Semafor Keeps Hosting “Restoring Trust In News” Events Stocked With Known Right Wing Bullshitters

Back in 2022, former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends launched a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization’s launch events didn’t go particularly well: a “trust in news” event that somehow didn’t see the problem with platforming and amplifying millionaire propagandist Tucker Carlson as a respectable voice in media.

At the event, Smith introduced Carlson as a serious journalist (this was before he got fired from Fox for being terrible), then conducted a softball interview where Smith failed to press Carlson on any issue of substance. All the while, Semafor proudly proclaimed it was a new kind of news company that would restore Americans’ trust in news, despite not really demonstrating any capacity to actually do that.

Three years later, and it’s not particularly clear Ben Smith or Semafor learned much of anything about the criticism they received for spearheading a “trust in news” event with a right wing propagandist.

The company recent announced a new February 27 event, entitled “Innovating To Restore Trust In News.” The event is very short on any of the independent voices actually innovating in news right now, and mostly features giant companies like Fox News, the New York Times, Comcast/NBC, and CNN — most of which have been broadly criticizing for softball election coverage and normalizing authoritarianism.

CNN, under Time Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav, has responded to authoritarianism by shifting the channel’s already corporatist, centrist coverage even further rightward. The New York Times has been aggressively lambasted for “both sides” coverage that loses the truth in a quest for false objectivity. And Fox News is, by any measure, the most successful right wing propaganda effort ever constructed.

As media critic Parker Molloy has long noted, the idea that the U.S. press suffered a “liberal bias” has long been a lie. Most consolidated, billionaire-owned U.S. media giants veer corporatist and center-right, and a long list of outlets (CBS, NPR, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post) have responded to authoritarianism by softening their criticism of far-right ideology and hiring more Republicans.

The reason Americans’ are losing their trust in news is because U.S. media has been highly consolidated in to the hands of the rich and is increasingly incapable of having too intimate of a relationship with the truth. Instead we get a lot of ad-engagement-chasing, feckless infotainment.

If you look around at journalism in this dangerous moment, most of the best, most innovative journalism is being performed by smaller companies or individuals. Wired has been beating major outlets to the punch on their coverage of Musk’s corrupt disemboweling of governance. Ditto for independent journalist Marisa Kabas, who has been out-scooping outlets with far greater staff and resources.

There are a ton of great worker-owned outlets like 404 Media or Defector or Aftermath that have emerged from U.S. media sector carnage caused by the extraction class and a rotating crop of fail-upward brunchlords. They’re all staffed with shell-shocked young journalists keen to do journalism that have been fired a dozen times by a rotating crop of terrible, incompetent media executives never held accountable.

Semafor didn’t think any of these folks were worth featuring as innovators. The closest the “innovation” symposium gets to an innovator is Mehdi Hasan, who recently launched a new news organization on the back of Substack despite the platform’s nazi problem. Semafor did, however, think it was important to feature Fox News’ Brett Baier and Megyn Kelly, both long maligned for oodles of right wing bullshit.

I recently wrote a long column for Dame Magazine on the deadly rise of right wing propaganda, its symbiosis with corporatist media, and the way this charade is all aided by outlets like Semafor that are seemingly incapable of calling a duck a duck.

Semafor, like countless other DC gossip mags (Axios, Politico), are the poster-child for “he said, she said” journalism that’s generally too afraid of upsetting sources, ad-clicking readers, or affluent ownership to get anywhere near the truth. This kind of “view from nowhere” journalism prioritizes maximizing engagement over helping readers genuinely understand what’s actually happening.

If you candidly acknowledge right wing propagandists and bullshitters as right wing propagandists and bullshitters, you risk alienating DC sources, a big segment of your readership, and the right wing rich brunchlord that likely owns the company. You lose money. So instead you get a sort of pseudo-journalistic mush, which looks like journalism but is routinely incapable of speaking truth to power.

That’s not to say these kinds of outlets can’t sometimes do good journalism. But more often than not they’re conditioned to be fecklessly truth-averse, something long exploited by authoritarians and their armies of disinfo merchants. With unelected fascist oligarchs now dismantling whatever’s left of effective U.S. governance to deadly effect, the hour is getting late for this kind of weak-kneed bullshit.