Bewkes' Regrets, Scarborough's Payday, and the Rittenhouse Saga

Good afternoon and welcome back to The Daily Courant, our subscriber-only email highlighting the latest and most noteworthy new journalism being produced at Puck.
 

Today, we're kicking off the week with a firehose of reporting. First up, Matt Belloni chats with HBO scholar James Andrew Miller about how else the Time Warner saga could have ended, before its star-crossed entanglement with AT&T. Teddy Schleifer scoops the arrival of a $100 million check from Jeff Bezos into Barack Obama's foundation bank account. And Tina Nguyen considers the political antecedents of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

Plus, below the fold, don't miss Dylan Byers' insider account of the deepening talent retention drama at MSNBC, where sources are buzzing about whether Joe Scarborough will be the next loose-in-the-saddle anchor to lever up his comp.

The Past, Present, and Uncertain Future of HBO

A chat with the incomparable James Andrew Miller, who’s just written a new book on HBO, about the Netflix rivalry, the disastrous AOL merger, who comes across as the biggest asshole, and what David Zaslav can expect when he walks through the door.

Matt Belloni: It’s crazy how many different ways HBO’s ownership could have gone. Before selling to AT&T in 2016, Time Warner C.E.O. Jeff Bewkes was talking to Bob Iger at Disney, and, ironically, David Zaslav at Discovery. Rupert Murdoch made a hostile run at it. If Bewkes didn’t sell to AT&T, what do you think was the most likely alternative scenario for HBO and the Time Warner assets?

James Andrew Miller: From 2014 on, when Murdoch comes after Time Warner and Bewkes is able to beat it back, he went to the board and they said, “We’re OK now.” And he said, “No, we’re not, because we still don’t have an answer to the question of how we are going to compete with Netflix,” given that 50 percent of their operation was funded by Turner, which is a linear television operation. So the [cable] bundle becomes a cancer on Time Warner. They clearly had to merge or get taken over. And there’s not a long list [of potential acquirers,] given its size. You have Apple, Verizon, AT&T, maybe Amazon. Maybe, in a long shot, Facebook would be interested. But it’s not like there were 30 entities. Apple was interested in HBO, but it didn’t want Turner. Who wants to deal with the bundle?

In the book, Bewkes takes a shot at the “malpractice” committed on Time Warner by AT&T’s management. Do you really believe Jeff thought AT&T would come in and keep all his people and operate the business largely as it was?

Without a doubt. If you look at the DOJ testimony [when the U.S. government tried to block the AT&T deal], it wasn’t about saying AT&T can run HBO and Warner Bros. better than a management team that, by all accounts, was running things pretty well.

But it’s like what AT&T’s John Stankey said, they paid a premium for an asset and had a strategy to do something with it. They believed that if they had been given time to execute on that strategy—I don’t agree with them, by the way—they would have been able to create a lot more value. Do you think Stankey recognizes now that the Time Warner plan was destined to fail?

You gotta give Stankey credit for being able to pivot [and orchestrate a spinoff to Discovery] once he realized they weren’t going to be able to succeed the way that he and Randall [Stephenson, AT&T’s former C.E.O.] wanted. It’s admirable...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT