Media

We’re tweaking this part of the newsletter to look forward to the questions being asked across media, in the hopes you’ll send tips about the questions we’re asking.

Tucker Carlson is going head-to-head with the Fox News debate by interviewing Donald Trump Wednesday. Who will look diminished the next day? And can Fox resist dragging the anchor, who is still under contract, to court?

Is the heat really off TikTok? The company’s new focus on a subscription music service suggests they’re not facing the paralysis that sometimes afflicts targets of U.S. government action.

And the story of heirs to an industrial fortune buying Manhattan cachet with cool media investments — Puck, Air Mail, Pushkin in the case of the Standard Industries roofing fortune — is as old as New York. The Times beat Vanity Fair to this one, for some reason, but we look forward to the glossy’s follow-up.

Republican candidate says Newsmax tried to make him pay for coverage

THE SCOOP

If Vivek Ramaswamy wants to appear on Newsmax, he should pay to do it.

That was the message that network chief Chris Ruddy delivered to the Republican presidential candidate during a private call earlier this summer, according to two people to whom the candidate described the conversation. Ramaswamy had complained that the right-leaning network was sticking him in little-watched midday slots or ignoring him outright.

Ruddy also suggested a solution, Ramaswamy told associates: Buy more television ads on the network. Ruddy, Ramaswamy told them, noted that such a transaction had helped Republican businessman Perry Johnson, a gadfly candidate who has thus far garnered only passing attention among mainstream and even conservative outlets covering the 2024 presidential cycle.

In a statement, Newsmax spokesperson Bill Daddi told Semafor that the insinuation “that Newsmax is asking candidates to advertise in order to ensure coverage as some quid pro quo … is categorically untrue and incorrect. Newsmax would take an assertion such as that very seriously. There is no correlation between advertising and editorial visibility for any candidate on Newsmax.”

Read more here.

Julian Borger is the world affairs editor at The Guardian.

Inside Michael Lewis’s hero factory

THE NEWS

The nonfiction hitmaker Michael Lewis has made a career of minting ordinary heroes, a practice that exploded into public acrimony last week when the football player depicted in The Blind Side sued the family who took him in.

But film rights aren’t the central revenue stream in Lewis’s unique run of creating public figures. The author has also adopted the unusual practice of shepherding his subjects into lucrative careers as public speakers, managed by his speaking agent and appearing beside him at public events.

For the past decade and a half, Lewis has been represented for speaking engagements by Greater Talent Agency, which books events for high-profile speakers and was bought by UTA in 2017. Over the years, Lewis’ books proved to be a farm team for Greater Talent speakers: The speaking agency also represented half a dozen other people heavily featured in Lewis’sbooks, including Moneyball subjects Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta, Flash Boys' Brad Katsuyama, and The Big Short‘s Steve Eisman, wh ose agency biographies cite Lewis’s books.

Greater Talent also represented Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, as well as Michael Oher, the main characters in the movie The Blind Side. Both the Tuohys and Oher asked for up to $50,000 per speaking engagement, according to two people familiar with the requests.

“In a delightfully open and engaging presentation, the Tuohy family invites audiences to go behind the scenes of The Blind Side with a heartwarming message: “In our house, we believe in miracles,” one promo for a speaking engagement with the Tuohys read.

Lewis’s relationship with the Tuohys is under scrutiny following a lawsuit last week filed by Oher in which the former professional football player alleged that the Tuohys lied about adopting him, and reaped millions from their conservatorship of him and using his life story without appropriately compensating him.

In an email to Semafor, Lewis said that he was uninvolved in the speaking process, saying “when book or magazine subjects ask me what to do with some lecture offer I receive I just refer them to either Don Epstein or David Evenchick,” who have both had leadership roles booking speakers for UTA.

Read more here.

News:

EXCLUSIVE: Lichting up: Chris Licht may not work at CNN anymore, but the network is still in his thoughts. One person familiar with the conversations told Semafor that the former CNN chief called several on-air personalities this week to congratulate them on their new roles following a scheduling change announcement this week. Since leaving CNN, Licht has not commented publicly on his exit, but the tabloids have spotted him dining with high-profile political figures and vacationing in Africa. — Max

Rating Trump: MSNBC is continuing to reap the benefits of CNN’s decision during Licht’s tenure to scale back on wall-to-wall Trump coverage. The network’s primetime ratings following the Georgia indictment rivaled those of the network’s best days during the peak of Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump.

Moscow rules: Moscow has added a group of British journalists to its honor roll of individuals banned from the country for coverage of the Ukraine war. They include BBC news chief Deborah Turness and host Ros Atkins, the Guardian correspondent Julian Borger, and four from the Telegraph. The Russian government accuses them of seeking to “exclude signs of dissent by using methods described by George Orwell in his novels 1984 and Animal Farm.”

Sell high: The activist investor ValueAct has sold about a quarter of its stake in the New York Times, whose stock has gone up 34% since the firm disclosed its stake.

Thank you, Lachlan: Burger genius (and Bon Appetit editor) Amiel Stanek, on whose shoulders an annual Brooklyn media BBQ rests, went AWOL on me, but finally surfaced after I leaked word of his ghosting to The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Cartwright.

Tech:

AI unscripted: You can’t copyright AI-generated work, a DC federal judge found, raising questions about AI’s value to the IP-crazy media biz.

Standoff in Ottawa: The Canadian government is demanding Meta allow Canadians to share news about wildfires, amid a standoff between the platform and news publishers.

Audio:

Another bite at the Apple: While it doesn’t get the coverage of rival Spotify, Apple has spent the summer quietly rolling out new features to attract users and podcast creators. Semafor is told that the company plans to roll out new podcast creator tools tomorrow morning, just a few weeks after tinkering with its podcast discovery feature on Apple Podcasts last month.

• TikTok has become a launching pad for new musicians around the world. Now it’s getting into streaming, with ambitious plans to rival Spotify and Apple Music — while also working with them.
• The Republican base is all in on impeaching Joe Biden, even as House leaders try to tread carefully.
• A growing debate divides the nascent carbon capture industry: What to do with the carbon once it’s captured?