Archives for July 2022

Mr. Trump found a home on Fox News when the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, gave him a weekly slot on “Fox Friends” in 2011. Mr. Trump used the platform to connect with the budding Tea Party movement as he thrashed establishment Republicans like Mr. Ryan and spread a lie about the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Initially, neither Mr. Ailes nor Mr. Murdoch thought of Mr. Trump as a serious presidential candidate. Mr. Ailes told colleagues at the time that he thought Mr. Trump was using his 2016 campaign to get a better deal with NBC, which broadcast “The Apprentice,” according to “Insurgency,” this reporter’s account of Mr. Trump’s rise in the G.O.P. And, when Ivanka Trump told Mr. Murdoch over lunch in 2015 that her father intended to run, Mr. Murdoch reportedly did not even look up from his soup, according to “The Devil’s Bargain,” by Joshua Green.

But as Mr. Trump became bigger than any one news outlet — and bigger than even his own political party — he was able to turn the tables and rally his supporters against Fox or any other outlet he felt was too critical of him. He regularly used Twitter to attack Fox personalities like Megyn Kelly, Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove.

The network could always be critical of him in its news coverage. But now the skepticism comes through louder — in asides from news anchors, in interviews with voters or in opinion articles for other Murdoch-owned properties.

Referring to the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, the Fox anchor Bret Baier said it had made Mr. Trump “look horrific” by detailing how it had taken 187 minutes for him to be persuaded to say anything publicly about the riot. One recent segment on FoxNews.com featured interviews with Trump supporters who were overwhelmingly unenthusiastic about a possible third campaign, saying that they thought “his time has passed” and that he was “a little too polarizing.” Then they offered their thoughts on who should replace him on the ticket. Unanimously, they named Mr. DeSantis.

“I spent 11 years at Fox, and I know nothing pretaped hits a Fox screen that hasn’t been signed off on and sanctioned at the very top levels of management,” said Eric Bolling, a former Fox host who is now with Newsmax. “Especially when it has to do with a presidential election.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/business/media/fox-news-donald-trump-rupert-murdoch.html

Frank Millspaugh, a general manager of the station in the 1960s and ’70s, said listeners had empathized with Mr. Josephson’s eternal grumbling about waking up early. But some board members of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns the station, were displeased with the countercultural tone of Mr. Josephson, Mr. Fass and Mr. Post.

“They wanted a more serious, more respectful sound to the station,” Mr. Millspaugh said in a phone interview. But when they understood how effective those hosts were in raising money for the station, “they softened their criticism.”

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Josephson served for two years as the general manager of WBAI, which routinely operated on a shoestring. During one urgent financial crisis, the station turned to listeners to raise $56,000 to meet its monthly expenses. Within four days, $25,800 had poured in, most of it cash.

“We will survive,” Mr. Josephson told The Daily News in 1976. “We have to raise more money and spend less. It’s just like New York City,” which was dealing with a much larger financial crisis of its own at the time.

Norman Lawrence Josephson was born on May 12, 1939, in Los Angeles. His father, Adrian, at one point owned a woodworking company; his mother, Marian (Tyre) Josephson, was a homemaker.

Larry had loved radio since childhood but did not initially pursue work in it. Instead, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied linguistics, then went to work for I.B.M. as a computer engineer in the New York area. (He did not finish his bachelor’s degree until 1973.) He began volunteering at WBAI in the 1960s and was hired to host the morning show in 1966 because, he said, the station couldn’t find anyone else who would wake up that early.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/obituaries/larry-josephson-dead.html

Vice has focused on diversifying its revenue streams in recent years, expanding its Vice Studio business; its ad agency, Virtue; and its global news gathering division. Those units have helped the company improve its financial results and achieve profitability during some quarters last year, a person familiar with the matter said.

On Thursday, Vice Media announced that it had garnered 33 Emmy nominations in the news and documentary category.

The Information reported earlier that Vice had hired advisers to explore a sale of its studio business. CNBC reported that Vice Media was exploring a sale of its entire business, and The Wall Street Journal reported that Group Black, a media company focused on Black ownership, was exploring a deal for Vice.

Vice, like many digital news companies, last year explored a plan to go public through a deal with a special purpose acquisition vehicle, which had been seen as an easier way to take a company public than a traditional initial public offering. But enthusiasm on Wall Street for SPACs waned, in part because of the poor performance of many of the companies that used them to go public, and Vice instead raised money from investors.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/business/media/vice-media-antenna-group.html

King, Garcia-Navarro and others had earlier alleged pay disparities at the organization between male and female hosts, among other issues. NPR has said that improving diversity and equity is its “foremost priority,” and pointed to competition from deep-pocketed rivals as one explanation for the departures.

