Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room. The long-awaited CNN–CBS News merger is officially underway: I’m told CBS News president Tom Cibrowski and other news and sports execs visited Hudson Yards last week and traveled to the Atlanta bureau today. As I reported in March, CNN’s real estate is likely to serve as the base of operations for both networks after the merger.

📣 I’ll have more on the CNN-CBS tie-up in the Wednesday issue of In the Room, the first that will be exclusive to Puck’s Inner Circle tier. Don’t forget to upgrade your subscription now to access the Wednesday send, as well as all of Puck’s most exclusive insider reporting and access to our sister publication, Air Mail. It is well worth it. In tonight’s email, news and notes on the latest contretemps between the New York Times newsroom and Katie Kingsbury’s Opinion section. In the wake of Kristof-gate, Times reporters are now chafing at an essay that, in their view, attempts to give cover to one Goldman lawyer’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. “Why are we letting her use the Times to whitewash her reputation?” one reporter asked me, speaking in the familiar lingua franca of aggrieved and occasionally self-righteous Timespeople. 🎙️ Plus, on tomorrow’s episode of The Grill Room, Versant Media C.E.O. Mark Lazarus will share his grand ambitions for MS NOW, CNBC, the Golf Channel, and more—and explain how he hopes to diversify the cable spinco beyond linear and bring in younger audiences through digital services. Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen. Also mentioned in this issue: Bari Weiss, Kathy Ruemmler, Cesar Conde, Robert Draper, Ross Douthat, Melinda Gates, Ankush Khardori, Ezra Klein, Sarah Longwell, Douglas Murray, Lachlan Murdoch, James and Kathryn Murdoch, Laurene Powell Jobs, Charlie Stadtlander, and many more.

Open Tab

Lachlan’s new deal: Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox Corp has reached a $22 billion deal to acquire Roku, the CTV platform that serves as the front door to the viewing experience in more than 100 million U.S. homes. By taking ownership at the platform layer, Fox will expand its audience, gain leverage with advertisers, and reduce its reliance on rival distributors. Lachlan called it “a defining moment” for the company.It’s also a defining moment for him—this marks his first big acquisition since taking the reins from Rupert. Fox is paying $14.6 billion in cash and the remainder in stock, sparking dilution fears that drove shares down more than 15 percent.

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Bulwark buy-in: The Bulwark, the digital media business launched by Sarah Longwell and her merry band of #NeverTrump conservatives, has attracted investment interest from Melinda Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs, among others, per the Journal. James and Kathryn Murdoch, who are already investors, also expressed interest in acquiring the business. Sarah, a recent Grill Room guest, said that the site brought in more than $20 million in revenue last year and is on track to increase that by around 50 percent this year.Obviously, this seems like one of those for-sale shingle stories amid a moment of increasing activity in affinity-driven digital media. If Bari Weiss got $150 million for potentially less revenue, and the TPBN guys did even better, maybe it’s time for Sarah to shoot her shot. After all, how much can the company grow when Trump is a lame duck who will eventually be out of office?
Bari’s new hire: Bari Weiss has lured conservative columnist Douglas Murray to The Free Press and, I’m told, is expected to deploy him as a regular contributor across CBS News programming. His hire will no doubt be controversial among progressives. Doug is a neoconservative and, like Bari, a staunch supporter of Israel. He is also a very vocal critic of Islam and has argued that Europe is “committing suicide” by welcoming non-European immigrants—arguments that have drawn accusations of Islamophobia and xenophobia. By Doug’s own account, Bari has been trying to hire him since she founded The Free Press in 2022. He is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and, up until two weeks ago, served as a columnist at the New York Post.
And finally…: Is Cesar Conde looking for a new job? The NBCU News Group chairman is the latest subject of The New York Times’s Corner Office series, where he engages in an entirely anodyne discussion about “trust in media.” I’m told that the Times’s pitch to Cesar was initially hooked to Telemundo’s World Cup rights, but it also seems like exactly the sort of low-risk profile that allows an ambitious corporate striver to keep his name circulating in the executive-transfer speculation ecosystem. Good luck to him!

Speaking of the Times, here’s the main event…

The Times’s Ruemmler in the Jungle

Weeks after the Kristof vs. Bibi kerfuffle, the Times newsroom is again in an uproar over an Opinion story, this time allegedly attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of an Epstein associate. Big deal? Little deal? No deal?

