Media

1. ‘Anti-woke’ identity crisis
2. Vanity Fair succession
3. Capehart riles Post
4. Info wars debrief
5. Bloomberg hedges on DEI

The so-called liberal media isn’t doing Democrats a lot of favors these days.

Six months after losing to Donald Trump for the second time, the Democratic Party’s shortcomings remain the biggest story in Washington. Revelations from the new Biden book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have prompted weeks of relitigation of the 2024 race. The duo have been on a book tour in which Tapper has gone beyond his reporting to act as a media critic himself, suggesting at one point that the kind of criticism he has received from the party is an indication of why it lost.

This week, The New York Times, too, said it would begin publishing a series of deep examinations on the Democratic Party’s defeat, beginning by revealing a $20 million dollar effort with the cringey codename SAM — “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.”

Meanwhile, Biden allies’ attempts to counter Original Sin have only juiced news articles and interest in the book, which is on its way to being one of the best-selling political nonfiction books in years. And even in lefty online spaces, it’s grim for Democrats: In Washington this week, I spoke with a few congressional staffers who said that they had tried using Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, but they gave up after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.

For the moment, Democrats and the media outlets they pay attention to seem most intent on making the party relive its most painful mistakes.

Also today: Lingering strife on the Washington Post editorial board, Bloomberg backtracks on DEI, and the latest in Vanity Fair’s editor search. (Scoop count: 4)

Anti-woke media’s identity crisis

The libertarian journalist Michael Moynihan felt the shift on election night 2024, after it had become clear that Donald Trump would win. He was co-hosting a livestream for The Free Press, a new publication that had boomed in response to The New York Times’s leftward turn, and was ranting about the dangers Trump would pose to free speech to an impassive group of “anti-woke” talkers.

“This is one of those many moments when I realized that this wasn’t, shall we say, a stable coalition,” he said in an email last week, after leaving a short stint at The Free Press. “One didn’t have to be especially prescient to spot those ‘anti-woke’ types who would just slowly become MAGA flunkies.”

That loose group, rooted in part in a letter published in Harper’s Magazine in 2020, includes HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the digital show Breaking Points, opinion outlets like Quillette, UnHerd and Persuasion, the Jewish online magazine Tablet, and podcasts like Blocked & Reported and The Fifth Column. Now, they are reckoning with a president who has embraced their positions on many of their favored issues — in particular, the traditional boundaries of sex and gender, the role of affirmative action, and the left-wing slant of American academia — but who is pursuing their goals with the illiberal tactics they’d abhorred.

— Max Tani

Succession at Condé Nast

Media watchers are squeezing the last drops of interest out of Vanity Fair, the once-dominant magazine that’s a long way from the “empire of the elite” (the title of a forthcoming book on the company). The publication has been in a long slide out of relevance, bedeviled by cost-cutting and Condé Nast’s attempts to transform a great brand into a matrixed global digital something-something.

There’s still fun speculation to be had, though, on two fronts: First, will Condé finally move the thing to Los Angeles, where it obviously belongs? And second, will it appoint an editor with a mandate to revive Vanity Fair — or a manager charged by their boss, Vogue eminence Anna Wintour, with managing decline?

The Ankler’s Janice Min told me recently she doesn’t want the job and suggested the editor who created the modern publication, Tina Brown, who also told me she doesn’t want it. The corporate logic leans toward low expectations, but I’m eager to be surprised. Most of all, though, the Vanity Fair succession saga serves as a distraction for the real question at the company: What’s the succession plan for Wintour who, at 75, has kept Vogue relevant and vital as virtually everything around it has fallen away?

— Ben Smith

Tension at the Post over Capehart’s new book

Last week, Washington Post opinion editor Jonathan Capehart published a book detailing his decision to step down from the paper’s editorial board in 2023. He attributed the move to a disagreement he had with another editor in the section, Karen Tumulty, over a piece by the editorial board saying that then-President Joe Biden’s decision to call Georgia’s voting laws “Jim Crow 2.0” was “hyperbolic.”

