The Zaz Comet, Hope Hicks, A Media Suit

Good morning,

Happy Saturday and welcome back to The Backstory.

It was another incredible week at Puck—Matt Belloni reported on the first shots of the David Zaslav era; Tina Nguyen had the scoop on a Trump proxy war in the Pittsburgh swamp starring Hope Hicks; William D. Cohan got the skinny on a billion-dollar Wall Street mystery; and Julia Ioffe, as usually, reported with breathtaking grace and ferocity on Putin’s latest moves. Check out these stories, along with the rest of our best work from the week, via the links below. And stick around, too, for the backstory on how it came together.

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HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni explains why the Zaslav honeymoon is already over.
and…
William D. Cohan breaks down Zaz’s $250-plus comp package. (Ari’s too!)
Bonus!:
Jason Kilar offers his unofficial exit interview, replete with some juicy Netflix gossip, on The Town, Matt’s newish show.

WALL STREET:
The indefatigable Bill also unearths a Trumpian Wall Street mystery…

WASHINGTON:
Tina Nguyen details why Hope Hicks and Stephen Miller are back at work.
and…
Julia Ioffe reveals what Putin and Zelensky actually have in common.
Double bonus!!:
Is Biden a one-termer? Peter Hamby and Ben Landy cast their votes on The Powers That Be: Daily.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer uncovers the changing of the guard in Donorville, S.F.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers has the TV news scoop of the week.
and…
Eriq Gardner has the dish on the media libel suit everyone is talking about.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to take advantage of our article gifting feature. You can share our work with your colleagues, friends, and family. Subscribers are entitled to 5 article gifts per month.

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The Zaz Comet is Coming in 5, 4, 3, 2…

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that Puck’s crack team of authors and domain experts have a healthy fascination with David Zaslav, the cable news pioneer, longtime C.E.O. of Discovery Communications, and, as of this writing, architect and chief steward of the long-heralded and finally-combined new entity, Warner Bros. Discovery, whose merger officially closed yesterday.

Zaz, in many ways, is one of the great characters of our time. For decades, he was a behind-the-scenes player at GE, deftly navigating the inflated egos of the show ponies, Type As, and Harvard M.B.A. types that populated the joint. At GE, as my colleague Bill Cohan has memorably written, Zaz helped mold both MSNBC and CNBC. And rather than stick around to climb the greasy pole at NBCU, he left to help build an ambitious media entity, Discovery Communications, with the support of the cable pioneer John Malone and the Newhouse family.

Zaz was always well compensated, sure, but that was partly because Discovery wasn’t quite 30 Rock or Burbank. Zaslav wasn’t thanked by everyone at the Oscars and air-kissed on the Emmy red carpet. But for a decade and change, he made dextrous deals—Scripps, the rights to European sports, et cetera—that returned profits to shareholders and built Discovery into a lean media Trojan horse for the Dr. Pimple Popper era. Guy Fieri, Chip & Joanna… they may not have been HBO stars, but they were celebrities both redolent and representative of the D.I.Y. hamster-wheel programming era.

Of course, this all changed a year ago when Zaslav pulled off the $43 billion deal to merge Discovery with AT&T’s WarnerMedia assets, allowing the telecom C.E.O. John Stankey to end his public misadventure in media and focus on 5G and the company’s famous dividend. All of a sudden, Zaz was the toast of the town, his every move the subject of rumor and innuendo, as the lawyers worked to close the deal.

In some ways, Zaslav embraced the moment. He bought Bob Evans’ estate and sat for interviews with Vanity Fair and Variety. (His head of communications, Nathaniel Brown, who previously ran comms for James Murdoch at 21st Century Fox, is one of the best in the business.) He held court at the Polo Lounge, and in private dinners, conducting a listening tour and positioning himself as a thoughtful student of show business, respectful of creative talent, and eager to understand a new sector of the media landscape—Richard Plepler in a vest.

It was a brilliant move. Months earlier, after all, the now former WarnerMedia C.E.O. Jason Kilar had single-handedly pissed off the entire industry by sending Warner Bros.’ 2021 film slate to HBO Max on the day-and-date of their theatrical exhibition. Disney C.E.O. Bob Chapek had done him one worse when Disney issued a scorched-earth statement villainizing Scarlett Johansson. All the while, however, Zaz had freed the WarnerMedia assets from the Dallas beancounters, and now was engendering support and buy-in from the A-list Hollywood community before officially taking the reins. Again, it was brilliant, but one wondered how long the good vibes might last, especially as the deal set to close and Zaslav’s many obligations came into full view: paying down a $58 billion debt load, nudging the stock price, reshuffling his executive ranks, growing HBO Max, launching CNN+, and so it goes.

Oh, and integrating two of the largest media entities on earth. As Matt Belloni writes in his excellent new piece, The David Zaslav Honeymoon is Already Over, this is the modern reality of any 21st century media takeover. Like politics, executives can campaign in poetry but they need to manage and execute the P&L in prose. As Matt writes: “the companies excel at different things—Discovery churns out cheap reality TV for a downmarket audience and maintains a huge international sports presence; Warner makes $200 million comic book movies and wins Emmys—which will render many aspects complementary. But it’s tough to smash together legacy companies with distinct cultures. Disney and Fox are still struggling with that integration.”

So, yes, we at Puck are watching the Zaslav tenure with great interest and enthusiasm. In part that’s because we firmly understand that mergers aren’t the consummation of business transactions. In fact, they are usually the commencement of entirely new eras—big bangs that beget more and more and more change. It’s one of the stories of our age, and one that we’ll be following incredibly closely, as ever, here at Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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