Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room, my twice-weekly private email on the media and media people. There are just 20 days left until the election, and the candidates are spending their final days on the trail engaging with a mix of old and new media: On Tuesday, Donald Trump sparred with Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait before sitting down for with Barstool’s Bussin’ With The Boys. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris went on Charlamagne tha God’s podcast (which, in a true sign of the times, was simulcast on both CNN and MSNBC), then sat down with Fox’s Bret Baier on Wednesday. And, as I mentioned on Puck’s The Powers That Be pod last week, her team is Joe Rogan-curious.

In tonight’s email, news and notes on the still-roiling CBS News clusterfuck on the eve of Wendy McMahon’s meeting with David Ellison and Jeff Shell. Obviously, this isn’t Shell’s first go-round overseeing a news division, and he surely has a lot of ideas about how they should be run. Maybe, at the very least, he wants a leader who appreciates the cardinal rule of both newsroom and TV management: Don’t embarrass your talent.

Also mentioned in this email: Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza (sigh), Deb OConnell, Robin Roberts and Sade Baderinwa (oof), Will Lewis, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Shari Redstone, Tony Dokoupil, Anna Palmer, Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, Christa Robinson, and many, many more.

But first…

• Depression hits CNN: As anticipated, the Great TV News Comp Depression that I wrote about last month has hit CNN. On Wednesday, The Ankler’s Lachlan Cartwright reported that Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, and John Berman were recently renewed without pay raises. Lachlan got almost all the salary figures wrong—in some cases egregiously (Jake and Wolf make millions more than $7 million and $3 million, respectively), in some cases as a rounding error (Berman is a few hundred thousand north of $1 million), but the broader point about talent being forced to renew at equal or lower comps is true. And it is indeed notable that Wolf has a new deal in hand, given the widespread speculation that he might retire after the election.

  Meanwhile, CNN chief Mark Thompson is planning to offer Chris Wallace a lower salary than the $7 million he’s making now (Lachlan puts the current figure at $8.5 million, which is too high, but whatever). In any case, broadly speaking, this will be the new reality for almost all TV talent across the networks. The depression is democratic and, frankly, where else are they supposed to go?

• Saving Ryan’s private life: Yes, the totally sordid and regrettably enthralling R.F.K. Jr.–Olivia Nuzzi–Ryan Lizza digital-sexting-demure-nudes scandal has returned to the headlines. In a new D.C. Superior Court filing this week, Ryan aggressively denied his ex-fiancée’s accusations that he had hacked her devices and threatened to blackmail her by exposing details of her prurient relationship with the conspiracy-theorizing erstwhile presidential hopeful.

  In the most memorable passage, Ryan says New York magazine’s star political reporter privately admitted to having a romantic affair with Kennedy, which she characterized as “toxic,” “psychotic,” “stupid,” and “indefensible.” He also says Olivia described the 70-year-old Kennedy as a “sex addict” who wanted to “possess,” “control,” and “impregnate” her. “She told me that there was a huge power disparity between them and that he manipulated her,” Ryan states in the filing.

  Meanwhile, for the Washington rubberneckers, the most intriguing detail was Ryan’s claim that Olivia had been involved in another relationship back in 2020. Ryan said he’d asked Olivia to assume responsibility for paying back the advance on their book deal, “since this is the second presidential cycle in a row where Ms. Nuzzi’s personal indiscretions have sabotaged our book project.”

  Nuzzi’s lawyers said Lizza’s statement was “full of salacious and irrelevant claims that we will not dignify with a response,” while a Kennedy spokesperson simply said that Lizza’s claims about the relationship were “not true.” And so this saga of three fame addicts with excellent media access rolls on, a real life Ryan Murphy script for the shallow political-media class that simply can’t get enough of it.

• WaPo research: Since taking over The Washington Post a year ago, Will Lewis has quietly telegraphed his intention to grow the business through acquisitions, with Jeff Bezos’s blessing. On Tuesday, The New York Times’s Ben Mullin reported that Lewis and his corporate development chief, Peter Elkins-Williams, are now scouting for deals. Unfortunately, there’s scant evidence of what those deals might actually be. The Times reports that Peter met with “executives at Punchbowl News,” which, in fact, was really just a standard lunch meet-and-greet with Punchbowl C.E.O. Anna Palmer, organized by a mutual friend.

  Mullin’s piece portrays the Post as resurgent, which is trueish at best. It has added more than 4,000 digital subscribers this year, the first time the paper has grown subscribers since 2021, but that’s laughably insubstantial for a media company of that scale. As Mullin himself noted on X—though, oddly, not in the piece—the Times and The Wall Street Journal added 300,000 and 73,000 subscriptions, respectively, in the last quarter. So, it’s a long row to hoe.

