Sep 13, 2025

Greetings from Los Angeles and welcome back to In the Room.

In tonight’s issue, news and notes on David Ellison’s Warner Bros. Discovery play, part of his ambitious plan to scale up his media business and perhaps go toe to toe with Netflix and YouTube. Along the way, he could unite CNN and CBS News—yes, seriously—and perhaps extend Bari Weiss’s influence across the entire combined news division.

🍸 Plus, on the latest edition of The Grill Room, Julia and I surveyed the media waterfront: the denouement of Rupert Murdoch’s succession drama, the future of Fox and News Corp, YouTube’s NFL play, the Ezra Klein zeitgeist, new CNN angst, and more. Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.

Mentioned in this issue: The Ellisons, the Murdochs, John Malone, Brian Roberts, David Zaslav, Bob Iger, Bari Weiss, Joe Kahn, Jay Wallace, Tom Cibrowski, Mark Thompson, Mark Lazarus, Matthew Dowd, Margaret Hoover, Rebecca Kutler, and more…

Let’s get started…

Dowd and out: Comcast chief Brian Roberts, president Mike Cavanagh, and Versant C.E.O.-in-waiting Mark Lazarus took the irregular step of issuing a statement to employees about the killing of Charlie Kirk after MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd was fired from the network for remarks he made on air. Dowd, the Bush ’04 strategist and veteran pundit, said of Kirk’s murder: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have, and then saying these awful words, and then not expect awful actions to take place.” In an earlier statement, MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler called Dowd’s remarks “inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable” and apologized on behalf of the network. (Dowd also apologized on social media.)

In their own statement, the Comcast leaders said Dowd’s remarks were “at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.” I agree with the message, of course, and I don’t begrudge any executive leader for speaking up at a time like this. But the fact that the front office felt the need to weigh in here—as opposed to leaving it to Kutler and perhaps Lazarus—seems notable in this political climate.

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More Malone: Cable cowboy John Malone continued his media tour this week with a stop on PBS’s Firing Line with Margaret Hoover. In addition to some familiar critiques of social media’s addictive power and CNN’s liberal bias, Malone warned that a weak Congress was pushing us “toward executive branch totalitarianism.” Malone has always spoken his mind, but he’s communicating with rare candor these days. And, notably, his commentary sounds more like something you’d see on CNN, which is within his portfolio, than his beloved Fox News.
Newsmen in the nave: Finally, several of America’s foremost newsroom leaders were in Vatican City this week at the invitation of Pope Leo XIV, who wanted to discuss how the media industry can bridge divisions in a time of fragmentation. Per Variety, guests who visited with the pope this morning in the Sistine Chapel included Fox News president Jay Wallace, CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, Sky News Group chief (and possible future CBS News executive) David Rhodes, and New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, among others. If the Vicar of Christ can’t inspire these guys to figure that problem out, heaven help us all.

And now, the main event…

The Book of David

As he prepares a potential all-cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, David Ellison is aiming to reshape Hollywood and the news business on a Murdochian scale.

Dylan Byers

At last, Skydance-Paramount chief David Ellison’s long anticipated plan to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery is beginning to take shape. Yes, my partners Kim and Matt have been previewing this move for weeks, but Thursday’s Wall Street Journal scoop that $PSKY was preparing an all-cash bid for all of $WBD marked the official start of the dealmaking frenzy: Executives on both sides go into hiding (sort of), the comms folks “can’t help,” and analysts start asking questions: Is this David Zaslav’s best available offer? Will Brian Roberts start a bidding war? And how would a Sky-Para-Warners-Discovery combination even work?

As Matt reported last night, Zaz has been telling friends that the Ellison offer will be too low. Perhaps the Ellison offer will be a lowball, or start as one, but Zaz may also be posturing ahead of a deal he may not be able to refuse. Theoretically, Zaz could turn down the offer, split the company as planned, and then hope a bigger fish like Amazon, Apple, or Netflix takes an interest in the streaming and studios business. But that would require a two-year waiting period and a lot of risk tolerance. Alas, the fantasy that the big tech companies would rescue legacy media companies like Romulus and Remus floating down the Tiber has long since been dispelled. These entities are far more focused on superscaling their A.I. investments—which Wall Street analysts reward—than building their media businesses.

