots. Despite a brutal year of downsizing in the industry, the biggest podcasters, like Joe Rogan and the Smartless guys, have still managed to sign major deals. while others, like Alex Cooper and the Kelce Brothers, are reportedly seeking major paydays in the tens and hundreds of millions when their contracts are up this year.

✰ Hollywood

Ghost TV: AP media writer David Bauder noted last week that TBS, TNT, History, Lifetime, FX, A&E, BET, E! Entertainment, SyFy, Comedy Central, VH1 and Discovery “have all lost at least half of their 2014 audience.” Their programming is now “big blocks of reruns” punctuated with “cheap and cheesy nonfiction.” He concluded by coining a new phrase: “That’s not appointment TV. It’s accidental. Ghosts.”

Movies! Mark Harris set out to write about how Hollywood is (as usual) dying, but his conclusion was surprisingly cheering: “Hollywood is looking at and buying and even making plans to produce a bunch of scripts that can get off the ground fast and be cast, shot and edited reasonably quickly. … These are self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes. They’re the kinds of films you might sometimes wish Hollywood made more of. Maybe you remember them. They’re what used to be called movies.”

✦ Marketing

Critical mention: Biden supporters and critics both declared victory after last week’s Democratic presidential primary in Michigan, which pitted the president against a symbolic “uncommitted” vote meant to signal disapproval of the president’s handling of the war in Gaza. Allies of the campaign noted that over 100,000 Democrats had ultimately voted uncommitted, representing a huge margin in a must-win state for Biden in November.

Biden overwhelmingly won the primary, despite huge media attention in the state garnered by the uncommitted campaign. Democratic paid media consultants with ties to the Biden campaign shared their informal analysis with Semafor. It showed that, excluding primary day, the total publicity value for the uncommitted campaign in Michigan was $2.5 million over the last two weeks. That’s a huge sum, close to the budget of a congressional campaign over the course of eight or nine months.

But some primary voters always remain uncommitted, and despite the buzz, this year’s uncommitted tally was only marginally higher than in 2012, when no such concerted campaign had materialized. Biden allies interpreted that showing as good news.

Social media money: The ad trade Campaign US reports that Meta — the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads — has hit record revenue from its ad business, while TikTok’s still-impressive engagement is declining a bit and X keeps cutting prices.

⁋ Publishing

Like a… Rolling Stone is raising the bar for its use of anonymous sources, according to our own anonymous source familiar with the change. Leadership at the legacy magazine had been frustrated with what it believed was the overuse of anonymous sources in stories run under Noah Shachtman, the former top editor who left the publication this week following editorial differences with CEO Gus Wenner.

The publication is also turning back the clock. While magazine cover stories during Shachtman’s tenure tended to focus on new artists, following his departure, the magazine has kicked around the idea of putting aging rock legend Bruce Springsteen back on its cover.

Video investment: Recurrent Ventures, the Miami-based company which operates over a dozen digital media sites, is going all-in on YouTube. Popular Science will launch a new YouTube channel on Wednesday with Vsauce2, Semafor has learned. The long running science site, purchased by Recurrent in 2020, will collaborate with the science and tech-focused creator channel, which has built a following of over 4.5 million subscribers.

The move is a part of a broader expansion into video centered around YouTube, where the company’s sites have a large audience. Recurrent also plans to launch a channel for military news site The War Zone, complementing the over 1 million YouTube subscribers for Task & Purpose, another Recurrent site. The company has also built sizable audiences on YouTube for its car content: Donut has over 8 million subscribers, and The Drive has nearly 2 million.

Future of future of work: The FT and Bloomberg both invested in the media startup Charter, founded by Kevin Delaney to cover fast-changing workplace issues. Delaney and the FT’s Matt Fottrell were among the guests last year at the new media confab OTR, which is clearly on its way to becoming the next Sun Valley.

Corrections: The Atlantic did, in fact, respond to complaints from the New York Times. And Gus Wenner is the CEO of Rolling Stone. We regret the errors.

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