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      A Century of the BBC, a ‘Quasi-Mystical’ Part of England’s Psyche

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      David Hendy’s “The BBC” looks back at 100 years of wartime reporting, dramas, satires and weather reports.THE BBCA Century on AirBy David HendyIllustrated. 638 pages. PublicAffairs. $38.The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC — the Beeb — turns 100 this year. “Hullo, hullo, 2LO calling, 2LO calling,” a few thousand listeners heard through the hissing ether at 6 p.m. on Nov. 14, 1922. “This is the British Broadcasting Company. 2LO. Stand by for one minute please!” What followed were short news and weather bulletins, read twice, the second time slowly so that listeners could take notes.David Hendy, in his thorough and engaging new book, “The BBC: A Century on Air,” writes that you can’t understand England without understanding the BBC. It occupies, he says, “a quasi-mystical place in the national psyche.” It’s just there, like the white cliffs of Dover.The BBC sparked to life in the wake of World War I. Its founders included wounded veterans, and they were idealists. Civilization was in tatters; they hoped, through a new medium, to forge a common culture by giving listeners not necessarily what they wanted, but what they needed, to hear.The audience was fed a fibrous diet of plays and concerts and talks and lectures; sports included Derby Day and Wimbledon. Announcers wore dinner jackets as well as their plummy accents, “as a courtesy to the live performers with whom they would be consorting.” Catching the chimes of Big Ben before the evening news became a ritual for millions.Equipment was primitive. A framed notice by the microphone warned guest speakers, “If you sneeze or rustle papers you will DEAFEN THOUSANDS!!!”Radio was new; the BBC felt that it had to teach people how to listen. “To keep your mind from wandering,” it advised, “you might wish to turn the lights out, or settle into your favorite armchair five minutes before the program starts; above all, you should remember that ‘If you only listen with half an ear, you haven’t a quarter of a right to criticize.’”The BBC gained a reputation for being a bit snooty, and soporific. One complaint can stand for many: “People do not want three hours of [expletive] ‘King Lear’ in verse when they get out of a 10-hour day in the [expletive] coal-pits, and [expletive] anybody who tries to tell them that they do.”The BBC took it from both sides. To mandarins like Virginia Woolf, it was irredeemably middlebrow; she referred to it as the “Betwixt and Between Company.” The BBC loosened up over time and took increasing account of working-class and minority audiences, and of audiences who simply wanted to laugh.The broadcaster was created by a Royal Charter; it has never been government-run, yet it must answer to government. Hendy recounts attempts to limit its editorial independence. Churchill and Thatcher were especially vocal critics: They felt there was something a bit pinko about the whole enterprise.The BBC’s scrupulous reporting during World War II gave it lasting prestige across the world. It largely lived up to the motto of R.T. Clark, its senior news editor: to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.”During wartime, the company occasionally broadcast from a safer perch. When announcers intoned “This is London,” with British phlegm, they were often in a countryside manor. The London headquarters took a direct hit from a bomb in October 1940; the reader of the evening news “paused for a split second to blow the plaster and soot off the script in front of him before carrying on with the rest of the bulletin.” Seven people were killed in the attack. After the war, the BBC’s foreign services became a prop to the Commonwealth, the new euphemism for “empire.”One of this book’s best set pieces is of the BBC’s wall-to-wall televised coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. One reporter referred to it as “C-Day.” This sort of thing had never been on TV before. The hard part, Hendy writes, was “persuading royal officials that mere subjects had a right to witness the ceremony in the first place.”Over time the BBC’s tentacles grew longer and more varied: Clusters of radio and television stations catered to different demographics. Competitors crept in.The satire boom of the postwar era arrived, led by “The Goon Show,” which ran from 1951 to 1960. There were TV dramas from iconic talents like Ken Loach and Dennis Potter. The BBC began to take the critic Clive James’s advice: “Anemic high art is less worth having than low art with guts.”From left, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, members of “The Goon Show,” which aired on the BBC from 1951 to 1960.Mirrorpix via Getty ImagesLanguage battles fought at the company are never dull to read about. For decades, “bloody” could be used only rarely and “bugger” not at all. One internal stylebook, Hendy writes, “included a ban on jokes about lavatories or ‘effeminacy in men’ as well as any ‘suggestive references’ to subjects such as ‘Honeymoon Couples, Chambermaids, Fig leaves, Prostitution, Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on, Animal habits, e.g. rabbits, Lodgers, Commercial travelers.”The eclectic and influential disc jockey John Peel was brought in; so, alas, was the cigar-chomping comic Jimmy Savile, the zany-uncle host of shows like “Top of the Pops,” who was found after his death in 2011 to have molested dozens if not hundreds of children across five decades. An inquiry found that the BBC did not do nearly enough to stop him.The BBC’s nature documentaries were pathbreaking, and big hits. (They left James “slack-jawed with wonder and respect.”) Hendy walks us through how, under David Attenborough, these things got made. They take years, enormous staffs and a global network of freelancers willing to sit out in the cold and rain to get the money shots.Attenborough was told, early on, that he couldn’t appear onscreen because his teeth were too big. Richard Dawkins has written, in his memoirs, about how difficult it is to talk while walking backward, a crucial skill for any BBC documentary host.More recent BBC hits include the reality series “Strictly Come Dancing,” the brainy documentaries of Louis Theroux and the comedy-drama series “I May Destroy You.”The right has retained its distrust of the BBC, including up-to-date complaints about wokeness; it would like to see it become smaller and more “distinctive,” in the manner of PBS and NPR. These American stations have had nothing like the BBC’s cultural impact — though Greg Jackson, in his story collection “Prodigals,” was correct to refer to Terry Gross as the “Catcher in the WHYY.”Hendy can be critical of the company, but at heart he’s a fan. He reports that across any given week, more than 91 percent of British households use one BBC service or another. He cites academic surveys showing that the broadcaster’s news output is, if anything, tilted slightly to the right.The BBC can still be snoozy. I’m not the only person I know who, at least before Putin rattled the world’s cage, listened to the BBC World Service app at bedtime because it’s an aural sleeping pill.I deserve to lose style points for borrowing Hendy’s last lines for my own, but he puts it simply about the BBC’s precarious position: “We sometimes never know just how much we need or want something until it is gone.” More

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      in Movies

      You Don’t Know Much About Jay Penske. And He’s Fine With That.

