Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room, my twice-weekly private email on the media and media people. There are now less than 100 hours to go until the polls close on Election Night. So, whether you’re in studio rehearsals or overseeing them, fine-tuning the Magic Wall or the Needle, good luck. It’s going to be a helluva night, or week.

🎙️🍸 The Grill Room: On today’s edition of the podcast, New York magazine’s Charlotte Klein and I offered the official, definitive list of the best and worst portraits from her recent media special issue, from Jake Tapper (alas) to Radhika Jones. Then, we dished on all the major trends and anxieties consuming the industry, from Mark Thompson’s digital subscription challenges at CNN and Wendy McMahon’s Shari problem at CBS to the Jeff Bezos Post endorsement “complexifier.” Plus, news and notes on Punchbowl, Semafor, The Atlantic, and so much more. Listen to the latest episode on Apple or Spotify, and follow The Grill Room wherever you get your podcasts.

In tonight’s email, news and notes on Comcast’s potentially massive cable channel spin-off and what it portends for Cesar Conde and the NBC News Group. Plus, some Trumpland-ABC drama.

Also mentioned in this email: Marc Benioff, Stephanie Ruhle, Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews, Hugh Hewitt, Bob Iger, David Zaslav, Justin Wells, Kamala Harris, David Muir, Linsey Davis, John Santucci, Jonathan Capehart, and many more…

But first…

• Benioff’s Time exit: Marc Benioff is in talks to sell Time to the Greek media firm Antenna Group, according to NBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and CNBC’s Alex Sherman. All the usual caveats apply here: talks are early, no deal is assured, etcetera. Benioff bought the asset for $190 million six years ago, saying he wanted to “unshackle” the venerated title from financial pressures—at least after he apparently decided he was too conflicted to acquire Fortune, the old Time Inc. asset that he originally coveted. Now, it seems he’s the one throwing off the shackles, even at a loss. Per Ruhle and Sherman, the two sides are currently valuing the company at around just $150 million. Antenna, which is controlled by an enigmatic shipping heir, owns a number of Central European legacy media assets and once dabbled in Vice. One can only expect that the company is hoping to use the brand to enter the U.S. market—and exploit the I.P. abroad.
• Storming out of the Post: Conservative radio host and Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt abruptly resigned from the paper on Friday after getting into a tense argument with his liberal colleagues during a talk show. Hewitt was on the Post’s First Look podcast with Ruth Marcus, who argued that Trump was laying the groundwork to contest the results of the election if he lost, and Jonathan Capehart, who at one point told Hewitt not to lecture him on matters of factual accuracy. It was then that Hewitt ripped out his earpiece and declared: “I won’t come back. I’m done. I’m done. This is the most unfair election ad I’ve ever been a part of.” Hewitt later confirmed that he had resigned from the Post. A spokesperson for the paper declined to comment on personnel matters, but touted the Post’s live-video platform as a place for “dynamic conversations and thought-provoking perspectives.” Quite the shitshow.
• The CBS News scramble: With just four days to go until the election, CBS News staff are taking note of the absence of news division C.E.O. Wendy McMahon, which has fueled speculation about her fate at the network following Shari Redstone’s very overt criticism of her management of the Tony Dokoupil–Ta-Nehisi Coates fracas. The good news for Wendy, of course, is that George Cheeks has her back, and incoming Paramount chief Jeff Shell seems to like her, as well. In any event, I’m told she’ll be back in New York starting this weekend. Meanwhile, CBSers also acknowledged the presence of Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews, the former news president who remains at the network in an advisory role. Ciprián-Matthews was on set at 1515 Broadway for Election Night rehearsals on Friday and has apparently been very hands-on with Election Night planning.

And now, on to 30 Rock, and then West 66th Street…

In such a scenario, NBC’s declining cable networks—Bravo, E!, SyFy, USA, etcetera, and MSNBC and CNBC—would become part of a new, stand-alone company. As the industry’s largest media companies all look to lop off their legacy linear assets, the Comcast networks might one day be consolidated with other cable channels, presumably those at Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, or even Starz, where C.E.O. Jeff Hirsch has expressed interest in buying more cable assets. They’re also certainly going to be appealing to various private equity firms, such as Apollo, which hung around the hoop on the Paramount Global deal as a buyer of last resort. At the very least, the spin-off would exorcize these declining assets from Comcast’s balance sheet. Cavanagh also said NBCUniversal was “open to considering partnerships in streaming,” hinting at a Peacock tie-up with Max or Paramount+.

