Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room. I’m en route to Washington,
D.C., and looking forward to seeing many of you at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as well as the weekend’s myriad parties, brunches, and receptions. No need to say, “off the record.”
In tonight’s issue, news and notes on the two biggest media stories of the week: Bill Owens’s abrupt resignation from CBS News and 60 Minutes, where he was effectively forced out by Shari Redstone amid her dogged pursuit of F.C.C.
approval for her Skydance deal; and Ryan Lizza’s feeble attempt to torch Politico in pursuit of buzz for his new, reader-funded Substack venture.
🍸 Plus, on the latest edition of The Grill Room, Jen Psaki joins me for a candid conversation about her next chapter as a full-time MSNBC primetime host. With today’s political discourse more combustible than ever, Psaki reflects on how she’s drawing from her tenure as White House press
secretary to navigate a political-media ecosystem in overdrive. She also dishes on what it takes to cut through the noise in today’s oversaturated landscape—and why thriving in the chaos means doing everything, everywhere, all at once. Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.
Mentioned in this issue: Ryan Lizza, Olivia Nuzzi, Bill Owens, Wendy McMahon, Larry Ellison, Lesley Stahl, John Harris, Jonathan Greenberger, David
Ellison, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Scott Pelley, and many, many more…
Let’s get started…
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Gone in 60 Minutes: On Tuesday afternoon, Bill Owens, the CBS News veteran and 60 Minutes executive producer, called a meeting to inform the show’s journalists that he would be resigning from the network after nearly four decades—a stunning move that, as he made clear, had been effectively forced by his corporate overlords. “It’s clear that I’ve become the problem,” he told the room, which included CBS News C.E.O. Wendy McMahon and top
correspondents like Scott Pelley and Lesley Stahl, as well as Anderson Cooper, who joined via teleconference from Rome. “I am the corporation’s problem.”
The details of that very emotional meeting have been reported elsewhere: Tears were shed, Owens was praised by all, and he implored his colleagues not to protest the move or stage any sort of walkout. Perhaps most notably, Pelley, his close friend, reiterated with
authority that this was not something Owens was doing of his own volition. “You are not being abandoned. There was no choice in any of this,” Pelley told his colleagues. “Leaving you would have been the last thing that Bill Owens would do. And that gives you some sense of the sacrifice that he is making for us.”
Those words hardly need parsing. As I’ve reported for months, Paramount owner Shari Redstone and Skydance owner David Ellison are
extremely eager to close their $8 billion merger, and have long seen CBS News as a nagging vulnerability. Earlier this month, Trump put 60 Minutes on blast for using his name “in a derogatory and defamatory way,” and called upon his F.C.C. chair, Brendan Carr, to impose maximum fines and punishment “for their unlawful and illegal behavior.” Of course, Trump has already sued the network for $20 billion over a benign editing faux pas at
60, which Shari is nevertheless willing to settle in order to get the deal through. Lawyers for Paramount and Trump recently agreed on a mediator to explore terms of a settlement. I can now report that the relevant parties met just days ago, and negotiations over the settlement are well underway. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Shari referred me to “the company,” which in turn declined to comment.)
For months, Shari has privately criticized 60 Minutes
packages—especially one about the conflict in Gaza, which she deemed too critical of Israel—and has also sought greater insight into the segments that the show intended to run prior to the broadcast. In January, former CBS News president Susan Zirinsky was appointed to an interim executive editor role to oversee standards across the network, a move that Shari championed and that Owens saw as an infringement on his editorial independence. In an interview with
Variety on Tuesday, Stahl said she’d been “made aware of interference in our news processes, and calling into question our judgment,” adding, “That is not the way that companies that own news organizations should be acting.”
The storied house of Murrow and Cronkite, CBS News has a long history of asserting itself in the face of government pressure. But, as I noted last week, it’s likely hard for Shari to summon such fortitude in the heat of a
deal. Nevertheless, one wonders how much humiliation she’s willing to endure and how much damage she’s willing to exact on the news division’s crown jewel in the process. Similar questions surely plague David Ellison, who, as my partner Eriq Gardner has reported, can’t even manage to secure a meeting with Carr to discuss the deal—despite the fact
that his father, Larry, is close with the president. Of course, David didn’t buy Paramount for 60 Minutes—he bought it for the studios, the library, the NFL rights, etcetera. At the end of the day, CBS News’s vulnerability given its diminishing place in the corporate structure, not Owens, may be the real seed of the problem.
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In the dun-colored afterglow of Nuzzi-gate, Ryan Lizza is trash-talking his former
employer and striking out on his own with a Substack and a notable disregard for nondisparagement clauses—while Nuzzi knuckles down on a book of her own.
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On Monday morning, Ryan Lizza announced that he had left Politico and was
launching his own Substack. “The main reason,” he claimed, was that Politico’s “style of political coverage is not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic political peril we are facing.” It was the first time in ages that readers had heard from Lizza, who has essentially gone to ground since the emergence of his ex-fiancée Olivia Nuzzi’s “demure nudes” sexting scandal with R.F.K. Jr.
