Business

Could Jeff Zucker Fix CNN? He Seems to Think So.

Published

2 years ago

June 4, 2023

Could Jeff Zucker Fix CNN? He Seems to Think So.

The seminar was to be on media leadership. Dozens of students filling a classroom at Yale University in April were there to learn about the business from a man who had commanded attention in TV control rooms and corporate boardrooms for decades before a stunning exit last year.

What they got was remarkable candor about that exit.

Jeff Zucker, who had been president of CNN for nine years, told the group that he believed the network’s former owners used his relationship with Allison Gollust — who was also in attendance — as a pretext for removing him, three people familiar with his comments said.

In front of the students — where other high-profile media executives, including Bob Iger of Disney, were scheduled to speak the same day — Mr. Zucker compared his failure to disclose his relationship with Ms. Gollust, CNN’s former communications chief, to handing over a dangerous weapon.

“I gave them a gun, and they shot me with it,” Mr. Zucker said, according to the people.

That Mr. Zucker would compare his forced departure to a gunshot wound underscores the depth of his frustration with his last days at a network he controlled with exacting detail for years.

The complaint wasn’t unusual for Mr. Zucker, 58. He often compares notes on the media business with former colleagues and industry acquaintances, many of whom call him to grouse about the current state of CNN.

But his gripes have become more frequent of late, and he has made no secret of his unhappiness with the terms of his exit from CNN or his low regard for the performance of its current leader, Chris Licht. In a sense, he is now serving as a kind of grievance switchboard for current and former employees of the news network, many people who have spoken with him said.

Mr. Zucker’s criticism may be painful for executives running CNN to hear second- and thirdhand. But also painful are the numbers: The news division, which once regularly made more than $1 billion in profit annually, generated just $750 million in profit last year. And its ratings were down more than 30 percent in the first quarter of this year compared with the same point in the 2020 presidential election cycle, when Donald J. Trump — a major driver of cable news viewership — was still in the White House, according to Nielsen data.

As it has geared up to cover the 2024 campaign, the network has committed some unforced errors. Last month, CNN hosted a town hall with Mr. Trump in New Hampshire that was criticized for airing false information. Mr. Licht’s leadership and problems at the helm of the network were dissected at length in a 15,000-word Atlantic article that was published Friday.

Many anchors Mr. Zucker hired or promoted, including Jake Tapper, and Kaitlan Collins, who moderated the town hall, are still in prominent spots in CNN’s lineup. But he has found himself banished from the control room during a major news cycle, including an indictment of former President Trump and the opening acts of the 2024 presidential election.

He has not been hiding away, though. He and Ms. Gollust traveled to Las Vegas to see a Taylor Swift concert, and last month he attended the Sports Emmy Awards at the invitation of Bryant Gumbel, along with the former “Today” anchor Matt Lauer. His new office in Manhattan — where a life-size statue of the Incredible Hulk looms in the entryway — is just blocks from CNN’s former New York headquarters in Columbus Circle.

And he is trying to get his next act off the ground, starting a new venture called RedBird IMI with $1 billion to spend on acquisitions in the digital media, sports, entertainment and news industries.

This article on Mr. Zucker is based on interviews with more than four dozen of his associates in the media industry who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their relationship with him. He declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman described his attitude toward CNN.

“It is wholly unsurprising that Jeff Zucker, the architect of CNN’s unprecedented success, would have deep misgivings about the direction the network has taken since he left,” said Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for Mr. Zucker. She added that it was also no surprise “that he gets asked a lot, publicly and privately, and regularly from former colleagues, about what he thinks of CNN now.”

Months after he left CNN in February 2022, Mr. Zucker met with his successor, Mr. Licht. The organizers of that meeting — industry confederates who know both men — hoped that a lunch at Mr. Zucker’s house on Amagansett’s tony Hedges Lane would clear the air.

Mr. Zucker had been privately critical of Mr. Licht’s leadership of CNN, according to people who have spoken with him, and the two men hadn’t met since Mr. Zucker was pushed out.

