Chris Licht’s New No. 2

Good afternoon, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on what’s really going on in the media. Today, in the dog days of summer, we turn our attention to some off-season maneuvering across the news industry—most notably at CNN, where Chris Licht is getting ready to promote Virginia Moseley, a TV news veteran and fixture of the D.C. establishment, to serve as his top deputy overseeing the network’s editorial operations. Plus, we check in on The New Yorker, Semafor and MSNBC.

Chris Licht’s New No. 2

Three months after taking the reins of a Zucker-less CNN, Licht is appointing a “head of editorial” to effectively function as the newsroom’s new Zucker, or the closest thing to him, and allowing himself to focus on the bigger-picture questions. Such as: Who will helm CNN’s new morning show?

DYLAN BYERS

The dog days of summer can be a drag on the media beat. After Sun Valley, Hollywood moguls disperse to yachts in the Mediterranean and Aegean, weddings in St. Tropez, or pastoral second, third, or fourth homes in the South of France and the American West. Manhattan media execs and their most well-paid talent retreat, as often as they can, to the Hamptons or Hudson Valley or Martha’s Vineyard. And even the employees tethered to their responsibilities in New York or Washington usually work from home, to beat the heat or avoid Covid exposure. The entire industry seems to have disbanded, time zones misalign, and it becomes hard to pin people down.

And so what if you did? No one is making much news, anyway. After all, there’s nothing really to discuss, other than Netflix’s Q2 earnings, or those photos of Ari Emanuel hosing down Elon Musk in Mykonos—and there’s really not much to say about all that, is there? In a sign of just how dry the media news well has become, the biggest fracas in New York media this week (so far) is The New Yorker’s archive editor, Erin Overbey, publishing a Felicia Sonmez-style tweet thread about gender disparity in which she accuses her boss, Pulitzerwinner David Remnick, of inserting factual errors into her writing as part of an effort to get her ousted for insubordination. The New Yorker called this accusation “absurd,” which reflects the sentiment of almost everyone I know there, as well as the news media industry at large. (As I go to press, there’s also a ridiculous story from Radar, at the top of Drudge, suggesting Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who just re-upped at MSNBC, may jump to CNN. The story is, I assure you, 100 percent false—and just reiterates how slow the media news cycle is right now.)...