Dalton Delan | The Unspin Room: The art of media empire war
Last night I had the strangest dream …
A dream of two titans, baldies both, jefes: one a Jeff of the Amazon everything store, retail by mail and accumulated cumulus computing clout, the other a once-wunderkind Jeff of The Today Show once upon a time and now in his last year of CNNing.
In my dream, I replayed their same-week announcements that they were stepping down or away — seemingly separate, united only in the surprise of their untimely abdication. There was ink on each regarding what they might do. For Jeff Bezos, perhaps he would slip the surly bonds of our Blue Origin like the Musk man. For lesser Jeff Zucker, was he spinning a crafty PR assault on Jason Kilar in a Game of Thrones played out in The New York Times for the soul of WarnerMedia? Good luck with that, JZ.
The press has missed the forest for the trees. Still dreaming, I stroll along S Street in the tony Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where the Obamas are neighbors and Jarvanka have been, too, before the collapse of their particular breed of kleptocracy sent them scurrying south to Florida, where all the nuts eventually roll.
My midnight meanderings take me past the former Textile Museum, one of the two properties being combined by Bezos to form the largest mansion in the District, whose 27,000 square feet include 25 bathrooms. I sure hope we don’t experience another run of toilet paper. I suppose he could wander over to the former president’s shack and borrow a roll. Be cool on TikTok.
This Amazonian abode puts the master of the universe’s morning jog an easy mile or two from The Washington Post, which Bezos personally purchased to keep democracy from dying in darkness, and from which Marty Baron, executive editor of Spotlight fame, has also recently announced his retirement. Coinkydink? I think not. Now the plot thickens, my friends. As we reside in the land of cabals, conspiracies and shadow governments, I shall point us to where the rubber of dreams meets the road we’re on. If I’m off, it’s only words.
John Stankey, CEO of AT&T, is nobody’s fool, and he knows that the future of WarnerMedia is in streaming services such as HBO Max — something which Jeff Zucker was sorely lagging in crafting from the clay of CNN. Zucker is a content not a platform guy, and having birthed Donald Frankenstein during his “Apprentice”-ship at NBC, he turned coat and taunted Trump as he planted a flag for CNN in the cable news firmament, though his old stomping ground of MSNBC lapped him in the race for rabid soundbites.
Were I Stankey, I’d be losing patience with this stunted third arm of telempire. My guess is he looks to unload CNN this year.
Which brings us back to Zucker announcing he is running out his contract. He might as well fly a stunt plane over Bezos trailing a “Pick me!” banner. What I am saying is: Bezos bought the WashPost; the logical second shoe to drop is on CNN. By combining a successfully digitized old-media print powerhouse with an endlessly struggling electronic 24/7 news channel, he creates the anti-Murdoch machine. A Washington Post-CNN merger brings investigative clout to a soulless TV baby and, in ways Bezos created, floods an Amazon river of marketable news.
The point being, Zucker has no real intention of stepping away from CNN. Bezos, for his part, has a former news anchor for a girlfriend and needs a new playground to engage his energies. He is a builder, not a caretaker. Under a Democratic Administration intent on dislodging monopolies where they are hiding in plain sight, running Amazon for the next four years means joining Zuckerberg to be tiresomely pilloried on the Hill. Sittin’ on the dock of that bay ain’t no way for the world’s second-richest dude to spend his days. Not by a long shot.
Thus my prescriptive dreamscape for this year’s Jeff on Jeff vaudeville act: Bezos negotiates with Stankey to buy CNN, and we see Rosebud gliding down snowy S Street. Zucker persuades Bezos to let him head up the whole shebang, since The Washington Post is known to be looking outside just traditional palaces of ink for a next-gen leader. Together, Jeff One and Jeff Too build a new news alliance that strikes back against the four years of Murdoch’s evil empire of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal that have polluted our airwaves and poisoned our republic.
I don’t know about you, but I’m all in for the fun ride. The Washington Post deserves to grow, and CNN needs to grow up. Together, they take on the thunder from down under. We need that competition.
I’ll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours.
Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.