The get-together didn’t kindle much bonhomie between the media executives, who had been friendly in the clubby world of TV news. Mr. Licht was seeking a rapprochement. Mr. Zucker was asked to give advice. But afterward, the former CNN president griped that Mr. Licht didn’t take any of his pointers, said a person familiar with his feelings following the meal.

“This is all very sad for Jeff,” said Kenneth Lerer, the co-founder of HuffPost and former chairman of BuzzFeed. “He should move on with his life. It’s disheartening to see.”

Mr. Lerer has a distinct perspective on the situation: He is a close friend of David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN owner Warner Bros. Discovery, and was once also friendly with Mr. Zucker.

Mr. Zucker’s criticism has rankled executives of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, according to people familiar with their thinking. They suspect Mr. Zucker has leaked unflattering information about the network’s operations to the press.

He has also been candid about what he sees as the missteps of CNN’s former parent company, AT&T, and its leaders, including the former WarnerMedia chief executive Jason Kilar, many industry acquaintances who have spoken with Mr. Zucker in recent months say.

Executives at Warner Bros. Discovery believe Mr. Zucker is waging a proxy war against Mr. Licht, undermining his leadership from afar, according to three people familiar with their thinking.

Mr. Zucker’s criticisms have come at a particularly inopportune time for Warner Bros. Discovery, which was created last year from the fusion of WarnerMedia, CNN’s parent company at the time, and Discovery, the home of “Dr. Pimple Popper” and “90 Day Fiancé” and is still trying to get CNN onto solid footing.

A spokesman for Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement that the company was confident in the direction of the network and in Mr. Licht’s leadership of it. “We set a high bar for ourselves and while we know that it will take time to complete the important work that’s underway, we have great confidence in the progress that Chris and the team are making and share their conviction in the strategy,” the statement said.

Underlying the grievances are tensions between Mr. Zucker and Mr. Zaslav, who picked Mr. Licht to succeed Mr. Zucker at the top of CNN. Once great friends and business allies — and a regular pair at the East Hampton Golf Club — the two men have grown apart since Mr. Zucker’s ouster, people familiar with their relationship say.

In March, Mr. Zaslav visited CNN’s Manhattan headquarters and criticized Mr. Zucker’s leadership of the network in a meeting with Mr. Licht’s lieutenants, according to someone at Warner Bros. Discovery. In the meeting, Mr. Zaslav told CNN executives that Mr. Zucker’s gripes — which had made their way to him — were ironic, given that Mr. Zucker had once remarked that Mr. Licht was the one executive who could do the job if he ever left the network.

Since he took over CNN’s parent company, Mr. Zaslav has fired back, telling employees in a private meeting that there was a “period of time” when it became an “advocacy network,” a not-so-subtle dig at segments that were stridently critical of President Trump, who drove massive ratings. Mr. Zucker disagrees with that characterization, people who have spoken with him say, believing that on his watch the network’s policy of calling out Mr. Trump’s falsehoods led to journalistic and financial success.

In another gathering this spring, Mr. Zucker said that his departure from CNN was the hardest period in his life, adding that the episode made his bond with Ms. Gollust stronger, according to a person familiar with his remarks. He also said that the punishment he received didn’t fit the crime.

When Mr. Zucker was forced out of CNN last year, he and the network’s parent company negotiated over a statement designating his failure to disclose his relationship with Ms. Gollust as the reason for his exit. “I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong,” Mr. Zucker wrote in a memo to employees at the time.

According to two people familiar with Mr. Zucker’s departure from CNN, a company investigation into his conduct by the law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore found multiple violations of CNN’s standards and practices, including taking part in advising former New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Ms. Heller, Mr. Zucker’s spokeswoman, said Mr. Zucker did not advise Mr. Cuomo.

“As we have said numerous times, Mr. Zucker never advised Andrew Cuomo, directly or indirectly,” she said. “He was asked to resign for one reason only, failure to disclose his relationship.”

For Mr. Zucker, who has been in senior management ranks since his 20s, when he became executive producer of “Today,” his abrupt exit from CNN represented a marked change of pace. He soon began to explore his options, gravitating to the familiar territories of sports and media. Years ago, Mr. Zucker told a writer for the Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper he worked on as an undergraduate, that he hadn’t taken a day off since finishing college.

