Ankler Agenda

“So what do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?” Casey Wasserman — founder of the Wasserman Agency, chair of the LA28 Olympic Committee, and grandson of Hollywood founding father Lew Wasserman — wrote in a 2003 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, later convicted of sex trafficking minors. The message is one of several exchanges included in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department as part of the Epstein files — and it has thrown one of the industry’s most connected executives into crisis. Chappell Roan and Abby Wambach publicly cut ties with Wasserman this week, with others threatening to follow.

But he’s not the only major player to appear in the Epstein email archive, as journalist and author Allen Salkin found out. Still, the bigger story may be what the cache reveals about the clubby worlds of media and entertainment, industries built on proximity — who gets invited to the dinner, who makes the introduction, who vouches for whom. Salkin joins Elaine Low and Natalie Jarvey to unpack the boldface names surfacing in the files and what their presence — whether incidental, transactional, or something more — says about the networks that drive the entertainment business. Plus, Sean McNulty breaks down the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics ratings, and Paramount’s latest sweetened bid for Warner Bros.
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Bell Media President Sean Cohan tells The Ankler’s Elaine Low onstage at NATPE Global/Realscreen Summit in Miami about the pitch process for ‘Heated Rivalry,’ how the show’s creators protected its Canadian authenticity and why so many viewers are “reheating” (aka rewatching) the gay hockey drama. He also charts the growth of Bell-owned Canadian streamer Crave and takes a contrarian view on Hollywood consolidation, including the Netflix-Warner Bros. tie-up. “We run as an industry to a ‘sky is falling’ kind of a place,” Cohan says. While big mergers have undeniably harsh consequences, they also open “lanes of opportunity.” He adds. “It'll be a great time for entrepreneurship, because these distracted, big, lumbering giants are going to get a little slower.”
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Disney finally did it: Bob Iger has a successor. Parks chief Josh D’Amaro is taking the throne, with runner-up Dana Walden annexing more territory at the Mouse House (and earning a higher base salary than her new boss). Everyone in TV and film knows Walden, but who is D’Amaro? And what does this new era of Disney actually look like? Elaine Low, Natalie Jarvey and Sean McNulty read between the lines and lay out the challenges facing D’Amaro on Day One. Then, Lesley Goldberg joins to share her reporting on Walden’s new remit, while theme park journalist Carlye Wisel discusses D’Amaro’s impact on the parks business. Plus, Matthew Frank is back with a look at the prediction markets ahead of perhaps the biggest sports betting day of the year: the Super Bowl.
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'MeidasTouch' podcaster and progressive media exec Ben Meiselas joins Like & Subscribe's Natalie Jarvey for a fiery discussion of the risks and new rules for American journalists as they report in U.S. cities “that look and feel like Fallujah” and work to cover "a regime that is hell-bent on retribution and instilling fear." Meiselas also reveals his close ties with Don Lemon, now facing federal charges in connection with his coverage of a Minnesota anti-ICE protest, and why he sees the "weaponization" of the U.S. Department of Justice faltering. As Meiselas’ podcast sees explosive growth, he argues that legacy news has lost the plot and audiences — "people who feel, who are struggling, who are being left behind" — and shares the strategy to keep building his independent media empire.
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Disney CEO Bob Iger is ready to abdicate the throne. Again. Six years after Iger first stepped down as CEO, and 38 months after he regained control of Disney following Bob Chapek’s disastrous two-year stretch, the succession planning committee is expected to announce the winner in “early 2026,” aka now. (Cue the Succession theme.) But even as the frontrunners have remained the same — it’s still a presumed two-horse race between Disney Parks head Josh D’Amaro and Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden — the world has rapidly changed. Disney has to contend with AI, a behemoth rival in a merged Netflix-Warner Bros., and a charged political environment. Which of these heavyweights lands the TKO? Would co-CEOs, à la Netflix, make sense? Elaine Low, Natalie Jarvey and Sean McNulty break it all down ahead of Disney’s next earnings call.
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