We admit that we spent some time in the past few weeks trying to figure out how to make our way to New York City last week to attend the inaugural edition of “The Status Summit.” Status, the excellent daily newsletter about the news and media business created by Oliver Darcy, put on the event. It was a day-long program of interviews with names talking about the state of business that we chronicle here at TVND.com.
Ultimately, we didn’t make the trip.
So, color us quite happy to learn that Status recorded video of the interviews conducted last Wednesday during the summit. We have been finding time over the past weekend and into the new week to watch the videos posted on their YouTube channel.
Let’s make our overall verdict clear right now: there are some really interesting moments in these sessions, and anyone interested in the current state—and the future of—the business of news should really take the time to watch them.
If you can only watch one, let us recommend the session with tech journalist and apparent queen of podcasting, Kara Swisher, who brought her incisive observations and scorching wit to the event. Swisher talked about everything, including her very public stance that she will leave CNN should Paramount-Skydance ever become its owner. That’s not an empty threat; the Cable News Network is where she has been doing the series “Kara Swisher Wants To Live Forever.” We’d argue it is one of the most interesting things on the network (and its digital platforms) since Anthony Bourdain created original content for them.
We also enjoyed watching former network news anchorman, Brian Williams, and his longtime producing colleague Jonathan Wald appear together on the Status Summit stage. “BriWi,” as he was dubbed along the way, was pretty candid about the state of the television news business, saying that he was “glad to be clear of the blast radius.” He meant the proverbial “bomb” that has fallen on the business he worked in for some 40-plus years, the last 23 of them at NBC and then MSNBC (now MS NOW). The interplay between the Anchor and his Producer was fun to watch in real time. Williams admitted he still watches the 11 pm local news each night because of “muscle memory.” (He did not mention that part of his motivation for watching the local CBS-owned station in New York City might be to see his son, Doug Williams, who is an anchor and reporter there.)
Speaking of CBS-owned stations that we have known and worked at (we spent two tours at WCBS-TV earlier in our career, one of those overlapped with the aforementioned Mr. Williams, senior), we come to another guest who appeared on the Status summit stage, the former CEO and President of CBS News and Stations, and apparently now an industry gadfly, Wendy McMahon.
It was McMahon, during her tenure from 2021 to 2025, who decided to roll up the storied network news unit with the company’s 28 local television stations across 17 major markets in the United States. Part of that combination was the decision to largely drop any local identity those stations had built over their history and abdicate their branding, becoming outposts of the network’s news division under the banner of “CBS News New York,” for example. (Substituting the specific location in place of NY.)
Fortunately, as we first reported last week, we have some hope that this “brilliant” decision is finally perhaps being unwound.
Ms. McMahon’s turn on the stage inside “The Times Center,” where the Status summit was held, began with an indeterminately long bit of her going on about the event’s host, Oliver Darcy, who was sitting next to her and just wanted to get to interviewing her. He graciously accepted the overwrought compliments and acknowledged the story that McMahon opened with, detailing that she had been “on standby” the entire day, just in case an announced guest was late or didn’t show up at all.
We would come to wish that Ms. McMahon had suffered the same fate that befalls Matt Damon at the end of each edition of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” where the host claims that “we’ve run out of time” and ironically apologizes to Damon—who was never booked in the first place.
If only the audience at The Times Center had been so fortunate.
What Ms. McMahon had to say was interesting and occasionally actually important. She was in the center of the CBS “eye” during the end of the Shari Redstone ownership years, before David Ellison’s Skydance Media (backed by his father’s millions) acquired Paramount, which owned CBS amongst its assets.
But her efforts to position herself as a champion of the free press, and most specifically the “protector” of the legacy of the news operation and, more specifically, its storied “60 Minutes” franchise, were more than a little hard to swallow.
At least with a good cocktail.
