May 8, 2026

Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room. Jeffrey Katzenberg’s annual WNDR conference at the Rosewood Miramar just wrapped, and, man, what an event. Maybe some of the attendees can tell me whether Mathias Döpfner or David Brooks does better karaoke.

In tonight’s issue, a deep dive into the problems plaguing Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, a onetime conservative media juggernaut that has been suffering through significant audience declines and layoffs. Yes, some of it can be chalked up to a “MAGA vibe shift,” but the problems also stem from years of internal discord over the direction of the company—and its exit strategy.

🎙️ Plus, on the latest episode of The Grill Room, Julia and I chewed over James Murdoch’s expected $300 million-plus acquisition of New York and the Vox Media Podcast Network, and debated whether he’s the next Laurene Powell Jobs or, alternatively, another Jay Penske. We also weighed in on how this affects James’s own identity as well as the broader Murdoch family dynamics. Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.

🍾 Speaking of Julia…: I’m thrilled to announce that the In the Room franchise is expanding to three days a week—Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—with Julia contributing her indispensable insights to the email at the end of each week. The new schedule goes into effect on May 18.

Also mentioned in this issue: Rupert Murdoch, Josh D’Amaro, Almar Latour, Jeremy Boreing, Caleb Robinson, Mathias Döpfner, Meredith Kopit Levien, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Brendan Carr, Charlie Kirk, Mark Levin, and many more…

Open Tab

D’Amaro on offense: As you may have seen, Disney’s ABC has accused the Federal Communications Commission of violating its free speech rights by trying to punish The View for hosting political speech it disagrees with. It’s a rare, and welcome, case of a media conglomerate standing up to the Trump administration—and a remarkable pivot from Disney’s previous capitulations in response to F.C.C. pressure and the president’s defamation lawsuits.

Without going into the weeds here, the case centers on F.C.C. chair Brendan Carr’s threat to revoke The View’s exemption from “equal time” rules, which Carr first raised after Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico appeared on the show. As you’ll recall, CBS scrapped Stephen Colbert’s interview with Talarico shortly thereafter, reinforcing Disney’s claim that the F.C.C.’s moves have a “chilling effect” on free speech. This is a bold early foray from Disney’s new C.E.O., Josh D’Amaro, and certainly a new tack for a company that 18 months ago paid $15 million to settle Trump’s specious defamation suit against George Stephanopoulos. We’ll see if it signals a new posture for the broader media’s approach to Trump.

Either way, we’re likely in for a long legal battle here. Disney has enlisted Paul Clement, the Bush-era solicitor general and one of the preeminent Supreme Court litigators, to press its case.
Rupert vs. Roger: I am absolutely hooked on this quadruple-bylined Wall Street Journal report on Rupert Murdoch’s quiet effort to lobby Trump and his regulators to slow the NFL’s accelerating shift toward streaming. Murdoch reportedly used a February White House dinner to warn the president that giving streamers more NFL rights could “kill broadcast networks,” effectively lobbying against one of Fox’s own most important business partners. This is one of the most intriguing plot twists yet in a story that’s likely to consume the industry for months to come, and which you can read about regularly in my partner John Ourand’s indispensable private email, The Varsity.
And finally…: Congrats to aforementioned Axel Springer chief Mathias Döpfner, who this week was elected to the board of directors at Adidas. I trust every Politico employee will get a new pair of Stan Smiths.

The ITR Index

4.71 million: The total number of Wall Street Journal subscribers following a 419,000 increase in digital-only subs last quarter. The Journal is even outpacing the Times, which this week reported an additional 310,000 digital subscribers for the quarter, bringing their overall total to 13.1 million. Congrats to all involved: Almar and Meredith are leading two of the rare success stories in legacy media.

And now, the main event…

The Ben Commandments

The sudden, precipitous decline of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire—with its sweeping layoffs and a steep drop-off in audience—has actually been a long time coming. And while it’s easy to point to MAGA’s shift away from Israel, its co-C.E.O.’s dream of producing an Arthurian fantasy series isn’t helping either.

Dylan Byers

On Thursday, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, two of the nation’s preeminent conservative culture-war entrepreneurs, came together on Megyn’s eponymous podcast to discuss the war in Iran and indulge in a little intraparty sniping at the “neocons” in the punditocracy. Megyn played a clip of Ben Shapiro promoting further U.S. military strikes, arguing that it exemplified “the pressure Trump is under from Shapiro, [Mark] Levin,” and others to forgo a peace plan and fight “until there’s nothing left.”

Tucker cautioned that these pundits didn’t really have much sway. “You wonder where the pressure’s coming from,” he said. “I mean, those are clearly the spokesmen for the coalition applying pressure, but they’re not in themselves powerful figures. I mean, Mark Levin has almost no viewers. Ben Shapiro’s going out of business.”

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Tucker’s knock on Levin was understandable—as Megyn noted, some of his videos get a mere 500 views—but the slight against Shapiro touched a raw nerve at The Daily Wire, the media company Ben co-founded a decade earlier. Just a few years ago, Ben was among the most influential voices on the right, and The Daily Wire appeared to be a thriving exemplar of the new independent-media business model.

