Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room, my private email on the media business and media people. In tonight’s jam-packed edition, fresh scoops on all the latest agita emanating from 30 Rock: Brian Roberts’ landmark decision to spin off his cable news assets, including MSNBC and CNBC, and what it really means for the networks’ future; plus the real backstory to Joe & Mika’s surprise pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago.

🎙️🍸 The Grill Room: On the latest edition of the podcast, we’ve got a banquet of culinary conversation. Alison Roman, the famed cook, writer, recipe concocter, and media entrepreneur, joins me to discuss Thanksgiving strategy, her journey from legacy media to startup life. and why her defenestration from the Times turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Plus, Infatuation C.E.O. Paul Needham chats about the economics and editorial strategy behind his restaurant recommendation company.

Also mentioned in this email: Cesar Conde, Matt Gaetz, Michael Wolff, Mark Lazarus, Megyn Kelly, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Will Lewis, Lachlan Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Simone Swink, Sally Buzbee, Jeff Zucker, John Berman, Anand Kini, Stephanie Ruhle, Brian Stelter, and many more…

But first…

• Trump’s Paramount bluster: The president-elect’s nominee to lead the F.C.C., Brendan Carr, is already trying to strike fear in the hearts of news organizations, citing CBS’s refusal to release a transcript of Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview as a potential factor in its review of the Skydance-Paramount deal. “I’m pretty confident that that news distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the F.C.C. review of that transaction,” Carr told Fox News this week.

  Of course, this is almost certainly just bluster—both Larry Ellison and Shari Redstone have direct lines in to Trump, if necessary—but it does induce flashbacks of the former and future president’s flagrant attempt to interfere with the AT&T-Time Warner deal based on his frustrations with CNN. (As my partner Matt Belloni previously noted, it’s now more unlikely than ever that Jeff Zucker will become involved in New Paramount—at least in the immediate future.) In most cases, a Trump administration is likely to be far more lenient on M&A. But few would put it past Trump to get hung up on personal vendettas.

• Wolff of Washington: On a related note, Trump’s senior leadership team has issued a statement dismissing journalist Michael Wolff ahead of the next installment in his series of bestselling-but-tenuously sourced Trump books. “A number of us have received inquiries from the disgraced author Michael Wolff, whose previous work can only be described as fiction,” the Trump team declared in a statement. “He is a known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations, and conclusions that never happened. As a group, we have decided not to respond to his bad faith inquiries, and we encourage others to completely disregard whatever nonsense he eventually publishes. Consider this our blanket response to whatever he writes.” Reached by text on Wednesday, Michael simply replied: “Ha!”
• The Post in Turmoil: The Washington Post, the terminally beleaguered paper, was on track to lose $77 million again this year even before the recent wave of cancellations stemming from endorsement-gate, New York’s Charlotte Klein reports. The figure, shared by a managing editor in a recent meeting with reporters and editors, matches the number the Post lost last year after cutting 240 staffers through buyouts. Meanwhile, on the morale front, C.E.O. Will Lewis has told employees who are protesting his return-to-work mandate that anyone not wishing to come into the office five days a week can kindly resign.
• Buzbee lands at Reuters: On a related note, Sally Buzbee, the former Post executive editor who chose to resign rather than be relegated to Lewis’s third newsroom—remember that?—has landed at Reuters, where she will serve as news editor for the U.S. and Canada.
• GMA cedes the morning: Back in TV land, NBC’s Today show has now surpassed ABC’s Good Morning America in total ratings for three straight weeks, its longest streak in more than four years. Yes, they’re sparring over an ever-diminishing audience, but the ramifications are still acutely felt at the network level, where Robin and George and Michael are already grossly overcompensated at $25 million each. “How much are they really worth if they can’t hold on to number one?” one veteran media executive asked. “How good is Debra if she can’t stop the bleeding? How skilled is Almin if he can’t turn it around? How did Simone let it slip away? And most conveniently, isn’t it all just Kim’s fault for three totally wasted years of neglect and self-absorption?” Failure is an orphan, but I certainly won’t quibble on that last point.

And now, onto 30 Rock…

Anticipating some blowback from their mostly liberal coalition, Joe and Mika cast the Trump meeting as an attempt to foster a constructive dialogue. “For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’” Mika said. “Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.” Later, Mika also alluded to her father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a top U.S. diplomat who served as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. She explained that maintaining an open dialogue was “a task shared by reporters and commentators alike.”