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      For the media executive Jay Penske, awards season is money season. It’s the time of year when Disney and Netflix, along with the other studios and streamers, demonstrate their love for the talent by spending millions on For Your Consideration ads in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, as well as the niche outlets Gold Derby, IndieWire and TVLine. All of those publications, which cover things of special interest to Oscar and Emmy voters, are part of Penske Media Corporation.Mr. Penske, a 43-year-old son of a billionaire, has expanded his company greatly in the last few years, pulling off a series of buy-low acquisitions that have turned him into a behind-the-scenes power broker. In addition to the Hollywood trades, he owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vibe and Women’s Wear Daily, and he has a controlling stake in the annual South by Southwest festival.“Jay Penske has become the Rupert Murdoch of entertainment publications,” said Stephen Galloway, a former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter who is now the dean of the Chapman University film school.The flurry of deals, announced in a steady drumbeat of news releases, was not all that sexy, given Mr. Penske’s focus on old-school publications at a time when Substack and TikTok were hot topics in media circles.But the moves have made him someone to be reckoned with, a mogul who can shape perceptions of Hollywood and its players. And his company has become a prime landing spot for the tens of millions spent annually on Oscars and Emmys advertising, a market that has heated up in recent years as streaming platforms spare no expense in their quests for prestige and attention.Mr. Penske made himself into a publisher after growing up the youngest son of the automotive industry titan Roger Penske, a onetime professional racecar driver, known as the Captain, who started his business, Penske Corporation, once his racing days were done. The father’s success made the Penske name all but inescapable. On any street you may see one of the more than 360,000 trucks and vans belonging to his transportation fleet, with the family name in bold black lettering on the side.Up until a decade ago, Jay Penske was one of many scions looking to move upward in Los Angeles. From the start, he was driven by a desire to make the family name known for something other than his father’s accomplishments, said the media entrepreneur Rafat Ali, who met Mr. Penske more than a dozen years ago. “I think he has a chip on his shoulder and wants to prove himself,” he said. “He was hustling back then not to be known as Penske — to prove himself not to the world, but to his family.”Mr. Penske, who declined to be interviewed for this article, entered publishing in earnest in 2009, when he bought Deadline Hollywood Daily, a take-no-prisoners entertainment news site started by the journalist Nikki Finke. A few years later, it became apparent that his ambitions went beyond watching over a scrappy digital outlet, when he set his sights on Variety, the age-old show business publication that was challenged by the transition to online media.The veteran Hollywood executive Sandy Climan put him in touch with Daniel S. Loeb, a hedge fund investor, and the two hit it off over breakfast at the Montage Beverly Hills. Months later Mr. Penske called Mr. Loeb to say he was closing in on a Variety deal — but his financing had collapsed.A 2015 cover of Variety, the trade publication acquired by Penske Media in 2012.via VarietyThe Hollywood Reporter, a Variety competitor, came aboard in 2020.Victoria Will (cover image), via Hollywood Reporter“He’s super-close to his dad,” Mr. Loeb said. “His dad could have written that check in a heartbeat. But I think Jay would rather have let the deal go off the rails before going to his dad for anything other than emotional support.”Mr. Loeb’s fund provided the $26 million in debt and equity Mr. Penske needed to clinch the sale. (That investment made Mr. Loeb a part owner of Variety; Mr. Penske has since bought back his stake, Mr. Loeb and a Penske Media spokeswoman said.)After acquiring Variety, he continued his spree, picking up faded properties at bargain-bin prices. In 2014 he bought Fairchild Fashion Media, the owner of Women’s Wear Daily, from Condé Nast. In 2017 he bought Jann Wenner’s 51 percent stake in Rolling Stone; two years later he acquired the remaining 49 percent, after a cash infusion from a Saudi company. In 2020 Mr. Penske bought 80 percent of The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Vibe.Last year he made his move on South by Southwest, becoming a majority shareholder in the annual tech, film and music festival, which had run into money troubles because of the pandemic. (It made its return this month, after having been shut down the last two years.) Along the way Mr. Penske added ARTnews, Art in America, Dirt, Beauty Inc. and Spy.“Jay grew up with great wealth, but in L.A. there are rooms that are not open to just any rich guy,” said Matthew Belloni, who leads entertainment industry coverage for a new publication, Puck, and who was the top editor of The Hollywood Reporter before Mr. Penske took over. “Owning all of these publications makes him a must-know.”In an industry that rewards attention seekers, he stands apart because of his penchant for privacy. He avoids red carpet events, almost never gives interviews and has no social media footprint. “He prefers to let the brands speak for themselves,” a Penske Media spokeswoman said.Illustration by Tom Hodgkinson; Xavier Bonilla/NurPhoto, via Getty Images‘Dragon, Dragon’Mr. Penske lives in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles with his wife, Elaine Irwin, 52, a former Victoria’s Secret and Calvin Klein model who was previously married to the rock star John Mellencamp, and their daughter. He keeps an apartment in New York and recently bought Hog Cay, a private island in the Bahamas.He grew up in New York City, Monmouth County, N.J., and Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where Penske Corporation has its headquarters. Family vacations took place at Deer Valley in Utah, a ski resort that was partly owned by his father from 1987 to 2017. “They were a country club family,” said Tom Bernard, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, who lived for a time near the Penskes and knew the young Jay.One of five siblings in a boisterous, competitive family, he distinguished himself in hockey and lacrosse at the Lawrenceville School, a boarding school in New Jersey, and Orchard Lake St. Mary’s, a Catholic prep school in Michigan. He was an all-state hockey player, and in 1997 he was named an All-American lacrosse player. A photo of him still hangs in a St. Mary’s athletic facility, showing him mid-stride on the lacrosse field in his No. 7 jersey, which the school retired.His father is a grand figure, beloved in the racing world. He started Penske Corporation in 1969 after racking up 55 victories behind the wheel. One of his company’s divisions owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the home of the Indy 500. Another subsidiary runs Team Penske, the organization whose drivers have won more than 600 races. In 2019, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jay Penske and Ms. Irwin were among the guests in the Oval Office who looked on as former President Donald J. Trump placed the medal around the patriarch’s neck.Jay showed signs that he would go his own way not long after his 2001 graduation from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to Los Angeles and threw himself into businesses that had nothing to do with the nuts, bolts and engine noise of the family trade. An early venture was Firefly Mobile, a company that offered phones designed for children, with large buttons. He also bought promising URLs, including Mail.com, which he built into an email portal business and eventually sold at a profit.The writer A. Scott Berg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Charles Lindbergh and a National Book Award for his study of the editor Maxwell Perkins, was a friend and mentor to Mr. Penske when he was new to Los Angeles. The two bonded over their shared love of books, Mr. Berg said in an interview, adding that he was struck by the younger man’s apparent distaste for Hollywood and the media.