GQ magazine pulled from its website an article that was critical of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav after representatives of the media titan objected to parts of it, The Hill reported on Wednesday.
The article, written by freelance Hollywood film critic Jason Bailey, described Zaslav in a negative light, referring to him as "the most hated man in Hollywood."
The article also cited tensions between Hollywood filmmakers and members of the largest writers guild, which is on strike, and recent cutbacks the media company made to Turner Classic Movies, which falls under the Warner Bros. Discovery umbrella.
When representatives for Zaslav complained after the article was published on Monday, GQ made a series of edits to the piece the same day that softened its tone, according to The Washington Post.
GQ's parent company, Condé Nast, is owned by Advance Publications, a major shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery.
Bailey said that after GQ made the changes, he requested that editors remove his byline. An editor told him that the magazine would not keep an article on its website without the author's name and, soon thereafter, the article was removed entirely from the site.
"I wrote what I felt was the story I was hired to write," Bailey told The Washington Post. "When I was asked to rewrite it after publication, I declined. The rewrite that was done was not to my satisfaction, so I asked to have my name removed and was told that the option there was to pull the article entirely, and I was fine with that."
A GQ spokeswoman said in a statement that the article "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."
A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesman said it criticized the article because Bailey didn't ask the company for comment before publishing and it contained inaccuracies.
Bailey acknowledged that he did not ask Warner Bros. Discovery for comment, but he told The Washington Post the article did not have inaccuracies, that his editors at GQ never told him it was inaccurate, and the edited version of the article did not contain a correction.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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