Preview

“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 …