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

Happy Valentine’s Day. Get your special someone a Puck subscription.

In tonight’s email, we go inside the Brady Briefing Room. Following the Hur Report, and Biden’s uncomfortable Peter Doocy confrontation, the White House press corps finally feels permitted to address head-on the questions surrounding the president’s acuity and energy—a topic they’ve been discussing privately among themselves for months. “There should have been tougher, more scrutinizing coverage of his age earlier,” one White House reporter told me.

But first…

🏈 Scoop: Spulu’s chief: The top executives at Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox have identified former Apple executive Pete Distad as the top candidate to helm their new sports streaming joint venture, per two sources familiar with the matter. Distad was hired by Apple from Hulu in 2013 and oversaw the business and operations side of the Apple TV app and Apple TV+, while also negotiating the company’s deals with Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball. As I first reported in Julia Alexander’s WIH+ email last night, Distad is the triumvirate’s top choice and one of two finalists for the position. The three companies are trying to close a deal with him now.

Meanwhile, there’s growing doubt among some media executives that this thing will ever actually launch, given the tricky logistics of governance and revenue sharing, the legal and regulatory questions, and the pressure from the leagues (see my partner John Ourand’s latest report on a contentious call between NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, the league’s chief media officer Brian Rolapp, and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro). In the meantime, Rich Greenfield just wants to know why Distad, a Hulu alum who “lived through the nightmare of working for a legacy media JV,” wants to do this all over again. As Don Draper once said, that’s what the money is for.

🏰 Layering Godwin: Disney has promoted Debra OConnell to the newly created role of president of news group and networks, creating a layer between Burbank and ABC News president Kim Godwin, whose disengaged and itinerant leadership style has long been criticized by ABC News veterans. Meanwhile, ABC News weekday programming is experiencing the sharpest declines in the 25-54 demo among all broadcast news networks. As readers may remember, I reported more than a year ago that Disney might promote OConnell to layer Godwin. It’s only surprising it took this long.

As of today, Godwin has extended her deal to remain president of the news network, but many insiders interpret this org chart maneuver as the beginning of her end. Sources described OConnell as a hardworking, hard-driving, no-bullshit, results-oriented leader who commands the respect of the rank and file and won’t suffer Godwin’s ineptitude or egomania. “This is Kim’s nightmare,” one ABC News veteran said. “Deb knows about all the problems already,” said another. “It won’t take her long to fix them.”

Another veteran media executive texted: “Well, that’s one way to get rid of Kim Godwin without getting rid of her. She’s now layered so far away from Iger that they’ll barely know ABC News exists.”

💸 Scoop: Finkelstein’s empty promise: Messenger founder and C.E.O. Jimmy Finkelstein wooed journalists to his ill-fated startup with written employment agreements that guaranteed severance payouts in the event of wrongful termination, former employees tell me. Many of the site’s top-level editors and reporters had clauses that guaranteed months’ worth of severance, which Finkelstein has so far denied them since shutting the site down last month. Agreements varied on a case-by-case basis, running from “two months to considerably longer,” one source said. In one case, I’m told, Finkelstein lured a single mom with a special-needs kid away from a stable job with verbal and written promises of severance that he has so far reneged on.

The fear among the Messenger diaspora is that Finkelstein will declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy for his LLC and thus evade the severance obligations. On Tuesday, Finkelstein told Axios’ Sara Fischer that he was now considering how he might compensate his former employees, but stopped short on specifics. “We are gathering all of our assets and we’ll see what happens,” he said.

I found it notable that Finkelstein, who has repeatedly refused my requests for comment or an interview, spoke to Axios, given that company co-founder Jim VandeHei recently lit him up as a snake oil salesman via a fiery quote to me.

I reached out to VandeHei again this week to get his response to the severance issue, and he did not hold back. “How in the hell do you live in Palm Beach and own a mansion in the Hamptons and say you can’t pay severance and healthcare for people who risked their careers for you?” VandeHei told me. “This is why people hate the rich. We all make tough business decisions with unfortunate human consequences. That’s the tough stuff of ownership. How you handle those shit moments defines you. I will gladly rescind my comments and applaud Jimmy if he does right by the people he made promises to, many in writing, to provide severance and healthcare. Hiding behind his LLC might be legal, but it’s lame.”

🇩🇪 Axel in America: Axel Springer has announced a new U.S. leadership team spearheaded by C.O.O. Gabe Brotman, a Politico veteran who will now oversee all of Axel’s U.S. operations, reporting to deputy chairman and news media president Jan Bayer. With 2,300 employees in the U.S. across Politico, Business Insider, and other titles, Axel now has roughly the same number of journalists in the U.S. as in Germany.

Meanwhile, I’m told Bill Ackman still intends to file that lawsuit against Axel over B.I.’s Neri Oxman reporting. When it hits, send all requests for comment to new U.S. comms chief Nick Pacilio, who used to run defense for Dorsey-era Twitter.

⛰️ Paramount cuts: Paramount Global chief Bob Bakish says the company will lay off roughly 800 employees, or about 3 percent of its workforce. The cuts will affect 20 employees at CBS News, I’m told, including correspondent Catherine Herridge, who is fighting a First Amendment battle over her refusal to divulge the names of sources for reporting she conducted while at Fox News.

