GQ Sells Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Its Integrity

On Monday, GQ published an article by film critic Jason Bailey. It was about Warner. Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and how everyone in the film industry seems to hate him. The headline, with its mention of him being “public enemy number one” was similar to that of a piece I wrote for Paste last year. Bailey’s story was full of just, well-argued, fully backed-up disgust with how Zaslav has run the company. A few hours after it went up, it had been substantially rewritten by someone else. By Monday afternoon, it was gone.

In the last twelve or so months, the entertainment world has formed an even more negative opinion of Zaslav, whose tactics have seemed designed to alienate and infuriate everyone but the most cynical of stockholders. He’s mangled HBO Max, pulling films and shows from the service to pinch residual pennies away from those that made them. He’s decimated Turner Classic Movies, pissing off Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s banished movies to the shadow realm, never to see the light of day, so that WBD can save a little on their taxes.

This is all to say, there’s ample ammunition to use against Zaslav and, as someone who just raked in a few hundred million dollars for his part in the WB-Discovery merger, he’s a big enough target to weather some criticism. Or so you’d think.

But no, a thin-skinned lackey (or perhaps the thin-skinned Zaslav himself) complained to GQ shortly after Bailey’s piece went up. GQ—with the backbone and journalistic integrity of its owners, the Newhouse family (which also owns 8.16% of WBD; Steven O. Newhouse is on its board of directors), and editor-in-chief Will Welch (currently producing a movie at Warner Bros.)—immediately put tongue to boot. With conflicts of interest as blatant as those, why wouldn’t they?

The ending of Bailey’s story, which compared Zaslav (quite effectively) to Succession‘s Logan Roy and Pretty Woman‘s Edward Lewis, was scrapped. A searing finale, “He’s out here carrying on like a mogul, but based on his performance to date, he’s only good at breaking things,” was replaced with milquetoast ass-kissing: “Fair or not, with Zaslav, the criticism has gotten personal.”

“Fair or not?”

You can understand why Bailey, who declined GQ’s proposal to revise the already published article, wanted his name removed from the heavily rewritten piece—one that now seemed to cowardly reverse positions at the very end. He was hired to write a piece of criticism. Like most people, Zaslav didn’t like being criticized. Unlike most reputable outlets, GQ valued the subject of the story over their writer. That sort of defeats the purpose of hiring someone to write criticism, and WBD already has a publicity team.

Rather than remove the byline, GQ removed the piece altogether. Poof, vanished.

Days later, WBD gave a statement explaining why they complained:

“The freelance reporter made no attempt to reach out to Warner Bros Discovery to fact-check the substance of the piece before publishing—a standard practice for any reputable news outlet. As is also standard practice, we contacted the outlet and asked that numerous inaccuracies be corrected. In the process of doing so, the editors ultimately decided to pull the piece.”

Aside from the blatant attempt to throw Bailey under the bus, WBD’s statement has some curious ideas about journalism, such as someone calling to fact-check a pop culture comparison. (“Uh, hi, can you confirm the veracity of the statement that Zaslav is like a handful of fictional leeches? Thanks!”) As for the “inaccuracies,” Bailey disputes them and, if you read the before-and-after, you can see that the revisions weren’t about any facts. Just feelings.

“I think a side-by-side comparison of the piece before and after GQ’s internal edits reveals exactly what WBD wanted changed, and that GQ was happy to do so,” Bailey told The Washington Post.

For all their happy, healthy collaboration, WBD and GQ couldn’t even get their story straight about what the problem was. In their own statement, GQ said the following:

“A piece published by GQ on Monday was not properly edited before going live. After a revision was published, the writer of the piece asked to have their byline removed, at which point GQ decided to unpublish the piece in question. GQ regrets the editorial error that led to a story being published before it was ready.”

Without any explanation, no notes from the editor or anything resembling a professional attempt to walk readers through the situation, we’re left to our own devices in order to decipher these claims.

Were there a ton of factual errors? Or was it that the piece didn’t include WBD confirming or denying that Zaslav is very much like the bad guy in a TV show, a show he’d happily condemn to the scrapyard for a quick buck? Or was it that the story slipped through the GQ editors’ fingers, accidentally hitting the internet without allowing their PR-conscious team to water it down?

Perhaps it was the simple answer: A rich and powerful man had his feelings hurt, then decided that he was rich and powerful enough to lean on people who should have recused themselves from being involved with this story in the first place. GQ editor-in-chief Welch, reportedly one of the two editors WBD complained to, should have had no say in the piece at all. He’s producing Warner Bros. and Jon M. Chu’s The Great Chinese Art Heist, based on a GQ article by Alex W. Palmer.

One can only hope that The Great Chinese Art Heist isn’t shelved for a tax write-off before it’s released, so that Welch might have a future career outside of journalism.