MEDIA
Eriq Gardner
•
November 26, 2024
A New Murdoch Suit & R.F.K.’s Cable Bomb
A group of angry investors is suing Fox News, claiming that its pandering to right-wing conspiracies saddled the company with legal costs they should have avoided. Murdoch is claiming free speech outweighs fiduciary responsibility, and many in the media are hoping he wins.
Dylan Byers
•
November 22, 2024
Maddow Money
News and notes on the latest anxieties inside MSNBC in its SpinCo singularity: questions about the Maddow deal, looming Stamford realities, and much more.
Dylan Byers
•
November 20, 2024
Mika & Joe’s Excellent Adventure
News and notes on the real ulterior motive behind the Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage. Plus, all the nail-biting and agita unleashed at 30 Rock in the wake of the Comcast spinco news.
Dylan Byers
•
November 15, 2024
The Mark-est Hour
A gloomy company-wide meeting revealed Mark Thompson’s CNN is still caught between the linear past and the digital future, and nonpolitical news versus 24-hour Trump TV. Insiders wonder who’s paying attention to the content while others wonder if a more sinister fate beckons.
Dylan Byers
•
November 13, 2024
How Chris Wallace Cut the Cord
The backstory of Wallace’s self-defenestration at CNN—the latest shoe to drop in an era that won’t stop ending.
Dylan Byers
•
November 8, 2024
CNN’s Existential Post-Election Season
With the election in the rearview, C.E.O. Mark Thompson will finally implement his true transformation plan at the network—including the culling of hundreds of jobs. Many of CNN’s own journalists, plenty of whom were blinded by Trump’s significant victory, have evinced similar naiveté about their own fates.
Dylan Byers
•
November 6, 2024
The #Resistance Is Futile
With Trump 2.0 upon us, a number of D.C. media people are cautiously wondering if the highly lucrative, gung-ho cri de coeur, green-room-and-book-deal #resistance marketplace of his last term will return to town with the 47th president. Alas, Trump may not have changed, but the industry sure has.
Dylan Byers
•
November 1, 2024
Render Unto Cesar…
Inside 30 Rock, word that Comcast is considering spinning out NBCU’s lesser cable assets—potentially severing MSNBC from NBC—has kicked off a furious sequence of questions about the future of both networks, and about the fate of NBC News Group boss Cesar Conde.
Dylan Byers
•
October 30, 2024
Bezos’s Inferno
The latest news, notes, and hunger cries from within The Washington Post, which finds itself embroiled in a largely predictable self-immolation of its own design—the latest scandal produced by an owner, management team, and rank-and-file that appear to operate a little too comfortably in opposition to one another.
Dylan Byers
•
October 25, 2024
Washington on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
The decisions by Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong to spike endorsements of Kamala Harris have created an uproar inside The Washington Post and LA Times, respectively. Is this a genuine gripe, an assault on democracy, or simply the latest grievance consuming a legacy media industry mad as hell and unwilling to take it any longer?
Dylan Byers
•
October 23, 2024
Playbook’s New Playbook
As Ryan Lizza remains mired in Nuzzigate, Politico’s leadership has been reassessing its Playbook franchise and accelerating long-standing plans to overhaul it.
Dylan Byers
•
October 16, 2024
McMahon on Wire
The nightmare on 57th Street continues as CBS News chief Wendy McMahon preps for a meeting with incoming Paramount leaders David Ellison and Jeff Shell amid a series of ongoing scandals and micro-scandals that have the newsroom and media chattering class in an uproar.
Dylan Byers
•
October 11, 2024
Dangling McMahon
The Tony–Ta-Nehisi drama consuming CBS News couldn’t have flared up at a worse time for its now-embattled chief executive, Wendy McMahon, as David Ellison and Jeff Shell begin taking meetings with Paramount division heads to familiarize themselves with the business—and, presumably, decide who among them is expendable.
Dylan Byers
•
October 9, 2024
The Tony–Ta-Nehisi Affair
Inside the totally predictable, somewhat absurd, and quasi-tragic fallout from Tony Dokoupil’s aggressive questioning of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the furious response inside CBS News, and the latest round of navel-gazing media existentialism.
Dylan Byers
•
October 4, 2024
The Great TV News Comp Depression
The industry-wide resetting of TV news contracts is now firmly underway, it seems, and most talent will be affected—at best by a smaller-than-anticipated cost-of-living raise, often by a pay cut, and, at worst, by a delicately choreographed defenestration.
Dylan Byers
•
October 2, 2024
Anchorman
Brian Williams’ latest return to television—well, to streaming—is not only a first step toward a possible career revival, but also a potential harbinger of the future of cable news.
Dylan Byers
•
September 27, 2024
Hoda to a Nightingale
Yes, Hoda Kotb deserves to ring in her seventh decade by sleeping in past 4 a.m. But the truth is that the star left her cushy $20 million-plus per year deal only after NBC proposed a pay cut. “This is the age of the great resetting of TV news contracts,” one veteran media executive told me. “Everyone is getting their pay cut or their jobs eliminated.”