Times employees had already taken note of the pattern, as high-profile attempts to share Times articles failed to travel on the platform. “There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August,” NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson told Semafor.
The drop in engagement in Times posts seems isolated to X: NewsWhip data showed that engagement with Times links shared on Facebook remained consistent relative to other outlets. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC, according to NewsWhip’s data on 300,000 influential users of X. Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically.
X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be attempting to limit its users’ access to The New York Times. Semafor will be all over the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York later this month, in person and in our energy and climate newsletter Net Zero by Tim McDonnell, which you can subscribe to here: Sign up here. Read on for scoops on X throttling the New York Times, the ongoing civil war at the Guardian, and even print deadlines. The episode reminded me of a gloomy line from Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide about the “subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics.” There are times, he wrote, “when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people.” Though to be fair, I got only a disappointing dozen mean tweets about it, suggesting Carlson’s move to X has been a bit of a bust, or at least this topic was.Īnd on that cheerful note, back to the day-to-day of global media, where things are going a little better than they were. The depressing part was the frictionless path from that snatch of a 1982 letter to a bunch of tweets to Sinclair/Avila/Gahanan (who joined Carlson in attacking me and that 2008 story toward the end of the interview, without denying any of it). This cycle began with a Q&A in the lively Jewish magazine Tablet with one of Obama’s biographers, who had reprinted a letter in which a 21-year-old Obama wrote to his girlfriend about his “androgynous” mind and gay fantasies. Sinclair’s resurgence reflects a threadbare quality of current American political media. He was, as Dave Portnoy tweeted, “top to bottom maybe the least trustworthy human I’ve ever laid eyes on.” Carlson, hilariously, touted the lie detector test without mentioning Sinclair had failed it. This is the sort of attention-seeking grifter who occasionally gets his 15 minutes. Federal marshals picked him up on an outstanding warrant after his press conference, and he vanished back into the criminal justice system. He volunteered to take, then managed to fail, a polygraph test. He filed to change his name to Larry Sinclair in 1996, and aliases also included “Larye Vizcarra Avila” and “Mohammed Gahanan,” none of which he contested at the time.
Specifically, he’d been arrested a number of times for larceny, check and credit card fraud, and finally convicted in Colorado on forgery charges in 1987 and sentenced to 16 years in jail. The bloggers hired a media lawyer I knew to protect their anonymity, and I wound up with an eye-popping story on the guy’s “itinerant life of small-time crime and bad checks, punctuated by stretches of jail time in two states.” Sinclair had sued some anonymous bloggers who alleged Sinclair had been in a psychiatric institution at the time he claimed to be with Obama. I hadn’t thought about Larry Sinclair since the summer of 2008, but actually spent quite a bit of time thinking about him back then. Tucker Carlson delighted parts of the right last week by interviewing a man who goes by the name Larry Sinclair and has claimed for years to have had sex with Barack Obama. Welcome to Semafor Media, where I’m disturbed by the latest sign of American decline: We aren’t even manufacturing new con men.
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