Shortly after his ouster from CNN, Mr. Zucker began plotting his next move, meeting with advisers, former colleagues and industry stalwarts at upscale watering holes like the Core Club in New York and the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. But even as he planned for the future, Mr. Zucker was thinking about his past.

In the summer, he traveled to Jackson Hole, in Wyoming, for an off-the-record gathering of media executives. In a fireside chat at the event, he was asked for his view on the current direction of CNN and in his answer criticized Mr. Kilar for the way the executive handled his exit, according to two people familiar with his remarks.

In his new endeavor, the investment vehicle Redbird IMI, he has told confidants he is interested in building a company that owns digital publications targeted at specific audiences, similar to Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker. He has held talks with owners of digital-media start-ups, but those conversations haven’t yet resulted in a deal. He is now one of at least three suitors exploring a deal to take a majority stake in Air Mail, the media company founded by the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

In recent months, he has also met with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, according to three people familiar with their conversation.

One company Mr. Zucker is not in talks to acquire is CNN, according to people familiar with his plans. Though he has told some associates he would be interested in acquiring the network should it come up for sale one day, he has lamented to others that CNN’s current owners, Warner Bros. Discovery, have damaged the network so much through cost-cutting that he wouldn’t be interested in owning it.

But Mr. Zucker has explored a deal for the network before. In late 2020, he and Andrew Morse, CNN’s former digital chief, met with Emerson Collective, the umbrella company founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, and had preliminary conversations about a potential spinout of the network. Without informing Mr. Kilar, his boss at the time, Mr. Zucker referred Emerson Collective’s interest to an executive at AT&T. The deal never happened, and AT&T ultimately turned to Discovery.

There are signs that Mr. Zucker believes he could once again be calling the shots at a media organization. He has told associates that he’s open to an operational role at one of the companies he buys, and many of his confidantes believe he could still land another big corporate job.

A professional revival for Mr. Zucker has some precedent. After he was fired as chief executive of NBCUniversal in 2010, Mr. Zucker created a new daytime show for Disney with the former “Today” host Katie Couric that he called a “tremendous opportunity.”

Then he got the CNN job. “Katie” was off the air two years later.

Business

Musk and Zuckerberg Reflect New Blows Against D.E.I. Policies

Published

7 hours ago

January 17, 2025

Press Room

Musk and Zuckerberg Reflect New Blows Against D.E.I. Policies

The war on D.E.I. intensifies

Even before Donald Trump won in November, the conservative backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion policies was going strong.

But new revelations about the next Trump administration’s efforts to constrain what’s commonly known as D.E.I. — and corporate titans’ willingness to put such programs aside — suggest just how strident the pushback will be.

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative is eyeing big cuts to federal diversity programs, according to The Washington Post. The nongovernmental panel, the Department of Government Efficiency, is said to be considering a report by a right-wing civil rights group that claims to have identified more than $120 billion in potential cuts in D.E.I.-related programs.

Among them, according to The Post, are ending programs to benefit Black farmers and businesses, as well as a Biden-era executive order reserving 15 percent of federal contracts for minority-owned businesses. (Separately, the F.B.I. confirmed that it had closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, prompting Trump to express anger that it had existed at all.)

The Times shed more light on Mark Zuckerberg’s move to unwind D.E.I. at Meta. In a meeting with Stephen Miller, the influential Trump aide, Zuckerberg signaled that he would do nothing to obstruct the president-elect’s agenda of cracking down on corporate D.E.I. culture. The tech mogul said new guidelines were coming — and soon after announced a rollback of content moderation rules and an end to Meta’s D.E.I. efforts.

Moreover, Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg, his former longtime lieutenant who was known for cultural advocacy programs like Lean In, for encouraging employee self-expression in the workplace, The Times adds. (The revelation stoked outrage online.)

The news underscores how defenses of D.E.I. are faltering. Many companies had already been rethinking their commitment to diversity programs before Trump’s victory, especially after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at universities. But several corporate giants, including Amazon and McDonald’s, have ended or scaled back such programs post-election.

