Media

1. Bannon vs. Fox
2. State Dept. vs. Europe
3. Commercial break
4. Lit Candle
5. The eyeball business

Max and I spent three days last week at the ad fest in Cannes, where everyone was talking about AI. (In two successive meetings, executives bragged to me that their companies had more than 10,000 agents each!)

Until Thursday, nobody had brought up Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s planned AI-based “companion” device, Io, which previewed last month with a soft-focus buddy video that drew wide mockery in tech marketing circles. But at the end of my trip, one of the smartest marketers I talked to brought up the video to note that in Altman and Ive’s world, nobody has a phone. There are no screens. Certainly nowhere to put an ad.

Io may not be what kills the iPhone Ive designed for Steve Jobs. But this marketer argued that Ive and Altman have accurately sensed the deep popular demand to get away from our little screens. We’d spent a week talking about the fast, scary, but ultimately incremental changes AI could bring to the media business: magical video production, efficient ad buying. A world that turns away from handheld screens — to glasses, voice, other humans, whatever — is harder to imagine. But what if the changes are faster and more radical, and the ubiquitous smartphone is displaced as abruptly as it arrived? That’s scary for advertisers, of course, and raises questions about how to deliver everything from journalism to entertainment that we haven’t begun to answer.

Also today: Steve Bannon’s war on Fox, a previously unreported State Department mission to Paris, Kevin Mayer’s regrets, our interview with the CEO of The New York Times, and a text from the newly independent Derek Thompson. (Scoop count: 4)

Bannon’s war on Fox

A key force in the populist MAGA media, former Trump campaign chief and White House aide Steve Bannon, has turned his opposition to bombing Iran into a fierce challenge to Fox News. Bannon began his show Friday with a montage of pro-war voices, promising his audience that it would make their “heads explode,” and he and his guests repeatedly attacked the network as “propaganda.”

“People on the right are now confronting an unpleasant reality, a great unmasking: The Murdochs don’t put America’s interests first,” Bannon told Semafor Sunday. “There needs to be a thorough FARA investigation into Fox’s relationship with a foreign power.” He added that “their audience is geriatrics — it’s people 70 and over,” and that Fox has “no stroke because it’s not an activist base.”

A Fox spokesperson declined to respond to the provocation, and there’s zero evidence for his implication that Fox is a paid Israeli proxy. The network has broadly offered positive coverage of the attack and the president, but has also given space to skepticism. But Bannon, who aired chatter Saturday morning predicting the coming attack, speaks to a large audience of right-wing activists and may offer Trump a valuable counterweight to the powerful cable network.

Trump’s friendly lunch with Bannon last week makes sense in this context: Fox’s ratings have soared as the rest of cable news declines, but the network is ever-sensitive to challenges from the right, and the president is always looking for leverage. (A curiosity: Bannon’s War Room, distributed on Real America’s Voice, Rumble, Spotify, and elsewhere, is still banned from YouTube over a vivid 2020 remark. But as the MAGA right has pivoted against the war, ideologies have scrambled, and Bannon’s show has hosted journalists from The Guardian and Axios.)

Trump’s diplomats go to Paris

A State Department official who was in France to oppose European speech regulations held a contentious meeting with Reporters Without Borders, the journalism advocacy group, at their Paris office on May 28, Ben reports. Samuel Samson — a young and ideological official who had demanded on the State Department’s official Substack that Europeans act as “civilizational allies” — argued with the group’s leaders over issues of speech and over Samson’s support of the right-wing leader Marine Le Pen.

“Everything was weird and troublesome about this visit by State Department officials — its purpose, the definition of freedom of expression that was the basis for this ‘investigation,’ and the strong bias of the questioning in favor of Europe’s far-right parties,” said Pierre Haski, a leading French commentator who chairs Reporters Without Borders. It was, he said, “as if liberal democracies in Western Europe were now to be treated at best as suspicious, if not outright adversaries.” A State Department official said the group also met with the French government and unspecified political parties.

Regularly scheduled programming

Podcasts are racing to become television — partially because of the explosion of viewership of podcast content on actual TVs. But media executives at Cannes Lions made clear advertisers are also one of the parties encouraging podcasts to go visual.