“When I met Jay Penske, he viewed two industries with contempt: show business and magazines,” Mr. Berg said. “For whatever reason, he seems to have changed his mind. Maybe he recognized their commercial value, or maybe he came to appreciate their content. One thing I knew from the night I met him in the summer of 2002 was that he was a serious bibliophile.”Jay Penske and his wife, Elaine Irwin, at a Ralph Lauren event in New York in 2018.Wonwoo Lee/ZUMA, via Alamy Mr. Penske gave full expression to his passion when he opened a bookshop in the Beverly Glen neighborhood of Los Angeles. He named it Dragon Books, after a collection of tales he had loved as a child, “Dragon, Dragon,” by John Gardner. The store, with its 18th-century French mantel, wood paneling and Doric columns, became a favorite of antiquarian book lovers. Two hundred people, including his parents, attended the opening in 2006, and Mr. Berg did a brief write-up for Vanity Fair.“While a serial prep-school expellee, he became a serious reader of 19th-century novels,” he wrote of Mr. Penske. “Soon he began collecting, starting with works by Kierkegaard and Mencken. When moving to Los Angeles in 2002, he discovered he had 28,000 volumes, half of which he’s now selling to sustain his passion for new acquisitions. He shelved each book himself, and he often mans the cash register.”He didn’t hold himself entirely aloof from his father’s world. In 2007, with the investor Steve Luczo, he started an IndyCar team, Luczo Dragon Racing. Now fully owned and operated by Mr. Penske and called Dragon Racing, it has competed in the Formula E racing series, for electric cars, for nearly a decade.In 2009, he dove into publishing with the purchase of Deadline. Built on Ms. Finke’s lively voice, it was a gleefully rude digital upstart that made Variety and The Hollywood Reporter seem like house organs for the movie studios and talent agencies. Mr. Penske and Ms. Finke added some reporting muscle when they lured Nellie Andreeva away from The Hollywood Reporter and Mike Fleming from Variety. Deadline’s minuscule staff regularly scooped the competition.With Mr. Penske’s entree into the media business came media attention. The gossip site Gawker took notice of him — at age 30 he was seen at parties in the company of the Benihana heiress Devon Aoki — and labeled him “the hard-partying Si Newhouse Wannabe of Bel Air,” a reference to the longtime Condé Nast chairman.Ms. Finke left Deadline after Mr. Penske’s purchase of Variety amid reports that she preferred that he remain focused on Deadline, rather than attempt to revive a competitor. She started a new blog and used it to refer to him as “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” After mediation with Mr. Penske, she shut down the site; since then, she has not reported on the entertainment industry. (Ms. Finke declined to comment.)Her onetime colleague Mr. Fleming had nothing but praise for the publisher. In an interview, he noted that Mr. Penske flew to New York to attend the wake for his father, who died in 2012 from injuries sustained during Hurricane Sandy. “That told me everything I needed to know,” said Mr. Fleming, who is now Deadline’s co-editor-in-chief with Ms. Andreeva.The visit took place during an eventful time for Mr. Penske. The year 2012 was also when he got arrested in Nantucket. According to a Nantucket Police Department report, Mr. Penske and his brother Mark were urinating in a parking lot outside the Nantucket Yacht Club late at night when a woman approached. “Jay turned and continued to urinate on her boots,” the report said. After the woman alerted the police, the brothers apparently tried “to flee.”An officer intercepted Jay, and his brother was found on the back staircase of an apartment building, according to the report. The Penskes were locked in a police station cell, only to be released soon afterward. Coverage of the incident was widespread, with reports in Auto Week, The Daily Mail, ESPN and Politico, among other publications.Mr. Penske has not spoken publicly of that night and has kept his silence when faced with public criticism in other instances. One came after his 2017 purchase of a Black church in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles for $6.3 million. Mr. Penske’s plan to convert it into a home for his family drew protests. He has since sold the property.In 2018, he accepted a $200 million investment from the Saudi Research and Media Group, a publicly traded company. The investment became a point of contention later that year, when Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who wrote a regular opinion column for The Washington Post, was murdered and dismembered in a Saudi consulate office in Turkey. The United States government concluded that the killing had been carried out by a team reporting directly to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.Mr. Penske did not publicly address the investment, even as his publications reported on the pressure faced by companies with financial ties to Saudi Arabia. In some articles, the Penske outlets mistakenly reported that his company had received money from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which is overseen by Prince Mohammed, rather than the Saudi Research and Media Group. After The Wrap reported on the matter, a number of Penske Media articles were updated to correct the error.“PMC has disclosed the small minority investment from SRMG to all of its stakeholders and brands,” a Penske Media spokeswoman said in a statement. “Any statement to the contrary is purely an attempt to create a false narrative. It is further disclosed in every article any PMC brand writes about Saudi Arabia.”Jay Penske watches the action at the Indianopolis Motor Speedway during a practice run before the Indianapolis 500 in 2012.Brent Smith/Reuters, via Alamy‘This Guy Is Serious’Ten Penske Media employees interviewed for this article describe their boss as someone who stepped up for publications in trouble. “Jay Penske came in and saved this business,” said Dea Lawrence, the chief operating and marketing officer of Variety. “He is a hero to the publishing world.” His company has more than 1,350 employees, according to the Penske Media vice chairman Gerry Byrne, nearly half of them journalists and content creators.After the company bought a controlling stake in Vibe and Billboard, which have offices in New York, he flew there to meet with each new employee. “This was in the middle of the pandemic, and so I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is serious!’” said Datwon Thomas, the editor in chief of Vibe. Mr. Thomas met Mr. Penske for lunch at Bryant Park Grill in Midtown. “Jay knew a lot about me and my background,” he said, “and he knew a lot about Vibe.” Four other Penske Media employees said that Mr. Penske makes a practice of meeting with each of his new employees soon after acquiring a property.Mr. Penske will sometimes play hardball with the staff. When Tatiana Siegel, a longtime Hollywood Reporter journalist, accepted a job at The Ankler, a subscription newsletter started by the show business writer Richard Rushfield that has expanded under the former Hollywood Reporter top editor Janice Min, Mr. Penske put a stop to the move. Ms. Siegel’s contract included a noncompete clause, and Mr. Penske held her to it. The parties eventually agreed that Ms. Siegel would decamp to Rolling Stone, committing 80 percent of her work to it, with the remainder going to The Ankler.“Jay has been by far the best owner I’ve worked under at The Hollywood Reporter,” said Ms. Siegel, who joined the magazine in 2003. “My situation was unique, and it was resolved amicably.”The upstart publications Puck and The Ankler pose a new threat to Penske Media’s hold on entertainment coverage. The competition is reminiscent of what took place more than a decade ago, when Deadline had the old guard quaking. Mr. Rushfield said that start-ups may have an advantage over entrenched publications, because they are not beholden to anyone.“If you’re at a publication like Variety, for example, the number of things a studio has over you is hard to keep track of,” Mr. Rushfield said. “You need friendly access to studio executives and agents gift wrapping your scoops. You need people for covers. You need people to speak at your conferences.” The result, he continued, is that “publications with different business models, and more aggressive reporting, can elbow their way in.”Mr. Penske may be able to counter the newcomers through the magic of synergy. The addition of South by Southwest has given him another way to promote all things Penske. The latest iteration of the festival, which is in Austin, Texas, included concerts hosted by Rolling Stone and live episodes of podcasts from The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline.Shortly before the first day, Variety published a glowing article headlined “‘SXSW Is My Whole Life’: An Ode to the Austin Festival as It Makes Its In-Person Return.” You can read it online, where, up until Oscar voting ended on March 22, it was surrounded by For Your Consideration ads. More

