‘Get me on Rogan!’: PR scrambles to navigate new media
A recurring them of the Monday morning quarterbacking over Kamala Harris’s election loss was her campaign’s failure to book her on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the most popular one in America. That commentary aligned with the belated acknowledgment that the days of a handful of legacy media outlets holding dominion over public opinion are over, and that podcasts, including those by raunchy comedians, held vast sway.
Ben Smith and Max Tani break down this shift in a Semafor piece on how powerhouse PR firms are clamouring for exposure on hit podcasts and other non-traditional platforms. “My teams are going to the clients and saying, ’We have a fundamental change here and we need to be in front of these people and we need not to be afraid,” marketing guru Richard Edelman said in an interview. “They have to get their clients comfortable with free-flowing conversations.”
The loose nature of podcast interviews presents an opportunity and major challenge to many politicians accustomed to speaking in scrupulously scripted soundbites. Smith and Tani are a bit pessimistic on on the odds of typical pols who are not Donald Trump using the free-flowing format to their advantage. “Trump is a singularly media-friendly figure, an entertainer and celebrity who was a professional talk show guest before he was president,” they writes. “He’ll always gamely say the most outrageous thing he can think of about whatever topic happens to be in the news.”
The Legal Battle Against Explicit AI Deepfakes
The FT’s Stephanie Stacey and Cristina Criddle look at the surge in pornographic deepfakes attributed to dramatically improved and cheaper technology that has opened the field to amateurs and caused alarm in classrooms and government offices around the world. The question of how to combat these images and videos is a vexing one, and attempts at regulation have so far been scattershot.
But “if it can be framed correctly, analysts say that legislation could provide a template for how to police other abuses of advanced AI, including fraudulent advertising, voice-cloning scams and misinformation — and even AI more generally,” Stacey and Criddle write. “It could also be an early test for how courts assess evidence in an era of sophisticated, easily accessible digital forgery.”
That would have implications extending to deepfakes in the media, a serious concern during election cycles and beyond.
The Fox News Rebound
While ratings plummet post-election at CNN and MSNBC, Fox continues to dominate cable news—and Donald Trump’s incoming cabinet. David A. Graham covers the “astonishing comeback” of the channel after a bumpy couple of years that included a fracture in its relationship with Trump after being the first to call Arizona for Biden in the 2020 election, the abrupt exits of star anchors including Tucker Carlson and the Dominion lawsuit that cost the network $787 million.
Now, democrats are appearing on Fox after years of sticking to friendlier outlets, the Trump alliance is mostly mended, and hosting or guesting on the network can be viewed as resume-burnishing for White House hopefuls. “Trump has sometimes tried to claim credit for Fox’s success,” Graham writes. “What really seems to have happened is that Trump and Fox rediscovered a symbiotic relationship that allowed both to rebound.”
