News and notes on three trending media mini-sagas: Mark Thompson’s inability to share his CNN reinvention, CBS News’ dreary ploy, and Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood’s Daily Beast M&A effort.

The pandemic will forever be remembered on Wall Street as the height of SPAC-mania, a consensual hallucination in which everyone, from Ackman to A-Rod, got in on the SPAC craze. It may have been easy to raise all those billions, but it turned out to be much harder to put them to work.