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      in Television

      Av Westin, Newsman Behind ABC’s ‘20/20,’ Dies at 92

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      After nearly 20 years at CBS News, he went to a rival network and helped turn its answer to “60 Minutes” into a frequent Emmy Award winner.Av Westin, an influential television producer who rose from copy boy at CBS News for Edward R. Murrow in the 1940s to help make ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine a perennial winner of Emmy Awards, died on March 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.His wife, Ellen Rossen, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Westin had spent a year as the executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight” when he took over at “20/20” in 1979. Over the next seven years, the program won more than 30 news and documentary Emmy Awards, including 11 in 1981.Looking to differentiate “20/20” from the entertainment shows it competed with in prime-time, as well as from CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Westin mixed ambitious investigative reports with celebrity profiles, lifestyle features and “process pieces” about artistic endeavors like the making of a new album of standards by Linda Ronstadt.A documentarian at heart, Mr. Westin also ordered a series of features called “Moment of Crisis,” which looked back at news events like the disastrous explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the efforts to save President Ronald Reagan’s life after he was wounded in an assassination attempt.“20/20,” which was hosted by Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs in the 1980s, had an A-list group of correspondents that included Sylvia Chase, Lynn Sherr, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Jarriel, Bob Brown and Sander Vanocur.Mr. Brown recalled that Mr. Westin gave correspondents and producers considerable leeway to cover a story as they chose.“But when the piece was screened, Av took over and was at his best,” Mr. Brown said in a phone interview. “He could break apart a story and make you see everything you’d done wrong and let you know what you had to do to fix it. He had a genius for going straight to a problem.”Mr. Westin’s time at “20/20” came to an end in February 1987, when he circulated an 18-page memo within ABC News and to its top executives at its parent company, Capital Cities/ABC, criticizing news-gathering procedures and calling the division inefficient and in need of a new focus.He said that he had been quietly asked by a Capital Cities executive to critique ABC News, whose president was Roone Arledge.“Cap Cities had essentially decided that Roone was not their guy anymore,” Mr. Westin said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2011. The executive told him that “Roone’s tenure was going to end, and I was likely to be the preferred candidate of management.”“What I wrote was accurate,” Mr. Westin added, “but obviously it was inflammatory.”The memo led Mr. Arledge to suspend him and take him off “20/20.” But the suspension did not last long, and Mr. Westin went on to work on projects like “The Blessings of Liberty,” about the U.S. Constitution at its centennial, until he left the network in 1989.It was not the first time the two men clashed. In 1985, Mr. Arledge killed a “20/20” segment about the death of Marilyn Monroe and her ties to the Kennedys, calling it “gossip-column stuff.” Mr. Westin objected, and Mr. Rivera angrily told the gossip columnist Liz Smith that he and others at “20/20” were appalled that Mr. Arledge “would overturn a respected, honorable, great newsman like Av.”Mr. Westin with the “20/20” host Hugh Downs in 1981. He recruited an A-list group of correspondents for the program.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesAvram Robert Westin was born on July 29, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, Elliot, was a vice president of a commercial baking company. His mother, Harriet (Radin) Westin, was a homemaker. Av Westin graduated from New York University in 1949. He had begun his studies as a pre-med student, but an experience during a summer job as a copy boy at CBS in 1947 altered his direction, to English and history.“A bulletin moved that a ship was sinking off Newfoundland,” he told the Television Academy, and he promptly carried the teletype copy to an editor. “I was the only person at CBS News headquarters who knew that information,” he said. “I was the ultimate insider. That’s the epiphany.”Mr. Westin was a writer, director, reporter and producer for 18 years at CBS, during which he earned a master’s degree in Russian and East European studies at Columbia University in 1958. He won an Emmy in 1960 as a writer for the documentary “The Population Explosion,” and in 1963 created and produced “CBS Morning News” with Mike Wallace.He left CBS in 1967, spent two years as executive director of the noncommercial Public Broadcasting Laboratory and joined ABC News in 1969 as the executive producer of its evening newscast, then anchored by Frank Reynolds. It was an era when “ABC Evening News” trailed CBS and NBC’s nightly news operations in prestige, ratings and financial resources.“My target is ‘H and B,’” Mr. Westin told The Indianapolis News in 1969, referring to NBC’s co-anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “I think people are getting tired of them, and if they’re shopping around, I want them to look at us before they automatically turn to Walter” Cronkite.The broadcast journalist Ted Koppel, who was a correspondent on the evening news program, said of Mr. Westin in a phone interview, “He probably elevated the ‘ABC Evening News’ as much as anyone until Roone Arledge,” adding, “Av was a very ambitious man, who thought he should have been ABC News president.”While at ABC News, Mr. Westin ran its “Close-Up” documentary unit, for which he won a Peabody Award in 1973. He won another Peabody the next year, for producing and directing the documentary “Sadat: Action Biography,” about the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat.He left ABC News in 1976 in a dispute with Bill Sheehan, the president of the division, but returned two years later at Mr. Arledge’s request “to get rid of” the incompatible, feuding “Evening News” anchor team of Ms. Walters and Harry Reasoner.“The day I arrived back at ABC, one of the producers who was in the Reasoner camp came up to me and said, ‘You know, she owes us 5 minutes and 25 seconds,’” Mr. Westin told the Television Academy, referring to how much more Ms. Walters had been on the air than Mr. Reasoner over the past year.After returning as the executive producer of “Evening News,” Mr. Westin collaborated with Mr. Arledge on an overhaul in 1978 that transformed the show into the faster-paced, graphics-oriented “World News Tonight,” with three anchors: Mr. Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson in Chicago and Peter Jennings in London.A year later, Mr. Arledge moved Mr. Westin to “20/20.”After leaving ABC News, Mr. Westin was an executive at King World Productions, Time Warner and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’s foundation.In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Mark. His previous marriages to Sandra Glick and Kathleen Lingo ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.To Mr. Westin, evening news programs, which cannot provide much depth in 22 minutes of airtime, have a clear mandate.“I believe the audience at dinner time wants to know the answers to three very important questions,” he said, explaining a rule he had at ABC News. “Is the world safe? Is my hometown and my home safe? If my wife and children are safe, what has happened in the past 24 hours to make them better off or to amuse them?” More