In recent weeks, however, media analysts have noted a drastic decline in The Daily Wire’s audience, including the loss of 80,000 YouTube subscribers so far this year. Kyle Tharp, a researcher who tracks political influence online, said Ben’s hemorrhaging audience represented “the steepest decline of any major political channel in 2026.” (“He’s lost the juice,” Kyle told me.) Meanwhile, The Daily Wire recently enacted layoffs that, I’m told, affected 42 employees, or a little under 20 percent of the headcount.

Sources close to the company described the cuts as a course correction after years of mismanagement and overhiring, and attributed any audience decline to platform algorithms that prioritize more-partisan or even conspiratorial content. But Ben’s competitors and other industry insiders suspect it has more to do with a “MAGA vibe shift,” and the growing unpopularity of his support for Israel and the war in Iran, among other issues. A Daily Wire spokesperson confirmed that the company had “made a difficult decision to restructure the organization, which included layoffs to a number of teams,” primarily at its Nashville production office.

In any event, political pundits are a notoriously combative species, and Ben’s critics have delighted in the chance to twist the knife. Candace Owens, who has been in a perennial fight with Ben since her termination from The Daily Wire two years ago in the wake of her antisemitic remarks, has alleged that much of Ben’s audience comes through inorganic paid channels. Other competitors leveled similar allegations to me this week. “We do normal marketing like every other show on YouTube,” Ben told me in response to these allegations, “and this year is slated to be the best advertising year in the history of The Daily Wire.”

On Megyn’s show, Tucker called pundits like Ben and Mark Levin “the outer fringe of the outer fringe. … Nobody watches this stuff, there’s no audience for this, there is no constituency for it,” he said. “These are not major figures in American media. They’re tiny. I mean, your average porn video has a thousand more views than any of these people get. So, they’re a joke.”

Crossed Wires

Ben’s business is indeed feeling strain, and some of that can be attributed to the aforementioned “vibe shift” among the MAGA base, as well as platform changes and algorithmic dynamics. But, as I learned this week, much of The Daily Wire’s struggles have also been spurred by internal disagreements over the direction of the business going back several years.

The Daily Wire hit its high-water mark two or three years ago, when episodes of Ben’s flagship show regularly drew several million viewers; these days, they garner around half a million—still a remarkable number, but obviously a comedown. In November 2024, Ben’s co-founder and then–co-C.E.O. Jeremy Boreing came on The Grill Room and told me that the company was on pace to surpass $200 million in annual revenue and that it would one day be a $10 billion business. “[The Daily Wire] is on a level and at a scale and of a quality that you’ve not ever seen from a conservative media organization in my lifetime,” he told me.

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Inside the company, however, Ben and the other co-founder and co-C.E.O. Caleb Robinson were growing increasingly disillusioned with Jeremy’s management, and particularly with his preoccupation with a big-budget creative project called The Pendragon Cycle, a seven-episode Arthurian fantasy series that Jeremy began working on in 2023. Jeremy created an eight-figure budget for the show—seven figures per episode—and also took a leave of absence to work on the project. Sources familiar with the matter said that while both Ben and Caleb signed off on the initial budget request for the project, Jeremy ended up spending nearly three times what they’d greenlit.

Jeremy’s defenders note that The Daily Wire was profitable and grew revenue year over year for a decade. But, at some point, the costs of this project became a burden on the company. Caleb eventually saw the need to bring in more money and perhaps even take some off the table. In late 2024 or early 2025, Caleb convinced his partners to bring in a SPAC called SilverBox Capital to explore a possible exit strategy.

During our discussion on The Grill Room, Jeremy had suggested that his commitment to The Daily Wire’s mission took precedence over money. “I wake up most mornings thinking about an exit, and I go to bed most evenings swearing that I would never take an exit,” he told me. In his view, I’m told, SilverBox’s focus on profits jeopardized both the company’s mission and its long-term potential as a force in conservative media. It was also an awkward dance partner. Years earlier, SilverBox had merged with Black Rifle Coffee Company, a veteran-founded, pro-military, pro-gun-rights coffee brand that rode the wave of the Trump-era culture-war economy. BRCC went public at a valuation of $1.7 billion in 2022, then got crushed. It now trades down 90 percent from its early highs, and at one point earlier this year dipped below the NYSE’s $1 minimum-price threshold, triggering a compliance warning.

In any event, The Daily Wire’s decision to engage SilverBox drove an even deeper wedge between Jeremy and Caleb, and ultimately Ben, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. Jeremy stepped down as co-C.E.O. in March 2025, ostensibly to focus on “creative projects,” but in reality due to the falling-out with his partners. Ben and Jeremy stopped talking, save for a phone call on the day of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

A few months before his departure, Jeremy told Axios that The Daily Wire was “not closed off to an offer” from a potential buyer like Fox. Eighteen months, seven episodes of The Pendragon Cycle, and one vibe shift later, one wonders if they’ve already missed their window.

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