Murdoch & Tucker, Condé Comp Queries & Zaz’s NBA Game Clock

Greetings from Los Angeles. In tonight’s email, news and notes on this week’s media circus in Milwaukee, from the David Sacks victory lap to the Rupert-Tucker run-in to Tapper’s MSNBC-LED dig. Plus, an annotated guide to the G.O.P. convention Nielsen ratings. But first…

💸 Lauren Sherman on a Condé Nast LTIP kerfuffle: The Condé Nast board meeting was on Wednesday, and there was so much ground to cover. First off, William Bowes, the company’s general counsel, just resigned. His departure follows the resignation of chief diversity officer Yashica Olden and, of course, chief revenue officer Pam Drucker Mann. (The Pam discourse is all over the place: She hasn’t been replaced, she is supposed to leave in early August, and there are internal candidates who still have their hopes up to replace her—even if it feels nearly inevitable that C.E.O Roger Lynch will pick an outsider. We’ll see...)Then there’s the executive comp piece of it all. Like many privately held conglomerates, Condé Nast’s top top executives are offered a synthetic derivative known as an “LTIP,” or long-term incentive plan, that basically functions as a stock position in a private concern that will not change control. Theoretically, LTIPs are intended to pay out an annual bonus, almost like a dividend. It’s often described as phantom equity. Anyway, these LTIPs can be benchmarked against whatever ownership prefers. And at Condé Nast, I’m told, they are tied to the company’s valuation, which is evaluated annually. Condé Nast’s value has decreased by 23 percent over the past year, according to a source with direct knowledge of the report. Because of the diminished value, many high-level employees will be receiving roughly half of the original award, issued in 2021. (The conclusion among executives is that the company’s value has roughly halved since 2021, when an independent arbiter began conducting valuations.) Why such a disappointing outcome, especially since the company publicly stated earlier this year that its revenue had stabilized around $2 billion, albeit with a leaner operation? I’ve talked to people across different Condé camps about this drop in valuation. The big thing to remember is that valuations of comparable companies have decreased a ton over this period, so the percentage drop is probably not so crazy in relative terms—although, it is a lot, and The New York Times Co.’s valuation on the NYSE is actually much higher than it was five years ago. (Public company, different biz, sure, but also a legacy media product that required significant transformation to survive, etcetera.) A rep for Condé Nast said that, “Over the last three years, the company’s valuation has tracked in line with valuation trends across media and entertainment sectors.” The frustration among certain parties, as I’ve reported before, is that Lynch’s hard-nosed approach to the paywall at properties like Vogue and GQ—any mag that’s aggregating, really—has meant sacrificing meaningful advertising revenue, and is a big reason there have been so many rounds of layoffs. Lynch could argue that forcing the paywall behavior, aided by lots of testing, would be better for the brands in the long run—and look, maybe he’s right—but that’s hard for employees to stomach while they receive disappointing payouts and marching orders to further reduce headcount. Lynch’s own compensation may also be impacted. I’m told that his contract, speculated to be fixed-term but is actually rolling, indicates payouts at three, five, and eight years if he hits certain milestones. This is year five. A rep for Lynch did not respond to a request for comment.

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🏀 John Ourand on the latest WBD-NBA micro-drama: On Wednesday, shortly after its team owners nearly unanimously voted to accept media rights deals with Disney, NBCU, and Amazon, the NBA officials sent all the relevant documents over to Warner Bros. Discovery, initiating the five-day window wherein David Zaslav & Co. have to decide whether to exercise their matching rights. Zaz and TNT Sports head Luis Silberwasser have until E.O.D. Monday to make their decision. (I broke that piece of news on X, and a TNT spokesman later confirmed that WBD had received the contracts and that the company is reviewing them and preparing a response.)Unless Zaz and Silberwasser are bluffing, I expect WBD to pursue the matching rights that are in its contract. (Translation: Pay the lawyers!) WBD’s position is that because the Amazon package features games—like the conference finals and Thursday night regular season matchup—included in TNT’s current deal, that makes its matching rights applicable. WBD also thinks that it can match Amazon’s streaming plans by putting at least some of the games on Max. The fact that the contract’s matching rights language was crafted in 2014—streaming was barely a thing—complicates matters even further. Working against WBD is the fact that the NBA has described Amazon’s deal as a streaming-only package, which undercuts WBD’s insistence on using TNT as the centerpiece of its bid. Plus, WBD would have to account for the difference in the size of its streaming options: Prime is in about twice the number of homes as Max. Inside league offices, there are questions about whether a company so laden with debt can afford a decade-plus deal with $19.8 billion in rights fees alone (there’s also production and talent costs, marketing spend, etcetera). What’s obvious is that the NBA has moved on from WBD. When that happens, leagues typically tilt the scales toward their preferred mediaco. Perhaps the NBA and WBD can find a middle ground that involves a consolation prize, like some international games or a new deal around NBA TV, which is run out of WBD’s Atlanta studios.

