On Wednesday, CBS News editorial and newsgathering chief Adrienne
Roark told staff that she would be leaving the network after just seven months in the job. In light of all the myriad controversies and internal drama emanating out of Black Rock in recent months—the Tony Dokoupil–Ta-Nehisi Coates dustup, which divided the newsroom; the controversial 60 Minutes segment on Gaza, which invited scrutiny from the Anti-Defamation League; the still-impending settlement with Trump over 60’s Kamala
interview; the confounding overhaul of Evening News, where ratings continue to slide week by week; Shari’s general discontent with all of it; etcetera—Roark’s sudden departure seemed like yet another blemish on the network and, by extension, its chief executive, Wendy McMahon (even if, admittedly, only
a majority of these things are really her fault). 

McMahon’s decision to give Roark oversight of the newsroom last August, following the departure of Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews, had confused many CBS journalists from the outset. A veteran manager of local TV stations and onetime CBS stations president, Roark never evidenced the newsroom leadership experience historically required of a
major broadcast news chief. (An aside: While visiting the London bureau last year, Roark inadvertently revealed that it was her first time in the country.) Anyway, McMahon placed her faith in the network’s true editorial lead, Bill Owens, the 60 Minutes executive producer whom McMahon also tasked with oversight of Evening News. Of course, that has come with its own problems. 

In any event, Roark wasn’t the right fit. After both sides determined that she wasn’t up to the challenges of the current moment, she got a job at Tegna, the local-TV-stations outfit. (News of her move, which the network had hoped to hold until next month, was first reported this week by Breaker.) No word yet on who will take over the newsroom—or whether McMahon still gets to have a
say in who that person might be, or whether it even matters. The parent company is on the verge of being sold to Skydance, and it’s hard to imagine how McMahon fits into the picture. 

Indeed, the Paramount-Skydance deal portends substantial changes. Sources close to the new leadership group at Skydance tell me that McMahon will almost certainly lose her job as head of the news division after the
merger, in part because of their frustration with the aforementioned controversies and management problems. McMahon’s boss, CBS C.E.O. George Cheeks, has agreed to stay on at the company, I’m told, and while he has historically been an advocate for her, this is not a fight he cares to wage. And indeed, Cheeks may have his own cause for frustration: I’m told that he had asked McMahon ahead of the 60 Minutes Gaza segment whether she
foresaw any problems with it. She told him that she didn’t, and added that, if anything, it might be perceived as too sympathetic to Israel. In the end, the segment invited public rebuke from both the ADL and the American Jewish Committee.

Meanwhile, McMahon may have also irked current and future leadership by strongly advocating against Shari Redstone’s plan to settle the lawsuit
that Trump brought against 60 Minutes—an obviously absurd capitulation that Shari nevertheless sees as a small price to pay for securing approval of the deal. (This may be illogical, on two fronts. One, settling with Trump does not necessarily deter future pressure, as Bob Iger and ABC News learned the hard way. Two, it’s highly unlikely that Trump will deprive his loyal supporter and donor Larry Ellison and his son David of the asset.)
In any case, McMahon has made her feelings about the settlement known and has worked behind the scenes to make sure other journalists are vocal about the dangers of settling, which isn’t exactly being celebrated by her bosses. 

On a separate note, the Cheeks re-up is probably the latest confirmation that Jeff Zucker is not headed to CBS, as many persistently wondered back in the day, during the quainter age of the
Biden administration. Not only does Zucker have his RedBird IMI fund, of course, but he’s also a Trump antagonist (an increasingly untrendy position these days) and, it goes without saying, is almost certainly past the stage of his career where he’ll want to take on a transformation job. 

Meanwhile, whoever replaces McMahon in the new regime will likely be looking at a teardown situation—a new evening
news format, possibly a new permanent anchor, a plan for Mornings after Gayle King eventually retires, and whatever is necessary to rebuild morale at 60 after this whole depressing settlement situation passes. It’s a tough job, but hopefully the Ellisons pay well.

