The Washington Post is on a pace to lose about $100 million in 2023, the New York Times reports.
“The Post has struggled to increase the number of its paying customers since the 2020 election, when its digital subscriptions peaked at three million. It now has around 2.5 million.”
“Sound of Freedom” — a movie about child sex trafficking, which has been hailed by Republicans and QAnon believers — was the second most-watched film in North America last weekend, behind “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning,” and has made $90.7 million as of Monday, the New York Times reports.
One of the movie’s stars has promoted baseless QAnon theories and Donald Trump has hosted a private screening of the movie at his golf club.
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel “has invited the popular Ruthless Podcast to host a ‘College GameDay’-style show ahead of the first GOP presidential debate in August,” Axios reports.
“The three-year-old podcast — which mixes politics and games, with Comfortably Smug, Josh Holmes, Michael Duncan and John Ashbrook as ringmasters — is one of the right’s most influential outlets, with more than 3 million unique listeners.”
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) was interviewed on Fox Business by Maria Bartiromo, where he accused President Biden of taking massive bribes with no evidence.
BIGGS: Maria, we’re talking literally, it’s not $10 million. It’s it’s well over 20, $30 million. And some estimates as high as $100 million flowing through these accounts.
BARTIROMO: Holy moly!
BIGGS: And so, we have to get to the bottom of it. But we’re getting slow-walked ourselves from the administration, obviously, and their partisans and their supporters but this looks more and more sinister every time we look at it…
BARTIROMO: Unbelievable. As much as $100 million taken in by the Biden family is what you just said.
“He and I got a one-on-one for the first time in years and it was frankly great to see him. You know, all that nonsense between us is under the bridge and he could not have been more magnanimous.”
— Megyn Kelly, saying on her show that she’s patched things up with Donald Trump
“Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former White House adviser Neil Patel are seeking to raise funds to start a new media company that would potentially use Twitter as its backbone,“ the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The new company would be anchored by longer versions of the free videos that Carlson has been posting regularly on Twitter since shortly after his departure from Fox News, but would ultimately be driven by subscriptions.”
“Carlson and Patel are looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the company.”
“Ray Epps, the man at the center of a widespread conspiracy theory about the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing Fox News and its former host Tucker Carlson of defamation for promoting a ‘fantastical story’ that Mr. Epps was an undercover government agent who instigated the violence at the Capitol as a way to disparage then-President Trump and his supporters,” the New York Times reports.
ProPublica: “AdStyle ads are often displayed on a network of more than a dozen U.S. conservative outlets connected to a lawyer whose clients have included former President Donald Trump. Advertisers pay AdStyle to show their ads to web users, and the company splits the revenue with its publisher partners. Its ads are easy to spot because they carry the AdStyle logo.”
“The prevalence of scam ads on AdStyle and its many partnerships with right-wing sites around the world exemplify how conservative publishers, politicians and operatives profit from fleecing their fellow right-wingers — and how some players take the strategy global. Even the editorially conservative National Review has acknowledged ‘the right’s grifter problem.'”
The Daily Mail spotted Jeff Zucker, Allison Gollust and Don Lemon — who were all fired from CNN — wining and dining on the Amalfi Coast in Italy.
This comes after Zucker emerged as a frontrunner vying to buy CNN.
“Speaker Kevin McCarthy has expanded the use of cameras in the House chamber after his own contested speaker’s race turned into a riveting reality TV show,” Semafor reports.
“Viewers now get a broader glimpse of Congress in action… There are nine different cameras inside the House chamber operated by the House Recording Studio, under the purview of the office of the Chief Administrative Officer, an appointed position determined by a majority vote at the start of every Congress.”
Showbiz411: “In the last two days, New York Times Culture writer Jason Bailey published a profile of controversial Warner Discovery owner David Zaslav. The story appeared on gq.com and was titled ‘How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Public Enemy Number One in Hollywood.’”
“But now the piece is gone. It’s been wiped clean from the GQ website. Vanished into thin air. A revised piece, 500 words shorter, has taken its place but not on the GQ website.”
“Fox News has agreed to pay $12 million to Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer who had accused the network of operating a hostile and discriminatory workplace and of coercing her into providing false testimony in a deposition,” the New York Times reports.
Puck: “Tucker’s new media play might — if executed adroitly — serve as a paradigm for a generation of TV news personalities with huge followings and fandoms who remain marooned to their desks amid shrinking audiences.”
Fox News host Jesse Watters accused former President Barack Obama of “never really looking at things from an American perspective,” the HuffPost reports.
Said Watters: “He’s always speaking to the world. Even when he’s speaking to us, he’s appealing to the world.”
Vanity Fair: “With eight weeks until Fox News hosts the first Republican presidential primary debate in Milwaukee, executives at the Rupert Murdoch–owned network are scrambling to convince front-runner Donald Trump to reverse his threat to boycott the event.”
Said one top GOP operative: “Fox is trying to get Trump to say yes. They’re offering him the world to show they can be trusted.”
“So far, though, Trump seems to be sticking to his suggestion that he will skip the debate.”
Mediaite: Trump whines about Fox’s coverage of DeSantis, ludicrously (and falsely) accuses network of icing him out.
“Jesse Watters will be the new host of Fox News’s 8 p.m. hour, succeeding ousted star anchor Tucker Carlson, one of several prime-time changes the network announced on Monday,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Laura Ingraham will shift earlier in the evening to the 7 p.m. hour, while late-night host Greg Gutfeld will move up an hour to 10 p.m.”
Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo claimed the Biden administration was “drumming up” coverage of possible civil war in Russia to distract from news of Hunter Biden’s plea deal.
Said Bartiromo: “The White House wanted to give the media something else to cover, and this is the MO. This is exactly the way they do things.”
Rolling Stone: “Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News laid bare how the network communicated behind the scenes about broadcasting 2020 election misinformation, ultimately leading the network to fork over a massive settlement.”
“Newsmax could be next, as voting technology company Smartmatic has subpoenaed several of the right-wing cable network’s current and former employees for work and personal correspondence.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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