From the Beast’s media desk |
Welcome to this week’s edition of Confider, the media newsletter that pulls back the curtain to reveal what’s really going on inside the world’s most powerful navel-gazing industry. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
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CNN DRAMA SPILLS OVER: The fallout from the firing of Brian Stelter and the cancellation of Reliable Sources continues this week as CNN insiders tell Confider that staffers cannot shake the feeling the shocking move was made to appease John Malone, a right-leaning billionaire, close friend of the Murdoch family, and key Warner Bros. Discovery board member who has made it well-known that he would like CNN to be more “centrist”—whatever that means. While Malone has denied he is “directly involved” in any decisions about CNN, multiple current and former staffers who spoke to us relayed a fear that the libertarian mogul is indirectly dictating an agenda to newly installed CNN boss Chris Licht. Sources further suggested that internal fears about future changes stem from how Licht has kept his cards close to his chest, with members of his own management team being left in the dark about next moves. The news of Stelter’s axing was actually supposed to be announced Friday with a carefully managed story placed with NPR, sources told Confider, but the news leaked early, including—perhaps curiously—to two conservative outlets, the Daily Mail and the Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller, which were both tipped off on Thursday morning. Stelter had been an antagonist of right-wing media for much of his time at the Reliable Sources desk, but other similarly vocal CNN stars like Don Lemon and Jim Acosta are safe for now, sources familiar with the matter told Confider. Instead, these insiders said, Licht will next turn his attention to “blowing up” CNN’s ratings-challenged morning show New Day, having brought on his old buddy Ryan Kadro from CBS to help rework it. Nevertheless, staffers fear further cutbacks and more layoffs as Licht, who has told friends he speaks to David Zaslav on a daily basis, seemingly carries out the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and his board’s wishes to make CNN less controversial and, in the words of several current and former CNN staffers, “more vanilla.” A CNN spokesperson declined to comment.
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LETTERS FROM LACHLAN: Mass media heir Lachlan Murdoch stayed silent on Monday after the Aussie news site Crikey took out an ad in The New York Times taunting him to sue them. The ding-dong centers over a column Crikey published in June that effectively blamed the eldest Murdoch son, his father Rupert Murdoch, and “their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators” for the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and its resultant political crisis. Through his lawyers, Lachlan fired off a series of legal letters resulting in the article getting yanked from Crikey only for it to be re-published last weekend, seemingly as a middle-finger to the thin-skinned media mogul. And now the site has published all the legal letters between the parties—a move that will no doubt give mega-billionaires some pause before threatening journalists. Sources told Confider that the scathing column hit a particularly touchy nerve for the Fox Corp boss, especially coming from a publication based Down Under where he and former actress and WonderBra model Sarah Murdoch live most of the year. “You have made it clear in your lawyer’s letters you intend to take court action to resolve this alleged defamation,” read the defiant Crikey ad in the Times. “We await your writ so that we can test this important issue of freedom of public interest journalism in a courtroom.” A rep for Murdoch declined to comment.
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JO LING GONE: NBC News business and tech correspondent Jo Ling Kent is out at the network after she made a series of allegedly “crazy” demands and bosses opted not to renew her contract, two people with knowledge of the situation told Confider. Kent, who joined NBC from the Fox Business Network back in 2016, has been missing from air for months. She was most frequently a contributor to the Today show and NBC’s evening news broadcast. Our sources said she claimed to NBC bosses that she had another offer and then “demanded the world” to stay before network brass called her bluff. Network insiders suggested this exit is a sign of the times at 30 Rock, especially at Today, which is experiencing woeful ratings and was even recently beaten by a reformatted CBS Mornings. A NBC News flack declined to comment while Kent did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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BROTHER IN, BROTHER OUT: The New York Times last week announced former BuzzFeed investigative journalist Ken Bensinger will join as its new disinfo reporter covering right-wing media. Bensinger, who was the lead byline when BuzzFeed published the infamous Steele dossier, would have joined his brother Greg Bensinger, who joined the paper in 2020 as an editorial board member. But there will be only one Bensinger byline in the Times, Confider has learned: Greg was laid off last month and his position was eliminated as the Gray Lady’s opinion section continues to undergo drastic changes. “Since joining our editorial board over two years ago, Greg Bensigner has penned numerous essays and provided valuable perspectives on technology and its impact to our society,” a Times spokesperson emailed Confider. “We thank him for his contributions and wish him well in his next endeavors.” Greg Bensinger declined to comment.
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BARSTOOL BROS REUNITE: The misogynist meatheads over at Barstool Sports have apparently rehired Francis Ellis, the blogger who was fired in 2019 after publishing a story mocking Mackenzie Lueck, a Utah college student who’d been missing for more than 10 days and was later found dead. At the time, Barstool’s bro-in-chief Dave Portnoy publicly lashed Ellis’ “ridiculous lack of judgment,” but now the New York-based writer appears to be back in the fold, posting a Barstool-branded video to Twitter “reintroducing” himself to the tune of Jay Z’s “Public Service Announcement (Interlude)” and writing “See you in September.” Portnoy added in a separate tweet: “Welcome back.”
