Greetings from Los Angeles. In tonight’s email, a close look at the layering of Kim Godwin and the agita inside ABC News.

But first….

🤼 An immovable Beast: Ben Sherwood and Joanna Coles’ very early attempts to refashion The Daily Beast as a provocative, high-end tabloid for the post-traffic era are meeting strong newsroom opposition, according to a revealing report from New York’s Justin Miller. In brief, staff appear to be rejecting Coles’ attempts to infuse the not-unfun news site with an even more playful, borderline sensationalist spirit via Page Six-style scuttlebutt items and performative job postings for Lauren Sánchez and Meghan Markle correspondents. (“We’re going to be pirates,” Coles has said.)

This was the perhaps inevitable result of putting a Tina Brown-lite star of the post-prime glossy era in charge of self-serious journalists quietly hoping for better offers from The New York Times—but either way, it isn’t what they signed up for. On the other hand, many of these folks may fail to appreciate how bad the Beast’s business was performing, and how close they came to being decimated had the duo not elected to take this gamble. In any event, this early friction isn’t Sherwood and Coles’ real dilemma; they can find other reporters to write this stuff. The real challenge is figuring out how to monetize this kind of populist tabloid fodder, and proving to the world that they’re as smart as their C.V.s suggest. Good luck!

🔮 Dept. of far-flung speculation: Earlier this week, Semafor media correspondent (and friend of Puck) Max Tani proffered a laundry list of potential successors for celebrated New Yorker editor David Remnick upon the inevitable event of his departure, whenever that might be. I have no names to add to the list, but certainly plenty to subtract. I sincerely commend Max (and, surely, Ben Smith) for the shit-stirring, but I can confidently say that many—indeed, most—of these folks will never come within a stone’s throw of that storied chair: Chris Hayes? Masha Gessen? Jodi Kantor? Might as well throw Barack Obama into the mix while you’re at it. (Oh, wait, they did…) At present, the most likely name on their list is probably an insider, a Daniel Zalewski type. But the salient point here is that, while Remnick certainly gets to make his recommendations, he doesn’t actually get to choose.

Godwin’s complaint appeared to betray not just insecurity, but also a stunning lack of self-awareness. OConnell’s elevation, two and a half months back, was an obvious vote of no confidence in Godwin. Indeed, Dana Walden, the Disney Entertainment co-chair, had created an entirely new position for OConnell in order to effectively demote Godwin and distance Burbank from the melodrama playing out at West 66th Street. So of course OConnell had been meddling—that was her mandate. And this was apparent to everyone at ABC—and across the broader industry—except, apparently, Godwin herself.

Since her arrival, OConnell has heard myriad complaints about Godwin’s leadership that, frankly, I and others have been writing about for a year and a half. In short, Godwin has not actually led the news organization, a score of current and former staffers say. She has not made meaningful strategic moves, programming initiatives, or major talent acquisitions. Instead, she has made performative (and mostly cringey) attempts to improve ABC’s once notoriously cutthroat culture—introducing do-not-disturb-mode weekends, leading all-staff birthday sing-a-longs, distributing sweatshirts from her alma mater, etcetera—while apparently bolstering her own reputation on the conference circuit. And, most notably, she has laid off veteran employees whom she perceived as critics, under the cover of requisite cost cuts, draining the network of its expertise and institutional knowledge in the process.

For years, Disney ignored or at least tolerated these complaints because ABC News was still drafting off the success of Godwin’s predecessors, as well as the on-air talent and executive producers who have largely been left alone to manage their fiefdoms. And while Godwin’s ineptitude would occasionally embarrass Burbank—most notably, her handling of the T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach affair, and that memorably disastrous Vanity Fair interview—it didn’t impact the business. After all, it was a minor irritant in the grand scheme of Disney’s various existential dilemmas: the Nelson Peltz proxy battle, the Netflix threat, the ESPN question, etcetera. Meanwhile, Godwin’s bosses surely sympathized with her plight as an outsider at an infamously cliquish workplace in a declining business. Indeed, at the time, Chris Licht was proving that some newsrooms eat their bosses alive.