For some corporations, work on diversity will still take place, using language that isn’t as politically charged. But as corporate leaders respond to pressure from ascendant right-wing activists and seek to get on Trump’s good side, the pressure on D.E.I. isn’t going away.

In related news: Meta’s chief technology officer said the company had mishandled how it rolled out changes to diversity policies and content moderation. And for some workers whose careers haven’t advanced how they like, diversity programs may have simply been an excuse to sugarcoat the real reason they were passed over, according to a Wall Street Journal column.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Israel’s security cabinet meets to approve the cease-fire deal. The vote is taking place after Israeli and Hamas negotiators resolved remaining disputes, with ministers expected to clear the agreement this weekend. If approved, Israel would withdraw eastward and both sides would release hostages or prisoners, potentially paving a path to ending the 15-month war.

China’s economy grows, but its population shrinks again. New data showed that the Chinese economy grew 5 percent last year, with increased exports and investment in manufacturing offsetting a slump in construction. But Beijing also disclosed that China’s population fell for a third straight year, despite an unexpected rise in births, portending a longer-term challenge to economic growth.

The Biden administration files a final flurry of regulatory actions. Regulators including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department struck settlements with companies including American Express, Block, General Motors and Toyota, and recommended charges against the parent of Snapchat. They’re a last burst of oversight actions before the Trump administration, which is expected to take a lighter hand in regulating business, takes office next week.

Markets feel reassured by Bessent

Bitcoin, stock futures and government bonds — all are rallying modestly on Friday, the final trading day of the Biden era.

Their fortunes appear to be buoyed by renewed bullishness for the next Trump administration, with investors feeling relieved about what they’ve heard from the president-elect’s Cabinet picks on how they intend to operate.

Markets were especially heartened by Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary pick, Scott Bessent. In his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Bessent played down the inflationary risks of Trump’s agenda.

Here are the highlights:

Bessent called for renewing and extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts to avert “economic calamity.” But while he said cutting fiscal spending was also important, he was noncommittal about repealing the country’s debt ceiling and said entitlement programs like Medicare would be safe.
He said tariffs should be imposed on select countries to fix trade imbalances or used as leverage to negotiate favorable trade deals. A new round directed at China seems inevitable. In response, China is zeroing in on American chipmakers.
Bessent said that Fed independence is key to American fiscal stability. But he warned that Trump, who has long grumbled about high interest rates, was still “going to make his views known.”
He demurred on the idea of the Fed creating a digital currency. Still, Bloomberg reports that Trump is expected to designate crypto as a national priority. Speculation is also growing that Trump will greenlight a federal Bitcoin reserve.

Other confirmation hearings raised questions about how the second Trump administration was shaping up. Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, the choice for interior secretary, criticized renewables as part of a wider national “electricity crisis.” The country needed to refocus on fossil fuels to maintain its global lead in energy-intensive sectors like artificial intelligence, he added.

But Lee Zeldin, Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, dodged questions about Trump’s repeated vows to roll back or scrap the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate legislation.

And Scott Turner, the former N.F.L. player tapped to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, offered little detail about how he would address a housing crunch. His lack of clarity came as new Freddie Mac data showed mortgage rates hitting an eight-month high.

The surge is pricing some prospective buyers out of the market — despite the Fed having lowered borrowing costs — in a trend that has alarmed some market watchers.

The TikTok countdown continues

As TikTok nears a potential ban in the United States, elected officials are racing to find ways to delay a crisis that many of them helped stoke by backing the law behind the punishment.

Here’s where things stand.

President Biden is trying to make it Donald Trump’s problem. An administration official told NBC News that the White House was “exploring options” to forestall the app from going dark. Biden also does not plan to fine the companies that host the TikTok app, like Google and Apple, according to NBC News.

That would leave it up to Trump to enforce any punishments against TikTok and its partners. The president-elect has been weighing an executive order to let the app keep running until a U.S. buyer is found, though it is unclear how effective that would be.

Senate Democrats scrambled to arrange a delay. Lawmakers led by Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Cory Booker of New Jersey have sought to pass a bill giving TikTok more time to find a buyer. But Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, objected, citing concerns about dangers posed by the app.

