Republicans have led a resurgence in trust in the media, according to a new Gallup survey, The Hill reports. Trust in mass media grew by 5% this year to 33%. This included newspapers, television and radio. Republicans drove the increase — 22% said they trusted the media, an 8% hike over 2025. Last year’s overall trust figure of 28% was a new low.

Meta achieved strong revenue results in the second quarter, including improvements in its advertising business, but its operating cash flow was almost all absorbed by capital expenditures, according to an analysis by Seeking Alpha. The company generated $60.8 billion, a 28% increases YoY, But its operating margin sank to 31%, down from 43% during the same period last year. The analyst did not feel comfortable adding a large premium to Meta’s current market price until there is a clear outlook regarding its financial performance.   

How I Built This, a podcast featuring interviews with entrepreneurs on how they built their businesses, will now be owned by Guy Raz, the star of the show. This fall, the podcast will debut video episodes on YouTube and social media platforms. Raz and Vox also plan to bring back live events. There have been more than 700 episodes since the podcast was launched in 2016. 

Legendary San Francisco adman Rich Silverstein is retiring after 58 years in the industry, the San Francisco Standard reports. As co-founder of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, a Chinatown-based ad agency, he is known for subverting or blowing up archetypes. His 1985 ad for the Mill Valley Film Festival portrayed "regular" local workers as cinephiles who had opinions on the French avant-garde. In one of his new activities, Silverstein is writing a musical about the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has written to five online platforms, including Google, Meta, Reddit, Snap and TikTok, demanding that they stop taking advertising for casinos aimed at state residents, Casino.org reports. “It has come to my attention that your company may be advertising illegal 'sweepstakes' casinos on its social media platforms to residents of Florida,” Uthmeier wrote to Google. “Promoting illegal gambling is a crime under Florida law.”

Meta and YouTube say they will accept advertising for Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary despite The Hollywood Reporter reporting that Meta, YouTube, TikTok and X had all refused to do so, TechCrunch reports. “This was an error and the ads are being restored,” a Meta spokesperson said. “This was an error and the ads are being restored.” Musk recently posted on X that “dogs**t is worth more respect than Gibney.” 

Google will start allowing personalized alcohol advertising on YouTube on Oct. 30, Yahoo/Tech reports, sourcing Meininger’s International. Alcoholic beverages alcohol-related products and alcohol alternatives can be advertised where permitted under state regulations. Previously, Google considered alcohol as a sensitive interest categories, and restricted personalized advertising.   

Podcasters are being offered show-level data on which podcasts are driving sales, thanks to an integration between  Fairing and Podscribe, Net Influencer reports. This arrangement fills in a gap caused by a change in listening habits. Podcast attribution has long depended on IP matching, which suffices for RSS-distributed audio, but it cannot measure listening on platforms like YouTube. Going forward, every active Podscribe campaign will automatically populate as a response option in Fairing’s post-purchase surveys. Fairing will verify these conversions when it sends that response back to Podscribe. 

Groups uniting under the Block the Merger banner, filed a third-party brief on Friday, opposing the merger of Paramount Skydance and Discovery, Variety reports. This occurred after 12 state attorneys general signed a deal to settle their action over the merger. “The arguments laid out in this brief reflect the concerns that just days ago, California Attorney General Bonta also willingly voiced,” the group said in a joint statement. “While we may never know what caused the radical turnabout to deliver such a toothless settlement, we do know that this consent decree bucks governmental safeguards designed to protect the public from harm. The …

Traffic to media web sites has plummeted over the past year, as Google and other tech giants funnel into artificial intelligence (AI) products that summarize journalism without encouraging users to click through to the source articles, Futurism reports. The number fell from 70 million visitors a month in July 2024 to slightly more than 47 million in July 2026. Meanwhile, a firm named Brown Brothers Media buys up defunct media properties and to convert them AI-driven content mills.