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In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.
What if you could have all three at the same time?
That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
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U.S. chat show pulled in political row.
We can breathe a little easier tonight because Donald Trump is out of the country.
Well, Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else.
Welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Sam Fenwick.
Disney has suspended the Jimmy Kimmel show when politics turns into a business problem.
And the US President Donald Trump warns European leaders to stop buying Russian oil.
So Disney has suspended one of America's most high-profile talk show hosts, Jimmy Kimmel, after he said this on his show on Monday.
We had some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
Now those comments caused political outrage, threats from regulators and concerns from the owners of local TV stations that carry ABC programmes that they would pull the show.
ABC is a division of Disney.
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, says that he's never been a fan of Jimmy Kimmel.
Well, Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else.
And he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk.
And Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person.
He had very bad ratings and they should have fired him a long time ago.
So, you know, you can call that free speech or not.
He was fired for lack of talent.
The decision by ABC has business as well as political implications.
And in a moment, we'll hear from someone with inside knowledge of the industry.
But first, the BBC's Michelle Fleury can take us through how we got here.
Yeah, I mean.
So the main regulator for media is under the kind of control of a group called the FCC, and the chair, Brendan Carr, suggested that Jimmy Kimmel should be suspended.
And he said, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
And it appears that the affiliates were listening, because within a few hours a company called Nexstar, which controls the sort of largest controller of small TV stations in America, said that they wouldn't air the show.
That was soon followed by announcement by the parent company of ABC, which is Disney.
And of course, all of this now kind of reeks of this idea of sort of a threat from regulators leading to corporate action.
But here, have a listen for yourself what the chair, Brendan Carr, said over Kimmel's remarks.
He was speaking on a right-wing commentator, Benny Johnson's podcast.
There's a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people about one of the most significant, newsworthy public interest acts that we've seen in a long time.
And what appears to be an action by Jimmy Kimmel to play into that narrative.
So do you think, Michelle, that these affiliates sort of jumped before they were pushed?
Look, you know, the timing suggests that that was the case.
You have to remember that.
You know we're talking about a matter of hours after Brendan Carr made these comments.
You saw Nextar move first. dropping his show from the stations it controls.
And remember, it controls 33 ABC stations.
So suddenly ABC and Disney faced this sort of network map where across the country Kimmel would only air on a couple of states, on a couple of stations.
And so it kind of its hand in some ways was forced.
And you saw it announced that it too would take Kimmel off the air.
And that has been met by this backlash.
Many people kind of saying well, this is about free speech, but it also seems to be about pressure on businesses to act.
Just explain to us the relationship between Disney, ABC and these local TV channels, perhaps for people that don't live in the United States.
Yeah, so if you think about ABC as, you know, it's the content creator.
And then what happens is that you have these companies like Nexstar, but also Sinclair, both of whom its ownership leans slightly more to the right, and they control these ABC stations across the country.
And they take that content from Disney and they put it on those ABC channels.
But if they say they're not going to do that...
Well, then, you know, who exactly are you making this show for?
And that's sort of where we found ourselves.
And that's the kind of dynamic here.
But playing into this even more is this idea that Nexstar, this huge ownership, owner of kind of local TV stations here in America, is in the process of trying to acquire a rival called Tegna, which owns another 13 ABC stations.
And that would kind of put it foul of regulations here in America, antitrust regulations.
And so it needs the FCC's approval to get the deal through.
It is a $6.2 billion deal.
There is a lot of money on the line.
And that is why people are looking at this and saying well, this is about trying to kind of win favor, carry favor with the Trump administration.
So that was Michelle Fleury, the BBC's North America business correspondent.
Let's talk now to Peter White.
He is executive editor of Television for Deadline, which is a TV industry magazine.
He joins us today from L.A.
Peter, critics are saying that this is regulatory intimidation.
You're speaking to TV executives about this.
What are they telling you?
Yes, it is certainly a bending of the knee in order to get some business that they might have in the future past the Trump administration.
I think there's two things at play here.
There is clearly the business element.
There is clearly some pressure from the right for these companies to go through the FCC to get the deals that they want done done.
And then there's also a free speech issue here.
I think people have been shocked and saddened since the news broke yesterday, largely because the people on the left are a little bit worried about what this means for free speech, and the people on the right clearly just don't like Jimmy Kimmel and are trying to get him off the airwaves.
This went right up to the top of Disney, didn't it?
Bob Iger, I think, made the decision to pull the show.
What was his biggest financial concern, do you think?
Yeah, we understand it.
We did some reporting yesterday and it was a tense day at Disney.
And this went all the way up to Bob Iger, who previously ran television at ABC back many, many years ago.