🐟 William D. Cohan on Mario’s “Operation Fishbowl” threat: Mario Gabelli, the long-suffering Paramount shareholder who knows that Ellison/RedBird is offering him $23 a share for his 4.9 million A shares, like every other voting shareholder not named Redstone, wants to know whether Shari is also getting $23 a share, or whether she’s getting more than he is for the same security. In an interview with me, he conceded that Shari is entitled to more than he is for her A shares because she can convey control of Paramount by selling NAI. It’s just a question of degree, apparently. “All we want to do is take a look at the books and records, put a microscope on them—just like what we do with 10Qs and 10Ks for companies,” Gabelli told Bill. “If the analysis of the records indicates that NAI got $25 and my clients got $23, okay, but if she got $35 and my clients got $23, eh…” (Check out Bill’s excellent piece, Casus Gabelli, and make sure you never miss Dry Powder, his exceptional private email.)

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Remembrance of R.N.C.s Past

News and notes on the conservative media scene, and its metaphorical resonance, in Milwaukee and beyond.

DYLAN BYERS

On Wednesday morning, in a hotel lobby just steps away from the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Rupert Murdoch inadvertently found himself standing steps away from Tucker Carlson, the impish and still-influential-ish right-wing showman he had abruptly defenestrated from Fox News some 15 months earlier. Carlson waved and smiled, Murdoch appeared not to notice, and then the mogul’s entourage moved to shield him from view. Alas, life is an infinite string of missed connections—ô toi que j’eusse aimée!—and we are left only to imagine what might have been.Of course, it would prove impossible for Murdoch to ignore the presence of his former primetime star in Milwaukee. One night earlier, Carlson had shown up in the Fox News green room inside the convention hall in the company of Donald Trump Jr., “sporting a megawatt grin,” per the Times, as former colleagues like Jeanine Pirro and Jesse Watters came to greet him. That night, Carlson sat near Trump in the former president’s friends and family box, and was the first to greet him after his dramatic entrance into the arena. And on Thursday, Carlson himself ascended the stage to rapturous applause, delivering a 12-minute speech that weaved together praise for Trump, crass humor about Biden’s age, and a characteristically dark and foreboding vision of a world under Democratic tyranny. Most people may have watched the speech on Murdoch’s network, but Carlson was the star. Every four years, the Republican National Convention offers up a notable taxonomy of the conservative media landscape. In 2016, Roger Ailes was memorably ousted from Fox News during the convention in Cleveland, a symbolic moment that seemed to signal the end of Fox News’s grip on Republican politics and the beginning of Trump’s. At the same time, then-radio host Laura Ingraham’s fiery speech seemed to presage conservative media’s communion with the soon-to-be 45th president. Indeed, Ingraham would be given her own Fox News show the following year. This year’s convention seemed to solidify just how multifaceted and multichannel the conservative media landscape has become in the eight years since. Indeed, Ailes may have created monoculture in conservative post-9/11 America, but his demise, along with the rise of new social platforms and diminished barriers to entry and new economic models, hastened its endless balkanization. We live in a world where the modern conservative media diet now revolves around a cascade of figures, often semi-canceled from the so-called mainstream, populating X, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, The Blaze, or countless other platforms of varying success befitting an era when the Republican nominee is also the fiduciary of Truth Social. One of the week’s early speakers was David Sacks, the Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur who has led the pro-Trump mobilization of tech billionaires, from Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Sacks, of course, is now best known as a co-host of the All In podcast, the remarkably self-unaware centimillionaire tech bro gabfest that has taken on outsize influence in Silicon Valley and beyond. As one notable conservative media figure told me, “Sacks is key, both for South Bay money and for making Trump an acceptable choice among West Coast donors.” And, as with Tucker, his presence was a reminder that conservative media has become far more decentralized in the streaming-social era, and that many of the most influential voices in that space have gone direct-to-consumer.