A spokesperson for Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, told The Wall Street Journal that the minority leader spoke with Biden on Thursday about creating a delay.

TikTok’s C.E.O. is continuing to court Trump as well. In addition to sitting on the dais for the inauguration with top Cabinet picks and other tech moguls, Shou Chew is hosting a party for pro-Trump creators Sunday night, which will cost TikTok about $50,000 to throw.

Chew is also expected to attend a Trump victory rally on Sunday at the Capital One Arena, sitting in the suite of Raul Fernandez, a Trump donor and a partner at Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the sports team owner.

Musk’s gaming rank

Elon Musk has famously and unapologetically clashed with regulators and heads of state. But he is coming up against opponents who appear to have touched a nerve: gamers who have questioned his claims to video game mastery.

A recap: Musk has boasted lately on X lately about his gaming prowess, including soaring to the top of the global leader boards in Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2. Such feats require skills, sure, but also a lot of screen time, leading skeptics to question how the C.E.O. of six companies and a key adviser to Donald Trump finds the time.

Online sleuths increasingly believe they have found the answer: They’ve accused Musk of paying others to use his accounts and put in the hours to boost his rankings.

A popular YouTube gaming personality named Asmongold in particular accused Musk of being disingenuous about his rapid rise to the top.

Musk has taken those charges personally. The billionaire has shared videos of himself in action as a way to prove he’s the real deal. Musk also fired back at Asmongold, saying of the YouTuber, “he is NOT good at video games.”

Others came to Asmongold’s defense, using X’s Community Notes feature to annotate Musk’s posts.

Given the level of discussion online, this spat feels like it’s far from over.

THE SPEED READ

Deals

Rio Tinto and Glencore reportedly held talks last year about a deal, which would have combined two of the world’s biggest miners, though discussions aren’t currently active. (Bloomberg).
Junior investment bankers beware: Artificial intelligence tools can write 95 percent of an I.P.O. prospectus in minutes, according to David Solomon, Goldman Sachs’s C.E.O. (FT)

Politics, policy and regulation

Meet Ken Howery, the tech investor and friend of Elon Musk who will spearhead any deal talks with Denmark over Greenland. (NYT)
A group representing Capitol Hill staffers who work for progressive lawmakers is pushing for a 32-hour workweek. (Politico)

Best of the rest

A SpaceX rocket broke up on Thursday during a test flight, forcing the F.A.A. to divert several commercial flights to avoid the debris. (CNBC)
David Lynch, the director behind classic movies and TV shows including “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” and “Twin Peaks,” has died. He was 78. (NYT)

We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

Business

Column: A stem cell clinic tees up a Supreme Court challenge to rules protecting patients' health and safety

Published

8 hours ago

January 17, 2025

Press Room

Column: A stem cell clinic tees up a Supreme Court challenge to rules protecting patients' health and safety

For years, the Food and Drug Administration has taken up arms against clinics hawking unproven and ineffective stem cell treatments to desperate patients looking for cures of intractable diseases and conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and even erectile dysfunction.

As the FDA has repeatedly cautioned, there is no scientifically validated evidence that these treatments work. They’re typically not covered by insurance. For the clinics, however, they’re money-makers, with fees of $9,000 or more per treatment; the clinics often recommend multiple treatments.

But now the FDA’s campaign against these bogus therapies is facing serious headwinds on two fronts.

[The FDA is] likely to be subjected to enormous political pressure during Trump 2.0 to weaken oversight of cell and regenerative products.

— Paul S. Knoepfler, UC Davis

One is the Supreme Court. A California stem cell network that recently lost a lawsuit brought by the FDA has signaled that it intends to appeal to the Supreme Court. It’s far from certain that the court will take up the appeal, at this stage — but a majority of the justices have looked favorably on efforts to rein in administrative agencies such as the FDA.

“I think it’s highly unlikely … but not impossible” that the court will take up the stem cell case, says Henry T. Greely, an expert in the legal issues involving bioscientific technologies.