In light of Joe and Mika’s relatively exalted status in the legacy media firmament, the disclosure became a minor source of fascination or frustration among their peers at 30 Rock, as well as fodder for the media’s broader introspective post-election soul-searching journey. At MSNBC, weekend host Katie Phang wrote that “normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period,” while Stephanie Ruhle sought to convince her viewers that engagement was sound journalistic practice, and by no means a capitulation. Joe and Mika’s pilgrimage earned write-ups from the Times, the Journal, CNN, and so forth. It also induced predictable hysterics from the chronically outraged gasbag class, including Keith Olbermann and Megyn Kelly. Meanwhile, the Morning Joe audience, already at a post-election nadir, dropped 17 percent in the hour after Joe and Mika revealed their Trump meeting. The following day, the show’s ratings were down 38 percent from this year’s average.

Alas, the debate over statecraft vs. surrender diverted attention from the real palace intrigue. After all, Joe and Mika’s paeans to diplomacy belied the true motivation for their visit to Mar-a-Lago. In fact, the couple made the trek to Palm Beach because they feared retribution, a fact that has thus far only been alluded to by CNN’s Brian Stelter. This week, sources with direct knowledge of Joe and Mika’s thinking provided me with more details on those fears that, in addition to underscoring the batshit-crazy nature of this moment in American politics, also offer insight into the potential chilling effect that Trump’s return to the Oval Office might have on the news media writ large, and especially MSNBC.

Since Trump’s victory on November 5, Joe and Mika have privately told friends that they’re worried the incoming president will seek revenge for their criticism of him during the campaign. Those concerns became far more acute last week when Trump nominated Matt Gaetz for attorney general. That same day, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon suggested that Gaetz would go after MSNBC for trying “to destroy” Trump. “​​You try to imprison Trump, you try to break Trump. He’s not breakable,” Bannon said on his podcast. “You couldn’t destroy him. And now he has turned on you. And he’s put a firebrand in charge of main justice, Department of Justice, and you’re going to have to live with it.”

Specifically, Joe and Mika have told friends and associates they’re afraid that Trump and Gaetz will resurrect a decades-old, totally bullshit, birther-level conspiracy theory about the death of Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old intern in Scarborough’s former Florida congressional office who died in 2001 from complications relating to a heart condition, and use it to apply legal pressure on Scarborough and otherwise make his life a living hell. The couple’s anxiety stems, in particular, from testimony that former White House communications director and current View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin gave in 2022 during the January 6 hearings, during which she recounted running into Gaetz outside of the Oval Office. Farah Griffin testified that Gaetz was carrying a folder filled with “conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough murdering his intern,” which he then presented to President Trump, who later tweeted about it.

Despite the baseless nature of the conspiracy theory, Joe and Mika “are petrified of retribution and of Gaetz opening an investigation into Joe and the intern,” one source with knowledge of their concerns said. “That's what this was about. It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation.” Another source close to the matter said Joe and Mika believed that by meeting with Trump, they could assuage his potential desire for reckless payback and thus nuke any possibility of having to endure the headlines of a Gaetz witch hunt or legal torture campaign. (Reached for comment, Scarborough referred me to an MSNBC spokesperson, who denied this characterization of the motivations for Joe and Mika’s Mar-a-Lago visit and said it was both false and inaccurate.) Coincidentally, Scarborough and Gaetz both represented Florida’s 1st congressional district.

In his own interview with Fox News on Monday morning, Trump described his meeting with Joe and Mika as “very cordial,” adding that “many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication.” He also said “the meeting ended in a very positive manner, and we agreed to speak in the future.”

The president-elect also said he expects similar meetings to “take place with others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile,” noting that he feels “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press. … If not treated fairly, however, that will end. The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America.”

The Comcast cable spin-out, of course, is just the latest Pangaea moment in the cable business—and in cable news, in particular—and the harbinger of a cascading series of subprime future outcomes: tighter budgets, higher margins, inscrutable overlords, lower salaries, less influence, smaller workforces, cheaper real estate, fewer benefits, replacing MacBooks with Acers, and rampant cost-cutting across the board, to name but a few. The maneuver is also likely to liberate other media conglomerates to pursue similar spinoffs and therefore consolidate the industry. On Sunday, my partner Bill Cohan presciently foreshadowed this move, noting how TPG’s conquest and highly profitable management of DirecTV presented a veritable playbook for how to deal with declining linear TV assets. (Disclosure: TPG is an investor in Puck.)

