| On Thursday afternoon, I was sitting at my desk in Puck’s glamorous new downtown office, just a few blocks from the Odeon, when a New York Times alert hit my iPhone screen: The Trump verdict would be announced in the next half hour. I exchanged a glance with Ben Landy, Puck’s executive editor—a sort of mutual recognition that we were about to live through a moment in history.
This timing wasn’t exactly a surprise, of course. Some had predicted the verdict might come in as early as last week. After the holiday weekend, however, it was increasingly clear that it would be delivered by the end of this month. In fact, during our weekly ideas meeting, my partner Tara Palmeri and I had discussed how to address the fact that the verdict would likely be descending at the very moment that her dispatch for The Best & The Brightest would land in subscribers’ inboxes. Indeed, my newest partner John Heilemann had already dissected and presaged the various political implications of each possible jury outcome in his perspicacious story, The Donald in the Dock.
As John noted in his piece, it’s slightly impossible to predict the political impact of the former president being charged with behaviors that many of his supporters find permissible and his detractors already expect. The caveat, however, was an unequivocal outcome like the one that the jury reached: guilty on all 34 counts. This verdict isn’t going to persuade ossified voters in Birmingham or Brooklyn, where they already hold religious opinions about the guy. But in a margin-of-error election that will be decided by not just a handful of states, but a half-dozen districts in various metro areas, like Detroit, an unambiguous and incontrovertible ruling matters. Sign up here to make sure you never miss an issue of John’s excellent Sunday night dispatch, which anchors our Best & Brightest franchise. He’ll have more on this topic tomorrow.
Meanwhile, as the jury issued their decision, Tara was wrapping up an utterly fabulous and counterintuitive piece, Trump’s Verdict & The Hunter Smoke Bomb, which previewed the next theater in this tawdry general election: the Wilmington courtroom where Joe Biden’s tragic and yet utterly sleazy son is being tried on gun-possession charges. Years ago, I laughed when House Republicans whipped themselves into a frenzy concocting a political narrative about the “Biden crime family.” Truly, I wondered, who could believe such a thing about an octogenarian teetotaler who had lost one son and suffered through the agony of the other’s various substance-related challenges. And yet, as Tara cogently notes, at least one outside Trump PAC is betting that the Hunter Biden trial will help erase some of the sting of their guy’s verdict and compel persuadable voters that the current first family isn’t any less appalling than the previous one.
As all this news was breaking, I was working away on a draft of John Ourand’s excellent’s piece about another high-wire act of our time, albeit one with less historical import. For months, Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav has been engaged in a face-saving negotiation to try to retain his company’s NBA broadcast rights. The crux, of course, is that while Zaz’s TNT may need the live sports package more than its competitors, such as Disney and Amazon and NBCU (all of whom also have NFL deals), he can’t afford to overpay. As loyal Puck subscribers know, Zaz has spent the first two years of his WBD journey reducing the company’s debt load from $55 billion to $39 billion. That’s a Herculean accomplishment, but that’s also still a lot of debt—at least enough to make him think twice about forking over a couple billion a year to broadcast even fewer games than he has now, all in the service of protecting his declining pay TV business.
The Zaz NBA saga has been a defining storyline here at Puck for all the obvious reasons. Zaz, both charismatic and reviled, has become a true 21st century media Zelig: ambitious and clever, and yet overpaid and often seemingly in over his head. Warner Bros. Discovery, whose debt is twice its market cap, sits in the middle of a spectrum between Paramount, whose fire sale is finally concluding, and the big guys, like Disney and Comcast. One wonders if the NBA deal is a sort of powder keg event. Could losing the rights push the company into Paramount territory? Would retaining the games give the company a chance to survive the next stage of the platform shift?
At Puck we have swarmed this story. This past week, Julia Alexander imagined a non-NBA path for WBD in the brilliant Zaz’s NBA Silver Lining Playbook. Bill Cohan provided his own veritable deal book on the subject in The Tao of Zaz. Dylan Byers contemplated the second-order effects in The Barkley Sweepstakes. And in his own fabulous story, The Zaz NBA Backtrack, John Ourand surveyed the media investor class on the topic.
Indeed, the Trump verdict may be in, but views on Zaz’s strategy still run the gamut. And while it may not be once-in-a-lifetime news, the outcome of this negotiation will have a generational impact on the media industry. It truly is one of the most confounding stories of our time, and exactly what you should expect from Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
