Welcome back to In the Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

Greetings from New York, where I’ve been running another 72-hour source-meeting marathon, capped by Tuesday night’s book party for Kara Swisher at Bob Steel’s NoHo apartment, which he’s renting from Gary Cohn.

It was a treat to toast one of the true icons of this trade, and great to see so many of you in the same place: Steel, Cohn, Arianna Huffington, Phil Griffin, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Kevin Sheekey, Brian Stelter, Campbell Brown, the Zagats, Joe Kahn, Chris Licht, Bill DeBlasio, Katy Tur, Peter Lattman, Joanna Coles, Molly Jong-Fast, Betsy Lack, Oliver Darcy, James Bennet, Maggie Haberman, Sam Dolnick, Allison Gollust, Jon Karp, Kaitlan Collins, Stephanie Ruhle, my partners Bill Cohan and Jon Kelly, and Don Lemon & Tim Malone, who have finally set a date for their wedding. (By the way, despite the $24.5 million number you may have read about, I’m told by sources that Don’s big CNN payout, negotiated months ago, was closer to $20 million, which would reflect a roughly $6 million annual salary for the give-or-take 3.5 years still left on his contract.)

In any event, Kara’s 27-stop world tour continues this week in Washington with a Laurene Powell Jobs interview and a Friday-night party at Jim Bankoff’s place. I’m en route to L.A., but I’ll be back in D.C. myself in mid-March for Puck’s second-annual First Amendment celebration at the French ambassador’s residence, where we’ll be honoring Andrea Mitchell.

In tonight’s email, news and notes on the fallout from the ABC News restructuring, where Kim Godwin has taken an Al Haig approach to her effective demotion, finally asserting herself as a leader in an attempt to match the ubiquity of the network’s true boss, Deb OConnell. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s already backfired.

But first…

🤯 Irreverent Vice: This morning, I received a cryptic and ominous email from a source at Vice Media, which recently laid off hundreds of staff and announced plans to shutter its website. “You wouldn’t believe how the Vice mtg just ended,” it read. “No way the C.E.O. survives.” It turns out that said meeting ended when C.E.O. Bruce Dixon took note of the “impossible to ignore” thumbs-down emojis that overwhelmed the all-staff Google Hangouts session as chief digital officer Cory Haik was speaking. Earlier in the meeting, Dixon warned that leadership “will not tolerate constant external leaks to the press moments after we communicate,” but of course that’s exactly what happened, and in part because Vice invited recently laid-off staffers to the live stream. (In a follow-up email Wednesday night, Dixon said the leadership still hoped to communicate openly with staff, but that “we are only able to do that in an environment that is respectful and professional for everyone.”)

For my money, the most confusing part of the meeting was Dixon’s attempt to bolster morale by suggesting that Vice News might one day become a sub-brand underneath CNN. As I reported last week, the CNN-Vice idea is a totally specious rumor being pushed by Vice’s owners to gin up interest, and there have been no real talks with CNN. Either way, I don’t know how long Dixon will be in his seat, but I disagree with the journalistic instinct that he’s a fleeting man. After all, the Vice job is entirely unappealing, and Dixon is incentivized to clean up the P&L by exiting staff. Management will back him to do the dirty work and suffer the slings and arrows in the process.

🦚 Mehdi Inc.?: Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan is the latest cable news personality to go it alone and brave the digital media business. The combative liberal commentator’s shows were canceled last fall, after which he claims to have raised $4 million in funding. Now, he’s launching a multiplatform channel on Substack (show, podcasts, articles) called Zeteo, from the Greek word meaning “to seek,” and will eventually charge subscribers $6 a month. Will it work? Ask Bill O’Reilly or Megyn Kelly. “It’s the equivalent of busking on the internet,” one veteran media executive tells me. “He has a fan base, decidedly small, and perhaps devoted enough to pay, [but] having an Ancient Greek name doesn’t make it another Axios—or a real business.”

🤝 Mattingly moves: Former CNN morning show co-host Phil Mattingly has struck a deal to become the network’s chief domestic correspondent, a savvy move by his representatives at CAA that likely positions him for future success at the network. Meanwhile, still no word on what’s next for Poppy Harlow…

🗣️ The week’s top talker: Adam Rubenstein’s “I Was a Heretic at The New York Times,” about—what else—the paper’s mishandling of the Tom Cotton op-ed. This really is the story that just won’t die. Blissfully, this post-mortem is quite a bit shorter than James Bennet’s recent opus. But it’s also a semi-tragic manifestation of the fact that, for some, Times Stockholm Syndrome has side effects that linger on long after they’ve left the institution.

