Good morning,
Thanks for reading The Backstory, our weekly digest of the best new work at Puck.
It was a fantastic week at Puck: Matt Belloni gleaned the motives behind Ted Sarandos’s move toward radical transparency as Julia Alexander dug into the data; Lauren Sherman reported on a Chanel pickle; Bill Cohan did due diligence on David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale’s new play for control of Paramount; and Dylan Byers dug into a fresh Times scandal. Meanwhile, Eriq Gardner broke the news on an epic Cher lawsuit; Julia Ioffe analyzed the Biden-Bibi divide; and Peter Hamby channeled the White House’s internal monologue on the president’s polling dirge.
Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.
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FASHION: Lauren Sherman captures the secondhand anxiety at Chanel and the post-“it”-bag blues.
WALL STREET: Bill Cohan and Matt Belloni evaluate the structure of the private equity-Hollywood deal of the year, and then Bill analyzes the deal points.
MEDIA: Dylan Byers assesses Tucker Carlson’s streaming ambitions, and the egos and vanities at play in the latest Times public feud. and… Eriq Gardner digs into a Cher lawsuit for the ages.
HOLLYWOOD: Matt Belloni interprets the three-dimensional chess of Netflix’s Engagement Report. and… Julia Alexander breaks down the numbers.
SILICON VALLEY: Teddy Schleifer has more on the private hemming and hawing of the Republican billionaire class as they come to terms with Trump’s inevitability.
WASHINGTON: Peter Hamby provides the White Houseian view on all this awful polling. and… Julia Ioffe appraises the administration chatter on the Biden-Bibi split. and… Tara Palmeri presages a House power struggle, while Abby Livingston and Tina Nguyen report on adjacent lower-chamber anxieties.
PODCASTS: Matt Belloni talks with Ted Sarandos about Netflix’s data volte-face on The Town. and… Tara Palmeri and Audie Cornish swap campaign war stories on Somebody’s Gotta Win. and… Peter Hamby and I talk about the Paramount deal on The Powers That Be. |
On Thursday morning, just after I’d deposited my boys at school, I was trying to do a few things at once—make another pot of coffee, start editing Lauren Sherman’s excellent draft on Chanel’s new economic pickle, contemplate getting on the Peloton, etcetera—when a perfect distraction emerged in the form of a text message on my phone. It was a note from a media executive friend referring me to a Ninety-five Theses-style manifesto in The Economist entitled When the New York Times Lost Its Way. Even at 17,000 words and change, it was catnip.
The piece was written by James Bennet, the former Opinion section editor of the Times, whose brilliant career had been truncated, in June of 2020, after he published a much-criticized op-ed written by Tom Cotton, the Trumpist senator from Arkansas and putative presidential aspirant. The brief article, infamously titled “Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops,” called for potential military intervention to quell civil unrest that developed after the murder of George Floyd.
The backlash to the brief Cotton piece was extraordinary and unprecedented, even during that fraught moment in recent history. After initially defending the op-ed on the merits of Cotton’s arguments—the senator made an attempt to differentiate between violent actors and peaceful protestors—the Times began apologizing for publishing it, affixing the weblink with a long mea culpa, and setting up endless self-flagellating internal Zooms. Bennet was summarily canceled by his charges and, eventually, forced out by his boss, Times Company publisher A.G. Sulzberger.
The Cotton op-ed subsequently became a fault line in American media. Some argued that Bennet had been mandated with the task of ushering in more conservative voices that might elasticize the views of the typically liberal Times audience. Others suggested that he’d pushed the remit too far and lost the room. I didn’t have a dog in the fight, but I was always curious to get his own full readout on his defenestration.
Soon after I saw the text, I pinged Puck’s media ace Dylan Byers to ask how the story was playing at the Times. After all, I’d spent a few formative years at the Times, and I remembered how a piece about the institution could shut down the newsroom for hours. To wit: I remember how Dylan’s report on the beef between Dean Baquet and Jill Abramson, around a decade ago, had brought the organization to a standstill.
In The Best of the Times, the Worst of the Times, Dylan not only chronicles the reaction from the third floor of 620 Eighth Avenue, but also explains how the Bennet experience has reshaped the institution in some key ways. Times kremlinologists should throw a log on the fire and dig in.
Shortly after Dylan and I initially chatted, I took a final pass on Lauren’s predictably fabulous story, Who Can Sell Chanel?, which brilliantly articulates the modern headaches of a luxury brand in a multichannel D.T.C., secondary market world. Managing a historic brand isn’t easy when consumer adoption changes. You can also track that leitmotif in Julia Alexander’s acerbic Netfllix’s Data Bomb & Iger’s Hulu Wish List. Indeed, it’s the story of our time and precisely what you should expect from Puck.
Have a great weekend, Jon |