Archives for February 2020

Mr. Chapek, 60, would gladly skip a red-carpet premiere to spend a quiet night at home, friends say. He lives on the outskirts of Los Angeles, far from the fashionable Brentwood and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods where most power players reside. He and his wife, Cindy, have been married for 38 years. At media events, such as the 2018 opening of Toy Story Land at Walt Disney World in Florida, Mr. Chapek amiably performs his role (in that case, yukking it up with Buzz Lightyear on a stage). But he is happy to not be the center of attention.

Mr. Chapek, known as “Bob C” inside Disney, has almost no experience in television, which remains a $25 billion annual business for Disney and where Mr. Iger — cool and charismatic — made his name before taking over as chief executive in 2005.

But comparing Mr. Chapek to Mr. Iger may be missing the point.

No one can reasonably be expected to fill Mr. Iger’s shoes, not only because he has a singular personality but because the company has changed so much during his tenure. When Mr. Iger took over as chief executive, Disney had two movie studios. Now it has eight, including Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Blue Sky and Searchlight. The company had two cruise ships in 2005. It will soon have seven. Annual theme park attendance has grown to 159 million worldwide, from about 115 million. Disney has two major new streaming services, Hulu and Disney Plus, both of which are making original programming to compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and the coming HBO Max.

With all of the sprawl, not even Mr. Iger can run Disney the way he has run it. In the past, he has been more involved in creative decisions than people might realize. He personally pushed ahead “Black Panther” and “Captain Marvel.” He tasted all of the food planned for Shanghai Disneyland, gave feedback on ride-operator costumes and personally chose the spot where a statue of Walt Disney would be placed.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/business/media/bob-chapek-disney-ceo.html

The nearly 16 million people who tuned in on Tuesday witnessed an unruly two-hour showdown. The seven Democratic presidential candidates spent much of the night jockeying for airtime and talking over one another, with the forum at times descending into mayhem. The moderators of the debate — the “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King and the “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell — were criticized for struggling to maintain control of the candidates.

The Democratic debates have found a ratings resurgence in recent weeks. In the five debates that were staged from October to the first week of February, interest had leveled off to about an average of about seven million viewers.

But the introduction last week of Michael R. Bloomberg to the stage as the race entered a pivotal juncture seemed to reignite interest.

The Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas had 19.7 million viewers, the highest total ever for a Democratic primary debate. A debate in June last year, the second of the election season, recorded 18.1 million viewers. The viewership for the debate on Tuesday matched that of the first debate, in June 2019.

After almost back-to-back debates, viewers will now get a reprieve for several weeks. The next debate is scheduled for March 15 on CNN. By then, votes will have been cast in South Carolina and Super Tuesday states, and the number of candidates left in the primary race could be significantly smaller.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/business/media/democratic-debate-cbs-ratings.html

Mr. Harder also represented Melania Trump, Mr. Trump’s wife, when she sued The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, in 2016, over what she said were “false and defamatory statements,” including that a modeling agency she worked for in the 1990s was also an escort service. The Daily Mail ultimately apologized, retracted the article and paid damages in a settlement.

Mr. Trump, whose public vilification of the news media has little precedent for someone in his office, has ratcheted up his attacks on the press over the past year. Though he has accused The Times of “treason,” tweeted the phrase “fake news” hundreds of times, and repeatedly warned of pulling broadcast licenses, his campaign’s lawsuit against The Times is the first concrete legal broadside against a news outlet of his tenure.

It is not, however, Mr. Trump’s first time going to court against a journalist. In 2006, Mr. Trump sued Timothy L. O’Brien for libel after the publication of Mr. O’Brien’s biography, “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” The case was dismissed three years later. (Mr. O’Brien, who previously worked as a reporter and editor at The Times, is currently a senior adviser to Michael R. Bloomberg’s presidential campaign.)

The Times is also defending itself in a defamation suit brought by Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee, over an editorial published in the Opinion pages that incorrectly linked her to a 2011 mass shooting that severely wounded Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona representative. Ms. Palin’s case was dismissed by a Federal District Court, but an appellate court reinstated the suit last year.

Nicole Hong and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/business/media/trump-new-york-times-lawsuit.html

After years as an agent at Ross Yoon Agency in Washington, she was inspired to start her own firm after reading about the connections that Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died in August, had to the publishing world and prominent nonfiction writers.

Though the publishing industry struggles with low salaries and razor-thin margins, it wields significant power over the public discourse. Sproul-Latimer said she hopes to shift that power to writers whose voices are seldom heard.

The agency represents writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, who has written genre-bending short stories and memoir, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, a novelist whose debut centered on a domestic worker in Colombia. Neon also represents Zoë Quinn, a video game developer, and Samantha Irby, a humor writer.

“I’m excited about the other people that she’s signing,” Hill said of Sproul-Latimer and Wolf’s budding list of clients, several of whom have also spoken out about sexual harassment or gender discrimination. “I hope we can create a network out of that.”

What Hill wants women to take away from her book is that they can own their mistakes and get back up, no matter how difficult their experience. “It would be much easier for me to just disappear, but I’m not, and this is an act of defiance, staying in the forefront,” she said. “You can’t let other people take away your power or your voice, even when it’s hard.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/books/katie-hill-she-will-rise-neon-literary.html

Quibi’s competitors are therefore not Netflix and HBO so much as YouTube and Facebook, whose previous competitors were our imaginations and memories. It’s one more thing to do with our phones instead of ever being bored. Framed that way, it sounds like an unnecessary product that may indicate some kind of incipient dystopia, or at least the increasing encroachment of past satire on present reality. In 2006, “30 Rock” imagined a 10-second sitcom made by craven executives for an audience with shattered attention spans. This formerly absurd premise will go on sale this spring.