In the end, as you all know, there is a small and fixed—and imperfect—pool of bidders here. Comcast faces hurdles on both the cash front and the regulatory landscape that Ellison, by virtue of his family’s largesse and wheel-greasing with Trump, most certainly does not. (Nota bene: Earlier this week, Larry Ellison temporarily became the world’s richest person when his net worth skyrocketed about $100 billion in a day based on projected Oracle earnings.) Of course, Roberts could drive up the price anyway, just as he forced Bob Iger to pay more for the 21st Century Fox assets, but it’s hard to think he’d push it to a point where Ellison would balk.

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In any event, Ellison’s ambitions are crystal clear. As I noted a month ago, he is trying to scale a media enterprise to the point where it can compete with tech giants like Netflix and YouTube—effectively trying to reverse-engineer the process by which those companies entered the media space—rather than pray for their munificence. And it’s very possible he could use his father’s Oracle business and its potential acquisition of TikTok to help him get there. That’s a long row to hoe, but the Ellisons have the resources and the ambition and, it appears, the will. Plenty of people have paid public homage to the C.E.O., which isn’t much of a surprise given the money at his disposal and his willingness to make transformational deals, as he did with the UFC. But he’s also a generation younger than his peers, and decidedly looking to build rather than offload or mitigate risk. And while a combination with WBD, hypothetically sitting atop a tech stack of his father’s conception, would take years to erect, it would also be truly competitive: the number-one film studio by box office, the top domestic TV business by revenue, and a sports portfolio rivaled only by ESPN. Indeed, though it may sound a bit facile, the Ellisons are on some level aspiring to assume the mantle that the Murdochs wore in previous decades—only at an inconceivably larger scale. Based on recent math, after all, Ellison père is about $350 billion wealthier than Rupert.

The Bari Sweetener

Like the Murdochs before them, the Ellisons could also secure major influence over the news space. If the deal goes through, and Ellison holds on to the cable assets, it’s likely he would combine CBS News with CNN—a merger, coincidentally, that previous owners of those two businesses have entertained off and on for more than a quarter-century. Ellison might then invest in a digital transformation of those businesses—again, with the help of Oracle and perhaps TikTok—leveraging some of the most powerful news brands to create the global news company for the post-linear era. Or at least he could.

Now Ellison’s push to acquire The Free Press and install Bari Weiss in an editorial leadership position—a deal that sources expect to close any day now—makes a lot more sense. Her role as “editor-in-chief” or “co-president” would conceivably extend across the combined CBS News and CNN. Of course, it’s possible that his entire motivation for the Bari deal, and his willingness to overpay for The Free Press, was always a penny ante for the larger WBD ambitions—one among several recent peace offerings to Trump in order to increase the chances for regulatory approval.

Weiss, after all, isn’t a trained executive or manager with any sort of experience scaling a vision across thousands of employees, and we’re still not really sure if this acquisition is evidence of some Vulcan chess economic sorcery, pure political persuasion, or maybe an inkling of centibillionaire heir folly. Will Bari one day call up from the control room to dispute a comment or line of questioning from Jake Tapper? Will she tell Anderson Cooper or Laura Coates to keep it moving? It’s hard to say and probably unlikely. And yet all of these early Ellison moves have vectored toward a grand unified strategy that was presumably conceived before the offer stage and honed during the endless gestation of the deal. So, no, Bari isn’t going to be a hood ornament or simply a pundit.

In any event, the specter of Bari’s ascension at CNN has already catalyzed a lot of soul searching among the network veterans who chafe at her pot-stirring heterodoxy (and pro-Israel orthodoxy), and are now joining their competitors and would-be colleagues at the CBS Broadcast Center in a somber pre-grieving ritual for a change they are powerless to stop. As ratings slide, consumers cut the cord, and the evidence of a turnaround plan remains scant, it has become the latest drama du jour. The bright side: Five years ago, Weiss was an opinion writer who didn’t like the direction that her company was moving in. And within half a decade, she went from making a couple hundred grand to soon likely bathing in tens of millions of generational wealth. It can happen to others, too.

Join Emmy Award-winning journalist Peter Hamby, along with the team of expert journalists at Puck, as they let you in on the conversations insiders are having across the four corners of power in America: Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Presented in partnership with Audacy, new episodes publish daily, Monday through Friday.

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