Prior to the merger, there was Wall Street chatter that Warner Bros. Zaslav’s generous pay-north of two hundred and forty-six million dollars in 2021, when the merger was taking shape-and newly minted media moguldom, which comes with perfectly pressed summer suits and a Beverly Hills villa previously owned by Robert Evans, belied his somewhat straightforward task of nickel-and-diming the company into something near profitability. He also killed a Batgirl movie that was already in postproduction and laid off more than three hundred CNN employees. A photograph of Malone is positioned prominently on a credenza behind Zaslav’s desk, in L.A., where you might find a portrait of a wife or children.Īfter the merger went through, in the spring of 2022, one of Zaslav’s first major moves was to shut down CNN+, CNN’s streaming experiment, a month after it launched. Discovery was born with more than fifty billion dollars in debt.) Zaslav had a behind-the-scenes partner: his mentor John Malone, the libertarian billionaire. David Zaslav, who piloted the merger and would run the new company, needed to cut costs and make an inordinate amount of money. Discovery, was the latest hybrid beast, cobbled together from prestige parts-HBO and CNN-and Discovery’s lowbrow reality-TV chum, to emerge from the fragmented media landscape. ![]() Now Zucker thinks that was pretense-an elaborate cover for CNN’s new owner to get rid of him, a man who many believe made the network synonymous with anti-Trump sentiment. Jeff Zucker had been ousted after it was revealed that he had been in a long-term affair with a fellow-executive at the network. Licht took over CNN last year in the fog of scandal. “Zucker couldn’t do this shit,” Licht said in one memorable scene, referencing his predecessor while hoisting a metal pole under the keen eye of his celebrity trainer. Licht, who had spurred so many gossipy headlines and titillated certain media columnists to no end, was felled in a blaze of remarkable TV-exec hubris, having participated in a good old-fashioned magazine profile. Little did we know that it wasn’t just the work of Canadian wildfires but the television gods portending ill: with the morning came news that Chris Licht, the C.E.O of CNN, had been fired. ![]() ![]() New York City went to sleep Tuesday night under an acrid haze and an apocalyptically eerie sky.
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