There’s nothing intimidating about David Ellison, the CEO and Chairman of Paramount Skydance and the current shooting star of the entertainment world. I bumped into Ellison at the Simon Wiesenthal gala Thursday night, and, in classic schmooze mode, immediately informed him I had written a positive piece about his decision to bring on Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief.
That kicked off a highly pleasant conversation around the issue of trust in media. Ellison is big on trust. He thinks the mainstream media in general has lost that trust, and he wants to regain it.
I don’t know why that is so difficult for some people to swallow. Should any of us be shocked that the mainstream media has a leftist bent? Seriously? It’s just a fact that the great majority of those in the media biz vote Democrat. The same holds true in academia. More than 90 percent of faculty lean left. That bias is the longtime elephant in the room in American culture. Ellison and Weiss are disrupting that status quo. They want to inject some balance in their news coverage, which has ruffled a whole bunch of entitled feathers at CBS.
My brief encounter with Ellison ended with the ironic mention that he was taking the Tiffany Network back 50 years when its lead anchor, Walter Cronkite, was the most trusted man in America.
There was an A-list buzz at the gala, which drew a who’s who of the media and entertainment industry, with Stephen Spielberg introducing the night’s honoree, Warner Bros Discovery chief David Zaslav.
I got lucky during the cocktail reception when I bumped into Bill Maher at the bar. My Bill Maher schmooze intro has been in my head for years: “I love how you’re not afraid to piss off your fans,” I told him, to which he replied, with all the wit he could muster, “Thanks.” We continued on that track, and I quickly noticed there wasn’t anything too funny or snarky about the points we were making. Yup, he seeks the truth wherever it goes, and the first person he must please is himself.
In an attempt to lighten things up, I mentioned that I was working on a column titled, “In praise of bullshit,” arguing that harmless exaggeration could be acceptable if it makes someone like your mother happy. He made a grimace before we got interrupted.
I bumped into other people throughout the night. How could I not? People were buzzing like hungry bees. One of the challenges of schmoozing in an A-list crowd is to try to find things to say that are quick but not useless. I asked Jason Alexander if he was getting funnier with age (not at all). I confused Dana Bash with someone else, but she didn’t get offended. All I could think of saying to Wolf Blitzer was that we have a friend in common (we talked about him). I told the head of Netflix he was keeping my family happy and he just about hugged me.
While Antonio Villaraigosa was showing me the latest poll numbers in his run for governor, my old friend from the advertising days Michael Kassan walked by and regaled us with a classic story about getting the Acura account. We are a people of memories.
I suggested to Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and founder of a major initiative against hate and antisemitism (which runs ads on the Super Bowl), that his “blue square” insignia was powerful precisely because it had no words. Millions of people should wear it as a conversation starter, I said. This was a night for saying agreeable things.
Speaking of agreeable, my favorite comedian Elon Gold was schmoozing it up with Lawrence Bender regarding a new series idea from Gold. I promised a cover story. They both liked the idea.
Beyond the schmoozing, networking and dealmaking, the soul of the evening was undoubtedly the presence of two Oct. 7 survivors. It brought a sobriety to an enchanted evening, but no one seemed to mind. As the survivors spoke, it was hard not to contrast the glittering evening with the dark dungeon where these two souls lived hungry and in misery for hundreds of days, not knowing whether they would ever be free.
“I chose life,” one of them said. It was Omer Shem Tov, who had been held hostage in those dungeons for 505 days.
On a night hosted by a center that makes sure the world never forgets the lessons of the Holocaust, that one line—I chose life—pierced through every grateful heart in the A-list room.
The survivor had earned our trust.
