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On July 3, GQ published an explosive, dishy profile of David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, calling him “the most hated man in Hollywood.” The article underwent substantial edits, then disappeared from GQ’s website entirely. The story of how and why that happened might be dishier than even the article itself.
The original article, headlined “How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Public Enemy Number One in Hollywood” and written by Jason Bailey, covered Zaslav’s turbulent tenure heading the entertainment giant through a merger, industry upheaval during the wake of the pandemic, ratings struggles at CNN, and a new rebranding at HBO to “Max.” It is no longer available on GQ.com but can be read in its entirety on various internet archive sites.
The original text included a misspelling of “alma mater” in the first sentence as “alma matter,” but typos were not the problem that got the article excommunicated from the GQ website, a digital disappearance first reported by Roger Friedman.
A few hours after publication, the article was edited to soften its sharpest edges jabbing at Zaslav, including an unflattering comparison to Richard Gere’s Pretty Woman character, a corporate raider who has to admit Julia Roberts’ call girl Vivian is right when she compares his profession to “stealing cars and selling them for the parts…you don’t make anything…you don’t build anything.”
“And perhaps that’s why David Zaslav is earning a concerning reputation so far. He’s out here carrying on like a mogul, but based on his performance to date, he’s only good at breaking things,” Bailey’s original article concluded.
In the edited version, the article wrapped by mentioning that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was facing similar problems but “doesn’t seem to attract quite the same vitriol. Fair or not, with Zaslav, the criticism has gotten personal.” The new version also deleted a section criticizing the company’s programming on Discovery as “reality slop” and a comparison between Zaslav and Logan Roy, the egotistical and overbearing family patriarch in HBO’s hit show, Succession. — well, make that “Max’s Succession.”
Shortly after the edited version went live on GQ.com, it disappeared from the site entirely. Clicking the original article link (https://www.gq.com/story/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-ceo-tcm-max) redirects to the GQ.com homepage and Bailey’s author page at GQ.com says “Jason Bailey is a writer for GQ” but lists zero articles to his name.
According to Will Sommer at the Washington Post, “a Zaslav spokesman” set in motion the events leading to the article’s deletion, by complaining about the article “soon after it was published, according to people close to the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve confidences.” In response, GQ “made extensive edits to the story” that afternoon, resulting in an article that was “much kinder to Zaslav.”
Bailey did not agree with the changes and requested for his byline to be removed from the article, he told the Post, and was told by GQ that they would not leave up an article without a byline, so it was taken down entirely. Bailey also tweeted a link to the Post article, calling it an “accurate summary” of what happened.
“I wrote what I felt was the story I was hired to write,” said Bailey said. “When I was asked to rewrite it after publication, I declined. The rewrite that was done was not to my satisfaction, so I asked to have my name removed and was told that the option there was to pull the article entirely, and I was fine with that.”
GQ attempted to frame the situation as an article being “not properly edited before going live,” and an “editorial error that [led] to a story being published before it was ready,” while a WBD spokesman said the company’s complaint was because Bailey did not reach out for comment before publishing, and claimed there were “numerous inaccuracies” in the article.
Bailey acknowledged to the Post that he had not asked for comment, but unsurprisingly pushed back on the accusation that his article had “numerous inaccuracies,” pointing out that the GQ editors had not mentioned any inaccuracies, the edited version didn’t actually make any corrections, and the comparison between the original and the edited version showed the changes were simply “what WBD wanted changed,” not the result of any mistakes being fixed.
The entire kerfuffle has been loudly criticized by many entertainment and media reporters and commentators, accusing GQ of engaging in “pandering” and acting as public relations for WBD instead of journalists, and Bailey has been retweeting many of these criticisms.
And in our current environment of mega corporations running everything, there is of course a corporate entanglement between WBD and GQ, as the Post’s Sommer noted:
GQ has a corporate connection to Warner Bros. Discovery. The magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, is owned by Advance Publications, a major shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery. Advance Publications did not respond to a request for comment.
It gets even messier: GQ’s current editor-in-chief, Will Welch, is producing a movie for WBD. According to Variety, Welch is “attached to direct and produce” a film at WBD based on a 2018 GQ article, and was “involved in the discussions surrounding the removal of Bailey’s initial story and made the call to pull the revamped story.”
“Welch’s involvement in the decision-making process would constitute a conflict of interest,” wrote Variety’s Tatiana Siegel. “As a producer on a Warner Bros. movie in early development, Welch would meet the criteria from the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics that says reporters and editors should ‘avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived [and] disclose unavoidable conflicts.’ Furthermore, journalistic best practices dictate that stories never just disappear and that any significant corrections be noted with full transparency.”
The attempts to stealth-edit and then disappear the article seem to be invoking the so-called “Streisand Effect,” where the attempt to squash information instead shines a giant spotlight on it, even garnering tweets specifically mentioning the singer.
Zaslav’s handpicked CEO for CNN, Chris Licht, found himself swiftly defenestrated in the wake of his own problematic magazine profile in The Atlantic, and that did not involve any suggestions that CNN or WBD attempted to block or tamper down the article (have massive regrets afterwards, sure, but they didn’t try to kill the piece). Add in the apparent conflict of interest with GQ’s corporate ownership and the editor’s production deal with WBD, and it’s a very sordid mess indeed.
The GQ article by Jason Bailey as originally published can be read here.
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