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The Godwin Complex

Notes on the layering of Kim Godwin, the agita inside ABC News, and the looming exit strategy coalescing in plain view.

kim godwin
Godwin has not actually led the news organization: Instead, she has made performative (and mostly cringey) attempts to improve ABC’s once notoriously cutthroat culture while apparently bolstering her own reputation on the conference circuit. Photo: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for ColorComm
Dylan Byers
May 4, 2024

Kim Godwin, the embattled president of ABC News, was at dinner with an associate in New York the other day when she began airing a familiar grievance: She was being micromanaged by Debra OConnell, the Disney veteran who was recently appointed president of the Disney News Group—and who, as I’ve reported, is a hard-driving, no-bullshit, results-oriented leader who has moved fast to acquaint herself with the newsroom, ascertain the root causes of its current torpor, and assert herself as the news division’s true boss.