In press releases and internal memos, Comcast and NBCUniversal executives touted the move as an opportunity for the well-capitalized, mostly debt-free, independent spinco to pursue new growth opportunities and even acquire other businesses and cable assets. This narrative, while not entirely untrue, has led some observers to anticipate that the new entity will be an M&A predator, not prey. In a meeting with MSNBC staff on Wednesday, NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus, who is set to become C.E.O. of the new entity, similarly highlighted those opportunities, which would bolster the spinco’s negotiations with cable operators.

But the real rationale for this new arrangement is almost certainly more pragmatic. Like other media conglomerates, all of which are trying to burnish growing and profitable streaming businesses, Comcast’s cable portfolio is an asset in decline— and it’s profitable, yes, but also expensive: a distraction for management and a frustration for shareholders. And the portfolio, in so many ways, represents precisely the profile of a company that entices the financial erogenous zones of private equity. Apollo or Blackstone deal hunters, to name but a few, would delight at the notion of resizing the company, cutting budgets, undoing costly decisions, and managing the business for cash flow. And, presumably, they could do it all with the Roberts family still in a supportive control position.

By spinning off the cable assets, Roberts could then wait for two years until the tax statute passes, and then sell the remainder of the business to their private equity partner, or another acquisitive mediaco buying the dip, without the tax hit. He’d still get a premium on his Class A shares, while preserving optionality in the event that the economic landscape changes, and possibly negotiating many favorable deals to support Peacock along the way. It’s likely that Lazarus and his C.F.O., Anand Kini, will contemplate some acquisitions and partnerships over the two-year period, but presumably in the same way that Shari Redstone went through the motions before ultimately selling Paramount to Skydance.

Of course, this spinoff has massive implications for the news networks, as well. Officially, Comcast says that NBC News Group chairman Cesar Conde will continue in that role, overseeing NBC News and NBC News Now, Telemundo Enterprises, and NBCU local stations, while also working with Comcast president Mike Cavanagh “on other growth opportunities for NBCUniversal.” But everyone outside of the Comcast and NBC P.R. departments knows that Conde is highly unlikely to stay in the news leadership role for more than a few more months. (Hell, savvy operator that he is, it’s possible that he recommended this move.) Whether he transitions to another role at Comcast or pursues a corner office elsewhere is an open question. But as of the announcement, he’s already ceded oversight of MSNBC and CNBC to Lazarus.

Meanwhile, Lazarus spent all of Wednesday seeking to assuage the fears of MSNBC talent through multiple Q&A sessions and direct outreach to anchors. Nevertheless, many network employees remain flooded with anxiety about the spinoff and what it means for them. Not to put too fine a point on it, but by midday Wednesday, half a dozen high-level employees there had called me, mostly unsolicited, to ask what this meant for the network’s future. Originally, I wanted to talk about Joe and Mika, but everyone else simply wanted to talk about spinco and what it meant for them.

Specifically, employees are wondering how the liberal news and opinion network will function once it’s severed from the NBC News production and newsgathering infrastructure. “NBC does all the coverage,” one source there said. “We don’t have anything: No studio. No cameras. No legal. No standards. No systems. It’s all NBC.” Others fear that the spinoff would propel MSNBC into a future as a liberal-opinion pure play, a better-produced version of Air America.

The more likely scenario, which Lazarus alluded to in his meetings, is something of a hybrid: MSNBC is likely to strike an affiliate-style “transaction services agreement” with NBC News that will allow it to continue utilizing the news network’s resources. Of course, it’s not hard to imagine a future scenario where MSNBC ultimately outsources these expenses to guests from digital news sites who are willing to do the live hits for free, all while broadcasting from Englewood Cliffs.

In the long term, there are a number of plausible scenarios for MSNBC and CNBC. But if things do indeed go the private equity route, it’s very possible these networks ultimately get sold off in parts. One veteran media executive I spoke to this week envisioned a scenario in which the private equity firm that buys spinco later sells CNBC to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, who would tie it up with Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, while MSNBC would be sold to Jeff Zucker’s RedBird IMI. Interesting idea, but would they even want them?