Michael Wolff

President Donald Trump's view on the $85.4 billion merger has been quite un-Republican-like, and he wants to keep his campaign promise, which would mean intervening (and stifling CNN nemesis Jeff Zucker). President Trump says he is determined to keep his campaign promises. It is a mantra in the West Wing. All campaign promises have to be turned into executive orders, legislation or regulatory action. That’s the agenda. There’s an actual checklist on which staffers tick off each promise. One of those promises — falling somewhere behind extreme vetting, repealing and replacing Obamacare (well, um, cough, blame someone else for that), tax reform, immigration bans, military expansion, budget cutting, a Mexican border wall and making NATO allies pay up — is to block the planned merger of AT&T and Time Warner.

[Commentary] And now begins the Fox News chief's war against the Murdochs. It was James Murdoch’s cold calculation that ended the hand-wringing debate: Whither Fox News and its $1.2 billion in annual profits without Roger Ailes, no small concern of his older brother Lachlan and their father, Rupert? "Ailes is 76 and unhealthy, so how much longer could he last anyway?" the younger Murdoch is said to have asked, and to have argued: Since they would lose Ailes soon enough anyway, why not turn lemons into lemonade and get credit for kicking him out for being a sexist pig?

With Ailes nearly as much a subject in Cleveland at the Republican convention among political professionals as Trump himself (the rumor of Ailes replacing Paul Manafort as campaign manager is an active one, with a further rumor putting Trump in favor of this and his children against it), the negotiation continues. It has been reportedly slowed not just by Ailes’ war-like posture, but because Rupert Murdoch is in the middle of it, full of angst and ambivalence and regret, changing the terms of the negotiation on an hourly basis. In real ways, Roger's end is his.

[Michael Wolff is the author of a biography of Rupert Murdoch]

[Commentary] Disney, which owns ABC, made a deal with Dish Network, the satellite provider that, for the first time, will formally allow the use of technology to let viewers skip ads on ABC shows.

The fig leaf compromise here is that Dish, which will now stream ABC shows over the Web, will have to wait three days after first broadcast before letting its ad-skipper, AutoHop, go to work. But it's a big breach in an up-to-now implacable network wall. Finally, a major network has bent to the obvious -- people expect to be able to skip ads. American media, marketers and culture move inextricably closer to a world in which video is wholly unhooked from advertising. Television advertising as it continues to exist -- lucratively so -- has often seemed like some odd form of protectionism, forcing the consumer to endure something that the simplest technology makes obsolete, and as a kind of emperor's new clothes conceit: Who beyond the comatose actually watches ads, anyway?

But what happens when there is no television advertising of any kind? What happens when even the most unassertive can easily skip even network television ads? Clearly, live-event programming, from the Oscars to sports, wherein real-time pauses can be naturally filled with ads, becomes ever-more sought after.

The media have been slowly converting themselves into a subscription and licensing business -- learning to live with lower margins. Even networks now get fees from cable companies. ABC's Dish deal undermines ad dollars, but replaces them with licensing dollars, however fewer. Brands, on the other hand, while they been moving consumer ad dollars into other forms of marketing, ultimately face a bigger crisis than television producers.

Digital media, a hoped-for alternative, have woefully failed to become a method of brand identification. Sponsored content offers much less of a return than being a television sponsor. Nothing, so far, has replaced, or even suggests it might someday be able to replace, the powerful nexus of video, a passive audience and advertising in the creation of consumer desire and, indeed, in the character of modern man.

[March 10]