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ESPN Deal Heat, Upfront Overdose, McCormick’s Hangover
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Happy Friday from Puck. You’re reading the Daily Courant, presenting the newest and most provocative reporting from our elite team of journalists.
Today, Dylan Byers scoops the details of a titillating mediaworld merger that got away—and what it portends for Comcast, ESPN, Disney and more.
Plus, below the fold, Matt Belloni reports from New York on the creeping Zaslavification of the TV business. And Tara Palmeri reveals how Trump rival Jeff Roe, the campaign guru who perfected the Youngkin–McCormick playbook, has been secretly singing for his next supper at Mar-a-Lago.
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| Brian Roberts’ One That Got Away |
| For months, the media elite have been wondering what the Comcast impresario might buy to scale up in the content wars. Turns out, Roberts had a plan that almost came together. |
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| For the last four years, What’s Brian Roberts going to buy has been a perennial parlor game question among the Sun Valley set. It all started in 2018, when the Comcast-NBCUniversal chief tried and failed to intercept Bob Iger‘s takeover of the Fox entertainment assets and settled for Sky, instead. The question came up again last year, when David Zaslav masterfully executed his stealth merger with WarnerMedia. The former Time Warner media assets, after all, would have been a boon to NBCUniversal, helping them compete more aggressively with Netflix, Disney, et al. And the question came up again this year after Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella agreed to pay $69 billion for Activision Blizzard, an asset that would have provided NBCU with a massive infusion of new I.P. and immediate entry into the highly lucrative gaming space.
Whether Roberts was too cautious, too late, too difficult, or too smart to land any of these is a matter of debate. He tried hard for Fox and is said to have wanted WarnerMedia. Whether or not he wanted to pursue Activision, he certainly never got around to having serious conversations about it. Whatever the case, the question stands, and remains as pressing as ever—especially as Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming play, languishes behind its competitors. Though Roberts has said that NBCUniversal doesn’t need mergers and acquisitions to achieve scale, the conventional wisdom among many of his peers and competitors, as well as among a considerable set of investors and analysts, is that, as a matter of fact, everyone does. Moreover, the Roberts family has traditionally been among the most acquisitive in the business…
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| FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT |
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| Jeff Roe ’24 |
| Insiders are obsessing about the political canoodling between Trump and Jeff Roe, the G.O.P. political operative. |
| TARA PALMERI |
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| Upfront Overkill |
| It’s all about “the portfolio” now, or “our unified approach,” or “company-wide capabilities.” |
| MATTHEW BELLONI |
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| Elon’s Next Moves |
| After brilliantly orchestrating the initial stanzas of his Twitter takeover, Musk has ceded power back to the Twitter board. |
| WILLIAM D. COHAN |
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| Post-Trump MAGA |
| Has the movement Trump created now moved beyond him? |
| TINA NGUYEN |
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