Recent developments have made the consequences of Godwin’s leadership more tangible, however: Good Morning America, the division’s main revenue driver, which has battled with NBC’s Today for ratings preeminence for decades, is now perilously close to falling behind the perennially third-place CBS This Morning—a scenario that would have been unfathomable to past ABC News regimes. Last month, the network lost its beloved Washington bureau chief, Jonathan Greenberger, to Politico, an inconvenient forfeiture heading into the 2024 presidential election. I’m told Godwin had made an unsuccessful attempt to push him out of the job, apparently suspecting that he was among her detractors. Her machinations totally perplexed Greenberger—who naturally took a better offer across town—as well as OConnell, who scrambled to throw him a going-away party in Washington.

Other questionable moves have no doubt come to OConnell’s attention. At one point, Godwin sought to elevate Stacia Deshishku, her executive editor and a member of her inner circle, to executive vice president—a promotion that confers very significant benefits—only to be informed by Burbank that such positions required sign-off from the C.E.O. Deshishku was instead promoted to senior vice president, though this year her title was quietly changed to E.V.P., without an announcement. Godwin has also gone more than a year without a head of talent, having laid off Galen Gordon and then failed to lure away talent chiefs from NBC News and CBS News. (I’m told she is now looking at Traci Wilkes Smith, an Atlanta-based talent agent). Godwin also overrode an attempt to hire CNN P.R. veteran Lauren Pratapas as head of communications, reneging on a formal offer to Pratapas at the eleventh hour despite the desires of the Disney P.R. team.

Notably, Godwin signed a new contract at the exact moment she was layered by OConnell—an apparent gesture of good faith. And yet, presumably, one imagines that if Godwin has lost the support of both her bosses and her staff, there’s not much reason to keep her. (Disney and ABC News leadership declined to comment for this piece, and a Disney Entertainment spokesperson declined to address any of the aforementioned complaints about Godwin).

The elephant in the room, according to the twenty-some current and former ABC News sources I spoke to, is representation. Godwin is the first Black woman to lead a broadcast news division—a long-overdue, glass-shattering achievement that both Disney leadership and Godwin correctly trumpeted upon her appointment three years ago. Indeed, in early 2023, shortly after Godwin first came under scrutiny, Bob Iger told top ABC News talent, “Kim’s success is our success,” a quote that suggested an awareness of how Godwin’s tenure might reflect on the parentco itself. Sources with knowledge of the Disney leadership’s thinking suggest that they are now apprehensive about the optics surrounding her demotion and possible termination.

At the same time, several Black ABC News employees who initially celebrated Godwin’s historic appointment have since told me they quickly soured on her leadership. Some said they grew disenchanted after getting the sense that Godwin was more interested in promoting herself rather than elevating other people of color. A few also chafed at some of the race-related remarks Godwin has made that struck a dissonant chord. In multiple meetings, several sources present in the room said, Godwin claimed that Black people don’t watch the news. In at least one meeting, Godwin also bemoaned how, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, news networks had overcompensated for a lack of diversity in the leadership ranks—a remark some in the room interpreted as a criticism of some of her Black deputies.

Some of those sources say they are fearful Godwin will use the race issue to insulate herself from criticism or frame the narrative around her seemingly inevitable departure. However it shakes out, Walden and OConnell’s attempt to solve the Godwin dilemma will obviously require delicate choreography. “Race in the workplace is so nuanced that it can be easily weaponized by all sides and bad actors of any race,” one Black ABC News veteran told me. The truth, this person said, is that “Disney fell into the trap of the soft bigotry of low expectations and appointed someone everyone knows is unqualified to do the job… Now [they] are worried that firing the first Black woman would be an act of racism, when she is simply bad at her job.”