In a forthcoming interview with Semafor, Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said that admakers were responding very positively to new video podcast advertising inventory, noting that the visual ads more closely resemble the traditional commercials that many are used to producing. Another senior podcast executive who spoke with me echoed that sentiment, saying that advertisers who were still at times hesitant to spend lots on audio-only brand ads have welcomed the return of the 30-second TV spot, and have been more willing to purchase packages that include video, audio, and social ads.

— Max Tani

Over its 174-year history, The New York Times has weathered seismic shifts in the media industry — and stayed on top, evolving into a digital powerhouse with hit podcasts and a daily app for games and cooking. This week, live from the Cannes Lions festival, Ben and Max sit down with CEO Meredith Kopit Levien to talk about how she’s keeping the Times relevant, how challenging Donald Trump fits into the business model, and whether tough journalism helps or hurts the bottom line.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Think of the children

Candle’s Kevin Mayer offered Max a candid view of what has gone right and wrong for his Blackstone-backed media company, which made a bad bet on the streaming boom but a good one on kids media on YouTube. Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine is “still profitable — not terrible, but it wasn’t worth what we paid,” while the children’s programmer Moonbug, the brand behind Cocomelon, has justified the entire company: “We had many seasons of Cocomelon, and a season is only three hours of content, in three-to-seven-minute increments in short form on YouTube. The first deal we did with Netflix a few years ago, we just took that free content and pulled it into one-hour episodes. We did nothing more than take one hour’s worth of content and repackage it. And from 2021, until now, it’s the biggest show on Netflix. That’s incredible, right? Not the biggest kid show, the biggest show.”

Get ready to scan your eyeballs

Not enough futurism for you in this newsletter? Well, Reddit is in talks to adopt biometric, blockchain-based identity verification offered by the iris-scanning device known as the Orb and connected to the WorldCoin cryptocurrency, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti scooped. The rise of large language models and their human-like text output, Reed notes, has created “new urgency to find ways to verify some information about people online while also providing the privacy and anonymity that has become a cherished characteristic of the web.”

Can we reconnect a generation? A mental health crisis is gripping young people, with rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness rising. As social bonds fray and digital life deepens isolation, experts are sounding the alarm and demanding action.

Join Daniel Zoltani, Executive Director of the Whole Foods Market Foundation; Sara DeWitt, Senior Vice President and General Manager of PBS KIDS; January Contreras, Former Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services; and Steve Bullock, Former Governor of Montana, as Semafor explores the complex drivers of youth wellbeing, highlighting opportunities to rebuild social ties, foster resilience, and develop lasting strategies to improve the mental health of young people.

July 16, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

Derek Thompson is a co-author of Abundance and recently launched a Substack newsletter.

TikTok CEO Shou Chew and Candle’s Mayer had a hushed dinner at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on Thursday, while a private farewell for ad legend David Droga was happening at the next table. One executive in attendance was forced to wear a dinner jacket … In response to the strike on Iran, Tom Llamas is anchoring a special edition of NBC’s evening news broadcast on Sunday … New branding we liked from an AI researcher in Cannes: They’re not AI “hallucinations,” they’re “rumors” … The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey “nearly accidentally ordered an 8,000 euro champagne-and-sparklers-and-American-flag-and-Bruce” at a “clubstaurant” that proved a bit loud for earnest discussion of media revenue ... Andrew Cuomo stood up the New York Editorial Board … Vital City’s panel of New York journalists ruled that The New York Times “made a hash” of its endorsement process … Meghan McCain tells us it was a “true privilege” to secure second lady Usha Vance’s first long-form, on-camera interview, which will air on the 2Way YouTube channel Wednesday: “The American public is going to love this more personal side we get to see of her.” ... The site Hunterbrook had the B-2 bombing story earlier than most mainstream news outlets, earning a hat-tip from The New York Times.

In March, SAP became Europe’s most highly valued company, having leapfrogged the likes of Novo Nordisk, LVMH, and ASML.

Its market capitalization is still just one-tenth that of Microsoft’s, and Novo has been jostling for the European lead again. But, as SAP CEO Christian Klein told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the company’s success shows legacy tech companies can still dominate in the disruptive era of cloud computing and artificial intelligence.