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

In tonight’s email, news and notes on the latest ABC News shake-up, which has elevated Deb OConnell, stripped Kim Godwin of her power (and the perks that come with it), and given Disney some much-needed distance from the drama of its news network’s inelegant decline.

But first…

🤝 A Zucker-Zaz-Malone deal: Jeff Zucker’s RedBird IMI has agreed to acquire the London-based production company All3Media for £1.15 billion from its joint owners, Warner Bros. Discovery and Liberty Media—which is to say, David Zaslav and John Malone. The deal, ironically, allows Zucker to acquire an asset from the two guys who helped facilitate his departure from CNN in a no-prints manner. (Yes, technically, Zucker left before the deal was consummated, sure, but Chris Licht was already looming in the background.) Strange bedfellows, I know.

I noted Zucker’s interest in the asset back in December, and my partner Matt Belloni scooped the deal last night in What I’m Hearing. All3Media boasts more than 30,000 hours of scripted and unscripted content in its library, including shows like The Tourist, Fleabag, and The Traitors, as well as Squid Game: The Challenge. And at £1.15 billion, it’s slightly cheaper than repaying the Barclay family debt for The Telegraph and Spectator.

🤔 A Paramount-Peacock deal: Shari Redstone’s Paramount has held talks with Brian Roberts’ Comcast to discuss combining their respective streaming networks, Paramount+ and Peacock, per The Wall Street Journal. It’s the latest sign that Paramount is exploring all its options in case this David Ellison deal can’t be consummated. And it’s also probably the latest piece of evidence, as my partner Julia Alexander recently noted, that Par+ isn’t long for this world one way or another.

By then, Godwin was less than two years into what had been an embattled tenure. She’d come to the infamously cliquish and competitive network as an outsider and arriviste—the former number two at, of all places, ABC’s third-place rival, CBS News—with a mandate to fix a cutthroat culture that network veterans had long prided themselves on. Godwin, who tends to emphasize work-life balance and office camaraderie, lost that crowd almost immediately with her birthday sing-a-longs and mental health mantras. At the same time, insiders also felt she displayed greater appetite for the conference circuit and personal brand-building than the hands-on leadership style for which her predecessors had been famous. Anyway, this is television: People talk and they can be catty.

Looming in the background of all this, of course, was the fateful reality that television news was fading, and so were some of its cultural tics—like beating the competition to a newsmaking morning interview or primetime sitdown special. A generation raised on these professional touchstones, and addicted to the adrenaline of fast nationals and budget-busting sweeps stunts, was coming to terms with the more humbling realities of cord-cutting and P&L management. On some level, Godwin was part of a dispiriting trend in which a new generation of less handsomely paid executives were overhired into roles and forced to clean up some of the mess of their successors while ruthlessly managing costs. Fairly or not, it all became fodder for a relentless whisper campaign, which fueled the spread of what turned out to be a specious rumor.

For almost a year, Godwin managed to maintain her direct line to Walden, and the power that this conferred. With it, she moved aggressively to evict her critics and perceived enemies. Last March, as part of a broader cost-cutting effort across Disney, Godwin ungracefully laid off roughly 50 members of her staff, including top leaders and longtime veterans like Wendy Fisher and Chris Vlasto who, according to sources across the organization, had been instrumental to the network’s past success. In their place, she installed a team of loyalists, some of whom lacked the institutional knowledge of their predecessors. Critics suspected vindictive motives for the cuts, and decried her intolerance for dissent. One veteran said the maneuvers were undergirded by “her indifference to the history and competitiveness that made ABC great.”

At last, on Wednesday, Walden formalized the long-anticipated restructuring: She promoted OConnell to the newly created role of president of news group and networks, giving her oversight of ABC News while establishing the aforementioned layer between herself and Godwin. “Debra is an excellent executive who has succeeded in a wide range of leadership roles around our company and knows very well the extraordinary power of ABC News and its world-class journalists,” Walden wrote. “This new role gives her oversight across all our linear operations, where she will be able to optimize our iconic brands and shepherd them into the future.”

OConnell, who has spent 27 years at Disney, most recently as networks president, is widely described as a hardworking, hard-driving, no-bullshit, results-oriented leader who commands the respect of the rank and file. (Walden is considered the same, by the way, but with a lighter touch.) “Deb is terrific, knows the business and has a great track record. Personally, I am very relieved,” one ABC News insider said. “She’s no nonsense and doesn’t suffer fools,” said another network veteran. “She’s ambitious, determined, and the rank and file respect her because she gets involved in the work and is an advocate for them.”

OConnell now oversees all of Disney’s linear networks, news, and stations, a massive portfolio in decline, and the very same one that Iger may one day decide to sell. “They are the least attractive and least appealing of all of Disney’s shiny wares,” one ABC News veteran said. If there is any anxiety about her appointment, it’s that she herself is not a news person—not a journalist, not a producer or programmer, not a talent scout—but a business leader. No one doubts her ability to make tough business calls, but people are waiting to see how she handles the tough journalism decisions.

Inevitably, business has suffered as a result. Yes, everyone’s ratings are down, but ABC News’s decline is by far the sharpest among all networks. Over the last four or so months, ratings for both Good Morning America and World News Tonight are down 21 percent year-over-year in the all-important 25- to 54-year-old demo. In reality, Burbank’s tolerance of these challenges may simply reflect the low priority of broadcast news as a business unit in a modern, streaming-first media conglomerate. After all, Paramount tolerated Neeraj Khemlani’s reign at CBS News for two years.

Meanwhile, Godwin has extended her deal to remain president of the news network, now reporting to OConnell. Nevertheless, most insiders interpret this org chart maneuver as the beginning of her exit. “This is Kim’s nightmare,” one ABC News veteran said. Immediately following Wednesday’s announcement, OConnell stopped by the set of World News Tonight and spoke to talent and staff. She showed up at Good Morning America on Thursday morning and introduced herself to everyone, including cameramen and production staff, and later dropped by the fifth-floor newsroom to make similar introductions. “Deb knows about all the problems already,” said another network insider. “It won’t take her long to fix them.”

Being layered sucks, as Shakespeare said, but it’s particularly excruciating for those for who relish the trappings of power. In Godwin’s case, the power didn’t seem to come from her actual work or her ideas or impact on the news division, but rather from the perception of her as a news president flying to conferences in Laguna Beach, to Hollywood for the Oscars, and to Burbank for senior staff meetings. Of course, this reorg strips that power. As one network veteran put it, “She is now essentially a general manager of the news division who doesn’t actually do the managing. … She is defeated. And now she is exposed and will be further exposed.”