Ben Smith

And it's a matter, it's not that they wouldn't ever do anything, you know, publish, you know, an accurate, important story that was, that didn't make the White House happy.

But it's that they're thinking about picking your battles.

And this really is familiar to any journalist who's worked in like complicated places.

I mean, I think, you know, for instance, if you're, you know, major, I once talked to somebody who'd been a correspondent for a great newspaper in Tehran.

And you kind of know at some point you're going to get booted because you're going to write a story that angers the regime.

But so you think, all right, is this one worth it?

This is kind of a dumb story about somebody's family being corrupt.

Let's skip this one.

Let's wait for the one that really gets them.

And so in situations like this, you just start to pick your battles and decide, look, we're not going to do this story about the president's family.

It's going to annoy him.

Let's wait till we... And it does change the shape of the coverage.

It means that there's less criticism.

I think the other thing that happened at ABC, though, was that I think you saw that there are these other stakeholders in these companies who they have to deal with, too.

And in particular for ABC, it's A-list actors and directors.

And for Disney.

And I think you saw that you saw... I don't think it ever really was a public protest, but people clearly called up Bob Iger and said, hey, we're going to start pulling movies.

We're going to publicly refuse to work with you.

And

These media companies are very, very, very dependent on talent, and talent does have leverage.