Welcome back to In the Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

Greetings from Los Angeles. In tonight’s email, news and notes on how The New York Times became the focal point for all the angst and anxieties of an industry in constant turmoil. As the most recent kerfuffle over its Gaza coverage shows, the Times is scrutinized more like a government institution than a news organization, and held to similarly high standards.

But first…

🏀 Spulu dreams: Two disparate takes on the forthcoming Disney-Warner Bros. Discovery-Fox sports mega-streamer… Fox Corp. C.E.O. Lachlan Murdoch, speaking at this week’s Morgan Stanley TMT conference, said he expects the streaming J.V. to reach 5 million subscribers in five years. … Endeavor president Mark Shapiro, also speaking at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference, called it “a big nothing. It's just another bundle out there. Who is going to pay $40, $50, $60 for half the NFL package?”

🥜 Fighting for peanuts: On Wednesday, a source at one of CNN’s rival networks informed me that, for the first time in Super Tuesday history, the cable news network lost the advertiser-relevant age 25-54 demo to MSNBC in both total day and primetime, while netting less than half of its overall audience. This landmark data point appeared to confirm the thesis that Zaz-era CNN has jettisoned the Zucker-era audience, even during the big election nights and breaking news events where it was once dominant. And, indeed, it’s becoming increasingly hard to dispute that thesis—even though, yes, yes, this is an incredibly uncompelling and depressing general election.

Nevertheless, a few moments later, a press release arrived from CNN P.R. declaring that CNN had, in fact, beaten MSNBC in the demo in primetime, with 243,000 demo-aged viewers vs. its rival’s 234,000 (yes, the numbers are really that small). Upon closer inspection, the discrepancy was due to CNN’s decision to redefine primetime as 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., rather than the historically—universally—agreed-upon hours of 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., which MSNBC won according to Nielsen’s Fast National ratings. Moments later—to put this spirited debate in perspective—the Fox News release arrived touting an indisputable triumph over both networks, with 455,000 demo-aged viewers versus MSNBC’s 251,000 and CNN’s… 251,000.

I’m not going to waste time trying to resolve the discrepancy in the higher figure Fox provided for both its rivals. As one industry executive told me, “The fact that CNN has to argue over this is beyond sad and a sign of how far they have fallen.” Meanwhile, CNN continues to stress that, “when considered with the crucial context that these numbers are on top of the audience on CNN Max and an engaged audience on CNN Digital platforms, the full picture of CNN’s success is notable.” But of course, it’s not notable because CNN doesn’t disclose how many people are watching on Max, or how many are five-second views from people who came to the service in search of Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives or Dr. Pimple Popper.

Don’t get me wrong, I know CNN has to play this game, and they’re doing their level best. But the fact that they continue to try to spin ratings victories from the tatters of defeat would seem to undercut the thesis, espoused by C.E.O. Mark Thompson, that television ratings are no longer the metrics by which CNN measures its success. Arguably, the most strategically savvy thing Thompson could do would be to triumphantly abandon the ratings releases altogether—ostensibly to telegraph his commitment to the digital future, practically to spare his staff further discouragement along the way.

Alas (I won’t belabor this…), Thompson’s mandate is riddled with, well, business riddles: For all the highfalutin talk about change and transformation, linear will still be central to CNN’s business model in the years to come. The challenge, indeed, is how Thompson increases the business unit’s revenue while those linear numbers, and everything attached to them, continue to fade.

Now on to the main event…

Of course, the Times had avoided this fate by long ago metamorphosing its business into a multiplatform, multi-sub-brand operation with more than 10 million paying subscribers—a veritable lifestyle hub for the coastal establishment and the Ivy-NESCAC liberal elite. Were the Times Co. not a mission-driven, dual-class-shareholder-structured public entity, A.G. would have surely been pressured to trim his formidable newsroom, as his father often had to in the olden days. Instead, the ballast-y prospects of the Times business plan had allowed him to support the newsgathering operation while still generating meaningful EBITDA. Shortly after our run-in, Times C.E.O. Meredith Kopit Levien (also at the party) would inform shareholders that the company’s annual digital subscription revenue had surpassed $1 billion for the first time.

During our chat, Sulzberger offered a note of context and caution: Yes, the Times had achieved relative success, but the economic value of the news industry as a whole had declined from the pre-internet era and was dwarfed by the tech colossi who had disrupted the business. Meanwhile, its profit margins were relatively slim, about $200 million a year.

As I would later learn, Sulzberger was workshopping remarks he would make weeks later in an interview with Oxford University’s Reuters Institute. “Half a century ago, in a much smaller country,” there were around “150, 200 million news subscriptions,” he said wistfully. “If you add up all the news subscriptions in this country today, … I would guess that it is closer to 30-40 million. That’s significantly less than Paramount+, which is not exactly a successful streamer. We are not even sniffing at Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Prime.”

Humility in victory is admirable enough, but Sulzberger’s data points merely emphasize the delta between the Times and its competitors. By his estimates, the Times accounts for somewhere between a quarter and a third of all U.S. news subscriptions. Its $1 billion digital subscription revenues are the envy of the industry, even if the profit margins reflect a mission-driven organization. The Times’ performance is certainly the envy of CNN’s Mark Thompson and The Washington Post’s Will Lewis (the party was held in his honor, by the way), who are still only in the earliest stages of ideating the subscription-supported initiatives that might, might reinvigorate their beleaguered businesses. But it’s a long row to hoe: In the Zucker heyday, CNN Digital did $400 million in revenue and $150 million in EBITDA; the Post, of course, has been losing $100 million annually of late.

