Welcome back to In The Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

In tonight’s email, news and notes on Bill Ackman’s media jihad against Business Insider and Axel Springer, which seems poised for further escalation. “Most people underestimated the way that Bill Ackman is completely losing it,” an Axel spokesperson told me, but “the facts of the story stand.”

Mentioned in this email: Aaron Rodgers, David and Larry Ellison, Don Lemon, Jimmy Pitaro, Jimmy Finkelstein, Jimmy Kimmel, Kevin Merida, Mark Thompson, Martin Varsavsky, Nicholas Carlson, Pat McAfee, Tucker Carlson, Shari Redstone, and Zaz, among others.

But first… some Wednesday thoughts…

🤝 Skydance advances on Paramount: Skydance’s David Ellison is moving slightly closer to an all-cash bid for Shari Redstone’s National Amusements, the Paramount parentco, per The Wall Street Journal. Ellison’s interest in the company has led him to expand his investor group, which now apparently includes his father, Larry, and other Skydance backers, such as RedBird and KKR, to help foot the bill for a majority stake. Skydance would then pursue a second deal to merge Skydance and Paramount.

I can only imagine how this news hit David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery executives, all of whom are spending the week together at Shutters, the beautiful Santa Monica beach hotel, for the company’s annual retreat. Zaslav has, of course, expressed his own interest in Paramount, but the Skydance talks are clearly more advanced and seem to include financing—cash, rather than stock—that might appeal to the Redstones. That said, a Skydance-Paramount deal would reinforce the argument put forward early today by my other partner, Bill Cohan: His new piece, A Philadelphia Story, suggests the inevitability of a Brian Roberts-Zaz tie-up.

📱 Mark Thompson’s Vice: CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson, who is in town for the WBD retreat, stopped by CNN’s Los Angeles headquarters on Monday with deputies Virginia Moseley and David Leavy. In a meeting with staff, Thompson went long on CNN’s potential but short on specifics about his highly anticipated restructuring, which, as I’ve reported, will prioritize CNN’s digital product in order to deepen audience engagement. He did say he wanted CNN to be a greater fixture in people’s daily lives—a brand that they connected to all day, whether that was watching the linear product on TV in the morning or listening to a podcast in the car. Thompson conceded it was easier for the Times, with its highly engaged and affluent audience, to achieve multi-touchpoint penetration with its consumer base. But it was also clear that the size of the opportunity at CNN, with its mass-market audience, is much larger. Anyway, that will soon be Alex MacCallum’s cross to bear.

Surprisingly, Thompson also mentioned Vice News as a source of inspiration for the kind of field reporting he’d like to see on CNN, citing their correspondents’ casual dress and the way they appeared actively engaged in the stories they were covering. And yet, perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising. Thompson cut his teeth at the BBC, which is still a standard bearer for international coverage—and was a subtle influence on Vice News, especially in the Josh Tyrangiel era.

🍋 Lemon takes the Tucker route: Former CNN anchor Don Lemon has announced that he will launch a new show on X, following Tucker Carlson’s post-Fox playbook. (Memorably, the two men were evicted from their respective alma maters on the same day last April; it just took Lemon longer to get here.) Elon Musk’s social network also announced similar deals with former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and fiery sports commentator Jim Rome.

The move is not altogether surprising; as I’ve noted before, there aren’t many good options for former TV news stars who still want to be TV news stars in this era of linear downsizing. Barring a sweetheart deal from MSNBC, which was never going to materialize, or his former employer (ditto), Lemon was more or less limited to a podcast or a SiriusXM radio show or, heaven forbid, a return to local broadcast. The X deal at least affords him what I’m told is a very significant amount of money—on top of the even higher eight-figure payout he’s getting from CNN—as well as the opportunity to distribute his show across other platforms after it first appears on X. And, of course, he will now be free—incentivized, even—to speak his mind and stir the pot more than he was ever able to at CNN.

🏈 McAfee calms the Rodgers waters: Disney’s Aaron Rodgers headache appears to have been at least momentarily alleviated, following Pat McAfee’s decision to stop Rodgers’s weekly appearances on his show, which is licensed by ESPN. As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Jets quarterback had baselessly suggested, sans evidence, that Jimmy Kimmel—a cherished member of the Disney family—had links to Jeffrey Epstein. After Kimmel threatened to sue and ESPN disavowed the statement, McAfee and Rodgers began badmouthing ESPN executives on-air. McAfee finally decided it wasn’t worth the trouble: “I’m pumped that that is no longer every single Wednesday of my life,” McAfee told listeners. Disney and ESPN executives obviously feel the same.

