A NYT Victory, A BlazeTV Fail | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

A.G. Sulzberger, Dean Baquet and the New York Times have pulled off quite a coup. After a lengthy negotiation, the New York Times Co has agreed to acquire The Athletic for nearly $550 million.

The deal will help the New York Times reach its goal of hitting 10 million digital subscribers by 2025.

As of Sept. 30, the Times reported 7.6 million digital subscribers, while The Athletic boasted a following of avid sports fans that totals 1.2 million consumers.

Launched in 2016, The Athletic quickly began to pillage the newspaper industry, stockpiling talent at a rapid and expensive rate. Receiving pressure from investors to start delivering a return, The Athletic originally sought a sale closer to $800 million.

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” co-founder of The Athletic, Alex Mather said in 2017. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

Less than five years later, The Athletic has yet to see a profit and is being bought out by one of those local papers they sought to “bleed” to death.

The acquisition is a win for the New York Times, which started the week out with a loss: Ben Smith announcing he was leaving the paper, where he served as its buzzy media columnist, to start his own media venture.

You win some, you lose some.

BlazeTV host Elijah Schaffer decried foreign influence in U.S. politics while calling out the nonexistent “Zionist Movement of America” for sponsoring the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), in addition to blaming Israel and other countries for exploiting “the greed of Americans.”

During Tuesday’s episode of The Blaze’s You Are Here, Schaffer called out countries – including Qatar, China, Russia – for influencing U.S. politics, but echoed the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish and Israeli control of U.S. policy as he went on.

Schaffer said these countries “took the greed of Americans and they’re selling out our country for the interests of foreign nations.”

Organizations similar to Schaffer’s nonexistent one that actually do exist include the American Zionist Movement and the Zionist Organization of America, with the former being a group that works with both sides of the political aisle and the latter being on the right.

Neither organization has been a sponsor at CPAC.

The only Zionist organization to be a sponsor at the conference was the right-wing Chovevei Zion a few years ago. Chovevei Zion is now Amariah, which also supports conservative policies in line with the conference.

Anti-Semitic tropes, couched as they were in mentions of other countries, stand out nevertheless when your example is a Zionist group that doesn’t exist being a sponsor of an event even the ones that do exist didn’t sponsor. Schaffer was wrong on the facts and the spirit.