Media

TikTok truce? A federal court last week blocked Montana’s attempt to ban TikTok, and the Biden administration has grown pretty quiet on the subject. It is equally a tribute to the power of the First Amendment and to federal weakness that two presidents and successive congresses have gotten nowhere on this one — but will a new Senate bill revive the effort?

The ‘un-cancellable’ Megyn Kelly returns to the debate stage

THE NEWS

After Megyn Kelly left her high-profile Fox News perch for a $69 million, three-year NBC contract — and, just two years later, was forced out of that gig — Ben Shapiro, the conservative media wunderkind, invited her to Los Angeles. It was 2019, and podcasts, he told her, were blowing up. Audio was proving lucrative for his company, The Daily Wire.

Kelly had hesitated, she recalled last month in a long telephone interview from a family vacation in the Caribbean. She had, in her view, been both “canceled by the right” — for hostility to Donald Trump, who famously said she was “bleeding out of her whatever” — and “canceled by the left,” for, among other things, defending people who dress in blackface for Halloween.

She confided in her therapist her biggest fear: That nobody would listen.

But then came May 2020, when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck until he suffocated, and the city and the country erupted. Kelly felt that the ensuing civil unrest and backlash to the police was out of control. She was also unhappy with the trans rights movement. So she solicited advice from other prominent independent figures she admires: journalist and Substacker Matt Taibbi, Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, and Free Press founder Bari Weiss.

“While we don’t share exactly the same politics, I think we’re all in the same cabal, we are all on a similar mission,” Kelly, 53, told me.

So she signed a deal with Red Seat Ventures, which develops conservative media startups, to sell ads and advise her on production, and began recording in a newly-built studio in Connecticut.

It’s only been three years since her pivot to audio. But on Dec. 6, Kelly will be onstage at a Republican presidential debate, which she is co-hosting on NewsNation, the upstart cable news channel. Kelly told Semafor that she received several offers to co-host debates this primary cycle, but agreed to participate because of her respect for the two cohosts, NewsNation anchor Elizabeth Vargas and Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson, a friend and frequent guest on Kelly’s podcast.

“I know how to do it, and it’s frustrating for me to watch others do it and not have my own try at it,” she said. “And I also just feel that, given how volatile everything around Trump is, this actually could matter.”

João Batista Jr. is a reporter for the Brazilian magazine Piauí and has reported on now-ejected Rep. George Santos’ activities in Brazil.

☊ Audio

Listen: Podcasts are vibrant — but hard to monetize, as this chart from Deloitte’s 2024 TMT Predictions report vividly illustrates. (h/t Hot Pod)

⁛ News

Owning the Times: (Corrected): We misunderstood a theoretical conversation with the investor Boykin Curry about buying 10% of the New York Times. He’s not, he says, planning on it.

Puzzling for everybody: Iconic Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward recalled recently being confused for neocon folk hero and anti-Trump Republican Bill Kristol. “Are you Bill Kristol?” a stranger asked him, continuing: “You have some ridiculous opinions.” “No, I’m Bob Woodward,” he replied. “That’s worse!” said his interlocutor (!!??).

Missing in Beijing: A reporter for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post has gone dark after covering a security forum on the mainland, Tokyo’s Kyodo News reports.

DeSantis beat, RIP: POLITICO’s DeSantis reporter, the talented Sally Goldenberg, has dropped the beat to return to covering the rather more interesting New York Mayor Eric Adams.

Switching sides: The Europe-China correspondent for the Financial Times, Yuan Yang, is campaigning for a Labour seat in the U.K. Parliament.

Traffic jam: Even at the New York Times, web traffic is often associated with success. In its internal daily note to staff on Tuesday, the paper said: “Dear colleagues, our coverage of the Israel Gaza war isn’t quite as strong as when the crisis flared, which you’d expect.” Several minutes later, the paper sent out an internal correction tweaking the language, saying, “Dear colleagues, reader interest of the Israel Gaza war isn’t quite as strong as when the crisis first flared, which you’d expect.”

Whew: The labor journalist Mike Elk has settled his messy lawsuit with the NewsGuild, which had prompted the Guild to seek emails from a journalist (me!) and from sexual harassment whistleblowers. Elk credited the new leader of the Guild’s parent union, Communications Workers of America president Claude Cummings, for “stepping in to resolve this matter” and trying to create “an inclusive atmosphere not just for people of color but for women, immigrants, and even autistics like me.” He said he’d be donating the $10,000 settlement to an immigrant resource center in Pittsburgh, Casa San José, to train young Latino reporters, and said he’ll be celebrating at Murphy’s Taproom in Pittsburgh’s Regent Square. The NewsGuild did not respond to an inquiry about Elk’s settlement.

Correction: Individual members of the New York Times tech guild — but not the Guild itself, as our report last week implied — proposed a union resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. We regret the error.

⁌ TV

Pay to play: Debates are expensive television productions and thus, quietly, a bit of a racket. The right-wing channel Newsmax is balking at demands it cough up $2 million for the privilege of being ABC News’s “junior partner” — and to basically defray some of ABC’s costs.

Ugly hot: Is Adam Driver ugly? Or hot? CNN’s Chris Wallace asks the distinctive-looking actor the hard questions.

✦ Marketing

Who will own Cannes? Ascential, the British company that runs the Cannes Lions ad festival, is selling off its assets — notably, a digital commerce division, which went for nearly a billion dollars to Omnicom. MediaLink’s Kassan is hoping to reach a deal with them to buy the festival itself, which he already more or less rules — and told Semafor at the DealBook summit that he thinks he has a “pretty good chance” of closing that deal.

Stay tuned: There is one (1) reason to look forward to the 2024 U.S. election: the huge boost it gives to big parts of the media business. Those numbers are expected to be bigger than ever, according to Madison and Wall’s Brian Wieser. He expects political advertising “to account for 4.3% of all advertising next year,” and more than 8% in the fourth quarter of 2024.

• COP28 opened with a big win — a new fund to provide climate reparations payments to low-income countries impacted by disasters. But it could still turn into a bust.
• In the new House of Representatives, anyone can control the floor. Rogue members have found a way to use a once-rare procedure to force votes constantly.
• President Joe Biden’s plans to counter China run through Angola.
• Communities in Kenya are protesting against forceful evictions from their homes which they blame on government deals to ramp up the sale of carbon credits.