The McAfee brouhaha is a P.R. hiccup emanating from a larger economic challenge. Indeed, as ESPN has been tightening its belt and offboarding beloved anchors and analysts, it has been forced to invest further in singular culture sensations—Stephen A. Smith, McAfee, etcetera—whose shock-jock personality often leads to problems. There was a time when badmouthing an ESPN executive on-air would have led to a public defenestration. But times have changed, even if McAfee’s show hasn’t entirely become the runaway success many hoped for.

🗞️ Kevin Merida out at L.A.T.: Kevin Merida abruptly stepped down as executive editor of The Los Angeles Times this week, a move that capped longstanding tensions with owner Patrick Soon-Shiong over the paper’s financial performance. The Times, which has a mere half-million digital subscribers, had been forced to cut staff by 13 percent last year. Soon-Shiong says he remains “1,000 percent committed” to the paper, has no plans to sell, and will now launch a search for Merida’s successor.

Merida, a 22-year veteran of The Washington Post who went on to spearhead ESPN’s coverage of race in sports, joined the Times two and a half years ago with a mandate to strengthen the business. But according to well-placed Times sources, he never articulated a long-term vision for the paper or a path back to solid financial footing. Ultimately, the annual budget shortfall reached a point that Soon-Shiong was no longer willing to tolerate. Some have speculated that Merida could return to the Post under new C.E.O. Will Lewis, though I’m told that there have been no such conversations yet.

💸 Over at The Messenger…: Jimmy Finkelstein’s ill-conceived media startup, based on a dated and illogical disintermediated traffic-and-display advertising business model, ended the year with a net loss of $43 million and just $667,000 in cash on hand. In recent weeks, Finkelstein has been pitching potential investors on an emergency $20 million cash infusion, which would only provide a few months of life support given the company’s almost $5 million monthly burn rate.

On Wednesday, CNBC’s Alex Sherman and Brian Schwartz obtained the deck Finkelstein has been using to pitch these potential investors for his rescue round. The numbers are predictably devastating: In its first seven months, The Messenger brought in a mere $3.8 million in advertising revenue. And yet, the deck claims The Messenger will hit $55 million in ad revenue in the year ahead—a third of which will come from something called Messenger TV, a yet-to-be-launched video service that will require 19 additional employees. It all sounds like bullshit—the same sort of rosy-eyed projections Finkelstein went to market with when he promised more than $100 million in annual revenue by 2024. The Hill TV, of course, was one of Finkelstein’s moderate successes in a past lifetime. But if the Messenger experience has taught him anything—and one hopes that it has taught him something—it’s that the industry, and consumer behavior, has evolved considerably in recent years.

In the event Finkelstein does find rescue investors, they will undoubtedly seek to reduce the burn rate considerably, possibly by half or more, which would necessitate drastic layoffs on top of the 25 positions The Messenger cut late last year. In the event he doesn’t, the deck anticipates a negative $16 million cash balance by June. Anyway, this thing seems over.

Now, on to Ackman…

Then, last week, Business Insider published two long-ish pieces suggesting that Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a computational designer and former M.I.T. academic, had also improperly used other academics’ work without citation for her 2010 dissertation. In a piece published on Thursday, B.I. highlighted a few examples in which Oxman either did not properly attribute the work of others or did not put quotation marks around their work in her paper. A follow-up piece, the next day, began with the lede that Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing.”

To many observers outside the vaunted ivory towers, B.I.’s double-barreled article drop inadvertently proved a couple of unrelated points. Firstly, the high-minded and self-important world of academia—a place where young people write multihundred-page dissertations that few will ever read—is presumably rife with unintentional instances of improper attribution and inaccurate citation. The vast majority of these oversights, one can easily surmise, are not malicious nor all that consequential in the grand scheme of things, no matter how momentarily embarrassing they may be upon discovery.

