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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

How Journalists Fawn Over Media Moguls
Right up until they're sacked

"To some, he is a futurist who recognizes that WarnerMedia must change
if it is to survive and prosper in the streaming era." So wrote Joe
Flint

in a (paywalled) Wall Street Journal profile of WarnerMedia CEO Jason
Kilar. The $52 million-a-year-or at least last year-executive was
given the superhero treatment that media moguls have come to expect from
mere journalists. Kilar, readers were informed, has not only "led one
of the most radical overhauls in the entertainment industry: undoing
centurylong business practices, putting new leadership in place,
slashing many jobs

and attempting to turn a vaunted studio into a content factory for the
company's streaming service," but he also knows where the bathrooms
are on the studio lot. (We learn, by the way, that the $52 million man
decided to make fully 2,000 workers jobless as a result of
"consolidation.") He has, Mr. Flint explains, "undergone baptism
by fire."

But not to worry, people. The dude was mos' def up for the job.
Comcast CEO Jeff Shell-a mere $16.5 million man
-said
of Kilar, "I think he knows what it takes to make HBO Max successful
and he's done a good job." This was a popular view, at least with
the other Masters of the Universe whom the article quoted. "He has
strong views on what he wants to do and when he wants to do those
things, he goes and pursues them," said Andy Jassy (compensation,
$35.8 million
),
who worked with Mr. Kilar at Amazon. So too, "entertainment mogul"
Jeffrey Katzenberg, a billionaire
for whom $52
million is chump change: "The obstacles are enormous and he's got a
really huge challenge, but I think he's up for it." Flint closed out
the piece-which did not quote any creative people who are furious with
the way HBO Max is treating their work, nor God forbid, any laborers or
the laid-off 2,000-with this inspirational observation of Obi-Wan
Kilar: "Change is hard for a lot of people ... And my job as a leader
is to provide context and rationale, and explanation behind the
change."

There are a lot of things one could say about this piece, but the most
obvious one is that it had a remarkably short shelf life. The Flint
piece ran last Friday. On Monday morning, AT&T announced it was cutting
loose WarnerMedia and with it, everyone seems to agree, Mr. Kilar. AT&T
purchased Warner in 2018 for $85 billion, but this new casting off and
recombination, done with Discovery, involves the transfer of only about
$43 billion worth of assets
from
Discovery to AT&T, so it is yet another massive screwup. But this is a
business defined by such screwups. The Times' breathless coverage of
the "media juggernaut" in the works correctly notes that the new
deal "indicates a failed acquisition strategy." The Washington
Post's Paul Farhi noted in a tweet
a record that
makes the 1962 Mets look good. The original Warner/AOL merger set a
major-league record for bad business judgment. Verizon's purchase of
Yahoo and AOL were also major money-losers for its stockholders. This is
to say nothing-and rare is the article that says anything-of the
countless jobs lost and the journalistic coverage that was decimated as
a result.

But hey, here we go again. Kilar, Friday's superhero, is set to start
spending more time with his family (with a payoff of just $5 million for
doing nothing next year). By Monday morning, we were learning from the
Times

of the bright future ahead for Discovery CEO David Zaslav (compensation,
$37.7 million
):
"A swashbuckling executive who can recall ratings figures off the top
of his head ... a hobnobbing mogul known for hosting lavish
get-togethers at his house in the Hamptons." It's also a win for the
80-year-old billionaire John Malone, "the cable pioneer and one of the
fiercest competitors in media," according to the Times. (Malone, who
fancies himself the kind of hero who shows up in Ayn Rand novels
, is
a major stockholder in Discovery, as well as, apparently, the largest
private land owner in the United States
.)
According to Variety
,
"the transaction has all the hallmarks of a Malone-engineered deal in
that shareholders avoid taxes through the complicated structure known as
a Reverse Morris Trust, a process which allows AT&T to spinoff
WarnerMedia as a separate entity that will then merge with Discovery."
Take notes, aspiring media moguls: Part of your job is to ensure that
you and your fellow superheroes avoid paying the taxes paid by the
schmucks who work for you.

