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Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room. The long-awaited CNN–CBS News merger is officially underway: I’m told CBS News president Tom Cibrowski and other news and sports execs visited Hudson Yards last week and traveled to the Atlanta bureau today. As I reported in March, CNN’s real estate is likely to serve as the base of operations for both networks after the merger.
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Speaking of the Times, here’s the main event…
Weeks after the Kristof vs. Bibi kerfuffle, the Times newsroom is again in an uproar over an Opinion story, this time allegedly attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of an Epstein associate. Big deal? Little deal? No deal?
Late last week, several New York Times reporters reached out to me independently to share their latest discontent with the paper’s Opinion section—a department that seems to have become a perennial source of internal frustration, from the Tom Cotton “Send in the Troops” goat rodeo of the early B.L.M. era all the way through Nick Kristof’s recent two-handed grab of the Israel-Gaza third rail. The most recent entry in the canon arrived on Thursday, as the Opinion section published a lengthy essay by independent legal analyst Ankush Khardori based on his interview with Kathy Ruemmler, a top Goldman lawyer and Obama White House counsel whose friendly exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein have drawn scrutiny in the Times’s own pages.
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Both Ankush and the Times strongly denied those insinuations. In an email, Ankush told me he objected to the idea that he’d helped Ruemmler circumvent the newsroom. She’d agreed to an exclusive interview with him in March, when he was writing a column at Politico, he said. “I took the piece to NYT Opinion when I left Politico in April because I had written for the section several times before. There was no effort by her or anyone else to make an end-run around the NYT news side or exploit some ‘loophole.’”
These statements are unlikely to quell the frustrations of the newsroom. On the heels of the recent Kristof firestorm, in which the Pulitzer-winner reported a piece for the Opinion section alleging sexual violence by Israeli military officers, many reporters see the Ruemmler episode as yet another example of Kingsbury’s fiefdom overstepping its bounds by cosplaying in the hard news space. They said that both episodes undercut the Times’s credibility with an audience that doesn’t draw distinctions between news and opinion. “The Opinion section has lost its way,” one said.
But every success in that effort carries an inherent risk. The more Opinion pursues influence to gain audience acquisition, the more it invites confusion about where advocacy ends and reporting begins. And because most readers don’t parse the institutional distinctions as carefully as the Times inmates do, each new boundary test becomes a reputational challenge for the organization as a whole. As the cable TV folks know, that is a defining feature for any media company trying to maximize the value of its opinion arm while preserving the authority of its news report. The problem, as both the Kristof and Ruemmler episodes demonstrated, is that those two objectives rarely align.
Puck founding partner Matt Belloni takes you inside the business of Hollywood, using exclusive reporting and insight to explain the backstories on everything from Marvel movies to the streaming wars.
A professional-grade rundown on the business of sports from John Ourand, the industry’s preeminent journalist, covering the leagues, players, agencies, media deals, and the egos fueling it all. Plus, the latest intel from Eriq Gardner on the sports legal beat.
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