Greetings from Los Angeles, welcome back to In the Room—and, at long last, welcome to summer. I will be off on Friday (barring major news), but I’ll still be in your ear throughout the holiday weekend: Julia Alexander and I will conduct our weekly media-biz yap fest on Friday’s edition of The Grill Room—talking the OpenAI-IO deal, ESPN’s future, and Knicksmania—and Puck co-founder Jon Kelly and I will join forces on Memorial Day for a special edition of Media Monday on The Powers That Be. 🇫🇷 Weekend programming: The Monaco Grand Prix starts on Sunday at 6 a.m. PT on ABC (and ESPN+). The French Open kicks off the same day on TNT (and HBO Max). Preorder your croissants in advance… Meanwhile, the NBA Conference Finals are on all weekend on both networks. Go Knicks. In tonight’s issue, the final installment in the Wendy McMahon saga at CBS News. The Trump drama surrounding the Paramount-Skydance deal has given the outgoing news chief a convenient chance to spin a truth-to-power story, but the reality is far more obvious and mundane: Wendy was effectively fired, and for the same reasons news chiefs usually get the boot. 🍸 Plus, on the latest edition of The Grill Room, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro joined me for a deep dive into his highly anticipated flagship D.T.C. product, which will be called… as everyone knows… ESPN. Pitaro unpacked the marketing strategy behind the new app, ESPN’s rights portfolio, the state of their MLB negotiations, the integration of sports betting, and much more. Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen. Also mentioned in this issue: Shari Redstone, David Ellison, George Cheeks, Jim Bankoff, Jake Tapper, Mathias Döpfner, Carrie Budoff Brown, Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway, Bill Owens, Norah O’Donnell, and many, many more… Let’s get started…

Hunter vs. Tapper, cont’d: In the wake of my report last week about the contretemps between Hunter Biden and Jake Tapper, the former president’s son has now gone on the record with Breaker, Lachlan Cartwright’s newsletter, to accuse the CNN anchor and Original Sin co-author of relentlessly trying to get him to deliver the scoop on Beau Biden’s death. As you’ll recall, Jake categorically denied this charge. Anyway, the whole thing is quite sad and obviously hasn’t done anything to eclipse the broader scrutiny surrounding Bidenworld’s alleged cover-up of the former president’s health and acuity—which, presumably, was the whole point. Most presidents disappear for a year after leaving office. Biden couldn’t quite muster the discipline to follow that tradition, but here’s hoping his son gets the unofficial memo that Oval Office kids should enjoy a gap year, too.
Kara and Scott’s new deal: After shopping their Pivot shtick to rival bidders, famed podcast duo Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway have re-upped with Vox Media in a deal that entitles them to some version of 70 percent of their podcasts’ revenues over the next four years, with no money upfront. In a glowing profile, The New York Times stated that this “novel” deal cemented Kara’s “reputation for betting on herself,” while Scott said that it could net them a cool $70 million over its lifespan.The truth is almost certainly a little more nuanced: Vox Media owns the I.P. and the feeds for five of Kara and Scott’s podcasts—Pivot, On, and a few others—which means any new deal would have forced them to start from scratch with a new partner. Meanwhile, Scott’s estimate rests on the assumption that Vox’s sales team could maximize the return on all these podcasts, despite the fact that the four not named Pivot have relatively small audiences—and, of course, the sales team has their own incentives and mandates. (Indeed, Pivot is an excellent show, but the D.N.A. that makes it so great—the political commentary and business rants—also likely makes it a harder sell to clients optimizing for brand safety.) In the end, one wonders whether Vox Media chief executive and co-founder Jim Bankoff actually landed the best deal—a performance-laden, in-success structure that minimized his own out-of-pocket costs. Galloway and Kara may have done a victory lap with this Times access story, but Jim may be the one smiling in the end.
Comeback Carrie: Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of politics at NBC News, is in talks to return to Politico, where she served as editor for five years until 2021. The talks, first reported by Breaker, are still in early stages, though I’m told that one outcome would see her returning to Politico Europe, which would make sense given that Alex Burns has now been elevated to run the core North American division.On a related note, I’ve learned that Axel Springer chief Mathias Döpfner hosted all the top editors from across his portfolio—Politico’s John Harris, Business Insider’s Jamie Heller, the folks from Die Welt and Bild, etcetera—at his country estate outside of Berlin last week.

And now, the main event…

McMahon Overboard

With the high-wire tensions between Paramount and the tormentor-in-chief at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s easy to view the exit of CBS News C.E.O. Wendy McMahon as fourth-estate martyrdom. But maybe she just wasn’t very good at her job.