And he had a couple of trusted executives, a lady named Dana Walden.
And Dana Walden was the person who called Jimmy Kimmel to tell him that they would not be airing this.
Ultimately, what happened during the day was that after these comments on Monday, Jimmy Kimmel was planning on addressing the controversy on the show last night.
And what they couldn't agree on is how that would actually manifest itself.
So they couldn't really get to a place where Kimmel didn't want to apologize.
But similarly, Disney was saying that they didn't particularly want to make matters worse.
So they made this decision to pause it.
And it is an indefinite, you know, they call it a preemption.
Essentially, they've parked it, suspended it for some time.
And how long that is, we won't know.
But yeah, I think Bob Iger's consideration is money.
Disney does have the opportunity to put this on its own stations.
It has a handful of what they call owned and operated stations.
And remember, they do have streaming services, Disney Plus and Hulu.
And here's the other thing about late night.
The majority of people watch this stuff on YouTube.
Right.
Now people on social media.
We've been tracking what they've been saying and they're saying that they could cancel their Disney Plus accounts, including their Hulu accounts, because they're protesting against the show being pulled.
So again, there are more financial implications there.
They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Speaking to people within ABC and Disney earlier in the day yesterday.
They were getting plenty of threats from people on the right.
And then as soon as they made this decision, they were getting threats from people on the left.
So they are in a really tricky situation now.
I think until Jimmy Kimmel says something, whether that's on the air or in some other form, we won't really know how this is going to play out.
But you're right.
I think some people will cancel those subscriptions.
In fact, there's protests around Hollywood and in Burbank today.
We're covering them right now.
OK, let's bring Kerry Leahy into our conversation now.
He's an economist at Columbia University joining us from New York.
A former president has also weighed in on this.
Barack Obama has said that this is new and dangerous level of the cancel culture.
Do you think it could potentially change the business model of some of these media companies?
Oh, I think so.
As we all know, they're all straining under the dealing with the challenge of streaming video and dealing with the old system, which is getting increasingly troublesome.
So the answer may be for better or for worse is that the affiliates, who tend to be more conservative, are aren't going to accept a program that they're not comfortable with.
And they've been doing this for decades where they pulled programs in certain towns, like being banned in Boston.
That's nothing new.
But actually suspend the series that quickly and not just take off one or two episodes or cancel them when their contract is up, is all new stuff.
And it's probably not good for freedom of information.
Peter, just back to you before we leave this.
Late night talk shows have been struggling for a while, haven't they, for ratings.
What do you think this could do to ratings of late night shows?
Yeah, well, this comes on the back of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert being cancelled.
Again, many people thought that had to do with a political situation.
CBS said it was a financial decision.
Really, if Kimmel does go off air, it will only be NBC with The Tonight Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Daily Show and our very own John Oliver on HBO.
So there'll be certainly far fewer shows.
I think the ratings are only going one way.
But I think the appetite for this type of content is just the way people watch it.
They watch it in slightly different forms.
So, yeah, these people are still huge institutions, just maybe not on broadcast television.
We will leave it there.
Peter White, executive editor for Deadline, joining us today in LA.
Thank you very much.
Kerry Leahy, stay where you are.
We will come and talk to you again in just a moment.
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In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.
What if you could have all three at the same time?
That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database application development and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.
How is it faster?
OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
Cheaper?
OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.
Better?
In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.
This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.
Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free.
Head to oracle.com slash strategic.
That's oracle.com slash strategic.
Now the US president has warned European leaders to stop buying Russian oil, saying that cutting off those revenues is key to ending the war in Ukraine.
Here's Donald Trump speaking at a press conference at the end of his visit to the UK.
Very simply, if the price of oil comes down, Putin's going to drop out.
He's going to have no choice.
He's going to drop out of that war.
And when I found out that the European nations were buying oil from Russia.
And as you know, I'm very close to India.
I'm very close to the prime minister of India.
I spoke to him the other day, wished him a happy birthday.
We have a very good relationship.
He put out a beautiful statement, too.
We have.
But I said, you know, I sanctioned them.
China is paying a very large tariff right now to the United States.
But I'm willing to do other things, but not when the people that I'm fighting for are buying oil from Russia.
If the oil price comes down, very simply, Russia will settle.
And the oil price is way down.
You know, we got it way down.
We're drilling and we produce more oil than anybody else in the world.
We're doing a lot.
But I was disappointed to see that.
And the prime minister was disappointed to see that.
So how much Russian oil is Europe still buying, and how realistic is the claim that cutting those purchases could end the war in Ukraine?
Sergei Vagalenko is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russian Eurasia Center and formerly a gas prom chief exec.
He has nearly...
25 years experience in the oil and gas industry as an economist.
