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   Mr. Solomon, now retired from AT&T, denied having any such exchange with   
   Mr. Ginsberg and called the account a fabrication. Mr. Stephenson also   
   said he had never suggested that Mr. Zucker be fired and rebutted the idea   
   that AT&T had made any promises to Mr. Trump.   
      
   “Anyone who says otherwise is categorically wrong or making it up,” Mr.   
   Stephenson said.   
      
   On June 27, just five days after Mr. Stephenson’s White House visit, Mr.   
   Trump tweeted, after CNN retracted a story on Mr. Trump and Russia, that   
   CNN was “looking at big management changes” and that its ratings were “way   
   down!” — pretty much the same message Mr. Ginsberg had heard from Mr.   
   Solomon.   
      
   Mr. Ginsberg was stunned. He confronted Mr. Solomon: “How did Trump know   
   this?” Mr. Ginsberg thought the answer was obvious, but Mr. Solomon   
   insisted that Mr. Stephenson hadn’t promised the president anything in   
   return for Mr. Trump’s support of the merger.   
      
   “Of course they weren’t so stupid as to say, ‘Trump wants this, and if you   
   do it he’ll do what we want,’” Mr. Bewkes recalled. What AT&T wanted at   
   the time was for the administration to approve the merger. “But Randall   
   was always probing me. ‘What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our   
   reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should Zucker be   
   replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”   
      
   Mr. Stephenson acknowledged that he had discussed the anti-Trump tenor of   
   CNN’s reporting with Mr. Bewkes. “If you ask me personally, would I have   
   liked to have seen CNN’s coverage be more moderate? Yes, that would have   
   been helpful,” Mr. Stephenson said.   
      
   Mr. Bewkes was adamant that the news division was independent, and that   
   he’d do nothing to interfere with its coverage. He would not fire Mr.   
   Zucker. If he did, “all your journalists will resign,” he warned Mr.   
   Stephenson. “They’ll tell everyone to write stories about what you’re   
   doing. Nobody will bring you a script in Hollywood if you become part of   
   the dark empire.”   
      
   In a recent interview, Mr. Zucker said he, too, had been aware of   
   discussions about getting rid of him to appease Mr. Trump.   
      
   Mr. Bewkes was so concerned that he took the issue to Time Warner’s board.   
   He explained what was happening and said he wouldn’t replace Mr. Zucker.   
   But Mr. Bewkes said he had realized that a $100 billion-plus merger might   
   be hanging in the balance. If the board disagreed, it could fire him and   
   find someone who would carry out what appeared to be AT&T’s — and by   
   extension Mr. Trump’s — wishes.   
      
   The board (which included Mr. Trump’s future attorney general William P.   
   Barr) gave him its unanimous backing. Mr. Zucker kept his job.   
      
   Once Makan Delrahim was installed as the administration’s antitrust chief   
   in 2017, he offered Mr. Stephenson and AT&T a path forward: Divest either   
   Turner Broadcasting or DirecTV or both in return for Justice Department   
   approval of the merger.   
      
   Mr. Bewkes urged Mr. Stephenson to jump at that opportunity. The Justice   
   Department’s offer provided cover for AT&T to get out of acquiring two   
   troubled and declining assets. Mr. Stephenson said he had offered to   
   divest a minority stake in Turner, but otherwise AT&T remained wedded to   
   its vision of a vertically integrated media colossus. The Justice   
   Department rejected Mr. Stephenson’s proposed compromise.   
      
   Any efforts to appease Mr. Trump went nowhere. AT&T later acknowledged   
   that its payments to Mr. Cohen had reached $600,000. By the time Mr. Cohen   
   came under criminal investigation for payments to the pornographic film   
   actress Stormy Daniels, and the AT&T payments were revealed, Mr.   
   Stephenson said hiring Mr. Cohen had been a “big mistake.”   
      
   At that point, Mr. Zucker probably had more job security than anyone at   
   Time Warner.   
      