If you find that vaguely nauseating, don’t worry: Quibi seems to agree. The quicksand spot is one of a series of Quibi advertisements that explore the theme of mobile entertainment as an inappropriate way to spend the remaining moments of your life. There’s a spot in which a mustachioed villain ties a cartoon cowboy to the railroad tracks and the cowboy fishes out his phone to watch Quibis as the train approaches. It’s the least disturbing of all the Quibi ads, by virtue of being a cartoon, which puts us at the furthest remove from the finality of death. At the opposite end of this spectrum is the Quibi ad in which a general informs the president that an asteroid is about to strike Earth. “How long do we have?” the president asks grimly. “Two, three Quibis, tops,” the general replies. At this point a staff member breaks out sobbing, and a Secret Service agent closes his eyes, presumably imagining the family that will be incinerated separately from but at the same moment as him. It’s a naturalistic portrayal of anguish and dread, but then everyone takes out a phone and starts chuckling at Quibis.

This approach — to ironically acknowledge our worst impulses in hopes of justifying them — has become a recognizable strategy in contemporary advertising. (“Satisfy your craving for zero human contact,” urges one ad for the food-delivery app Seamless.) A rhetorical sleight-of-hand that substitutes naming the problem for reckoning with it, this trope speaks to a culture that has become exasperated with itself but which does not expect to change. Anyone who self-deprecates recognizes the technique. “Good thing I’m not stress-eating!” I say, cleverly, as I eat full-size peanut butter cups straight out of the bag. Such acknowledgments allow me to go on doing the things I know I shouldn’t, because unlike the morons who actually engage in foolish behavior in ways that define their being, I’m doing it knowingly. That makes it different, somehow, for reasons I cannot articulate that are nonetheless critically important.

By the same token, it is crucial that we maintain the distinction between our culture, which is amusing itself to death with pocket TVs in a self-aware, ironic way, and the kind of culture that would do that without realizing it. A sincere reckoning with just how much of our lives we spend watching things is probably impossible at this point. We’re not going back, and what addict wants to measure the progress of his addiction? Quibi knows that where willpower has failed, self-deprecation steps in to give our bad habits a patina of sardonic resignation. The subtext of the ads is that, unlike the man sinking in quicksand, the cowboy tied to the tracks or the doomed occupants of the Oval Office, we get that we’re ridiculous. And that ironic distance is just enough to make us feel like we’re not really in this situation.

The ads also make it clear that Quibi knows it is unnecessary. With Netflix, Hulu, fuboTV, Philo, HBO Go, CBS All Access, Disney+, ESPN+, Amazon Prime Video and others, the market for streaming entertainment is thoroughly served. Here is the umpteenth iteration of a technology many of us have come to wish had never happened. The last thing we need is another reason to look at the phone, and we know it. The good people at Quibi know we know it. But they are also pretty sure that millions will pay for it anyway, so let’s just admit that, have a laugh and get on with choosing passwords. And then we can start counting down our remaining days.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/magazine/quibi-ad.html

While puzzled by the timing of the announcement, analysts were supportive of the choice.

“Chapek is a really good, no-brainer pick — the other division leaders have been there too short of a time,” Michael Nathanson, a media analyst and founding partner at MoffettNathanson, said in a phone interview. “He’s a really nice person who is part of the Disney culture, which is important.”

Other candidates to succeed Mr. Iger included Kevin A. Mayer, chairman of Disney’s direct-to-consumer and international division, and Peter Rice, chairman of Walt Disney Television.

Mr. Chapek indicated that he hoped to rely on both of those men. “Obviously I have not spent as much time on the media side or the direct-to-consumer side, but we have some really great, experienced leaders that are in place in those businesses,” he said.

Even so, Mr. Chapek said that his years at Disney had given him “a bit of fluency” in those businesses. “I’m familiar with the opportunities and some of the challenges that they all face,” he said.

Since taking over as chief executive in October 2005, Mr. Iger has led Disney to record financial results, even in the face of economic downturns, the occasional horrendous movie write-off and changing consumer habits that dented ESPN, the company’s longtime profit engine. Last year, Mr. Iger completed a $71.3 billion acquisition that gave Disney the bulk of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, substantially altering the entertainment landscape. Mr. Iger then oversaw the successful introduction of Disney Plus.

The downside to that success? Nobody seemed to measure up, complicating succession. One internal candidate to succeed Mr. Iger, the well-regarded Mr. Staggs, abruptly left Disney in 2016 after losing the unqualified support of Mr. Iger and some other board members. Since then, Disney has been engaged in a quiet hunt for a successor.

Even among media conglomerates, Disney has a unique mix of businesses, some of which are healthier than others. The company’s movie studio is widely regarded as the strongest in Hollywood and the Disney theme parks are delivering record profits. But the company’s vast consumer products division has been challenged, and Disney’s television operation, which includes ABC, Disney Channel and Freeform, has been struggling with ratings weakness and a lack of breakout shows. Now it has entered the streaming era with Disney Plus, which has started strong but will lose money for the coming years as Disney spends billions of dollars on original content and technological infrastructure.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/business/media/bob-iger-disney-ceo.html