Greetings from Bolinas, some 20 miles up the coast from San Francisco, and welcome back to In the Room.

A quick reminder that I’ll be back in your inbox on Monday, as we expand the In the Room franchise to three days a week. If for any reason you’re still hitting the paywall, now’s the time to subscribe.

In tonight’s issue, news and notes on The New York Times’s still-metastasizing Nick Kristof debacle, which has brought new scrutiny on the Times and rekindled long-latent tensions between the newsroom and the Opinion side.

🎙️ Plus, on the latest episode of The Grill Room, Julia and I discussed Byron Allen’s eye-popping $120 million deal to acquire BuzzFeed, the rationale behind NBC’s Wordle licensing agreement, and the perennial trials and tribulations of CNN as it stands up a new weather app. Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.

Also mentioned in this issue: David Ellison, Joe Kahn, Kathy Kingsbury, Ezra Klein, Bret Stephens, Katie and Stephen Miller, Meredith Kopit Levien, Brendan Carr, Bibi Netanyahu, and many more…

Open Tab

David meets the Millers: David Ellison’s Paramount is eyeing an expansion of its podcast business, per Axios, and has had preliminary discussions with a number of potential partners and platforms, including Paragon Collective and Jubilee Media. Paramount sources stressed that the talks are nascent, but it’s clear there’s interest in opening revenue lines around video podcasts, much like Netflix’s deal with The Ringer.

The most intriguing detail here, however, is that Paramount is courting Katie Miller, the former Trump administration official and wife of Trump consigliere Stephen Miller. Katie’s YouTube channel has less than 58,000 subscribers, which has led critics to speculate that this is yet another move to court the White House—a micro version of Amazon’s $40 million Melania deal. That may be an uncharitable interpretation, but perhaps not invalid given all the other genuflections.

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The BuzzFeed 2.0 media tour: Byron Allen is on the press circuit following his $120 million BuzzFeed acquisition, which I dissected on Wednesday. (It’s really a $20 million deal.) Byron’s booked for a Grill Room visit in the coming days. In the meantime, he sat down with New York’s Charlotte Klein, who asked him whether he had any anxiety about acquiring a nearly bankrupt, post-prime media brand. “Not at all,” he told her. “What you’re talking about is, you know, you’re under the hood. That’s the media. Not the consumer. I don’t live in that bubble. The media’s gonna do what they’re gonna do, say what they’re going to say, but quite frankly, the media doesn’t know.”

He continued: “People who listen to the media, they crash and burn. The ones who listen to the people go to the top. I don’t worry about the media. I focus on the people. The people love BuzzFeed. The people love Tasty. The people love HuffPost.” Good luck, Byron!
And finally…: F.C.C. chair Brendan Carr had lunch with the FT, at Washington’s King Street Oyster Bar. The exchange really captured his essence: He’s both “perfectly pleasant” and mildly insufferable.

The ITR Index

5 percent: The extent of the staff cuts at Business Insider this week—a minor trimming on the heels of last year’s layoffs, which cut the workforce by more than a fifth. Still, one imagines that the initial bloodletting was intended in part to preempt this kind of incremental right-sizing. Alas.

And now, the main event…

Will There Be “Blood Libel”?

Nick Kristof’s exposé on Israeli prison abuse has brought the threat of a potential “blood libel” case from Netanyahu and another epic internal schism on Eighth Avenue, once again pitting the Opinion section against the newsroom. Here’s how it’s playing on the inside.

Dylan Byers

Even by Times standards, it was a heavy week: Nick Kristof’s radioactive Opinion piece—a lengthy exposé alleging that Israeli prison guards had engaged in depraved and systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians—set in motion a series of high-pitched events. Pro-Israel advocates immediately accused the paper of antisemitism. Incredulous editorials in The Wall Street Journal and The Free Press followed. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu threatened to sue the Times for libel against the State of Israel. Whether it is actually possible for a nation to bring a libel case against a foreign newspaper is not the concern of this column; suffice to say that the threat itself achieved the desired conflagratory effect.

The Times is standing by its star columnist, and has issued several public statements asserting that the column, supported by numerous on-the-record victim accounts and independent human rights reports, was rigorously and meticulously fact-checked. In private conversations, the paper’s upper echelons stress that Nick is a two-time Pulitzer winner with a reporter’s DNA, and attest to a rigorous editing process and a lack of factual errors.

Nevertheless, many Times journalists told me they remain suspicious of Nick’s sourcing for the most incendiary allegations, skeptical that those sources would have cleared the standards of the newsroom rather than Opinion, and mildly miffed at the Pulitzer-eager columnist for bringing scrutiny on the paper in a piece that should have been in their jurisdiction. Above all else, many seemed exasperated by what they viewed as another instance of the Times brand being undercut by the actions of another department that, they feel, is not held to the same standards. Said one, “I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section.”

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The distinction between news and opinion matters only to the inmates at this point, and you can imagine how much time some reporters spend bitching about the reputational effects that an Ezra Klein or Bret Stephens piece of content has on the brand. But, in this case, the journalists’ sentiments toward Nick underscore just how much his column, despite being an Opinion piece, has become the newsroom’s issue—and the first real crisis of the otherwise mostly peaceful Joe Kahn era, the recent Dianna Russini scandal at The Athletic notwithstanding.

The Times has reported on two allegations of Israeli sexual abuse against Palestinians in the past, and the paper’s leadership says it feels no need to have the newsroom rereview Nick’s work—which, it maintains, contains no factual errors. Nevertheless, given the scrutiny, Nick has effectively put the onus on Joe and the Times newsdesk to engage in a referendum on the Times’s own editorial product—either by advancing the reporting or ignoring it, neither of which is likely to quell the issue or satisfy the critics.

The Times has endured many scandals in recent years, of course: Tom Cotton, Caliphate, the Trump suit, Russini, etcetera, to say nothing of the more distant Jayson Blair and Judith Miller controversies. But, in truth, those all had lower stakes and fewer dimensions. It would be hard to conceive of a more Timesian scandal than a legendary columnist pitting news vs. opinion by way of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The scandal is still unfolding, and every Times kremlinologist will be watching to see how both Joe and Opinion editor Kathy Kingsbury navigate it. One imagines it could have implications for both of their futures at the paper, as well as the succession plan. And despite nearly half a dozen statements from the Times stressing that it’s time to move on, no one has.

But above all else, Kristofgate points to the Times’s broader institutional anxiety at a time when it is both more influential and more diversified than ever. The Times is not merely a newspaper anymore—it’s a $12 billion multifaceted lifestyle brand with a sprawling product ecosystem that has to grow and adapt while still preserving the trust and integrity of the core news report. The Opinion page has been among the most-fertile growth areas, as the Times tries to elevate the likes of Ezra and Lulu Garcia-Navarro to stardom and reap the benefits of their influence. But to hold attention in the political discourse is also to court the sort of controversy that Meredith Kopit Levien doesn’t need.

The Times leadership wants its readers to recognize the difference between news and opinion, just as they hoped to keep the Russini drama at arm’s length by emphasizing that she wrote for The Athletic—a distinction that likely still matters more internally than publicly. But good luck making that point with the protestors on Eighth Avenue, the Anti-Defamation League, or, indeed, the prime minister of Israel. And while it’s unlikely Bibi will even bring the lawsuit—he’s threatened the Times before—let alone force A.G. Sulzberger to stand trial in The Hague, this is the sort of thing that will certainly inspire subscription cancellations and follow the paper for years to come.

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