And now on the chattering class scandal du jour…

There was a lot more to chew on, too. On a separate front, CBS’s 60 Minutes had foolishly edited a recent Kamala Harris interview so that she appeared to give different answers to the same questions, which invited scrutiny from Donald Trump. Days later, House Speaker Mike Johnson seized on an edit of his own remarks in a CBS Face The Nation interview, fueling a right-wing narrative of media manipulation that was propelled further when Johnson got the coveted retweet from Elon Musk. Combined with the Dokoupil mess, the multipronged crises cast new scrutiny on McMahon’s leadership capabilities, and her ability to deal with what the Journal recently described as “a baptism by fire.”

Meanwhile, on the Upper West Side, these same subjects hung over the table at El Fish, where former CBS News president Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews was being bid adieu by her former direct reports, including Stacey Benson, the network’s chief financial officer; Ross Dagan, the head of news operations; Terri Stewart, the head of newsgathering; Claudia Milne, the senior vice president of standards and practices; and Christa Robinson, the former communications chief. Generally speaking, this group has a more nuanced appreciation of McMahon’s struggles than Tony or Shari, but they are just as cognizant of how dispiriting recent events have been for CBS.

Of course, Shari will soon have no bearing on CBS’s future, and Ingrid is already effectively gone. So perhaps the more salient talking point for these discussions was the news, first reported here last week, that McMahon will meet with Paramount’s future leaders David Ellison and Jeff Shell on Thursday. (My partner Matt Belloni has reported on some of Ellison and Shell’s other one-on-one sit-downs with division heads across the company, as well as the requisite ring-kissing of Paramount-adjacent talent like Taylor Sheridan and Tom Cruise.) As I noted, the conversation with McMahon will focus on business strategy and financials, of course. But, surely, the future C.E.O. and president of Paramount will also be quietly examining the I.Q. and the E.Q. of the leaders running their divisions. This isn’t Shell’s first go-round overseeing a portfolio with a news division, and he surely has a lot of ideas about how this one should be run.

As for the Dokoupil matter, yes, McMahon was obviously grappling with a Herculean challenge, trying to appease bitterly divided constituencies in a polarized, self-important legacy newsroom—and with the added pressure of an outspoken and opinionated outgoing owner. At the same time, her decision to announce the Tony ruling on an all-staff call and, yes, on October 7, betrayed a fundamental inexperience with both talent and P.R. management, which—as any seasoned media executive will tell you—really is at least half the job. Indeed, as one media executive put it to me this week, a cardinal rule of this business is that “you don’t embarrass your talent.”

This was far from Kim Godwin-level folly, but in light of the coming TV news comp realignment, OConnell’s quote also read like a warning to Roberts and her GMA co-hosts—all of whom will be asked to renegotiate their $25 million-a-year contracts in the years ahead; indeed, George already is—that they are replaceable. (Some media insiders also noted an inadvertent racial faux pas). At the very least, it’s definitely the sort of thing that’s likely to upset the talent in question, and may force OConnell to call and genuflect. “This may be the single dumbest quotation I have ever read in my life by any media executive,” one veteran media executive told me. “I think I understand what she is trying to say, but I think that it is something that should never be attempted anywhere near a reporter.”

True, such unforced errors have been the norm in this business, whether it’s former CBS News chief Neeraj Khemlani indiscreetly offering Norah O’Donnell’s job to Brian Williams, or the myriad occasions upon which former CNN C.E.O. Chris Licht left his talent exposed, from Kaitlan Collins being forced to fend off audience ridicule in the Trump town hall to Jake Tapper’s temporary humiliation during that ill-fated primetime experiment.

Of course, one of the benefits of inheriting a news network is the opportunity to write a new chapter. Shell surely has some thoughts about what he’d like to change, particularly when it comes to the bigger structural challenges that pose a far more existential threat to the business than anything stirred up by the Dokoupil drama. CBS Mornings has been sliding in the ratings for months, and now averages less than 2 million viewers despite the presidential campaign cycle. O’Donnell will soon step down from Evening News and hand the show to a rotating cast of hosts, which will certainly save money but just as assuredly hurt ratings. 60 Minutes obviously does not have the heft it used to, editing errors aside. And while McMahon is trying to advance the news division’s streaming efforts with a third hour of CBS Mornings, this seems relatively unambitious in the grand scheme of the network’s challenges. Finally, at some point, McMahon or her successor will have to implement yet another round of cost cuts.

In any event, Shell will inherit many far more significant challenges when he takes over Paramount: the unprofitable streaming business, the Hollywood studio, retrading the NFL rights, etcetera. And that, alas, is the point. Each year, the news business represents a smaller and smaller, and less consequential, piece of the portfolio—and with that, ironically, a bigger pain in the ass to manage.