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      in Theater

      Richard Christiansen, Influential Chicago Theater Critic, Dies at 90

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      His reviews for The Chicago Tribune, and his encouragement of the drama crowd, helped make Chicago one of the country’s leading theater cities.In 1970, as Americans were preparing to mark the first Earth Day, Richard Christiansen, still relatively early in what became a storied career of writing about theater in Chicago, seized the moment to argue that the arts deserved just as much attention as the environment but were unlikely to receive it.“One can actually see the air becoming befouled through pollution,” he wrote in The Chicago Daily News, his employer at the time, “but it is much more difficult to tell when the spirit is withering for lack of nourishment.”Over the next three decades, at The News and then, from 1978 to 2002, at The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Christiansen nourished readers with his drama criticism. He helped make Chicago one of the most vibrant theater towns in the country, not only through his writing but also with the occasional behind-the-scenes nudge.He championed early work by David Mamet and other playwrights, boosted the careers of directors like Robert Falls and highlighted performances by countless actors who would go on to become national names, among them Gary Sinise, Amy Morton and Brian Dennehy. He shined his spotlight on the innovative early efforts of now venerable companies like Steppenwolf and now departed ones like the Famous Door Theater.He was so widely respected that when he retired in 2002, the League of Chicago Theaters Foundation turned its annual gala into “Showtime 2002! A Salute to Richard Christiansen” and filled the evening with scenes from some of his favorite plays.Mr. Christiansen died on Jan. 28 at a Chicago nursing home. He was 90. Sid Smith, a former colleague at The Tribune and his executor, confirmed the death.Mr. Christiansen was not just a big-house critic; from the 1960s on, Chicago was home to theater staged in converted bowling alleys and storefronts and assorted other so-called off-Loop spaces, and Mr. Christiansen eagerly sampled seemingly all of it.Last week, the producer Charles Grippo, in a letter to The Tribune, recalled the time in 1987 when he produced his first show, a revival of Mr. Mamet’s “The Woods,” in just such a space. Mr. Christiansen had called for a ticket, but on the appointed day a blizzard struck. Mr. Grippo decided to proceed with the performance anyway and was pleasantly surprised when Mr. Christiansen braved the storm and turned up at the theater. His enthusiastic review made the show a success.“Christiansen was always honest with his readers,” Mr. Grippo wrote, “but he was never mean. He truly wanted those of us in the Chicago theater community to flourish.”In a 2002 article in The Tribune reflecting on his career, Mr. Christiansen recalled some of those off-the-beaten-trail discoveries, including the night in 1987 when he made his way to “a ramshackle space underneath the L tracks” to see a production by a new company, Famous Door, which went on to considerable acclaim before folding in 2005.“In Chicago, at least,” he wrote, “you never know where the lightning is going to strike, where the talent is going to show itself.”Mr. Christiansen in 2002. Once, after being moved by a production, he wrote, “I had to pull my car over to the side of the street so that I could clear the tears from my eyes?” Afterward, a rave from him was known in Chicago’s theater world as a “pull over.”Charles Osgood/Chicago TribuneRichard Dean Christiansen was born on Aug. 1, 1931, in Berwyn, Ill., west of Chicago, to William and Louise (Dethlefs) Christiansen. He grew up in Oak Park, Ill. In his 2004 book, “A Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago,” the dedication reads, “For my parents, who went to church and to the theater and took me with them.”In a 2004 interview with The Tribune occasioned by publication of that book, he recalled that the first show he was permitted to attend was “Oklahoma!”“Before I was allowed to go, my mother had to make sure there were no dirty words in it,” he said. “I was still able to see it even though it had one ‘damn.’”He graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1953 with an English degree and did a year of postgraduate work at Harvard University, “learning that I lacked a true scholarly bent,” as he summed up that experience. Then came two years in the Army and a trainee position at Time magazine in New York before he returned to Chicago in 1956 and took a job at the City News Bureau, a cooperative news agency that fed the area’s papers.Mr. Christiansen went to work for The News in 1957. He started on the night shift, but by the early 1960s he was writing more and more about the arts — books, television, music. And theater. He left The News in 1973 to edit a new magazine, The Chicagoan, but when it went out of business after 18 months he returned to The News. When that paper went under in 1978, he was picked up by The Tribune.As a critic, Mr. Christiansen was no cheerleader; if he thought a production was bad, he wasn’t shy about saying so. His opening sentence in a 1985 review of a drama called “White Biting Dog” at Remains Theater said simply, “‘White Biting Dog’ shouldn’t happen to a dog.”But if he liked a show, his words could help make the reputations of actors, directors and companies. An oft-cited case in point was his 1983 review of Jack Henry Abbott’s “In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison” at Wisdom Bridge Theater, a production directed by Mr. Falls and starring William L. Petersen, the actor now well known from the television series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Mr. Christiansen wrote of Mr. Petersen’s stage mannerisms and craftsmanship, then said this:“These qualities are admirable in acting, and can be accounted for, but how do I account for the fact that minutes after leaving the theater Thursday night, I had to pull my car over to the side of the street so that I could clear the tears from my eyes?”Afterward, the Chicago theater world was said to refer to a rave from Mr. Christiansen as “a pull over.”Some critics keep a distance from actors, directors and others they write about, but Mr. Christiansen, who leaves no immediate survivors, was known to talk shop with those in the theater world and offer career guidance.In the mid-1980s, for instance, he went to a showcase production of Shakespeare scenes staged by a young director and actress named Barbara Gaines, liked it and invited Ms. Gaines to lunch.“I didn’t even finish my chocolate mousse before he suggested — or rather, informed me — that my next project must be to direct a full-length Shakespeare play,” Ms. Gaines said by email. “And from that fateful day, Chicago Shakespeare Theater as we know it was born.” She is now artistic director of that well-regarded company.The playwright Jeffrey Sweet, who wrote an appreciation of Mr. Christiansen last week for the website American Theater, told of his own experience with the Christiansen guiding hand.“Without telling me he was going to,” he said by email, “he phoned Northwestern University Press and told an editor there, ‘Sweet’s written enough good stuff it’s time for you to publish an anthology.’ And they did. And he wrote the introduction.” More

