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 More BriWi Dish, Fauci Fatigue, and Maddow in the Metaverse
Welcome, good afternoon, and thanks for reading The Daily Courant. Here’s a look at what’s new at Puck.
Today, we lead with Dylan Byers‘ inside-the-room reporting on the office drama at the CBS Evening News, the former Cronkite flagship, as the division’s recently installed president, Neeraj Khemlani, searches urgently—and not particularly discreetly—for another anchor to replace Norah O’Donnell. But does anyone actually want the job?
Plus, below the fold: Baratunde Thurston breaks down his beef with the C.D.C. and explains why Twitter’s censoriousness may be inadvertently fueling the rise of something far worse.
The former House that Cronkite Built is reeling from the ill-fated recruitment of Brian Williams, insults to Norah O’Donnell’s ratings, and botched crisis communications. Meanwhile, they’ve hired a consulting firm to analyze the news division as Shari Redstone presumably sets up ViacomCBS for an eventual sale. Norah O’Donnell’s future at the helm of the CBS Evening News has been the subject of much in-crowd media gossip and intrigue for some time now. This industry is always fascinated by talent moves, speculation about who’s in and who’s out and who’s next, no matter how relatively small the stakes. And in this case, part of the fascination, surely, is the sexism inherent in television news—an industry where anchor chairs have so often been held by men. Another part of it, though, has to do with the office politics inside CBS News.
O’Donnell’s old boss, Susan Zirinksy, stepped down from her role as the head of CBS News back in April. Zirinsky was the executive who selected O’Donnell to take over the diminished throne once inhabited by the legendary Walter Cronkite. She’d also greenlit the decision to move the show to D.C., a gesture that made sense in the Trump era when Washington was the world’s stage, but has since seemed out of step. During O’Donnell’s tenure, the Evening News has remained in third place, though for the first time in nearly three decades it has at least come within spitting distance of the competition.
But even that didn’t seem like enough. Earlier this week, CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported that Brian Williams, the legendary newsman, had turned down overtures from CBS to take over O’Donnell’s role. In many ways, the flirtation itself seemed like both a fool’s errand and a horrific example of media executive gamesmanship. Back in September, if you’ll recall, I noted that Williams would never take the job, a point I re-reported in November. Williams didn’t want to handle the corrosive nightly grind of TV news, and he presumably wouldn’t want to grind away on a third place show. One also imagines that, given his own decency and the graceful way that he recovered from his own career scandal, he wouldn’t risk his reputation by launching a third career act by defenestrating the only female nightly news anchor. Neeraj Khemlani, the recently installed co-president of CBS News, seemed less bothered by the pitfalls of such a potential switcheroo…
FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT 
Notes on Jack Dorsey’s successor, the stratification of digital media, and Omicron-era information overload.
BARATUNDE THURSTON 
Despite the narrative, Trump and DeSantis don’t hate one another’s guts. Instead, they are involved in a more complex game theory.
TINA NGUYEN 
After missing out on Fox and the Zaz-Warner merger, Comcast seemed like a natural acquirer for Activision. What happens now?
DYLAN BYERS 
Why did Michael Saylor convert MicroStrategy’s reserves into Bitcoin? Perhaps it’s because, as Ray Dalio says, “cash is trash.”
WILLIAM D. COHAN
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