At Dow Jones, meanwhile, Almar Latour has done a very admirable job of doubling digital subscriptions in five years—thanks to its unwavering focus on white-collar professionals, and the addition of spritely Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker—but that will remain an intentionally smaller business. Indeed, Sulzberger’s Paramount+ analogy is more apt than even he may have realized. As of this writing, the Times Co. and Paramount have roughly equal $7 billion market capitalizations, which is evidence of Paramount’s Netflix-era shrinkage (sorry, Shari) but also testament to the Times’ success.

That last topic was indisputably the most charged. As Sulzberger himself noted, “there’s no story that is more fiercely contested, more mired in competing zero-sum narratives,” than the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Indeed, in recent months, the Times has become embroiled in yet another micro-scandal over its coverage of the war in Gaza. In late February, The Intercept, the nonprofit news organization and self-appointed watchdog for perceived pro-Israel bias in media, published a lengthy exposé that sought to cast doubt on a Dec. 28 front-page Times story about Hamas’s “weaponization” of sexual violence. The Intercept’s story did not question whether Hamas militants had committed acts of sexual violence on October 7—a recent U.N. report confirmed as much, and it is all too obvious to anyone who has seen footage of the attack—but rather questioned whether the Times report provided enough evidence to prove, as the Times claimed, that “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.”

The Intercept has also reported that the Times pulled an episode of its The Daily podcast based on the article, which it characterized as a sort of smoking gun. Later, Vanity Fair reported that the Times was conducting a highly irregular internal search to determine the source of the leak.

This is definitely not the forum to litigate the issue. A Times spokesperson says the paper stands by the story, will continue “to report on the issue of sexual violence on Oct. 7,” and also provided evidence to undercut some of the claims The Intercept made in an attempt to undercut its own reporting. Semafor’s Ben Smith has provided ample evidence that any errors in the Times report were likely the result not of pro-Israel bias, but rather a strained Jerusalem bureau that injudiciously handed this highly sensitive story over to Jeffrey Gettleman, a divisive figure inside the Times, likened by some to a “swaggering old-time narrative correspondent,” who was in turn forced to rely on local amateur researchers. Meanwhile, the amount of ink The Intercept has spilled on this issue—Was the rape of innocent civilians coordinated or spontaneous? And does that prove the Times’ pro-Israel bias?—would seem to confirm its own bias, particularly when weighed against the scant attention it has given to the aforementioned U.N. report on the obvious atrocities.

In any event, the Times’ economic success has almost surely, once again, made it a delicious target for industry player-haterism, much as it was in the ’80s when Spy magazine documented its kremlinology in a monthly column. Indeed, what I find notable here is how the Times seems to have become the focal point for all the angst and anxieties of an industry amid a season of constant turmoil, and how its very success has made it more vulnerable to scrutiny than any other news organization. Unsurprisingly, the Gettleman affair has already birthed a small subgenre of countervailing takes, from The Nation, where Jeet Heer accuses the “Nixonian” paper of stonewalling on its “discredited” article, to the Times’ own Opinion section, where Bret Stephens sees The Intercept’s attack on the Times as the latest evidence of antisemitic rape denialism. And of course, Sulzberger himself addresses this issue, albeit indirectly, at the Reuters Institute, where he defended the paper’s fact-based journalism and argued that “the accusations saying we are biased against Israelis or biased against Palestinians are almost always equal in volume and intensity.” (He offered this and this as evidence).

Such fevered debates surrounding the Times’ reportage and opinion have become evergreen in the digital age, from the scrutiny surrounding the paper’s coverage of trans issues to its characterization of the campus antisemitism debate to the very public departure of Bari Weiss. Of course, the intense, still ongoing debate over the infamous Tom Cotton “Send in the Troops” op-ed, and Sulzberger’s excruciatingly misguided handling of that issue, is the most obvious example of the way the Times is treated more like a government institution than a news organization, and held to similarly high standards. As one former Times reporter told me this week, “I’ve made mistakes where I thought, ‘Man, if I were at the Times we’d be pilloried,’ and not have anyone notice.” To wit, on CNN this week, Charles Barkley said he would punch any Black person who he saw wearing Trump paraphernalia—and the world more or less shrugged and moved on.

Of course, even minor journalistic lapses turn virtually every reporter and editor at the Times into an unassigned law enforcement officer. And less-significant micro-scandals have led more-august reporters than Gettleman into the paper’s veritable rubber room—that virtual purgatory where they get politely annexed to lesser beats, or quietly disappeared for months or years at a time like minor envoys from a colonial government. If there is a silver lining here, however, it’s that the Times’ strength has afforded it the opportunity to withstand more and more of these scandals without impact. Unspoken in A.G.’s various discourses is the reality that the total addressable market for subscription-based journalism is likely to once again rise up toward the nine-figure mark during the next generation, and his company is best positioned to extend its moat, regardless of what The Intercept, or anyone else, has to say about it.