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      in Movies

      What a Times Journalist Learned From His ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment

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      A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago.One of the thus-far theoretical duties of the astronomer is to inform the public that something very big and horrible is about to happen: The sun will soon explode, a black hole has just wandered into Earth’s path, hostile aliens have amassed an armada right behind the moon.In the new Netflix film “Don’t Look Up,” a pair of astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, assume this responsibility when they discover that a “planet-killing” comet is headed straight for Earth and must spread the news.It doesn’t go well. The president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, is more concerned with her poll numbers. Television talk show hosts ridicule the scientists. Rich oligarchs want to exploit the comet’s minerals. “Don’t Look Up” may be the most cinematic fun anyone has had with the End of the World since Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”Watching it brought back my own experience reporting Really Bad news. In March of 1998, I was the new deputy science editor of The Times, and my doomsday audience was small but elite: The Times’s top editors. I had been on the job for only a month. Nobody really knew me. My direct boss, the science editor, had taken the week off, leaving me in charge.And so, late in the afternoon on March 11, I walked into the 4:30 news meeting where editors pitch stories for the next day’s front page and announced that we had a late-breaking story by the distinguished reporter Malcolm Browne. “It’s a pretty good story,” I said. “It’s about the end of the world.”Brian Marsden, the astronomer who calculated that in 2028 the asteroid 1997 XF11 would come within 30,000 miles of Earth.Evan RichmanThe source was Brian Marsden, director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which is the International Astronomical Union’s clearinghouse for cosmic discoveries, as well as its Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for keeping track of comets and asteroids. He had just calculated that a recently discovered asteroid, a mile-wide rock named 1997 XF11 (now asteroid 35396), would pass within 30,000 miles of Earth on Oct. 26, 2028 — and had a small but real chance of hitting our planet.“In more than 40 years of computing orbits, I had never seen anything like that before,” Dr. Marsden later said. He felt he had a duty to share this with the world in an I.A.U. Circular.The front-page meeting dissolved into a purposeful pandemonium. I spent the rest of the night answering questions from newsroom colleagues who wanted to know whether they should continue to pay their mortgages, and responding to queries and suggestions from the top editors. Astronomers sent pictures of the asteroid, a fuzzy dot in the darkness. I was having an adrenaline-fueled crash course in the scrutiny a front-page story receives in the newsroom before it can be published.I didn’t want to go home that night but eventually did, in a nervous fritter. The next morning it was already all over. Pictures of the asteroid from several years earlier had turned up overnight, and Dr. Marsden had recalculated the orbit and found that 1997 XF11 would miss the Earth by 600,000 miles. That was still close by cosmic standards, but safe for civilization.An image of the asteroid 1997 XF11, now minor planet 35396, taken on March 11, 1998, over an interval of 30 minutes by the astronomer Bernadette Rodgers of the University of Washington.Bernadette Rodgers/University of Washington/Astrophysical Research ConsortiumIn the following days, Dr. Marsden was publicly scolded by his colleagues and the media as a “Chicken Little” who had made “cockamamie calculations” without consulting other astronomers who already knew that the asteroid posed no risk. NASA told the astronomers to get their act together before blindsiding the agency and the public with news of an apocalypse.Dr. Marsden apologized for generating such a scare, but noted that he had helped raise awareness on the danger of asteroid strikes and extinction..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Much as the incident was bad for my reputation, we needed a scare like that to bring attention to this problem,” he later wrote in The Boston Globe. “I also believe that for us not to make the announcement as we did would have led to condemnation that science was being stripped of its essential openness,” he said.I felt bad for Dr. Marsden, a wry, cherubic presence I had known for 20 years of reporting on astronomy. (He died in 2010.) And I felt bad for myself. How often do you get to cover the possible end of the world after only a month on the job? The next day, when The New York Post ran the headline “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye!,” I took it personally.The New York Times’s front-page article of March 12, 1998, and The New York Post’s cover of March 13.But the incident was indeed a kind of turning point, according to Amy Mainzer, an asteroid expert at the University of Arizona who served as a scientific consultant on “Don’t Look Up.”In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to find and begin tracking at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 500 feet wide or so that come near Earth. (They neglected to provide much money to pay for the search until years later.) The word was out that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.NASA now spends some $150 million a year on the endeavor. “We’ve come a long way since 1997 XF11,” said Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who criticized Dr. Marsden back in 1998.These days, computers do the work of sorting asteroids and comets, automatically calculating orbits from new observations, comparing them with known objects, scoring them for how dangerous they are and sending out the results to astronomers. Anything that comes within five million miles of Earth is considered a Potentially Hazardous Object, or PHO.“We didn’t have all that back then,” Dr. Mainzer said. “We’ve learned a lot as a community.”“Don’t Look Up,” directed and co-written by Adam McKay, arrives on Friday — incidentally, less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see whether asteroids could be diverted from their trajectories. But the film is less about asteroids than about the tendency of humans to dismiss bad news from science and to embrace misinformation. It was conceived as an allegory about the failure to act on climate change. “A lot of people don’t want to hear it,” Dr. Mainzer said. “As a scientist, this is terrifying.”However, the film was shot, very carefully, during the pandemic, and the parallels to the ongoing health crisis are hard to miss.“Scientists don’t possess the power to effect change,” Dr. Mainzer said. “How do we get people to act on scientific information?” Should they “work within the system,” she asked, even if it means they have to cope with purveyors of misinformation?Humor helps, Dr. Mainzer added: “We’re saying it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to go down this path.”Sync your calendar with the solar systemNever miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world. More