The case doesn’t have the customary hallmarks of cases that warrant Supreme Court action, Greely told me, such as disagreements among appellate circuits requiring resolution. But it may suit the ideological bent of four justices — the minimum number required to place a case on the Supreme Court docket.

“Some of these justices really hate administrative agency power,” Greely says.

In a landmark ruling last year, the Supreme Court struck down a 40-year-old precedent—the Chevron doctrine — that required courts to accept federal agencies’ interpretations of the laws they administer as long as their interpretations weren’t openly unreasonable. That sharply narrowed agency authority. The FDA has ranked high on the list of agencies that conservatives see as exercising excessive authority.

It may not take a Supreme Court decision to hamper the FDA’s campaign against bogus stem cell treatments.

“Just the possibility that [the Supreme Court] could take this case may have a chilling effect on FDA activity in the stem cell clinic space,” Paul S. Knoepfler, a UC Davis biologist who has assiduously tracked the industry, told me. Even without the case, he says, the FDA is “likely to be subjected to enormous political pressure during Trump 2.0 to weaken oversight of cell and regenerative products.”

That brings us to the second threat, coming from Donald Trump’s nominee as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Even before his nomination, Kennedy made clear that he was girding to go to war against the FDA, which would come under his jurisdiction at HHS.

In an Oct. 25 tweet, he declared “FDA’s war on public health is about to end.” He specifically accused the agency of “aggressive suppression” of stem cells as well as “psychedelics, peptides, … raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine … and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”

Kennedy wasn’t clear what he meant by his reference to stem cells or whether he was referring to the unproven stem cell treatments marketed by the clinics facing FDA regulation.

Many of the other items in his litany have been shown to be ineffective for their marketed purposes — ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, for example, have been touted as treatments for COVID-19 even though scientific studies have shown them to be useless against the disease. I asked Kennedy to clarify his reference to stem cells but haven’t received a reply.

Here’s a brief primer on what these clinics are selling. Typically, their method involves removing fat cells from a customer via liposuction, treating the fat ostensibly to extract stem cells, and injecting those cells into the customer’s body.

For instance, Cell Surgical Network, a defendant in the FDA’s California case, boasts of offering “innovative solutions” for spine disease, knee problems and other orthopedic conditions; lupus, Crohn’s and other autoimmune diseases; ALS, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis; cardiac conditions; and glaucoma, among other issues. None of these claims has been supported by scientific research.

The only stem cell products the FDA has approved for use are stem cells extracted from umbilical cord blood, and then only for rare blood disorders.

Like other clinics, Cell Surgical has asserted that its products are exempt from oversight because, as reimplantations of a customer’s own tissue, they don’t meet the law’s definition of “drugs.”

They also claim the “same surgical procedure” exemption from FDA regulation, which the agency typically applies to procedures in which a patient’s tissue is given only minimal processing before being used, such as in skin grafting or coronary artery bypass surgery. The FDA holds that the stem cell clinics subject the tissues to significant processing and that the procedures are separate surgical events.

Before the FDA acted, both the Florida and California clinic networks had been operating for years. The Florida company had been operating since at least 2014, and Lander and Berman had founded their California Stem Cell Treatment Center in Rancho Mirage in 2010. By 2018, the FDA said in its lawsuit, Lander had claimed that affiliated clinics had administered the technique he and Berman developed to more than 6,000 patients.

Yet the FDA sometimes seems to be fighting a losing battle, or at least a whack-a-mole battle, against clinics offering dubious stem cell treatments. There are just too many — more than 1,000, by Knoepfler’s reckoning — making pitches to desperate customers seeking cures against intractable conditions.

That has left things up to state and local regulators, but the record there is spotty. A notable recent success can be chalked up to Georgia Atty. Gen. Chris Carr, who announced on Jan. 8 that in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission he had obtained judgments totaling more than $5.1 million from the operators of bogus stem cell clinics. The sum includes refunds of more than $3.3 million for 479 customers, most of whom were “older or disabled adults” who had been “sold expensive, unproven stem cell products.”

In June 2019, federal Judge Ursula Ungaro of Miami ordered U.S. Stem Cell of Florida effectively shut down, siding with the FDA in a lawsuit the agency had filed in May 2018.

