Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, your Saturday review of the best new work at Puck.

It was another incredible week here at Puck: Matt Belloni scrutinized Disney’s Trump-inflected H.R. pivot; Kim Masters analyzed an Amazon executive hire; Eriq Gardner detailed a media legal war; Julia Alexander gauged EA Sports’s live events ambitions; Dylan Byers checked in on Bari Weiss’s first days in the new office; Bill Cohan previewed Zaz’s chess moves to fend off the Ellisons; Lauren Sherman contemplated the Chanel-Dior face-off; Rachel Strugatz documented a Sephora power play; Sarah Shapiro spotlighted a Nike challenger; Ian Krietzberg unearthed Microsoft’s secret A.I. weapon; Marion Maneker chronicled a high-stakes Munch switcheroo; and Julia Brenner captured the flavor of a new Magritte–Les Lalanne mash-up.

Meanwhile, Julia Ioffe surveyed the troops on Trump’s Portland quagmire; Leigh Ann Caldwell revealed the Stephen Miller handwringing on the Hill; Peter Hamby marveled at the Dems’ shutdown messaging victory; and Abby Livingston sorted through the latest mess in Texas.

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Lauren Sherman contrasts the Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson debuts.
and…
Rachel Strugatz names the victor of a Sephora-Ulta bidding war.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro charts Bandit’s anti-Nike ascent.

Marion Maneker combs through the midseason sales data from New York and Hong Kong.
and…
Julie Davich reports on a new surrealist collab.

Matt Belloni assesses Disney’s post-woke H.R. makeover.
meanwhile…
Eriq Gardner tracks Iger and Zaz’s suit against Dish.
and…
Kim Masters wonders if Peter Friedlander can save Amazon TV.

Ian Krietzberg reads the water meters in Quincy, Washington.

Dylan Byers gathers the mixed feedback from the Bari Weiss welcome wagon.
and…
Julia Alexander hypothesizes how EA Sports might enter the rights market.
meanwhile…
John Ourand conveys the agony and ecstasy of NCAA wrecking ball Cody Campbell.

Bill Cohan gives a talmudic reading of Zaz’s anti-Ellison options.

Leigh Ann Caldwell diagnoses the Stephen Miller agita afflicting Hill Republicans.
and…
Abby Livingston ponders the latest headaches in the Lone Star State.
and…
Peter Hamby crowns a winner of the shutdown messaging wars.
meanwhile…
Julia Ioffe gets the military readout on Trump’s domestic troop deployment fetish.

Dylan chats up Red Seat Ventures C.E.O. Chris Balfe on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand delves into NHL economics with ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and star stylist Becky Malinsky recap the European shows on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and former R.N.C. chairman Michael Steele dissect the shutdown on Impolitic.
and…
Matt chops it up with Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro on The Town.
and…
Lauren and Peter plumb the fashion industry’s Ozempic obsession on The Powers That Be.

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I was on the road this week, traveling to and from the West Coast on business, and you might imagine that my DMs, email threads, and WhatsApps would have been filled with the consequential news stories of the moment—the potential truce in the Middle East, say, or the government shutdown in Washington. And yes, I did receive a number of queries on these topics, and Puck published some very estimable work on them. (To wit, my partner Leigh Ann Caldwell’s excellent piece on a shutdown-adjacent subplot, or Peter Hamby’s characteristically acerbic portrayal of the Democrats’ digital performance during the furlough.) But most of my interlocutors had another topic on their mind: Bari Weiss, the iconoclastic former Times opinion artist who recently sold her company, The Free Press, to David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance for $150 million and subsequently became the editor-in-chief of the young mogul’s CBS News. Her first day was Monday.

I don’t live on Mars: I obviously understand the many splendored delights of the Weiss saga. She is a fabulous character, filled with obvious contradictions and nuances, virtually pulled from a Jesse Armstrong script. For starters, she began her career as a legacy media enfant terrible who rose to national prominence on account of her viral resignation letter from the Times. Now, she’s been set upon the highest rung of perhaps the most historic and nostalgia-huffing American news organization this side of 620 Eighth Avenue. As you can imagine, gallons of ink—and oceans of haterade—have been spilled by media people who either resent her success or discredit her path; by the liberal elite, who view her as a totem of these Trump II times; and from plenty of politically active citizens who disavow her politics and dismiss her as an anti-woke shock jock.

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Weiss, in many ways, has become a Rorschach test for the media in the second Trump era. But these interpretations misunderstand, at least to my mind, the real matter at hand. In half a decade, Weiss made a credible case for shorting legacy media, built and exited a successful newmediaco, and subsequently decided to devote the prime of her career to figuring out if she could use her experiences to restore CBS News—a proud yet financially challenged business unit that, like so much of the television and news industry, remains in desperate need of reinvention.

In short, I believe the obsession over Weiss’s politics profoundly misses the point. Instead, this drama centers on an entrepreneur attempting to innovate a historic business from the inside—itself a microcosm of Ellison’s broader thesis to reinvigorate Paramount with Skydance’s mojo, and roll this combination up with other entertainment companies.

My partner Dylan Byers has been all over this percolating drama, where the conclusion will reveal as much about Weiss’s aptitude as the dexterity of legacy institutions, themselves. In Bari, Bari, Quite Contrary, Dylan unveiled the somewhat surprising internal sentiment regarding her arrival. “People want to see CBS succeed, and having a new force come in isn’t the worst thing,” one company insider told Dylan. “Anyone who is acting like CBS News internally is aghast is not capturing the actual mood. There’s not celebrations across the board, but those who know her and her work believe this is someone who is trying to come in and change it. And her journalistic principles hit a good note with a lot of people.” In a follow-up piece, Bari Poppins, he captured the full Week 1 rundown.

Indeed, Weiss’s ascent comes at a particularly fragile moment in the American experiment, amid the chaos of Trump’s second term and the broad dislocation of the news business. During Trump I, plenty of broadcast anchors were able to wing their way through the turbulence with the knowledge that they were enjoying colossal ratings and commensurate compensation. Plenty of newsrooms similarly built their subscription businesses on an apparent monoculture of Trump-provoked angst. We live in different times now, which may offer one explanation for the outsize media attention being paid to a newbie news division chief.

And yet, like so many other ripe storylines of the moment, this one is unfolding before our eyes without a clear end in sight. And in that regard, it’s one of the great tales of our time, and precisely what you should expect to read in Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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