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      in Music

      Maureen Cleave, Pop Journalist and Beatles Confidante, Dies at 87

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      Ms. Cleave’s interview with John Lennon, in which he said the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” drew worldwide attention.Maureen Cleave, a British journalist who was one of the first music writers to introduce readers to the Beatles, and who recorded John Lennon’s famous observation that the band was “more popular than Jesus,” died on Nov. 6 at her home in Aldeburgh, England. She was 87.Her daughter Dora Nichols confirmed her death. She did not give a cause but said Ms. Cleave had Alzheimer’s disease.When Ms. Cleave began writing the column “Disc Date” for The London Evening Standard in 1961, serious writing about pop music was in its infancy. She helped raise its profile, in columns that featured conversations with luminaries including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Rolling Stones. She became a marquee byline; in 1976, The Standard called her “the writer who gets people to talk about themselves in the way no other writer can match.”But she was best known for her regular reporting on the Beatles, with whom she had a warm relationship, and whom she described affectionately in the newspaper’s pages. Her piece headlined “The Year of the Beatles,” published in The Standard in 1963, was one of the first major newspaper articles about the band.“Their behavior ranges from the preposterous, farcical and impossible to the kindly, thoughtful and polite,” Ms. Cleave wrote. “You are outraged, diverted and charmed. You are never, ever bored.”Her biggest moment stemmed from an interview with Lennon published in March 1966, in which she delved into his thoughts on organized religion. “Christianity will go,” he said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first — rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”Readers, and the rest of the British press, paid little notice. But in July, a month before the Beatles began a tour of the United States, the American magazine Datebook reprinted the interview and provoked a frenzy.Lennon’s remark, which came to be widely known as a claim that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” prompted demonstrations and drew the ire of many American Christians. Lennon was accused of blasphemy — as, by extension, was Ms. Cleave.A Baptist pastor in Cleveland threatened excommunication for members of his parish who attended a Beatles concert. The Ku Klux Klan protested Lennon’s remarks. The Vatican issued a statement condemning the comparison.Lennon apologized — albeit reluctantly — at a news conference during the American tour, under pressure from the band’s manager, Brian Epstein.Paul McCartney said in the multimedia release “The Beatles Anthology” that Ms. Cleave was one of the band’s go-to journalists. “Maureen was interesting and easy to talk to,” he said. Lennon, he added, “made the unfortunate mistake of talking very freely because Maureen was someone we knew very well, to whom we would just talk straight from the shoulder.”Lennon’s line made it into The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.The 1966 American tour, fraught with protests and the lingering fear of violence, was the Beatles’ last.Maureen Diana Cleave was born on Oct. 20, 1934, in India, which was part of the British Empire at the time.Her father, Maj. John Cleave, was a British officer stationed in India. Her mother, Isabella Mary Fraser Browne, was a homemaker. She had two sisters.Ms. Cleave attended high school in her mother’s native Ireland after the family returned there.After graduating from St. Anne’s College at Oxford in 1957, Ms. Cleave found a job at The Evening Standard as a secretary.An avid fan of pop music, she pitched a column on the subject to the paper’s editors. That idea became “Disc Date.” She traveled to Liverpool in 1963 to see the Beatles in person.She married Francis Nichols, an Oxford classmate, in 1966, and they later moved to his ancestral home at Lawford Hall in Essex. He died in 2015. Her survivors include their daughters, Dora and Sadie Nichols; their son, Bertie Nichols; and three grandchildren.After the Beatles broke up in 1970, Ms. Cleave continued covering the music scene for The Evening Standard. In a series of articles in the 1970s under the rubric “Maureen Cleave’s Guide to the Young,” she explained the hippie movement to Standard readers and explored the Hells Angels, among other topics.Ms. Cleave was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, after collapsing on a London Underground platform in 1992. She documented her experience with the ailment in The Standard the next year. “The medical profession lagged behind in M.E. awareness,” she wrote; “because there is no test, ergo it doesn’t exist.”“Apart from having it, I knew little about it myself,” she added. She saw homeopathic doctors as well as traditional practitioners in an effort to manage her condition.Among the other topics she explored was women’s fitness. She also wrote profiles of painters, writers and philanthropists.But she also continued publishing reflections on her time with the Beatles. In 2005, she wrote a piece for The Daily Telegraph tied to what would have been John Lennon’s 65th birthday.“Charisma rarely survives the aging process,” she wrote, “but, killed in the prime of life, Lennon remains a very powerful absence.” More