The deal also appears to revive the fortunes of CNN president Jeff
Zucker (compensation, $6.3 million
) who is apparently
Zaslav's BFF. The Times

lets us know that the two share "golf games in the Hamptons where
their sprawling estates sit a 10-minute drive apart. (Mr. Zucker is
inland; Mr. Zaslav has the oceanfront view.)" What's more, "they
were a formidable team when they were together at NBC," according to
Jeff Gaspin (bathroom cost, just $60,000, not $200,000, dammit
),
a former chairman of entertainment at NBCUniversal. "They'll make a
formidable team at Warner if Jeff chooses to stay."

Zaslav calls the CNN president "one of the greatest media leaders of
all time" and praised CNN's journalism as "exceptional." Zucker
is also said to be quite popular at CNN, having led them through the
difficult years of the Trump presidency. What does not get said nearly
frequently enough is that without Zucker, there would almost certainly
have been no Trump presidency
.

As I wrote in Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is
Worse
,
at NBC, it was Zucker who gave The Apprentice the green light, saving
Trump from his deserved fate in "the dustbin of best-forgotten 1980s
history with the likes of Milli Vanilli and Mr. T." When Trump entered
the presidential race in 2015, Zucker was ensconced in the top job at
CNN:

"The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that
and approached it that way," he told a reporter. And just as sports
broadcasters hire hosts who can make boring games sound interesting, and
keep the audience entertained regardless of their level of expertise,
so, too, Zucker chose pundits with no discernible qualifications
whatsoever, save their willingness to sing the praises of Donald Trump.
Zucker hired Jeffrey Lord, a journeyman conservative author who
repeatedly compared Trump to Martin Luther King Jr., and Kayleigh
McEnany, an attractive young law student who consistently argued that
Trump "doesn't lie," but that instead, "the press lies." ...
According to Zucker's preferred metric, these hires were more than
justified. "Everybody says, 'Oh, I can't believe you have Jeffrey
Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,'" he said. "But you know what? They know
who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are"-as if this somehow
justified their lies and the lunatic conspiracy theories they passed
along to viewers.

Zucker even proved willing to hire Trump's former campaign manager,
Corey Lewandowski, in June 2016, not long after an incident in which
Lewandowski was charged with misdemeanor battery following his physical
attack against a female reporter whose question he did not like. (The
charges were later dropped, though not before Lewandowski was accused by
another Trump supporter of sexual assault.) Lewandowski had lost an
internal power struggle within the Trump campaign, and with it his job.
Such a hire would not normally be considered unusual in the incestuous
world of cable TV commentary, but in this case, Lewandowski had signed a
nondisclosure agreement that contained a nondisparagement clause before
leaving the campaign. That meant he was legally enjoined from saying
anything that might reflect badly on Trump-even if it was truthful.
Zucker did not care. Truth was not the metric: ratings were.

During the lead-up to a campaign rally, CNN would promote the event with
live footage of an empty lectern and captions on the screen that read:
"DONALD TRUMP EXPECTED TO SPEAK ANY MINUTE." No other
candidate-Republican or Democrat-was treated with anything remotely
like this degree of attention and pretend-news value. According to the
calculations of data scientist Kalev Leetaru, Donald Trump was mentioned
on CNN almost eight times more than any other Republican candidate. Sam
Nunberg, a Trump strategist at the time, later credited CNN as a
campaign "asset." The network's willingness to allow Trump to
fulfill his goal to "saturate the airwaves," he noted, increased his
credibility, especially early in the campaign, at a time when Rupert
Murdoch and Roger Ailes were still trying to find a way to put the
kibosh on his candidacy over at Fox.

So, um, great: Give this guy more power over what Americans see and hear
about the world; yeah, that's the ticket ...

Odds and Ends

I somehow missed the state of Michigan's declaration of "What's
Going On Day" this past January. Belatedly, here's
Marvin Gaye singing it live, and here
is the "Playing for Change" version,
and here

is Michael McDonald's version, and here
is the Cyndi Lauper version, and here again
, is a 2019-released video version of
Marvin singing it, this time with politics.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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