On Tuesday, a day after I
broke the news, Politico founding editor and patriarch John Harris sent his staff a typically magniloquent memo—1,400 words, with a 1,100-word addendum, rife with superlatives—announcing that Alex Burns, his 38-year-old head of news and hand-picked heir apparent, would be ascending still higher up the org chart. As “senior executive editor,” Burns
will lead all North American coverage, including the core Washington report, plus the flagship Playbook product, congressional coverage, the New York and California verticals, etcetera. His peers, Joe Schatz and Anita Kumar, would meanwhile be moved to deputy positions overseeing growth and standards, respectively. 

Even for ChatGPT, which capably whittled Harris’s
email down to 180 words, the memo’s significance was clear. Burns’s ascension to the penultimate editor job is the culmination of a vision Harris has had for years, at least since he first brought Burns back to Politico from the Times in 2022 in an understated associate editor and columnist role that belied the real roadmap. Still, there are reasons why Burns’s promotion required delicate choreography, Harris’s loquacity notwithstanding.

While expanding his remit, Burns has ruffled a lot of feathers, as I’ve reported on several occasions. As Burns and Harris see it, he’s a brilliant journalist trying to elevate standards and provide editorial direction in a newsroom that’s lost its edge. “He’s very sharp. He doesn’t abide flabby story pitches or shoddy writing, and Politico has too much of both,” one Politico insider told me. But to many in the newsroom, Burns comes across as
pretentious and condescending, with little patience for shortcomings and no regard for diplomacy. The approach, as another insider described it, is, “I’m smarter than you, get with the program, or get the fuck out.”

On some level, Burns’s promotion might seem like a de facto resolution to that conflict. Harris has now formally made his golden boy the heir to his chair. Meanwhile, the owners at Axel and the
rest of the core leadership team seem to have faith and conviction in Burns—including C.E.O. Goli Sheikholeslami, and executive vice president Jonathan Greenberger, a former ABC News executive producer who may himself ascend to the C.E.O. role, in tandem with Burns’s rise to the top editorial role in a few years time. And for whatever it’s worth, many of the most vocal Burns shit-talkers have already been shown the door or, in some cases, left of their own
volition. “Burns irks a lot of folks in the newsroom but IMO he is the right pick,” emailed one insider, perhaps best summarizing the situation.

In his own memo to staff on Tuesday, titled “the best version of Politico,” Burns promised a faster editorial process, a more unified newsroom, and stronger promotion, among other things. (One gripe against Burns is that his exacting standards slowed down the
editorial process; in fairness, that probably had more to do with the convoluted structure Harris is now trying to rectify.) But the guy also has a ton of work ahead of him outside of operational process work and kumbaya shit. 

As I’ve written before, Politico’s core Washington coverage feels extremely inert right now. The decision to give the flagship Playbook enterprise to Jack
Blanchard, a Brit who ran Politico’s U.K. operation and is only now learning Washington’s inner workings—and, it seems, American politics—has already yielded some embarrassing results. The long-dormant congressional coverage, while finally showing signs of life, still lives in the shadow of Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer’s Punchbowl.
At the White House, Politico is notably short on reporters with real ties to Trump and his inner circle. Meanwhile, if the decision to place former NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns in charge of that bureau is indicative of some strategy, we still have yet to see what it is. (Maybe Harris has some other long-gestating master plan to be revealed in a verbose memo in a few months’ time.)

Anyway,
these are critiques Harris and Burns have heard before—and ones that, in their view, not only misunderstand the long-term strategy underway, but also downplay Politico’s strengths, from its defense coverage, to those California and New York verticals, to its highly lucrative Politico Pro vertical, which is withstanding DOGE penny-pinching. But that, too, may be indicative of the fundamental problem: In the same way Harris and Burns don’t want to suffer the complaints of their newsroom, they also
don’t seem to want to reckon with how the core product—the one around which so much of their business revolves—is being received in the market. To hear Harris tell it, Jack Blanchard is the second coming of Jonathan Swan, and Dasha Burns the next Maggie Haberman. Eavesdrop on any conversation on Capitol Hill or at the White House, and it becomes quite clear that they’re reading the wrong weather vane. But maybe they’re just smarter than we are.