Although Sanders said that “issues of equity” were a factor in his decision, he added that the choice had been largely personal, fueled by his desire for maximal creative freedom.

“I spent a third of my life in that place and it still means a lot to me,” he said. “But I wanted the time and the space to carve out an identity that wasn’t ‘Sam Sanders from NPR.’”

On the first episode of “Into It,” Sanders was lithe and sprightly, a distance runner easing into stride. Over the course of 30 minutes, he bounded through a series of games with Vulture colleagues that highlighted the week’s preoccupations: Jennifer Lopez (“a human angel here on earth”), Ben Affleck (“something dead behind his eyes”), Keke Palmer (“a breath of fresh air”).

The structure of the show, over which Sanders has wide discretion, is deliberately flexible. His long interviews are back in the mix (the first episode included a deep dive on Beyoncé with the journalist Danyel Smith) and he is leaving space for what he calls “high jinks for the sake of high jinks,” like the celebrity liquor tasting.

Mostly, he says, he wants to talk about whatever feels good, and invite others to do the same.

“I think the best thing that I can offer is a place where you can come recharge, learn, be entertained, and then go back out into the world feeling a little bit of a lift,” Sanders said. “That’s what I’ve wanted for my listeners from Day 1.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/arts/sam-sanders-npr-vulture.html

A successful entrepreneur as well as a newsman, he founded The Lakota Journal, a weekly newspaper based in Rapid City, in 2000. Nine years later, he started Native Sun News Today, another Rapid City newspaper, which he owned with his subsequent wife, Jackie Giago, and wrote for until his death.

Timothy Antoine Giago Jr., a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, was born on July 12, 1934, in Kyle, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of seven children of Tim Sr., who worked in a store in nearby Porcupine, and Lupita Giago, a homemaker. His Oglala name was Nanwica Kcjii, which translates to “He stands up for them.”

Mr. Giago attended the University of Nevada, Reno, before he began writing a column on Indian affairs for The Rapid City Journal in 1979, becoming the first regular American Indian voice in a South Dakota newspaper. The following year he was hired as a full-time reporter at the paper before striking out on his own.

With no precedent for a plucky, pugnacious reservation newspaper, Lakota Times was thought to have little chance of success. “Some people said, ‘I’m only going to take out a six-month subscription, because I don’t expect you to be around much longer than that,” Doris Giago recalled.

But the newspaper filled a void for Pine Ridge citizens.

“It was often the only way they could get information about what was going on,” said Rhonda LeValdo, a former president of NAJA who now teaches journalism at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan. “For us as Native people, our issues were rarely talked about in mainstream news unless it was about something affecting non-Natives.”

Under Mr. Giago’s leadership, the newspaper published investigative articles that “caused banks to be fined and rip-offs of the tribal government to be halted,” he wrote in the Nieman newsletter, Nieman Reports. In 1990, he spearheaded a successful campaign to get South Dakota to rename Pioneer Day, celebrated on Columbus Day, to Native American Day.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/tim-giago-dead.html

Still, other readers have come to the defense of Ms. Zelenska, seeing the shoot as a symbol of national pride: a means to show the world Ukrainian elegance; a reminder of the balm that can be found in beauty; and a subtle nod to shared humanity in the face of inhuman aggression. She is not, after all, in a ball gown eating cake. She is in a war zone, looking haunted.

To a certain extent, the debate simply shows how tangled our feelings about fashion still are and how entrenched the view of it as a nonserious subject remains — despite the fact that fashion is a key part of pop culture and the rare equivalent of a global language. It’s one that every politician, and public figure, employs to their own ends, whether they want to admit it or not. (That’s why, despite the risks, they keep appearing in magazines like Vogue.)

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a war being conducted on all fronts: on the ground, in the air, in the digital sphere and in the arena of public opinion. (See, for example, Ms. Zelenska’s appearance in Washington last week.) Vogue — and, indeed, any outlet that allows the Ukrainian people to reach different swaths of the global population and influence sentiment — is one of them. As Ms. Zelenska and her husband, who founded one of the biggest television entertainment production companies in Ukraine before getting into politics, know.

By putting Ms. Zelenska on its cover, Vogue is furthering her role as the relatable face, and voice, of the struggle; bringing her up close and personal for the watching world. And by appearing in public, and raising issues in public, when her husband cannot, she is keeping her country’s needs alive in the international conversation at a time when other crises are vying for attention. She has, essentially, weaponized Vogue.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/style/olena-zelenska-vogue.html