Yes, this was just a finger in the air, reminiscent of Bob Iger’s suggestion last summer, in Sun Valley, that Disney was exploring a sale of ABC and its other linear assets. Cavanagh and his colleagues have yet to work out the specific details of how such a spin-off would work, but his mere suggestion highlights the increasing pressure these companies feel to free their core businesses from the albatross of linear television. After all, it was just three months ago that David Zaslav took a $9 billion writedown on his own cable networks. “It’s taking a bunch of shitty assets and putting them into a separate bucket where you can aggressively manage costs to suck out every last dollar from them,” one media industry veteran said. “But I truly don’t think they have thought it all the way through yet. This was the ultimate testing of the water.”

Inside 30 Rock, one of the most pressing questions after the earnings call was how this hypothetical spin-off might one day impact the NBC News division and its sister networks, MSNBC and CNBC. Most of these questions are hard to even fathom in the absence of greater specifics: Would MSNBC continue to rely on the NBC News infrastructure for reporting, or would it become a pure opinion network divorced from hard news? What would happen to the anchors, correspondents, and other talent who bridge the NBC-MSNBC divide? And might this move potentially hurt NBC News, which relies on MSNBC and CNBC to amortize costs?

One thing that does seem likely in the event of a spin-off: Cesar Conde, the NBC News Group chairman, would likely vacate that position, presumably seeking to climb another rung up the corporate ladder at NBC or, frankly, anywhere else. “Why would he want to stay as the president of NBC News and TV stations without MSNBC and CNBC?” one veteran executive asked rhetorically. “It’s a diminished role.” Presumably, that’s a responsibility that could pass to Mark Lazarus, the NBCUniversal Media Group chairman, who could simply assign a Deb OConnell type or Wendy McMahon-style executive to run the network and its affiliate newsrooms.

As my partner Matt Belloni noted last night, such a spin-off would be complicated and not without its tradeoffs. (There are reasons why Iger put everything on the table but didn’t follow through with a plan.) Indeed, Comcast’s networks arguably need MSNBC and CNBC for negotiating leverage with distributors. On the other hand, this sort of maneuver would merely accelerate the inevitable, making them increasingly vulnerable and irrelevant. The trial balloon reminded many in the industry of Jeff Bewkes’ decision, some 15 years ago, to spin off the Time Inc. magazine division from Time Warner. Alas, the move quickly led to the desecration of the magazine publisher, which was sold to Meredith… before being picked apart by various moguls and Barry Diller’s Dotdash. In fact, as NBC News reported today, Marc Benioff just agreed to sell off Time to a Greek shipping heir.

Halfway through the episode, while Harris and Trump debate, his co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita can be seen losing his proverbial shit on someone backstage. “What the fuck is this?” he asks. “That’s a fuck job!” His interlocutor, whose back is to the camera, tries to assure him that the situation is being handled: “We are trying,” he says. “We are in the control room. We are in the ears. We are trying. … There are several issues we’ve been trying to get to. We are working on it.”

The individual in question is ABC News executive editorial producer John Santucci, but what was the it he was working on? Multiple sources familiar with the matter tell me that Santucci had made assurances to LaCivita and the Trump campaign prior to the debate that the moderators would not fact-check the candidates, which may explain why LaCivita was so irate and why Santucci sought to assure him that he was “in the ears” of the control room, “trying” to fix the situation.

In mid-October, The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey also reported that the Trump team believed it had assurances from ABC News that there would be no fact-checking during the debate, despite there being no such stipulation in the official debate rules provided by the network.

Per their report, LaCivita and Jason Miller “were furious with ABC for pointedly fact-checking Trump live during his debate with Harris,” and “erupted at ABC executives and journalists in the middle of the debate, according to the people familiar with the situation. They implored the network to stop fact-checking for the rest of the event and said it had breached its promise, and a call was even lodged to the president of ABC News by Susie Wiles, the campaign’s top aide. At least one Trump adviser demanded to talk to the moderators during the debate.” (ABC News declined to comment on the matter.)

On some level, the whole episode seems to epitomize the relationship between media and political campaigns in the Trump era: a legacy news network trying to uphold its journalistic obligations on air while its operators engage in whatever dark-arts diplomacy is necessary to get the booking, and then ensure that the show goes on. Meanwhile, the very presence of a pro-Trump, Tucker Carlson affiliate shooting the whole thing on camera exemplifies the rebellious posture of an anti-media media wing on the right that seeks to expose not the candidates, but the journalists. It all feels very fraught and frenetic, like the political moment itself, and will probably only get worse after the election.