Media

1. Ratner’s world
2. CNN quits Apple
3. Mixed Signals
4. WaPo leans right
5. CPJ report

I was finishing up this week’s reporting on Donald Trump’s latest unusual use of presidential power — to revive a buddy cop franchise, more on that below — when the president and New York’s socialist mayor-elect came onto the screen.

Just as it seemed like Trump was losing his ability to surprise and captivate much of the American public, the president left the nation’s jaw on the floor with his Friday afternoon lovefest with Zohran Mamdani.

The reality of the presidency is getting harder, as it tends to: election losses, inability to escape the Epstein files, and infighting have been snowballing toward the impression that Trump is a lame duck whose powers and influence are naturally beginning to wane.

But he’s still the nation’s great television programmer. Millions of people tuned in on cable television and YouTube to watch the Republican president lavish praise on a Democratic upstart who’d won in part by loudly opposing him. The assembled media seemed unable to contain its collective disbelief at the duo pairing up to take on crime, housing, and affordability in New York.

And so as the ratings on Season 5 of the Trump show had begun to dip, we have an exciting new character. Will the partnership simply be a made-for-TV spectacle? Who knows — that’s the drama. And, if nothing else, the new American state capitalism may get us Rush Hour 4.

Also today: Washington Post hires that weren’t, and why CNN is missing from your Apple News feed.

Trump yearns for a remake of American culture — and ‘Rush Hour’

Trump has strong views about news media and an interest in asserting them; he’s long claimed credit for ending the careers of journalists and comedians. CNN staff now worry that if their company is sold to Paramount, his friend Larry Ellison may fire two of the network’s most prominent women: Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar.

Somewhat less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which Trump wants to shape popular culture outside news and late night comedy. The onetime wannabe Broadway producer brought his particular style of late 20th century over-the-top macho taste to political events, elevating professional wrestling to the Republican National Convention and inviting the 1980s icons Sylvester Stallone and Mike Tyson to the White House.

Entertainment studios have thrown the Trumps the occasional bone — Amazon paid $40 million for Brett Ratner’s documentary about Melania Trump, a presumably soft-focus project on the life of the fairly private first lady. But beyond his on-again-off-again relationship with the Murdochs, Trump’s preferences have largely been ignored by the entertainment industry titans who made him a household name. He has been forced to deliver his cultural preferences through online rants about celebrities and programming for political events and at the White House, where he commandeered the presidential aux cord.

But now Larry Ellison, one of Trump’s most prominent financial supporters, owns a second-tier studio, Paramount, and is on the cusp of taking control of the great Warner legacy, with the giant library and sprawling production that come with it.

The film producer Dallas Sonnier predicts “a wave of classically male-driven movies with mentally tough, traditional, courageous, confident heroes. Maybe even a tad cocky, but dedicated to honor and duty. Plus, of course, a few explosions, gun battles, helicopters, fistfights, and car chases!”

Now, the president is offering some creative input on potential upcoming projects.

Trump appears to want to revive the raucous comedies and action movies of the late 1980s to late 1990s. He’s passionate, for instance, about the 1988 Jean-Claude Van Damme sports flick Bloodsport. A person directly familiar with the conversations told Semafor that the president of the United States has personally pressed the Paramount owner to revive another franchise from Ratner: Rush Hour, a buddy-cop comedy starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker that blended physical comedy, martial arts, and gags about racial stereotypes.

Jodi Kantor on SCOTUS’ secrets

Can the Supreme Court keep its secrets? New York Times investigative reporter Jodi Kantor joins Mixed Signals to explain how she’s revealed the secrets of internal deliberations behind the ceremony and black robes of the US Supreme Court. Max and Ben ask whether the court is actually leaking more, how newer justices are reshaping its public face, and what Kantor has learned about the culture of secrecy and power inside a long-impenetrable institution. She also reflects on the post–#MeToo media landscape and the fracturing of “factual consensus.”

WaPo drifts right

Can you fire your audience? The Washington Post’s opinion section seems willing, at least, to run the risk in its post-Democracy-Dies-in-Darkness era. Vice President JD Vance is reportedly pushing Jeff Bezos to hire the Scotty Reston of MAGA, Matt Boyle. The Post’s opinion desk has also ventured well beyond its blandly libertarian new ethos, we’re told, and sought to recruit one of Washington’s leading socially conservative journalists, The Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan, an anti-abortion correspondent whose work has also played a major role in rallying Republicans against transgender people in sports.

“The audience now is overwhelmingly left-leaning,” opinion editor Adam O’Neal acknowledged to Reason’s Nick Gillespie. “We’re not trying to push them away and make this a MAGA project where they’ll be deeply offended by everything we write. At the same time, I don’t think it’s a great business model to have one … very similar audience. And so we’re trying to continue to serve our existing subscribers, who we value, while also looking at people — I don’t know, like my dad.”

Introspection! at the gala

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual gala has long been a place where American reporters celebrate their profession — and keep their own struggles in context by honoring their peers around the world who have been jailed, assaulted, or killed.

But the group’s dinner Thursday brought to the surface some of the strains facing American journalists and advocacy groups of all sorts, including questions about how to respond to Trump. In one instance, the event’s chair, Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour, called on journalists to be “cool and collected in the face of low-grade provocations.” CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg then focused on Trump’s escalating insults of journalists, saying: “The last week has not left me feeling cool or collected.”

We’re not sure how to resolve that one, but while you mull it, please check out this moving video about the pathbreaking exiled Central Asian investigative journalist Bolot Temirov, whose distribution methods include traditional Kyrgyz song.

— Ben Smith

CNN drops out of Apple News feed

CNN quietly removed its stories from Apple News over the weekend as the cable news brand’s contract with Apple lapsed, Semafor has learned, though the two companies are discussing a new deal that would restore CNN’s content to the popular news app. The app and its paid counterpart, Apple News+, have become increasingly important distribution and monetization levers for news publishers, as social media platforms avoid pushing users towards written news content. But CNN’s vanishing from the Apple News feed also underscores the risk media companies may face when they rely heavily on traffic from a single external source that they don’t control. CNN declined to comment. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of The Nation and the founding editor of Jacobin. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reposted one of Jacobin’s articles about Jeffrey Epstein.)

• Semafor has a new head of communications. Rachel Keidan joins us from fintech firm Superstate and a series of Washington jobs, including at the US International Development Finance Corporation.
• There aren’t many areas in which The Washington Post has positioned itself better than The New York Times over the last several years, but the paper dodged at least one embarrassing situation that befell its longtime competitor. In late 2023, the Post’s opinion section began production for a podcast that would have been co-hosted by Larry Summers. Ultimately the idea was scrapped after it proved difficult to coordinate with the former Treasury secretary. Instead, Summers signed on as a contributor to the Times, which cut ties with him earlier this week amid revelations about his relationship with Epstein.
• Gerry Cardinale’s long Telegraph nightmare is over — so he can focus on another small media investment, Paramount. It was, Lionel Barber writes, “a very British stitch-up,” a triumph for the country’s still-formidable establishment, ending in a victory for the canny Mail chairman Lord Rothermere.
• Bloomberg has quietly started inserting AI summaries of competitors’ articles into the Bloomberg Terminal, Semafor has learned.
• The New York Times released its annual Puzzle Mania issue on Sunday, several weeks earlier than normal. A spokesperson for the paper told Semafor the Times released the issue earlier as it realized many families play the games together each year, and often want more time to finish them.