Secondly, alas, neither article conveyed this sort of sangfroid. During its nearly two decades in existence, B.I. has published a great deal of influential journalism—current top editor Nicholas Carlson’s exposé on Marissa Mayer, a decade ago, was assigned as required reading to every editor at The New York Times Magazine—and even won a Pulitzer. But some of the work can convey a gotcha tone—perhaps a relic of its younger newsroom and traffic-based business model. (John Cook, the top editor of the investigative group at B.I., whom Ackman has attacked as an “anti-Zionist,” was the executive editor of Gawker Media in a past life.) In fact, in recent years, B.I. has published a considerable number of everything-is-a-nail stories that seemed to lavish an inordinate amount of reporting upon underwhelming targets—the toxic culture at Carta, microaggressions at a supplements company, mistreatment on reality show sets, etcetera.

And while the Oxman investigations don’t overtly delight in illuminating the hypocrisy that an anti-plagiarism crusader’s wife had unintentionally committed some similar mistakes, the stories also don’t acknowledge that these are largely victimless mishaps that shouldn’t discredit Oxman’s scholarship. A pervading sense that the publication wanted to land maximum impact was underscored by Ackman’s initial gripe: B.I. sent him and his team a length set of questions to respond to at the eleventh hour, and published shortly thereafter.

Ackman’s stream of consciousness tweeting strongly hinted where his mind was headed. In one soliloquy, he mused that B.I.’s reporting on Oxman’s plagiarism could be conflated with accusations of fraud, which suggested he might be considering a draconian (and surely quixotic) legal option. Yesterday, Elon Musk responded to Ackman on X by noting, “I recommend a lawsuit.” Ackman acknowledged the advice. He has noted that Oxman hired a lawyer on Monday and is working through the accusations with counsel. Among Ackman’s gripes is the notion that Oxman’s lapses were “clerical errors,” as opposed to plagiarism. In another tweet, Ackman posited that copying passages from Wikipedia is more akin to using a dictionary.

In perhaps the most lucid expression of his anger, however, Ackman tweeted what appear to be his most authentic feelings on Tuesday. (I’ve removed the paragraph breaks for readability.) “I have heard truly wonderful things about Mathias Dopfner who is the CEO and a major shareholder of Axel Springer, from friends whose opinions I trust,” Ackman wrote. “I recently had the opportunity to speak to Martin Varsavsky who is on the board of AS. He seems like a first class person and we have a former friend in common. In five minutes, I could tell he was a very good man. I have also heard good things about him. AS is controlled by KKR, which is also a first class operation. What are they all doing owning Business Insider whose unethical business model appears to be based on destroying people by any means possible? How can such high quality people own such a terrible company? Why haven’t they cleaned house or shut this thing down? How can KKR be the ultimate controlling shareholder of a totally unethical and sleazy media company? What are they thinking?”

In a phone call this week, Sisani told me that the company launched the review because Axel took Ackman’s accusations so seriously—chiefly, the insinuation that targeting Oxman, who was born in Israel, was antisemitic or anti-Zionist. “That’s a very hard red line,” Sisani said of Ackman’s assertions. “Those are accusations that we’re going to make triple-sure are outrageous and not based in reality.” Still, Sisani conceded, “most people underestimated the way that Bill Ackman is completely losing it.”

Ackman embraces his crusader reputation; he has reposted memes on social media depicting himself as both a Roman emperor and Mel Gibson in Braveheart. And yet, according to Sisani, it appears he’s unlikely to force B.I. to concede defeat. Axel and Business Insider will conclude their review in a matter of days, Sisani said, but, he added, “the outcome of the review is pretty clear.” Sisani continued: “We believe in our own editorial standards. Of course there’s not a bias in the sense that his wife is Jewish—that’s so far out there. What remains is: Did we give him and his wife enough time to comment? I’m sure there’s an email trail that’s easily reviewed. Could there be an outcome where maybe we give them an hour extra?” Sisani also acknowledged that some of B.I.’s reporters “could be seen as spiking the football” with their own seemingly impartial posts on social media, rather than “letting the story speak for itself.” Nevertheless, he said, “the facts of the story stand. I’m certain the sourcing and technical journalistic work done was spotless.”

Presumably, this response will only further ignite Ackman, who did not respond to multiple requests seeking his perspective on the matter. Though, true to form, I’m sure he will make that perspective known. Meanwhile, good luck to the next president of Harvard.