Sergei, thanks for being with us today on the programme.
So the EU has already drastically reduced how much Russian oil it imports.
I think a ban on seaborne Russian crude imports cut EU imports by about 90%.
So how much is still going into Europe and who's buying it?
Well...
It's about 300,000 barrels per day going into Hungary and Slovakia.
If you want to be particularly detailed about that, you could say that there are some physical barrels of Russian oil which are commercially Kazakh, coming into former German Democratic Republic East Germany via Russian pipelines.
So physically it's Russian oil, commercially it's Kazakh oil.
There is kind of a swap.
That's about it.
And there is some amount of condensate, which is a bit like oil-like liquid that comes into Rotterdam, which is not banned because it's a part of the gas stream.
So 300,000 barrels a day, you say.
Is that then enough?
If that was stopped tomorrow, is that enough to kind of blow a hole in Russia's financial economy?
Yes.
Nowhere nearly.
Russia exports 7 million barrels per day of oil and oil products.
So 300,000 barrels per day is a very small fraction.
So it's a tiny fraction, isn't it, actually?
It is, yes.
Less than 5%.
Less than 5%.
OK, so let's bring Joe Murphy in, a senior analyst at Petroleum Economist, a trade magazine.
He joins us from London.
How do you think the EU can stop Hungary and Slovakia buying those 300,000 barrels?
Good to be here.
Yeah, so Hungary and Slovakia...
As noted, they are the only really main buyers of Russian oil in Europe left.
They did so by securing an exemption from the EU embargo imposed three years ago.
They've very fiercely opposed EU pressure to stop taking this oil.
They claim that, as landlocked nations, they don't have the infrastructure in place to reasonably find alternatives at an affordable price.
And 300,000 barrels, does that sort of keep them going?
They must be topping up from somewhere else, you'd have thought.
Yeah, so they do have some alternatives, but this is covering the majority of their oil consumption.
So the EU is pressing forward with a proposal to phase out all remaining energy oil and gas by the end of 2027.
But this is far from finalized.
It will take many more months to you know, move through the negotiations between the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council.
A lot of steps to go through.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sergey, the biggest buyers of Russian oil are India and China.
And at that press conference Mr Trump talked about secondary tariffs on India and China of as much as 100 to try and stop them buying Russian oil.
Will that do that, do you think?
I'm afraid not.
The US have already introduced secondary tariffs on India.
It has little to do with actually India buying Russian oil has a lot to do with a trade dispute between India and the United States.
It's more of a pretense.
With China.
As we saw in spring, the number of errors in the US trade quiver towards China is actually quite limited.
China was quite swift in its retribution towards the U.S. by limiting exports of critical minerals.
And U.S. had to trace back with the tariffs they were trying to impose on China.
So I don't think 100% tariffs on China would work.
And I also think that would hurt U.S. maybe more than China.
It would be extremely painful to both sides.
Because the price of oil will go up.
No, it has nothing to do with price of oil.
If the US would try to introduce 100 import tariffs on all the Chinese goods, the US would suffer quite a lot.
And then it's another question whether it would be possible to indeed make India and China stop buying Russian oil, because by some measure, let's imagine it is possible.
What would be the ramifications for the world markets?
And they would be rather grave.
So oil prices would indeed go probably above $200 a barrel, maybe even above $300 a barrel.
That would be a problem for people filling up their cars.
Everywhere.
US included.
Ukraine has been bombing oil refineries in Russia.
How much capacity is left?
As a percentage, maybe, how much has Russia's production of oil declined since the war started?
Production didn't decline at all.
Well, it did decline, but it's because of OPEC Plus agreements.
What Ukraine is targeting is refining.
So that's a different branch of oil industry.
Talking about that, since...
Beginning of August this year, when Ukraine started its campaign against refineries.
By various counts probably 17 or maybe 20 of Russian refining capacity has been impacted.
But it's a moving target, because on one hand Ukraine attacks Russian refineries, on the other hand Russia fixes and mends them, and then next night Ukraine attacks something else.
So it's a dynamic balance, if you wish.
Thank you very much both for your time.
Sergei Vakalenka, who is an energy economist and also formerly of Gazprom, and Joe Murphy, senior analyst at The Petroleum Economist, which is a trade magazine, joining us today from London.
Thank you both.
Now, could artificial intelligence ever replace people like me in the newsroom?
I do hope not.
Around the world.
Startups are already using AI-generated presenters and automated news scripts, and even established broadcasters are experimenting with AI.
But there are some big questions over trust, authenticity and editorial control in newsrooms, as Sam Gruet now reports.
Hello and welcome to Channel One, a new way of consuming, reporting and thinking about the news, powered by artificial intelligence.