The statement, which Godwin made in an ongoing email exchange she’d initiated to discuss how to cover the former president’s recent remarks—he’d said his string of indictments were “why the Black people like me”—was the latest in a series of unforced errors that Godwin has made during her embattled tenure atop the network news division. And her missive was all the more notable because it didn’t even align with the network’s own editorial posture toward Trump’s comments. For its part, ABC News more cautiously characterized them as having been “criticized as racist.”

In any event, the scrutiny around Godwin’s remark came at a particularly inopportune time for her. After almost three years beset by criticism, she was effectively demoted earlier this month when her bosses created a new position for veteran Disney insider Deb OConnell that gave her oversight of the news division. Godwin had simultaneously (and somewhat unexpectedly) renewed her contract as network president for three years, but the implications of the restructuring were clear: Godwin had been sapped of her power, and the perks it conferred, and instead become what one network veteran insightfully described as “a general manager of the news division who doesn’t actually do the managing.”

Then again, many ABC veterans thought Godwin hadn’t done much managing to begin with. As many network insiders see it, Godwin’s latest misstep was actually an unfortunate symptom of her response to the restructuring. One of the frequent criticisms of Godwin is that she has been a hands-off leader who spends more time trying to manage her reputation than actually doing the job of managing the newsroom. In the process, she has often responded to perceived threats by hunkering down and enlisting the support of her loyalists or, in one memorable and notorious case, dispensing with critics by laying them off—moves that obviously have done little to burnish the rep or stanch the criticism. Indeed, one of the main reasons that talent and producers have welcomed OConnell is because she is exactly the opposite: a very hands-on leader who in her first weeks on the job has made a point of visiting every set, control room, and makeup studio, entertaining the talent, and keeping close tabs on the editorial product in a way Godwin never did.

According to the usual playbook, this is a moment when Godwin might try to rally loyalists to her side—and she may still be trying to do that. This week, I was told that several of the network’s Black anchors and correspondents had been invited to “a lunch for Kim” this Saturday at the home of Byron Pitts, the network’s chief national correspondent and Nightline co-anchor. When asked to comment, however, Godwin relayed via a spokesperson that she was not involved with the event. Of course, that left the invited journalists confused by what, exactly, they’d been invited to attend.

As I’ve noted many times, Godwin began this job at a disadvantage. She entered an infamously cliquish and competitive network as an outsider and arriviste—and as the network’s first Black and first female president, no less. She was also given a mandate to change a cutthroat culture that many network veterans didn’t want to see changed, even if it had to be. The criticism of ABC News as a “wolf’s den” was welcomed by those who proudly self-identified as wolves. At the same time, Godwin’s conviction that she was being unfairly maligned by a coterie of nostalgic, grizzled detractors is belied by the fact that, even after exorcising those people, the cries of protest continue to come from inside the house. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people I talk to attribute ABC’s relative successes—ratings, bookings, etcetera—to the achievements of her predecessors or executive producers and talent who manage their own fiefdoms. In any event, many ABC News insiders don’t believe it will be possible for Godwin to see out the next three years of her contract.

Meanwhile, the relative optimism surrounding OConnell’s appointment betrays another longstanding anxiety of this industry. Across both broadcast and cable news, one of the most oft-repeated complaints I hear is that there are no more real leaders: no creative impresarios who actually watch the shows and care about winning big bookings and pulverizing the competition. Instead, the networks are mostly led by careerist manager types who are too busy prolonging the decline of the linear business (and, in some cases, their own climb up the greased ladder) to spend much time worrying about what’s happening on air.

When I hear these complaints, I can’t help but reflect that running a network news division used to be a calling and a final career destination. Now, it’s a necessary midcareer challenge for an ambitious fix-it executive type. OConnell is trying to be Roone Arledge as much as Cesar Conde wants to be Andy Lack. These days, these gigs are just stops en route to a corner office on a higher floor. After they take on Godwin, the wolves may just eat themselves.