Meidas Touch Fucks Substack
Their Branding, Our Journalism
I keep seeing MeidasTouch and Legal AF creeping into spaces that belong to independent journalism.
Name-brand reporters are leaving corporate media.
Independent journalists with their own followings are looking for partners.
MeidasTouch is there.
It absorbs them, and their credibility comes with them.
Start with what MeidasTouch actually is.
It began as a Democratic-aligned SuperPAC in 2020.
Its founder said as much at the time.
Ben Meiselas told CNN the videos weren’t just anti-Trump ads.
They were pro-Biden ads. Going into 2024, MeidasTouch ran a fundraising scheme that split donations directly with the Biden campaign.
As of last August, Media Bias/Fact Check found the outlet had spent over $800,000 against Republicans.
Against Democrats, zero.
Ben Meiselas has publicly claimed MeidasTouch has no billionaire investors.
“One hundred percent people-powered,” he said. In April of this year, MeidasTouch took an investment round led by Soros Fund Management.
This is the same fund that backs Crooked Media and holds a controlling stake in Audacy.
Michael Popok donated over four thousand dollars to the MeidasTouch PAC back in 2021.
That was more than a year before he became an on-air contributor. He isn’t just a Popok in a chair.
He’s an investor in a chair.
Then there’s Prestige WW. In the 2022 cycle, the MeidasTouch PAC raised $2.4 million.
It spent just $240,000 on actual political ads. Of that $2.4 million, $1.1 million went to a consulting firm called Prestige WW. Prestige WW is run by Adam Parkhomenko, a former Hillary Clinton aide. Parkhomenko later did political work for Michael Avenatti, the anti-Trump lawyer later convicted of trying to extort Nike for $20 million.
Prestige WW, in turn, pays consulting fees to Brett Meiselas, MeidasTouch’s treasurer, for his work producing the PAC’s videos.
A former FEC lawyer described this shape directly: a PAC paying an outside vendor that then pays the PAC’s own officer.
He called it the kind of pass-through structure that violates federal transparency requirements.
It’s the same kind of arrangement that got the Trump campaign into legal trouble in a separate case.
The donor money that was supposed to fund “fighting Trump” mostly funded a payment chain.
That chain ended with the PAC’s treasurer, routed through a Clinton-world operative one step removed from a man convicted of extortion.
Now watch the absorption pattern at work.
It isn’t one thing.
It’s three different mechanisms wearing the same branding.
The first is the post-purge absorption.
Scott MacFarlane left CBS this past March.
The reported reason, the network’s rightward turn under Bari Weiss, installed after David Ellison’s family took over Paramount and CBS.
Nine days later, MeidasTouch hired him as chief Washington correspondent.
Katie Phang’s MSNBC show was canceled in early 2025.
It was part of a broader restructuring that also hit Joy Reid and Jonathan Capehart.
Rachel Maddow publicly criticized the network for disproportionately cutting its non-white hosts.
By May, Phang had launched a YouTube channel in partnership with MeidasTouch.
By October, she was on Popok’s Legal AF telling viewers she believed she’d been fired over her race, her politics, and her tone.
In both cases, a journalist with a real grievance against a corporate-media power shift gets absorbed by MeidasTouch. MeidasTouch gets to wear that grievance as its own brand armor, the place that took in the people corporate media pushed out.
MacFarlane’s case has a deeper irony.
MeidasTouch had been running Oracle NetSuite ad reads since at least spring 2025.
NetSuite is a company Larry Ellison personally founded. When Oracle bought it, the Ellison family walked away with roughly four billion dollars.
So the journalist fleeing Ellison’s influence landed somewhere already taking Ellison-family ad money.
Nobody at MeidasTouch has addressed this on air.
The same NetSuite ad sits in Ben Shapiro’s sponsor block too.
Different tracking link. Same script.
The checks just keep clearing.
The second mechanism is brand absorption of someone who was never pushed out at all.
Allison Gill runs MSW Media, her own network of more than twenty-five shows.
