Greetings from Los Angeles and welcome back to In the Room, where there’s some big news on the home front: Kim Masters, the revered entertainment reporter, is joining Puck as partner and Hollywood correspondent, working alongside Matt Belloni and Eriq Gardner on the What I’m Hearing franchise. (If you haven’t yet subscribed to Matt’s private email, change that now.) Kim will join us in February after 14 years at The Hollywood Reporter. Follow her here until then.

In tonight’s email, news and notes on David Zaslav’s big Warner Bros. Discovery split, Brian Roberts’ SpinCo, and what it all portends for the future of the cable business—including CNN and MSNBC, where employees seem increasingly uncertain about their own futures.

Also mentioned in this email: Mark Thompson, Rachel Maddow, Rupert Murdoch, Patrick Soon-Shiong, George Stephanopoulos, Stephanie Ruhle, Scott Galloway, Bari Weiss, Dasha Burns, Jeff Zucker, Jim Bankoff, Willie Geist, Chuck Lane, and many more…

P.S., we’re still gathering surveys for the second iteration of our Puck Private Conversation series, powered by Orchestra. The data will provide a snapshot of what our elite readership really thinks about the biggest themes and plot points we’re obsessing over this quarter. It’s fun, and only takes a few minutes to fill out, which you can do by clicking here.

But first…

• 🍸 On the latest edition of The Grill Room, Puck’s resident dealmaking guru Bill Cohan joins me to dissect the stark financial calculus behind Zaz’s decision to separate Warner Bros. Discovery’s growth assets from its declining linear TV networks—a move that has made Wall Street practically euphoric. We also dive into Zaz’s ultimate endgame: to build, to sell, or to spin? Plus, what this all means for CNN. Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
• Kara and Scott go shopping: Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway are shopping their famed Pivot podcast concept ahead of deal renegotiations with Vox Media, per Bloomberg. The pair are reportedly asking for an eight-figure sum—based on $10 million in annual revenue—and see a potential suitor in CNN, where Kara is an on-air contributor. Of course, this may just be an effort to extract a sweeter deal from Vox C.E.O. Jim Bankoff. As Bloomberg notes, Kara and Scott “are still waiting on specific offers to come through,” and it’s not really clear whether either one wants to abandon the Vox infrastructure.
• Soon-shiong remains the same: Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is drawing scrutiny from staff again, this time for blocking an editorial that would have criticized President Trump’s cabinet appointments. Soon-shiong’s interference, of course, comes on the heels of his decision to block the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. And, as The New York Times reports, it’s “one of a string of events in which he has waded into the publication’s opinion section in ways that he hadn’t until this fall’s presidential campaign.”

  Is this all a capitulation to Trump? Maybe. It might also just be that stage in a newspaper owner’s buyer’s remorse when they can no longer contain their impatience with their staff and just release their id. Soon-Shiong, of course, paid $500 million for the L.A. Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune… and you don’t need a degree from Wharton to understand that moguls who pay half a billion dollars for declining assets only to be ignored for years can get mighty pissed about it. Happy holidays, all.

• Post haste to FP: The Washington Post’s deputy opinion editor Chuck Lane is leaving the paper to join Bari Weiss’s Free Press, a departure that comes on the heels of managing editor Matea Gold’s own defection to The New York Times. Meanwhile, still no update on whether the Times’s Cliff Levy is getting the Post executive editor post. Though it’s hard to imagine why he wouldn’t have it already if they really wanted him in the seat.
• Trump v. Stephanopoulos: A federal judge has ordered President Trump and ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos to sit for four-hour depositions next week in the libel lawsuit the president-elect brought against the network after Stephanopoulos said on air that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll. (The jury did not come to that conclusion, though the judge suggested that may have been a legal distinction.)

And now, on to the main event…

The recent activity in legacy media portends a very busy few years ahead, particularly once Trump lifts regulatory burdens. As one Hollywood executive noted, between Comcast’s SpinCo, WBD’s restructure, and Skydance’s impending takeover of Paramount, “the only thing that seems evident today is chaos.” Add to that the uncertainty at Fox, where Rupert Murdoch has lost a bid to amend his family trust and might consider a sale of his own.

What else might Zaz offload? Inevitably, attention has turned to CNN, which, as I’ve reported ad nauseam, has been significantly diminished since WBD took it over in 2022. (Ever hear about this Chris Licht guy?) Since Mark Thompson’s arrival as C.E.O. last summer, the network has effectively forfeited the linear ratings war and now draws an audience smaller than the Food Network—yet another WBD asset that Zaz may seek to sell.

At the same time, Thompson still hasn’t shown meaningful progress toward articulating a post-linear vision for the business, despite his many promises. Either way, the new WBD structure positions CNN squarely in the linear unit, alongside the likes of Animal Planet and TLC, rather than as a potential streaming asset. Is that cruel irony, or an admission of defeat?

Several media executives have told me they anticipate the news network will be sold off by the end of next year. In a recent note, LightShed media analysts Rich Greenfield and Brandon Ross said they expect WBD “to be opportunistic selling non-core assets, such as CNN or Food Network, neither of which is driving the Max story.” If so, CNN could join MSNBC in the wilderness, cut loose from the growth-oriented streaming business. Of course, no one is quite sure who would buy the asset, though Jeff Zucker’s name reliably, and unsurprisingly, comes up any time one broaches the topic.

Meanwhile, how are the anchors, correspondents, and producers supposed to play this field? If you’re Rachel Maddow or Jake Tapper, you’re already committed to riding this thing out on very lucrative terms. Presumably, some of 30 Rock’s cross-channel talents like Willie Geist and Stephanie Ruhle will have to figure out which side of the NBC News–MSNBC divide they’ll land on. Other, younger talents may follow in the footsteps of Dasha Burns and vacate TV news altogether for starring roles in digital media. But in most cases, the linear natives have nothing to do but bide their time, and hope against hope that all the available evidence about this industry’s future is wrong, even though it’s not.