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      in Television

      Gadsby and Netflix Employees Pressure Executive Over Dave Chappelle Special

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      Tensions at Netflix continued to flare on Friday, 10 days after the release of a special by the comedian Dave Chappelle that critics inside and outside the company have described as promoting bigotry against transgender people.Early on Friday, a Netflix star criticized the company and Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive, in a stinging social media post. Later in the day, Netflix said it had fired an employee for sharing documents related to Mr. Chappelle with a reporter, and Mr. Sarandos fielded pointed questions from employees during a companywide virtual meeting.In a rare public rebuke, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby upbraided Mr. Sarandos by name for his defense of Mr. Chappelle. Ms. Gadsby, whose 2017 Netflix special, “Nanette,” earned an Emmy and a Peabody Award, is the most prominent entertainer to criticize Mr. Sarandos and Netflix, which she referred to in an Instagram post as an “amoral algorithm cult.”Mr. Sarandos and Netflix’s other co-chief, Reed Hastings, have been unwavering in their support of Mr. Chappelle, who signed a lucrative multiyear deal with the company in 2016 and has won Emmys and Grammys for his Netflix work. In a note this week, Mr. Sarandos countered the arguments of Netflix staff members who had suggested that Mr. Chappelle’s special, “The Closer,” could lead to violence against transgender people, writing that he had the “strong belief that content on-screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.”Mr. Sarandos, who joined Netflix two decades ago and became its co-chief executive last year, also said that the company would go to great lengths to “ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story.” He cited inclusive Netflix programs like “Sex Education” and “Orange Is the New Black” as well as Ms. Gadsby’s specials, which also include “Douglas,” released in 2020.In her social media post on Friday, Ms. Gadsby, who is a lesbian, objected to the executive’s references to her in his defense of the company and Mr. Chappelle’s special.Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix specials were critical and popular successes, called the company “amoral” in a social media post on Friday.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Hey Ted Sarandos!” Ms. Gadsby wrote. “Just a quick note to let you know that I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess. Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chappelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view.”She continued: “You didn’t pay me nearly enough to deal with the real world consequences of the hate speech dog whistling you refuse to acknowledge, Ted.”Netflix declined to comment on Ms. Gadsby’s remarks.At a virtual company meeting that started at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, Mr. Sarandos replied to a series of tough questions from employees, who asked about Mr. Chappelle’s special and how the company had responded to criticisms of it, according to three people with knowledge of the gathering. The event became emotional when several employees were persistent in their questioning of Mr. Sarandos and his support for someone who they feel engages in hate speech, the people said.After the meeting, Netflix said in a statement that an employee had been fired for sharing internal documents pertaining to Mr. Chappelle with the press.“We have let go of an employee for sharing confidential, commercially sensitive information outside the company,” the statement said. “We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company.”The documents included private financial information regarding Mr. Chappelle’s Netflix specials that were published this week by Bloomberg, according to a person with knowledge of the termination. The documents included the costs for the specials — $24.1 million for “The Closer” and $23.6 million for Mr. Chappelle’s previous special, “Sticks & Stones” — as well as an internal metric that determines the value of the specials relative to their budgets.Such data is available to Netflix staff but rarely made public. The appearance of the statistics in a published article is a further sign of how deep the schism is between some Netflix employees and company leadership.Several organizations, including GLAAD, which monitors the news media and entertainment companies for bias against the L.G.B.T.Q. community, have criticized Mr. Chappelle’s special as transphobic. A group of Netflix workers has planned a walkout for next week in protest.Nicole Sperling More

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      in Movies

      Netflix Employee Who Criticized Dave Chapelle Is Among 3 Suspended

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      Netflix recently suspended three employees, including a transgender employee who posted a Twitter thread last week criticizing a new Dave Chappelle stand-up special on the streaming service as being transphobic.The employees were suspended after they attended a virtual business meeting among top executives at the company that they had not been invited to, a person familiar with the decision said on Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter. Netflix said in a statement that the transgender employee, Terra Field, was not suspended because of the tweets critical of Mr. Chappelle’s show.“It is absolutely untrue to say that we have suspended any employees for tweeting about this show,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement. “Our employees are encouraged to disagree openly, and we support their right to do so.”Mr. Chappelle’s comedy special, “The Closer,” debuted on Netflix on Tuesday, and was quickly criticized by several organizations, including GLAAD, for “ridiculing trans people.” Jaclyn Moore, an executive producer for the Netflix series “Dear White People,” said last week that she would not work with Netflix “as long as they continue to put out and profit from blatantly and dangerously transphobic content.”Ms. Field, who is a software engineer at Netflix, tweeted last week that the special “attacks the trans community, and the very validity of transness.”On Monday, after news of her suspension went public following a report by The Verge, she tweeted: “I just want to say I appreciate everyone’s support. You’re all the best, especially when things are difficult.”As criticism of Mr. Chappelle’s special began last week, Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos sent a memo to employees defending the comedian.“Several of you have also asked where we draw the line on hate,” Mr. Sarandos wrote in the memo. “We don’t allow titles on Netflix that are designed to incite hate or violence, and we don’t believe ‘The Closer’ crosses that line. I recognize, however, that distinguishing between commentary and harm is hard, especially with stand-up comedy which exists to push boundaries. Some people find the art of stand-up to be meanspirited, but our members enjoy it, and it’s an important part of our content offering.”Mr. Sarandos also cited Netflix’s “longstanding deal” with Mr. Chappelle and said the comedian’s 2019 special, “Sticks & Stones,” was also “controversial” and was “our most watched, stickiest and most award-winning stand-up special to date.”In 2019, Netflix was criticized when it blocked an episode of Hasan Minhaj’s topical show, “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj,” in Saudi Arabia after the kingdom’s government made a request for it to do so. In the episode, Mr. Minaj criticized the Saudi Arabian government and questioned the role of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.“We’re not in the news business,” Netflix’s co-chief executive Reed Hastings said in 2019, explaining the decision. “We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power.’ We’re trying to entertain.” More