   ‘Mr. Chairman’   
      
   Mr. Ginsberg’s and Mr. Bewkes’s accounts of AT&T efforts to appease Mr.   
   Trump spread throughout Time Warner. That hardened suspicions within the   
   ranks that AT&T’s executives — and their future bosses, assuming the deal   
   was eventually approved — couldn’t be trusted. The contrast in the   
   companies’ cultures was already evident: AT&T was formal and hierarchical,   
   Time Warner freewheeling.   
      
   In one small but telling detail, almost everyone at AT&T referred to Mr.   
   Stephenson not by his first or last name but as “the chairman.” At Warner,   
   Mr. Bewkes was simply “Jeff.”   
      
   “I guess we should start calling you Mr. Chairman,” Olaf Olafsson, Time   
   Warner’s strategy chief, had told Mr. Bewkes.   
      
   On May 16, 2017, while the deal was still undergoing regulatory scrutiny,   
   Mr. Stephenson was in New York to receive the Steven J. Ross Humanitarian   
   Award from the UJA-Federation of New York, a Jewish philanthropy. The   
   award, named for the Warner Communications chairman who had built the   
   company into an entertainment colossus, was a measure of Mr. Stephenson’s   
   new stature. The venue, Cipriani’s, was packed with media and   
   entertainment figures, and Time Warner executives took six tables. The   
   event raised a record $2.5 million.   
      
   That the award went to a non-Jew from Texas did not go unnoticed. Mr.   
   Chernin, who played a prominent role in the ceremony, called the event as   
   Mr. Stephenson’s “honorary bar mitzvah,” adding, “Not since Menachem Begin   
   shook hands with Anwar Sadat have Jews reached so far into a different   
   culture to embrace the greater good.”   
      
   When it was Mr. Stephenson’s turn to speak, he alluded to the coming   
   merger, saying his wife, who was in the audience, was getting jealous. “I   
   spend more time with Jeff Bewkes than I do with her,” he maintained.   
      
   There was polite laughter — even though making his wife the brunt of a   
   joke seemed like a throwback to “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — but at the Time   
   Warner tables, there were raised eyebrows and a general rolling of eyes.   
   For in fact, Mr. Stephenson had spent little time with Mr. Bewkes.   
      
   “It was a blatant lie,” Mr. Ginsberg recalled. This was corroborated by   
   several other Time Warner executives who attended.   
      
   Mr. Stephenson said he didn’t recall the remark about his wife, but   
   “obviously it was a joke.” Nonetheless, the remark prompted increased   
   skepticism toward AT&T among members of Time Warner management.   
      
   A running team vs. a passing team   
   That summer, Mr. Bewkes accepted Mr. Stephenson’s invitation to address   
   the AT&T board in Dallas. He ended up speaking for two hours, twice his   
   allotted time. For sports-obsessed Texans, he chose a football analogy:   
   AT&T is “a running team. You move slowly down the field, three yards and a   
   cloud of dust. You depend on obedient execution.” By contrast, “we’re a   
   passing team. We may miss two or three times. But when we complete a pass,   
   we’re 50 yards down the line.”   
      
   He elaborated that AT&T employed hundreds of thousands of essentially   
   fungible workers. Time Warner was different, with a relatively small   
   number of executives given a high degree of discretion.   
      
   “We’re like a platoon fighting a guerrilla war in the jungle,” Mr. Bewkes   
   recalled telling the board. “If you try to replace our team with a   
   regimented army, you’re going to ruin all our network and studio   
   businesses.”   
      
   More fundamentally, he warned that AT&T’s main strategy for competing with   
   Netflix and Amazon was flawed: It wanted to funnel as much Warner content   
   as possible to HBO Max.   
      
   On the contrary, he believed Time Warner’s strength was it was “like   
   Switzerland,” selling to the highest and most appropriate bidder, both   
   domestically and internationally, Mr. Bewkes contended. That’s why its   
      
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