Her work includes the Mueller probe, the Jack Smith investigation, and ongoing Epstein litigation reporting. She wasn’t fired from anywhere.
In September 2025, she launched a new show with Ben Meiselas. MeidasTouch’s own promotional language describes her as “now a leading voice on the MeidasTouch Network.”
Her independent body of work gets folded into their umbrella.
Her own network’s identity gets no comparable lift in return.
MSW is actual journalism, casework and filings tracked over months and years.
What Gill gets from the arrangement is reach.
What MeidasTouch gets is to stand next to someone who does the kind of work its own format isn’t built to do.
Which gets to the third thing: the format itself.
MeidasTouch’s only real competency is the legal-commentary lane.
It’s real because it’s lawyers doing what lawyers actually do, reading filings, explaining procedure, reacting to hearings as they happen.
Popok, Phang, Filipkowski, Litman, that’s a panel of attorneys doing legal analysis, and it works.
Everything else is a clip-reaction show.
Twenty-plus minutes of impressions, banter, and chaos-list news roundups.
A major story and a screwworm outbreak fold into the same breath.
It ends in a pitch for Meidas+.
So why does any of this matter for what doesn’t get covered?
Every piece tagged Israel on meidasnews.com is written by one of two names, Troy Matthews or J.D. Wolf.
Not Ben.
Not Brett.
Not Jordy.
Not Popok.
None of the names doing the legal-analysis lane or the credibility-sharing with absorbed journalists.
Every one of those pieces is framed through Trump, through Netanyahu’s relationship to Trump.
Never through Gaza on its own terms.
Brett Meiselas has posted on his own social media calling it a genocide, with casualty figures.
The opinion exists.
It doesn’t make it into the format.
Not the clip show.
Not the legal-analysis panel.
Nowhere the reach is.
Part of this is the platform.
YouTube has a documented record of demonetizing content critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, while running Israeli government ads on the same platform.
It has terminated entire creator accounts over Palestine coverage, on grounds that went beyond what the law required.
For an outlet running on YouTube ad revenue and sponsor reads, Gaza is the one major story the platform itself won’t pay for.
Meidas Touch ❤ Gavin Newsom
Gavin Newsom hurts homeless people. Gavin Newsom hurts trans people. Gavin Newsom won’t tax the rich.
And part of it is who gets amplified instead. MeidasTouch runs live coverage of Gavin Newsom’s press events and lawsuits.
Ben Meiselas conducted an exclusive interview with him. Newsom returned the favor on his own podcast, where Meiselas pitched MeidasTouch’s reach against Rogan and Fox.
Meanwhile, AIPAC-aligned spending has shifted tactics.
It now routes through front groups with names like Elect Chicago Women, specifically so voters never see the AIPAC connection.
That spending removed the two House Democrats most outspoken on Gaza, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, tens of millions of dollars’ worth, confirmed after the fact in FEC filings.
One front group funded an attack on a Palestinian-American candidate while quietly funding a different pro-Palestinian candidate too, splitting the vote on purpose.
The Democrats left standing, the ones MeidasTouch amplifies, are survivors of that filtering.
So picture the established journalist, fresh off a legitimate grievance against corporate media.
The independent operator with their own real body of work.
They sit down.
They share a segment, an audience, credit, with Ben Meiselas or Michael Popok.
What they’re lending their name to: an operation that took donor money meant to fight Trump and routed most of it through a Clinton-operative’s firm back to its own treasurer.
An operation with investors it denied having, ad money from the family it covers as a threat, a governor it treats like a client.
Why do we tune into Meidas Touch?
Do we like their broke down comedy act and self promotion?
Oh do fuck off. Who cares about ANY of the points brought up here. Good for them for not donating money to fascists. Good for them for being independent journalists and taking in others who are leaving mainstream media controlled by the. 4th Reich. Why don’t you post this crap on X where you belong.
I really like Katie Phang, but I don't really care for the way most of the rest of Meidas does their videos; it's always in the most hyperbolic language possible.
When everything is the biggest thing ever, nothing is the biggest thing ever.