TV Agent Panic as News Talent Goes Solo; WME Blocks Joy Reid
'An avalanche of capitulation,' says Steve Schmidt of cable as Piers Morgan, Jim Acosta & more describe life in Substack, YouTube and…the Noosphere?!
To say that the TV news business has hit its nadir would be assuming that it couldn’t get any lower. But there it was on May 21, a Daily Beast report that both Bob Iger and ABC News president Almin Karamehmedovic had asked the EP and hosts of The View dial down their focus on politics and “broaden the topics of debate.” And this on the heels of the WSJ’s report that Shari Redstone’s Paramount had offered $15 million to settle President Trump’s $20 billion suit against CBS News for its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Never mind that legal experts say the suit is baseless — it’s getting in the way of Paramount’s multibillion sale to Skydance, and Redstone wants to eliminate all obstacles, including Wendy McMahon, the CBS News president who was forced out on May 19 on the heels of 60 Minutes EP Bill Owens.
And I’m not even going to get into the payouts, pay cuts, pushes, and layoffs that sidelined such big names as CNN’s Jim Acosta and MSNBC’s Joy Reid — we should all just assume this snowball will keep rolling downhill and growing as cable TV crumbles and a new vernacular of Versant to Fox Nation to Noosphere (more on this later) attempt to replace the 24/7 studio standbys with digital platforms where the average viewer is sub-septuagenarian.
For the big talent agencies — CAA, WME and UTA — accustomed to living 10 percent at a time off the teats of once-highly paid anchors and their news executives (remember Matt Lauer’s reported $20-$25 million annual haul, or Megyn Kelly’s short-lived NBC stint for $15-$20 million a year), a source of income once as steady as Walter Cronkite’s timbre is eroding before their eyes. Hoda Kotb and Norah O’Donnell are among the names who stepped down from anchor roles reportedly over pay cuts. CNN alone has laid off several hundred employees in the past three years — about 200 in January 2025 alone — as it attempts a digital paywall where the release of no subscriber numbers yet means nothing good.
But while the agencies still scramble to staff talent in jobs that no longer exist, talent has taken matters into their own hands. In the past couple of years, the ousted-or-demoted to very-online crew of independent names has grown to include Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, Katie Phang and Don Lemon. Just yesterday, former NBC doyenne Katie Couric joined Substack (“This is the only place where I’ll be ‘Katie Unplugged,’” she wrote). In the course of talking for this column to Piers Morgan, Acosta, Substack’s head of news and politics Catherine Valentine, plus top agents and producers, I learned that this is where — for the agencies — lies the rub.
No one is more panicked about the sharp shifts in this market than TV agents, with one Big Three agency insider telling me that Substack’s in-your-face courting of its clients is becoming an increasingly problematic irritant. Reid, an outspoken Trump critic whose show, The ReidOut, was canceled by MSNBC in late February amid “restructuring,” started posting regularly on Substack soon after, and all signs pointed to going solo. But that’s when WME — where she has been repped by Henry Reisch — stepped in.
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