Former Daily Show host Trevor Noah has never technically been a journalist, though he played one on TV.
But I’m finding that information tough to square with a new report from the New York Post. I don’t love the Post, but I’ll give them some credit that their reporter Lydia Moynihan appears to have caught something interesting.
Essentially, Noah appears to have built a second career for himself with Microsoft, first starting as a consultant, then as what the company calls Chief Questions Officer, which is best described as “guy who promotes AI through Daily Show-style clips.”
It’s a situation where the lines connect together neatly and openly, but nobody has stitched together the conversation into one piece until now. Information about the connection between Noah and Microsoft first surfaced in a Hollywood Reporter piece about his departure from the show. The mention is part of a longer section that highlights his larger array of work with the company.
His late 2016 memoir, Born a Crime, about being born during apartheid, which made his very existence as a mixed-race child illegal, became a New York Times best-seller, sitting on the list for a staggering 26 weeks. In 2018, Paramount announced it would be making a film version, for which Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o is still attached to play his mom. That same year, Noah signed a second book deal, which he may finally have time to honor. There were podcasts and speaking gigs, too; and, with whatever free time he had, he’d fly to South Africa to do work with his eponymous foundation, or out west, to Washington state, to meet with Microsoft. Though his chief questions officer title there is new, the tech wiz has been consulting with the company for six years and, through his work with its product development team, has applied for multiple patents. (The latter involve user interfaces for “multiscreen computing devices,” and at least one of them has been granted.)
A consulting role of this nature, for a journalist, would potentially be fine with some disclosure and some guardrails. He would be able to thread that needle, and maybe he could hand off a Microsoft-related story to somebody else.
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The problem is, he maintained this consultant role while actually covering Microsoft as a part of his Daily Show work, even going so far as to name-drop Microsoft products in magazine interviews.
For example, this conversation with Microsoft President Brad Smith occurred during the consultancy period. The Post pinpoints the beginning of the relationship with a critical segment about Microsoft’s AI in 2016. Soon after, he took part in a Backstage session with the company that included the question: “What would I do if I worked at Microsoft?”
“I appreciate the creation of this thing and seeing it work, and seeing the components come together, so if I could work at Microsoft, I would probably be involved in some way in the world of R&D,” Noah stated.
Noah got his wish. If you go to Google Patents, you will find three patent applications on which his name is included, two of which are active. Based on the patent filings, he helped work on elements of what became the Surface Duo foldable tablet.
Now, to be clear, him being able to do this work is awesome. I am happy Noah got his opportunity to do this apparent dream gig. But it’s really troublesome that he continued interviewing Microsoft stakeholders in a journalistic role while doing this work. That is not something that a traditional journalist would be allowed to do, and it puts the thought into your head, seeing this, that Noah got the opportunity to do this R&D work in exchange for friendly treatment of the company on a program many see as journalistic.
The Smith interview is one thing. But Noah, now primarily focused on his podcast, was literally the first person to do an interview with Sam Altman after his mess with the OpenAI board. Microsoft played a very heavy, very direct role in the OpenAI mess. Noah, with his conflict of interest, was the wrong person for this specific interview. But nobody seems to have noticed—until now. (To his credit, he’s doing the interview with an iPad rather than a Surface.)
That the Post is calling it out, rather than a less divisive media outlet, makes it seem like, if the scandal picks up steam, it’s a win for the right. But I just did a little bit of research, and the truth is, the facts check out: Noah worked as a consultant for Microsoft, is named in Microsoft-owned patents, and appears in Microsoft’s content marketing—and, beyond his secondary work with Microsoft, he does interviews with Microsoft-orbiting personalities. But the thing is, even if Noah is excited about all this stuff and finds it awesome, he should not be doing pieces like this without disclosure.
Arguably, he likely shouldn’t be touching them at all. But clearly the train has left this station.
Unconflicted Links
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