Ryan’s feeble attempt to launch an independent journalism career
with a Bari Weiss–style protest resignation was very du jour. He is not the first suddenly self-employed journalist to try to rustle up some subscription revenue by torching his or her former employer, or the mainstream media writ large. But it is most certainly not the main reason he left.
After the R.F.K. Jr. scandal broke last fall, Politico placed Ryan on temporary leave, relieving him of co-author duties on Playbook, the company’s flagship morning
tipsheet. Olivia subsequently accused Ryan of using the R.F.K. sexts to harass and blackmail her, and tried to take out a temporary restraining order against him, which she later withdrew. Ryan then accused her of being a serial liar who had “shamelessly used litigation with false and defamatory allegations as a public relations strategy.” Ugly stuff.
By that point, Politico editor-in-chief John Harris and executive vice president Jonathan Greenberger had
already begun rethinking their strategy for Playbook and eyeing new authors. And yet, rather than use the scandal as an opportunity to sever ties with Lizza immediately, as many in the newsroom expected, they instead gave him a short-term sinecure. In January, Ryan was moved to Politico magazine and told he had three months to find his next gig. Ryan, once a gifted writer, would continue to be paid—handsomely, by industry standards—and could write as much, or as little, as he wished while
determining his next career move. (As Politicos know, Harris has a soft spot for his employees and tends to grant a lot of third and fourth chances, which can often be a drag on the organization.)
In the ideal scenario, Ryan would find a new job and leave with some dignity intact, while in the meantime producing a little more journalism that would be commensurate with his salary and allow him to move past the cloud of the Olivia drama. Alas, Ryan didn’t write anything for the magazine,
and he didn’t find another job—or, at least, not one that he wanted. Instead, he decided to bite the hand that had fed him in the name of fearless journalism. (Ryan did not respond to requests to discuss his relationship with Politico.)
In the inaugural post on his new Substack, Telos, Ryan averred that Politico wasn’t up to the challenge of the moment—a faux epiphany that had prompted him to strike out on his own. “The gap between what is actually happening in Washington and how
it was being framed and reported became much too wide,” he wrote. “This new publication, Telos, is my modest attempt to do things better.” Ryan’s first foray in that effort centered on how the law firm Paul Weiss had scrubbed praise for partner Jeannie Rhee from its website, seemingly in response to pressure from the Trump administration. “One of the leading law firms in America deleted entire chapters of its own history, erased the accomplishments of its top
partners, and rewrote its own stated core values to appease the federal government. That is some 1984-level shit,” Ryan wrote. “It shook me. And there is no way to capture that when writing for a place such as Politico.”
Presumably, Ryan could have written an article for Politico about the web edits at Paul Weiss, but we’ll never know because he never pitched the idea to the editors. Instead, he decided to put Politico on blast as part of his own fundraising effort,
chastising his former employer for sending a reporter to appear at CPAC, the conservative summit, after the Trump administration canceled federal government subscriptions to Politico. Telos, by contrast, would remain mission-oriented. “I originally considered raising money for this venture, but after the first conversation with a wealthy funder, I realized I would be recreating some of the same problems I was trying to fix in the current corporate media landscape,” Ryan explained. “So
this effort will be 100% funded by Telos readers—you.”
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Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. For all his noble principles, Ryan was informed repeatedly
by a Politico lawyer that, by trash-talking Politico, he had violated his nondisparagement agreement and needed to delete the post. (Ryan did indeed sign an NDA, which typically secures a larger payout.) Instead, Ryan parlayed this into yet another business-building opportunity: In a new post, Ryan recounted the lawyer’s entreaties and framed them as an attempt “to censor critical reporting about Politico,” as well as “critical reporting about Trump.” In his telling, “Politico, regrettably, was
doing the bidding of the Trump administration by using a legal threat to assist the White House in stifling criticism of the president.” Heavy cake.
On Wednesday, Ryan published another response to Politico—or, as he put it, “the media conglomerate trying to censor me.” As of this writing, he is waiting on Politico to specify what aspects of his initial post qualify as disparagement, or otherwise withdraw the takedown request and apologize. With the exception of the initial Paul
Weiss revelation and video conversations with guests Steve Schmidt and Don Lemon, Ryan’s beef with Politico now accounts for Telos’s entire content offering, all of which can be accessed for $7 a month. Meanwhile, Ryan’s author page has been scrubbed from Politico’s website, though articles about Lizza—ranging from his W.H.C.A. award for journalistic excellence, in 2013, to his termination from The New Yorker for improper sexual conduct four years
later—remain.
A coda: Before their split, Ryan and Olivia had a longstanding, seven-figure deal with Simon & Schuster to co-author a book about the presidential campaign—the 2020 campaign, initially, and then the 2024 campaign, a delay that Ryan attributed in court to Olivia’s infidelity. In their legal fight last fall, Ryan confirmed that he had asked Nuzzi to assume financial responsibility for the contract (she claimed he threatened her with physical violence if she didn’t, a
charge he denied). In any case, Ryan is no longer attached to that project, but I’m told on good authority that New York magazine’s former star political reporter still intends to write a book.
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