Dylan Byers

On Saturday afternoon, Paramount Global co-C.E.O. George Cheeks called Wendy McMahon, the long-embattled C.E.O. of CBS News, and informed her that the time had come to tender her resignation. Practically speaking, he was firing her. But, for the sake of her reputation and that of the company, he was officially giving her the opportunity to save face. On Monday morning, Wendy informed staff that she was “stepping down,” since it had “become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” Wendy’s defenestration was broadly interpreted as another plot twist in Paramount’s long, dispiriting political drama. On the face of it, she was the latest casualty of Shari Redstone’s hard-fought effort to sell the company to David Ellison’s Skydance. Shari had already greenlit mediation talks with Trump over his tenuous 60 Minutes lawsuit, tested the historic newsweekly’s sacrosanct independence by asking Cheeks to delay sensitive reporting, and forced the show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, to resign—all in the hopes of placating Trump and his F.C.C. chair, Brendan Carr, and winning approval for the deal. Now, it seemed, she was canning Wendy for the same reason. Every headline, from the Times to the Journal to the Post, framed it thus. Obviously it’s impossible to disentangle the Wendy news from that context. Like Owens, Wendy fought for the newsroom’s independence, chafed at Shari’s willingness to settle the Trump lawsuit, and made it clear she would not apologize for the 60 Minutes editing discrepancies that inspired the president’s ire. And obviously Shari had zero interest in letting a divisional executive from the stations group complicate any effort to close the deal that, as I’ve reported, has become an existential necessity for her. At the same time, this framing drastically oversimplifies Wendy’s legacy and downplays the longstanding motivations for her expulsion—which, as I’ve been reporting for at least three months, was a long time coming.

The Norah Debacle

When George made Wendy the sole C.E.O. of the news division, in 2023, she was a mostly well-regarded stations chief who was credited with growing revenue and improving the culture, much as she’d done in her previous 12-year stint at ABC. (She had detractors there, too, of course, but who ever made it through the Magic Kingdom without them?) Anyway, as you know by now, the news business is a crucible of an entirely different order. Wendy took the helm of CBS News with little-to-no experience in national broadcast news, and proceeded to make a number of ultimately regrettable decisions. Sensing the learning curve before her, Wendy’s first move was to go all in on Owens, a 35-year network veteran who had been with 60 Minutes for more than two decades. She expanded his remit to include oversight of CBS Evening News, and backed his decision to overhaul the show, sending Norah O’Donnell off to the popemobile and replacing her with co-hosts John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois—all while shifting the show’s focus away from Washington toward more evergreen, general interest packages. Ostensibly, this move would help the network cut costs, and the frothy content would appeal to spooked and apolitical advertisers in the second Trump era. In reality, it was a colossal screw-up. The show has hemorrhaged more than 1.5 million viewers, and cost CBS more in lost advertising revenue than it ever stood to gain from cutting back on Norah’s contract. In an alternate reality, a Norah-led Evening News might have capitalized on this political moment, as well as Lester Holt’s forthcoming departure at NBC, and gained audience share. Instead, this milquetoast Evening News now loses to Fox’s Bret Baier. This failure wasn’t only on Owens. It was on Wendy, too. In retrospect, expanding Owens’s remit may also have left him overextended. “I will not take my eye off the show with the stopwatch on Sunday,” he promised his 60 Minutes team when he announced his additional duties. “Not for a second.” Alas, there are some at CBS News who look at the 60 Minutes editing discrepancy that Trump capitalized on and blame Owens for leaving the network vulnerable, even if no one thinks Trump’s lawsuit is justified. Around that time, Wendy also promoted Adrienne Roark to president and editorial of newsgathering, despite the fact that she, too, had none of the newsroom leadership chops historically required of a broadcast news chief. Roark left the job for Tegna, of all places, just seven months later. Along the way, both Wendy and Adrienne put their newsroom inexperience on full display when they decided to admonish one of the network’s top talents, Tony Dokoupil, during an all-hands meeting for aggressively questioning Ta-Nehisi Coates over his avowedly one-sided perspective on the Israel-Gaza conflict. As you no doubt remember, the whole episode, which took place on the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, inspired Shari to publicly criticize Wendy while treating Tony to dinner in an overt show of support. The Dokoupil affair was the first of several conflicts between Shari and Wendy, often fought through George as intermediary, and often relating to the network’s coverage of Israel. The most notable among these was a controversial 60 Minutes report, in January, regarding internal State Department concerns about the U.S. policy in Gaza, which drew condemnation from the American Jewish Committee. As I reported last month, Wendy had assured George prior to the broadcast that there was no cause for concern about bias in the package—a moment of careless naivete that not only angered Shari, but also put distance between George and Wendy. Why was Wendy forced to resign now? For months, the conventional wisdom among sources close to the deal was that she would be fired immediately after the Skydance merger. (No, David Ellison and Jeff Shell aren’t Wendy fans, either.) Understandably, there’s been rampant speculation that, in private meetings with Trump representatives, Wendy’s termination became a precondition for a settlement or deal approval. Certain things may ultimately be unknowable. But the reality is probably more mundane: Wendy wasn’t very good at this, Shari didn’t like her, she’d lost the room, and her C.V. is the latest on the Paramount pyre. In retrospect, this succession had been quietly underway for a long time, and Wendy just simply didn’t see it. In January, with Shari’s support, George brought former CBS News chief Susan Zirinsky back to the network to oversee standards. In February, George hired former ABC News executive Tom Cibrowski to serve as CBS News president. Tom will now report directly to George. And while the surrounding Trump drama has conveniently allowed Wendy, like Owens before her, to wrap herself in the cloak of a First Amendment warrior, the truth is that she just couldn’t hack it.

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