Despite running the most powerful conservative media outlets in the country, the 93-year-old Murdoch can often seem like a marginalized figure in this new MAGA-charged environment. Of course, his personal opinion of Trump has never been a secret. The Fox News owner has warned about the dangers of a second Trump term and privately looks upon the former president as a deranged embarrassment. He used his various media outlets to try to advance Ron DeSantis’s campaign before he tried to support Nikki Haley’s, and then lobbied Trump to pick a more centrist running mate while both Sacks and Carlson were pushing for J.D. Vance. If Fox News had any influence, the aforementioned conservative media figure told me, “Nikki would be the nominee and Marco would be her running mate.”To its credit, Murdoch’s Fox News remains the leading distribution network for the MAGA theatrics that were on display this week. During the 10 p.m. hour, when Trump’s speech started on Thursday night, the network averaged more than 10.4 million viewers, accounting for roughly half of the more than 25 million people who tuned in to watch the former president’s rambling 90-minute soliloquy. Fox far outperformed all of its cable and broadcast competitors, and declared it the highest-rated convention in its history. But that is only a relative victory. As with television news generally, the total audience for political conventions is in rapid decline. Roughly 39 million people watched both the Obama and McCain convention speeches in 2008. In 2012, Obama and Romney drew about 36 and 31 million viewers, respectively. Trump’s 2016 speech had 32 million viewers, while Hillary’s drew 30 million. During the Covid-era 2020 campaign, both Biden and Trump drew an audience of about 24 million. Meanwhile, the vast, vast majority of Fox’s audience, even on big nights like these, is senescent. More than 80 percent of those 10.4 million viewers were above the age of 54. Meanwhile, Fox News’ dominance in this shrinking arena is increasingly uncontested. As is so often the case these days, the most damning revelation in the Nielsen numbers pertained to CNN. Historically, that network has thrived during presidential campaign seasons, and it’s hard to imagine any campaign cycle that would provide more of a boon to the beleaguered channel than one in which one candidate was nearly assassinated and the other seems to be on the verge of relinquishing his place atop the ticket. CNN has thrown all its muscle into covering and analyzing this historic moment in American politics, and it has produced some compelling television in the process, earning a rare and notable ratings victory this week over MSNBC. (Of course, MSNBC is still self-medicating over the Biden dilemma and couldn’t even be bothered to send its star anchors to Milwaukee. Even Jake Tapper dinged the rival network this week for using an LED screen to give viewers the false impression that Maddow & Co. were in Milwaukee.) Ultimately, however, CNN’s ratings bump only emphasizes its diminished influence: It averaged about 1.7 million viewers in primetime on Thursday night, according to Nielsen—less than one-fifth the audience on Fox. Of course, CNN C.E.O. Mark Thompson is savvy enough to see that the war for television ratings is one of attrition, and he is at least trying to chart a path to success on other, nonlinear platforms. Meanwhile, his boss David Zaslav is fielding pressure from Wall Street analysts to perhaps offload the news network altogether. (BofA’s Jessica Reif Ehrlich suggested he could get $6 billion for it, which would considerably help alleviate the company’s massive debt load. Not so long ago, he probably could’ve sold it for $10 billion). Fox News has a streaming service too, of course, albeit one built on lifestyle programming and documentaries, rather than fiery conservative rhetoric. It is decidedly not the forum where the Ben Shapiros of the world are likely to take their podcasts. In that arena, Murdoch instead seems content to ride out these last, still very lucrative days of linear, presiding over a news network that still claims a formidable audience, if not the influence it once had. It may be an increasingly balkanized world, but it’s one where he can still blow off Tucker in the hotel lobby.

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT

Fall of the Biden Bunker

Inside Nancy Pelosi’s pressure campaign.

TARA PALMERI

The Shape of Skims

Is Kim K’s most successful brand headed to market?

LAUREN SHERMAN

Iron Manfred

A candid chat with MLB commish Rob Manfred.

DYLAN BYERS

Zaz Dark Thirty

Notes on David Zaslav’s come-to-Jesus moment.

MATTHEW BELLONI

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