For Channel One, the future is very much here. all presented by our team of AI-generated reporters.
The generative AI news service launched for a brief period last year, advertised its news scripted, edited and presented by artificial intelligence.
But would you or anyone you know actually watch a channel that lacks a real human being?
I put that to founder and CEO Adam Mossam.
We got, I think it was 8,000 emails in the week after that.
And that was from such a wide variety of folks, everything from people that were the creatives in the industry to the CEOs of, I feel like, most of the biggest media companies on the planet.
What about the potential for AI to completely replace journalists?
Listen, there's a lot of jobs that you know if you speak to folks in the industry that are being done that people don't really want to do right.
They want to focus on higher value content.
If we could take that off their plates.
Our product essentially acts as an assistant to the creatives right.
Next comes the launch of our daily news program in countries and languages across the globe.
So, with new possibilities for news output, how much of it are we seeing rolled out across newsrooms around the world?
Chris Stoker-Walker is a journalist and author of How AI Ate the World.
We are seeing AI being used on the front lines of journalism, at the point at which the audience consumes that bit of information.
But it's not all been smooth sailing between the media and AI.
The New York Times is suing Microsoft and chat GPT maker OpenAI over copyright infringement.
The newspaper claims the company's used its intellectual property to train large language models.
One of the challenges here is that the generative AI space has been a little bit of a wild west.
There is this real appetite for these AI models to be trained on data.
Without that source information, AI needs that base data.
OpenAI has denied these claims and the case is ongoing.
And frankly, the outcome of it could really significantly affect the future of AI development.
So I've been a journalist with the BBC for the best part of the last decade.
And what I'm about to do isn't part of my typical day.
It's not part of my usual workflow.
I'm going to use the most popular AI chatbot.
That's ChatGPT, although others are, of course, available.
And I'm going to ask it to write me an introduction for my next guest.
He's called Dylan Jacks and he's Group Technology Director at the Telegraph Media Group.
Our next guest is at the forefront of how one of Britain's biggest newsrooms is using technology to shape the way we consume journalism.
We really have been trying to position ourselves as an organisation that drills into the value of how AI can support, elevate and accelerate journalism.
We've got a really interesting AI project around our Ukraine The Latest podcasts.
From today, each episode of Ukraine The Latest will be translated into Ukrainian.
We want to ensure those most affected by the war can access our coverage.
That podcast has got really great global reach.
But one of the things that we wanted to do is we wanted to make that available to non-English speakers, particularly in Ukraine and Russia, and we used very advanced AI tooling to recreate that podcast, cloning and using the voices of those presenters.
To be clear, this is AI helping to present our journalism, not produce it.
They are.
I mean, even though they didn't get everything they wanted.
They might have wanted more members to dissent for more interest rate hikes and were done yesterday, meaning a half a percentage point rather than a quarter of a percentage point.
But the market knows that.
The historical evidence is pretty good that when the Fed switches from being neutral, meaning no change in rates for a considerable period of time let's say six months and then they start cutting, good things happen to the stock market.
On average, you know, 10 gains over six months.
They're not unusual.
So they're feeling very good about that.
The big question, of course, is the economy, which is slowing down quite substantially, though it hasn't really affected the unemployment rate yet, because both labor demand and supply have both slowed down.
Will we avoid a recession?
If we avoid a recession, all the things I just told you 30 seconds ago, go right out the window.
So it's a no recession, Wonderful story with lower rates.
It is a weird thing for people to try and understand that the economy –, the data is showing weaknesses in the economy, especially with those job data that you mentioned.
Yet stocks are reaching all-time highs.
That's right.
They're making a vote that, down the line, earnings are going to be very good, even though we're taking on a bunch of body blows regarding tariffs.
Restriction of supply through cutting back on legal and illegal immigration.
So it really is many people, including yours, truly think they're whistling past the graveyard.
But so far, you can't fight the wave and the wave is up.
There's been a lot of investment as well in tech this week, hasn't there?
And then chipmaker Nvidia has said it's going to invest 5 billion into its struggling rival Intel, giving it a huge sort of 4 stake in the business.
Why would you do that?
Well, in the hope that that will be a good use of the most profitable firm in the business, helping out one of the least profitable, meaning that Intel at one time was the best firm out there.
And maybe a decent amount of money, a decent chunk of cash will help them turn things around.
So they're willing to take a stab on that to have a healthier industry.
Fascinating stuff.
Thank you so much.
Kerry Leahy, economist there at Columbia University in New York.
That's all we have time for today.
Thank you very much for listening to World Business Report.
And don't forget, you can always subscribe to our podcast.
Search for World Business Report.
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