The FDA’s case against California-based Cell Surgical Network and its affiliates took a somewhat different course. The agency filed suit in California federal court against the network and its physician-proprietors, Elliott B. Lander and the late Mark Berman, the same day it sued the Florida firm. But it lost at the trial stage in August 2022, when federal Judge Jesus Bernal of Riverside accepted the defendants’ claim that they were entitled to the “same surgical procedure” exemption from FDA oversight.

Bernal’s decision, however, was overturned last September by the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which found in a 3-0 ruling that the FDA’s interpretation of the law “is the only interpretation that makes sense.” The appeals court sent the case back to Bernal with instructions to reconsider the case in light of its finding.

That’s where things stood until Jan. 6, when Cell Surgical Network and its affiliated defendants asked the appellate court to suspend its order to remand the case to Bernal, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. The FDA opposed the motion, arguing that the Supreme Court is unlikely to take up the case. The appellate court rejected the network’s motion Tuesday, but the network hasn’t indicated that it intends to drop the Supreme Court appeal. I asked its lawyers if their plans have changed but haven’t received a reply.

As I’ve written before, undermining the FDA’s authority has been a right-wing project for years. That’s because the agency’s duty is to stand in the way of businesses desiring to push unsafe and ineffective nostrums at unwary consumers, and also in the way of a perverse idea that personal freedom includes the freedom to be gulled by charlatans.

In 2018, then-President Trump signed a right-to-try law that purportedly gave victims of terminal diseases access to experimental treatments that might save them.

But despite claims that it was designed as a “compassionate measure” for terminal patient, the law was a scam perpetrated by the Koch network and its allies, aimed at undermining the FDA’s authority to make sure our drugs are safe and effective. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) ultimately gave the game away, informing then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, a critic of the law, that its purpose was to “diminish the FDA’s power over people’s lives, not increase it.”

In 2023, GOP-appointed judges on the right wing-dominated 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FDA had exceeded its authority in advising against the use of ivermectin against COVID. “The FDA can inform,” the court said, “but it has identified no authority allowing it to recommend consumers ‘stop’ taking medicine.” (Emphasis in the original.)

There may not be much distance between that finding by the 5th Circuit and a decision by the current Supreme Court majority that the FDA overstepped its bounds in not only informing consumers of the dangers of taking unproven and even dangerous stem cell treatments, but blocking the treatments by seeking to put clinics that sell them.

“MAGA loves stem cell clinics,” Greely says. “Why? It gives people a chance to make a lot of money, and because it’s a change for people to say ‘no bureaucrat is going to tell me what to do.’”

If the trend continues along these lines, you can expect more providers collecting more dollars by pushing worthless therapies to desperate customers. The threat to Americans’ health will be very real indeed.

Business

China’s Population Declines for 3rd Straight Year

Published

15 hours ago

January 17, 2025

Press Room

China’s Population Declines for 3rd Straight Year

To get its citizens to have more children and stop its population from shrinking, China has tried it all, even declaring having babies an act of patriotism. And yet, for the third year in a row, its population got smaller.

Not even a surprise uptick in the number of babies born, a first in seven years, could reverse the course of an aging and declining population.

China is staring down a longer term baby bust that is rippling through the economy. Hospitals are shutting their obstetrics units, and companies that sold baby formula are idling factories. Thousands of kindergartens have closed and more than 170,000 preschool teachers lost their jobs in 2023.

The country’s birthrate, as one former kindergarten in the southern city of Chongqing put it, “is falling off a cliff.” Enrollments in China’s kindergartens plummeted by more than five million in 2023, according to the most recently available data.

On Friday, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that 9.54 million babies were born last year, up slightly from 9.02 million in 2023. Taken together with the number of people who died over 2024 — 10.93 million — China’s population shrank for a third straight year.

The small bump in newborns, in part because it was the auspicious Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac, didn’t change the broader trajectory, experts said. China’s childbearing population is declining and young people are reluctant to have children.

“In the medium and long term, the annual number of births in my country will continue to decline,” said Ren Yuan, a professor at Fudan University’s Institute of Population Studies.