🦔 Scoop: Fox’s Hedgehog: Fox Corp. is investing $5 million in a new digital media startup led by former Parler C.E.O. John Matze, my colleague Tina Nguyen scoops. “From what I’ve seen, Hedgehog is supposed to be a news aggregation site with a social media network aspect—kind of like a center-right hybrid between the Drudge Report and LinkedIn,” Tina tells me. “$5 million is a small amount of seed capital, even for a digital media startup. (The company has made similar investments in startups like Eluvio, a blockchain platform, and Caffeine, a broadcasting platform). It’s also notable that it’s happening under Lachlan, who took control of Fox after Rupert retired last year.”

Last Thursday, after Robert Hur’s report clearing Biden of wrongdoing in the classified materials investigation was subsumed by his commentary on the president’s acuity, I texted a producer at CNN to gauge their coverage plans for the evening. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Axelrod had been booked for the majority of primetime. Of course, his attempts to underscore the political significance of the report, which he described as “a shiv” into Biden’s reelection campaign, contended with the president’s loyalists, who sought to direct attention elsewhere. These pals, true believers, and surrogates criticized Hur—a Republican with an agenda!—for cosplaying as a neurologist and reiterated the familiar Trump-inflected whataboutism—juxtaposing Biden with another elderly, misremembering man who also happens to be an aspiring fascist facing 91 felony charges. These arguments were even more audible over on MSNBC.

And so it went in subsequent days. Biden advisers and surrogates also tended to utilize another familiar, imperfect argument: Behind closed doors, where it matters, the president is sharp, detail-oriented, on top of it, and in full control of his faculties, they insist. This talking point has become an exhausting refrain: I heard it Sunday on Meet the Press from Biden senior adviser Mitch Landrieu (“This guy is tough, he’s smart, he’s on his game”) and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (“He is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented and focused”). And I heard it again over breakfast on Monday morning from a source very close to Biden.

And while this depiction of Biden may be true, it’s an impossible argument to win because it inherently contradicts what many Americans just watched, themselves. As Jon Stewart astutely pointed out in his return to The Daily Show on Monday, why can’t the White House put that sharp, focused, and on-top-of-it version of Biden on camera? Of late, the White House has avoided every opportunity to do so, even opting out of the traditional Super Bowl pregame interview.

I’m not here to validate a cable news disagreement. Of course, both arguments are flawed. The presidency is an office, and Biden is surrounded by brilliant and capable people who help guide his decision-making and have led the country out of Covid, aligned NATO against Russia, passed historic infrastructure, manufacturing, gun-safety, and inflation-reduction legislation, and facilitated economic growth of 3.3 percent in the most recent quarter. And yet, this isn’t—or shouldn’t be—a binary issue. Just because Biden defeated Trump in a once-in-a-lifetime election, which featured mail-in voting during a pandemic, doesn’t mean he alone can defeat him now. The Republican Party establishment seemed to do everything in its power to line up contenders as alternatives to Trump. The Democratic machine is openly hostile to any contemplation of another option and, as the Axelrod affair demonstrates, gets seriously pissed at anyone with the temerity to break rank.

That all now appears to be shifting. For better or worse, it is now open season on the question of Biden’s age. And that is largely because, as Axelrod himself pointed out, “the most damaging things in politics are the things that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions.” Only in this case, it’s not so much a suspicion as a perceptible and audible fact. The president obviously looks and sounds like he’s lost a step—understandably so!—and neither the gratuity of Hur’s report nor the myriad threats posed by a second Trump presidency can negate it. And this all has a number of journalists covering the president second-guessing some of their reporting decisions and looking at their subject with fresh eyes.

Since the beginning of Biden’s term, many White House journalists have reported on, or alluded to, concerns surrounding Biden’s age in often gentle or euphemistic ways. Nevertheless, several of the journalists I spoke with said the true significance and importance of that issue, as they observed it, was not reflected in the coverage—often due to the sense that it was sensitive or unseemly, or because there was no obvious evidence that it had affected his performance as president beyond optics. Or, left unsaid, perhaps because they didn’t want to ruin their relationship with the White House by being the lone wolf to speak up.“It was something that felt indelicate to talk about,” one member of the White House press corps told me. In retrospect, some journalists felt like it probably warranted more coverage: “The amount of time we spent talking about it versus the time we spent reporting on it was not the same,” one of the reporters said. “There should have been tougher, more scrutinizing coverage of his age earlier.”

The Hur report has obviously given the press corps greater license to cover the issue—in the same way, one journalist noted, that the Monica Lewinsky scandal gave the White House press corps greater license to talk about the flirtatious behavior they’d witnessed Bill Clinton exhibiting toward some women, but never felt like they had the freedom to write about in their pages. And, as one reporter noted, the problem with the age issue is that it only moves in one direction: “It’s not just the next nine months,” this reporter said. “It’s potentially the next five years.”

Whatever the case, Biden’s age is now a thing, an enduring thing, a challenge for the administration and campaign, and a test for news organizations trying to be honest brokers without losing sight of the fact that, yes, Trump’s myriad things—the criminal charges, the demagoguery, the disregard for the electoral process, and his own age-related verbal peculiarities—are national risks of a whole other magnitude. Still, as Stewart noted on The Daily Show, “The stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny; it actually makes him more subject to scrutiny.”

Stewart explained his logic with a rather amusing Conan the Barbarian analogy, but it effectively amounts to this: If you’re among those who support Biden and believe that Trump presents an existential threat to American democracy, you should be even more concerned about the vigor of the one man who stands between him and the White House. At the very least, you certainly shouldn’t be pretending like the conversation is unwarranted. Time does fly, and it’ll be November before you know it.