Dylan Byers

Late last week, several New York Times reporters reached out to me independently to share their latest discontent with the paper’s Opinion section—a department that seems to have become a perennial source of internal frustration, from the Tom Cotton “Send in the Troops” goat rodeo of the early B.L.M. era all the way through Nick Kristof’s recent two-handed grab of the Israel-Gaza third rail. The most recent entry in the canon arrived on Thursday, as the Opinion section published a lengthy essay by independent legal analyst Ankush Khardori based on his interview with Kathy Ruemmler, a top Goldman lawyer and Obama White House counsel whose friendly exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein have drawn scrutiny in the Times’s own pages.

After acknowledging that the emails painted “a damning picture of their relationship,” Ankush explained that Ruemmler’s business with the disgraced sex offender was also status quo for top legal professionals. (As my partner Bill Cohan has reported, some of Ruemmler’s exchanges may have been a little cringey, but she effectively leveraged Epstein for new business as a rainmaking attorney at Latham & Watkins.) From there, Ankush effectively gave Ruemmler the floor to contextualize and justify her dealings with Epstein before seemingly arguing that she had been collateral damage, and that there was no sense in “castigating” her for doing her job. The reporters I spoke to were both outraged and humiliated by the essay. For months, Times reporter Robert Draper had been reporting on Ruemmler’s friendship with Epstein, as well as the shady efforts employed by a crisis P.R. firm to downplay those ties. The Times reporters said Draper and others had reached out to Ruemmler for interviews multiple times and been rebuffed. Meanwhile, Ankush disclosed in his essay that Ruemmler had contacted him in March “to ask if I’d like to hear her side of the Epstein story.” He also revealed that they were acquaintances and that, when he was practicing law, they’d “had a call to discuss opportunities in the public sector.” In the reporters’ view, the Opinion department, led by Katie Kingsbury, was giving Ruemmler and her friend a loophole to leverage the Times imprimatur for her P.R. rehabilitation effort. “Why are we letting her use the Times to whitewash her reputation?” one of the reporters asked. Two reporters separately referred to the piece as “a disgrace.”

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Both Ankush and the Times strongly denied those insinuations. In an email, Ankush told me he objected to the idea that he’d helped Ruemmler circumvent the newsroom. She’d agreed to an exclusive interview with him in March, when he was writing a column at Politico, he said. “I took the piece to NYT Opinion when I left Politico in April because I had written for the section several times before. There was no effort by her or anyone else to make an end-run around the NYT news side or exploit some ‘loophole.’”

Ankush also accused Times reporters, “or maybe just Robert Draper,” of “jumping to predetermined conclusions without doing basic homework on the actual facts.” These reporters “appear to think that this was the result of some effort to avoid the news side of the NYT, and although I understand why they would have that suspicion, it isn’t accurate,” he said. Citing his experience as a lawyer and federal prosecutor, Ankush told me he had “a distinct set of experiences that most other writers in this area do not. It’s frankly a little demeaning that all of that has gotten swept aside because some people have a preconceived dispute with the Opinion section, and they immediately jumped to conclusions about what happened that fit that predetermined narrative.” (In a statement, Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said that Ankush’s essay “presented compelling and illuminating coverage of Kathy Ruemmler,” and reiterated that the news and opinion sections “do not coordinate with each other.”)

“Lost Its Way”

These statements are unlikely to quell the frustrations of the newsroom. On the heels of the recent Kristof firestorm, in which the Pulitzer-winner reported a piece for the Opinion section alleging sexual violence by Israeli military officers, many reporters see the Ruemmler episode as yet another example of Kingsbury’s fiefdom overstepping its bounds by cosplaying in the hard news space. They said that both episodes undercut the Times’s credibility with an audience that doesn’t draw distinctions between news and opinion. “The Opinion section has lost its way,” one said.

Of course, as I noted during the Kristof convulsion, the Times’s real dilemma here coalesces around the much broader challenges of running a $12 billion multifaceted lifestyle brand with a sprawling product ecosystem. The Times has invested heavily in Opinion as part of its growth effort, elevating stars like Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat to quasi-celebrity status through an aggressive push into video and personality-driven journalism. At the same time, it has increasingly relied on Opinion to produce compelling, and occasionally controversial, editorial offerings that don’t fit neatly within the confines of a traditional news report.

But every success in that effort carries an inherent risk. The more Opinion pursues influence to gain audience acquisition, the more it invites confusion about where advocacy ends and reporting begins. And because most readers don’t parse the institutional distinctions as carefully as the Times inmates do, each new boundary test becomes a reputational challenge for the organization as a whole. As the cable TV folks know, that is a defining feature for any media company trying to maximize the value of its opinion arm while preserving the authority of its news report. The problem, as both the Kristof and Ruemmler episodes demonstrated, is that those two objectives rarely align.

This newsletter has been updated.

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