The lack of babies is adding to China’s economic challenges. A shrinking working-age population is straining an underfunded pension system, and an aging society is leaning on a creaking health care system. China also reported on Friday that the economy grew by 5 percent in 2024, a number that was in line with expectations but that many experts said did not fully reflect a crisis of confidence among households reeling from a multiyear property crisis.

To encourage people to have more babies, the authorities are offering tax benefits, cheaper housing and cash. Cities are promising to cover the cost of in vitro fertilization. In some parts of the country, they are even promising to get rid of restrictions that penalize single mothers.

The government has called on local officials to put in place early-warning systems to monitor big changes in population at the village and town levels around the country. Some officials are even knocking on doors and calling women to inquire about their menstrual cycles.

Companies are also getting involved. In 2023, the travel site Trip.com started paying employees nearly $1,400 a year for each newborn until the age of 5. Last week, the founder of electric vehicle maker XPeng said he would give employees nearly $4,100 if they had a third child.

“We want our employees to have more kids,” said He Xiaopeng, the founder, in a video posted on social media. “I think the company should take care of the money, so employees can have children.”

The problem is not unique to China, which in 2023 was passed by India as the world’s most populous nation. Falling birthrates are often a measure of a country’s move up the economic ladder because fertility rates tend to fall as incomes and education levels go up. But China’s sudden decline in population arrived much sooner than the government had expected. Many families are earning more money than they were a decade ago, but have lost income because of the housing crisis.

Officials have long feared the day when there will not be enough workers to support retirees. Now the government has less time to prepare. More than 400 million people will be 60 or older in the next decade.

China is facing two challenges on this front. Its public pension system is severely underfunded and many young people are reluctant — or are unable — to contribute. A low retirement age has made things worse. After years of deliberation, the government decided on a 15-year plan to gradually increase the official age to 63 for men, 58 for women in office jobs and 55 for women who work in factories. The changes took effect this month.

The party only loosened birth restrictions in 2015 to allow families to have two children, an easing that created a sudden boom. Hospitals had to add beds in the corridors because there weren’t enough.

But the moment was short-lived. By 2017, births started declining every year until last year.

In 2021, panicked officials loosened China’s birth policy again, allowing couples to have three children. It was too late. The next year, so few babies were born that the population began to shrink for the first time since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed experiment that resulted in widespread famine and death in the 1960s.

China has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, far below what demographers refer to as the replacement rate required for a population to grow. This threshold requires every couple, on average, to have two children.

Experts said the number of births would likely continue to fluctuate.

“For a country of 1.4 billion a half million more births is not much of a rebound at all,” Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. “This is in comparison to the lowest year, in 2023 when the pandemic certainly put a pause on childbearing.”

Many young Chinese people are quick to rattle off reasons not to have children: the rising cost of education, growing burdens of taking care of their aging parents and a desire to live a lifestyle known as “Double Income, No Kids.”

For women, the sentiment is especially strong. Daughters who were the only children in their families received education and employment opportunities their parents often did not. They have grown up to become empowered women who see Mr. Xi’s appeals to them to do their patriotic duty and bear children as one step too far. Many of these women have said that deep-seated inequality and insufficient legal protections have made them reluctant to get married.

The steep drop in babies is having a drastic effect on health care, education and even the consumer market. Companies that once minted money selling baby formula to feed a baby boom are now making shakes with calcium and selenium for older adults with brittle bones.

Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, is shutting a factory for the China market that employs more than 500 people halfway across the world in Europe. The company will focus on selling premium baby products and expanding its offering in adult nutrition in China, a spokesman said.

The pressure on China’s health care system is even more pronounced. Dozens of hospitals and maternal health clinic chains have reported closing over the past two years.

On social media forums, nurses specializing in obstetrics have talked about low pay and lost jobs. One doctor told state media that being in obstetrics, once considered an “iron rice bowl” position with guaranteed job security, had become a “rusty iron rice bowl.”

And some smaller hospitals have stopped paying their staff, Han Zhonghou, a former official at a hospital in northern China, told a Chinese magazine.

“Life for maternal and child hospitals,” Mr. Han said, “is getting harder and harder by the year.”