McMahon demurred when asked about the woman who succeeded her as the leader of CBS News, saying only that she “doesn’t know Bari Weiss.” But she added that she really isn’t a fan of what seems to be happening since she left the CBS Broadcast Center for the last time in May of 2025. Her departure was widely reported to be necessary for Shari Redstone to get approval, both from the Trump administration and the President himself, for her sale of Paramount, and, in turn, CBS, to Skydance. As you may recall, the 47th President was suing “60 Minutes” on the dubious claim that the newsmagazine had “unfairly” edited an interview in October of 2024 with his then-Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Executive Producer of the program at the time, the well-respected Bill Owens, had already resigned in protest over the “corporate pressure” for the newsmagazine to acknowledge it had made an error and agree to settle the President’s lawsuit.
Now, Wendy McMahon wants you to know that she was always fighting for the editorial independence of both CBS News and “60 Minutes” during her time leading the news division, the owned stations division, and the TV program syndication division. She took the opportunity to point out to the live audience that her final year in her job could be described in terms that one might attribute to a figure like the late Katherine Graham, the storied publisher of The Washington Post.
“Look, my last year at CBS News stations and media ventures was largely spent defending, protecting, standing up for, and oftentimes fighting for the editorial independence of 60 Minutes. Um, I am proud to say that no stories were killed, no shows were preempted, and I think it was one of the most consequential seasons in 60 Minutes history. And not just because of what happened, but because of the storytelling and the journalism and the reporting that was produced.”
Within seconds, responding to a direct question from Oliver Darcy about how often she was over at “60 Minutes” offices to be “involved with the editorial,” McMahon said plainly, “I didn’t.” It seemed to us that she believed this distinguished her from the actions of current CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss, who has reportedly been quite involved with the widely reported revamping and recasting of the program over the past few months.
And speaking of that revamp, word as we go to press is that the not-very-dramatically-changed “60 Minutes” debuted this past Sunday for its 59th season with a 21% smaller viewing audience, as only 7.94 million people tuned in—even with a solid NFL Sunday football lead-in. That figure will likely draw significant scrutiny, especially if it takes the program out of its usual position as the most-watched (non-sports) TV program of the week.
Wendy McMahon’s appearance at The Status Summit had a lot more to unpack, and we’d recommend watching the full video if you’re interested and have the time. We’ll link to it here on YouTube. But the one other thing that stretched our credulity was her statement that she is surprised that other broadcasting companies haven’t come to the defense of the ABC Owned and Operated Stations (which McMahon herself used to lead before 2021, when she left to take the job at CBS). The 8 ABC O&Os are now under what is called an “early license review” at the Federal Communications Commission. The review is allegedly to determine whether those stations are still “acting in the public interest” and should be allowed to keep their licenses.
The obvious reason is that Disney owns the stations and the ABC network. The latter has kept Jimmy Kimmel and his late-night talk show on the air, despite the President of the United States, along with his attack-dog FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, not being fans of the program’s host or his monologues.
McMahon rattled off a roll call of NBC and CBS, along with local station owners Gray, Nexstar, Scripps, Sinclair, and “the list that goes on and on” of other companies that have yet to speak up in the defense of the ABC-owned stations. The fact that she would include Sinclair among the companies that would support ABC in this fight suggests her understanding of the current reality of the television business is nonexistent. (A reminder that Sinclair, along with Nexstar, pulled Kimmel’s show off its stations over his single critical joke in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September of 2025. They returned his 11:35 pm program to their stations, but only after he was suspended and expressed his regrets when he returned to the network.)
Our skepticism here can be summarized with this single assertion: If Wendy McMahon were still running the CBS News and Stations unit, instead of advising the newsletter-publishing platform Beehiiv, she would not have a damn thing to say about the patently unfair—and clearly political—retribution they are currently fighting. Like those other media companies she called out from the stage last Wednesday, she would be more worried about her TV stations staying in business than about becoming the next targets of a bullying FCC.
Because, to quote a former famous face of CBS News, “that’s the way it is.”
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