According to his book, Capehart, the only Black man on the Post’s editorial board at the time, agreed with Biden’s description and was bothered by the editorial and the fact that readers could believe it represented his view. “Tumulty took an incident where I felt ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity,” he wrote in the book, which was published last week. “She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was Black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.”

Capehart left the editorial board after complaining about the incident to human resources and other senior figures at the paper. But his description of the incident in his book — and Capehart’s book tour — has been the subject of internal recriminations at the Post in recent days.

Jamie Rubin on the information wars

The former State Department official Jamie Rubin reflected on Mixed Signals on his time running the Global Engagement Center during the Biden administration, which was charged with battling foreign propaganda but has been accused by the right of meddling in American speech. He called it “the hardest single subject I ever worked on in my life” because of the hazy line between foreign and domestic information spheres.

The lawyer nominated to lead public diplomacy at State, Sarah Rogers, has argued for more offense (imagine State Department responses to propaganda, in the spirit of Trump’s tweets) and less behind-the-scenes pressure on social media companies. But Rubin said he thinks Republicans understate the challenge.

“Their mistake is to not understand how powerful and the magnitude of Russian and Chinese disinformation around the world. When they start reading their intelligence reports — the ones that I read very, very carefully — and they see what a high priority [it is], and how many billions and billions of dollars are spent by Beijing and Moscow to destroy the reputation of the United States all over the world, they may decide that doing some of the defense we were doing is worthwhile,” he said.

Bloomberg rethinks diversity programs

Bloomberg editor John Micklethwait has told his newsroom the company is changing its inclusion efforts, saying they will no longer be specifically focused on underrepresented groups.

“We’re making sure that all of our programs are inclusive of everybody as opposed to being specifically built for particular underrepresented groups. That’s a change we’re going through,” he said in a staff meeting in recent weeks.

The company has also made slight changes in recent months to its diversity policies, like renaming its DEI team the “HR Inclusion” team.

Micklethwait’s comments seemed to represent a tonal shift from as recently as February, when he wrote in an email, “A number of you have recently asked about our commitment to diversity and inclusion — perhaps not surprisingly given the stories we and others have written about companies using the change in the political winds as cover to stage various retreats.” That email continued: “In editorial and research that commitment remains unchanged — both in terms of our coverage (especially the importance of diverse voices on all of our platforms) and in terms of our workforce.”

The Airwaves We’re Losing: Before the internet, shortwave radio connected — and divided — the world. On the Media’s Peabody Award-winning The Divided Dial is back with four new episodes exposing how extremists, cults, and Wall Street predators are battling for control of these public airwaves today. Listen to the series.

As Trump’s pressure on big media outlets has drawn attention, his FBI is also going after an independent journalist on the left. Ken Klippenstein shared last week that he was visited for a second time in months by the FBI after publishing what he says is a manifesto by the suspected killer of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. Klippenstein said he found the visit “aggressive and threatening,” but wrote that he published the alleged manifesto “not to glorify the violence — which I find abhorrent and condemn — but so the public can better understand the truth of what happened.” Investigators also sent a list of questions to his attorney asking whether he had a relationship with the alleged killer.

⁌ TV

• YouTube held its first-ever “For Your Consideration” event, an attempt to convince Emmy voters to nominate YouTube shows for television’s highest honor.

☊ Audio

• Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., sent a letter to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek pressing the platform to crack down on podcasts that’ve been directing listeners to websites that sell drugs.

✰ Hollywood

• The runtime of standing ovations at the Cannes Film Festival has gotten out of hand, and the lack of a standard measurement for what counts as part of the ovation has led to confusion and misreporting of just how long the adulation lasts.

✦ Marketing

• Through a carefully executed strategy, Rolex has come to dominate professional tennis marketing, sponsoring all four Grand Slam tournaments and becoming synonymous with greatness in the sport.

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S expects artificial intelligence to have profound implications for his 350,000 employees — and for those he hasn’t hired yet.

Kumar, a former nuclear scientist-turned-executive who joined the IT giant in 2023, is a big believer in upskilling, he told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: Cognizant is training its developers on new AI tools, while funding a global initiative that aims to teach a million people how to use AI by 2026.