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NEW YORKER SHIFTING SEATS: The New Yorker on Monday announced a series of internal job changes, none of which were related to replacing the recently fired Erin Overbey as archives editor. In a staff-wide memo, Editor-in-Chief David Remnick wrote that his deputy editor Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn will partly move away from that role to edit features and mentor editors across the outlet. “Deirdre’s skills as an editor have been sorely missed and our journalism will benefit tremendously from her reimmersion in this work,” Remick wrote. “She will continue to act as an arbiter on select operations and business matters, advising me and many others.” That shift meant a promotion for managing editor Leily Kleinbard to a newly created executive managing editor role, creating a vacancy for Jessica Henderson, the magazine’s A-issue editor, to move up to the managing editor position. The memo also announced a new job posting for executive director of editorial operations, but no mention of any intention to hire for the archives role left vacant by Overbey when she was fired a month ago.
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IN PLAIN SIGHT: Former president Bill Clinton at the annual Artists & Writers Charity Softball Game on Saturday in East Hampton where the writers made an epic comeback in the ninth inning to win… Dennis Rodman and NBC’s Jonathan Allen smoking cigars outside Shelly’s Backroom in D.C. late Saturday, hours before Allen reported the ex-NBA star is headed to Russia to plead for Brittney Griner’s release… Washington Post exec editor Sally Buzbee at Union Station on Sunday after the latest of her many trips down the Acela corridor.
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WE HEAR WHISPERS: Substack’s resident anti-”cancel culture” crusader Bari Weiss and wife Nellie Bowles, a fellow ex-New York Times outcast, are expecting a baby girl in the next few weeks. |
More from the Beast’s Media Desk |
—If you can’t already tell, more changes are coming to CNN and, as The Daily Beast first reported, CEO Chris Licht cautioned staffers on Friday that they may not “like” or “understand” these impending changes. Ominous. More on that here.
—Dr. Mehmet Oz keeps stepping on rakes during his Senate bid. Last week brought us an ill-conceived ad in which he complained about the price of putting together a crudité platter. Not even his staunchest right-wing media allies over at Newsmax could stand by without giving him grief over it. Read about that here.
—Fox News daytime programming is rife with cheesy, cringe-inducing commentary, but apparently making references to an enema is a bridge too far. Fox host Dagen McDowell on Monday scolded Jason Chaffetz on-air after he repeatedly tried to workshop a hacky joke about the rectal-cleansing procedure and the IRS. Watch that here. |
—After getting fired by Fox News for accurately calling the 2020 election results, Chris Stirewalt originally seemed hesitant to criticize the cable channel. However, the Times got a hold of his upcoming book and he doesn’t hold back, calling out the “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred” spewed by his former employer with the blessings of its “hypocritical” corporate overseers. Read more here.
—Substack routinely professes its devotion to “free speech” and its hatred of all things “cancel culture,” and yet it fired editor extraordinaire Sam Thielman for the horrific crime of editing our former colleague Spencer Ackerman’s scathing post explaining why he quit the controversial newsletter platform. More here. —A week after Gannett laid off 50 journalists, Defector published a withering takedown of the holding company—whose CEO makes a $7.7 million salary while staffers earn a median salary of $48,419—that has accelerated the end of print media. “Gannett isn’t a company. It’s an angel of death.” More here.
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**WHAT ARE WE OUTRAGED ABOUT NOW?** |
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After fuming about the cringey “Dark Brandon” meme that the White House and #Resistance libs inevitably drove into the ground, Fox News moved on to whining about another cringey Biden meme last week. Yet, this time around, all they really had to go on was a single New York Times style section piece, headlined “The Return of Aviator Joe,” which spotlighted how the president was suddenly sporting his favorite shades amid a series of legislative victories. Biden’s sunglasses were met with predictably outsized outrage from right-wing media. Over on Fox News chatfest Outnumbered, which led its Wednesday broadcast with this story, host Emily Compagno said the Times piece was “bordering on offensive” because it was around the one-year anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal. While Trump flack-turned-Fox pundit Kayleigh McEnany snarked that Biden is “not Tom Cruise,” anchor Harris Faulkner found a more pseudo-philosophical angle for her outrage: “I think it is ironic they cover his eyes. There were so many Americans that express they don’t feel like they are seen by this president and the White House.” Fox News court jester Greg Gutfeld, meanwhile, reacted to the article with his trademark brand of groan-worthy humor: “He’s wearing sunglasses in case his eyes fall out,” he quipped to scattered laughter.
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