This was a move Licht could have also pulled at any time, and did not. Zaslav saved himself from saying anything in print he might come to regret. And then, the night before, Zaslav's personal comms person reached out to say, oops, nevermind, it's going to be "on background." Alberta in turn rejected that offer because he wanted the interview to be on the record or bust, and the talk never happened. He could have stopped it at any time by breaking a promise to Alberta and closing access.Īlberta demonstrates exactly how an executive might do this when, in his piece, he tells the story of how after months of persuasion he was finally scheduled to have an on-the-record interview with Licht's boss, the WBD CEO Zaslav. Nothing I've heard from sources suggests he wasn't, and a lot of what's in the story and what I've been told suggests he was. So, if at this point you're like: OK, but who the heck is to blame for this thing? I was right there with you after talking to all these people.īut then I remembered there is no way a story like this happens without Licht himself being super duper into all of it. The deep access, the long timeline, everything. Its publishing schedule got moved up only recently, this person says, because the disastrous town hall was such a great news peg. It's actually been sort of heartwarming to see sources who could kill each other over this close ranks and want to protect one another when SOMEONE definitely screwed up.Īnyway, in the course of reporting this all out, I saw evidence that shows people at both CNN and The Atlantic expected all along that the story would run sometime in the middle of 2023.Īlso, a person with direct knowledge of a publishing process discussed by multiple people at both CNN and The Atlantic tells me both sides knew from the beginning that this story was originally scheduled to be published in print in the summer of 2023. Plus news across mediums is getting whacked by a post-pandemic, post-Trump environment in which normal people are really happy to not give a hoot about current events for the next little while.įair enough! These are just comms people doing their job at a company that's got a lot of challenges beyond their control. Which means the real question is: Why the heck did CNN's comms team give Alberta so many long interviews with so many people over such a long period of time? Couldn't they have foreseen that bad events were headed CNN's way?Ĭable news as a sector is basically screwed, and it's only getting worse because mostly old people watch it and they don't live forever. There's a universe in which CNN could have given Alberta a ton of access over a short period of time, maybe just a day or a week or a month or even two, and his story wouldn't have had so many damning anecdotes and details. Like him (I assume), she came to regret it." The last big piece he did was this masterful takedown of Nikki Haley that continues to dog and define her. "It was doubly shocking to me that they thought Tim Alberta was the best idea for this. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |