Sharon Waxman (b. 1963) is an American journalist, author, and media entrepreneur. She founded TheWrap in 2009 and serves as its chief executive and editor in chief. The site covers the business of entertainment and media, and it remains the only independently owned Hollywood trade competing with the legacy press of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. She arrived at that work through two earlier careers, first as a foreign correspondent in Europe and the Middle East, then as a Hollywood reporter for two of the most prominent American newspapers. The thread that runs through all three phases is a preference for institutions and incentives over personality.
Waxman grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio. She took a bachelor of arts in English literature from Barnard College in 1985, then a master of philosophy in modern Middle Eastern studies from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1987. The graduate work turned her toward the politics and history of the region, and she gained working fluency in French, Hebrew, and Arabic. Those languages shaped the first decade of her career.
She started as a foreign correspondent. After an internship on the foreign desk of the Washington Post, she reported from Jerusalem for Reuters and filed for several American papers, including dispatches from Israel during the Gulf War. From 1989 to 1995 she covered Europe and the Middle East, reporting on war, diplomacy, and political upheaval. The assignments built her name as an international reporter at ease with hard political stories rather than with entertainment.
In November 1995 she moved to Los Angeles on a full-time contract to cover the entertainment industry for the Washington Post Style section, the first such position at the paper. She treated Hollywood as a business and a seat of power, and she paired investigative reporting with profiles and analysis of studio strategy. In 1998 the University of Missouri gave her its feature writing award for arts and entertainment. After September 2001 the paper sent her back to the Middle East more than once, including a posting in postwar Iraq, and she reported on the Second Intifada.
In 2003 The New York Times hired her as its Hollywood correspondent, a post she held until 2008. The features editor Adam Moss (b. 1957) made the offer in October of that year, the cultural news editor Steven Erlanger had named her his first choice, and the executive editor Bill Keller (b. 1949) led the paper. She covered an industry in transition. She paid close attention to the specialty divisions, Fox Searchlight and Focus Features, whose mix of independent filmmaking and studio money reshaped the economics of prestige cinema. She wrote about the meeting point of creative ambition, corporate strategy, awards campaigns, and the early pressure of digital change.
One episode from her Times years later moved to the center of her public standing. In 2004 she reported on Harvey Weinstein (b. 1952) and Miramax. Her draft pointed to sexual harassment, aggressive behavior toward female employees, and a financial settlement with a London assistant; the published version dropped those claims and ran as a short item about the reassignment of an Italian executive, Fabrizio Lombardo. After the Weinstein revelations of 2017, Waxman wrote in TheWrap that Weinstein, his lawyer David Boies, and a spokesman had come to the newsroom to meet Keller before publication. Keller, Jill Abramson, and Dean Baquet disputed the charge that anyone had killed the story, and Keller told her he recalled the Weinstein visit but not pressure over the piece. The exchange placed Waxman inside a defining press controversy and lent force to her later argument that legacy newsrooms can bend toward powerful subjects and major advertisers.
She left the Times in January 2008 rather than accept a transfer to the New York headquarters. She had concluded that newspapers could no longer compete in a faster digital market for entertainment news. Rather than join another legacy title, she built her own. She launched TheWrap on January 26, 2009, on seed money, and in 2010 raised a two-million-dollar venture round led by Maveron, the firm co-founded by Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan. The financing let the company grow as it competed with Deadline Hollywood and pressed against the older trades.
TheWrap broke from those trades in method. It favored fast publication, investigative exclusives, and reporting on the business itself: studio leadership, streaming competition, mergers, labor talks, and the changing economics of film and television. Waxman held that entertainment journalism should track corporate decisions and media economics rather than celebrity gossip. As the company matured it added conferences, professional services, and subscription products for industry readers, among them WrapPRO and the annual TheGrill leadership conference. She also created WrapWomen and its Power Women Summit, a forum for women in media and entertainment leadership.
Her two books extend the same interest in structure. Rebels on the Backlot (2005) weaves together the careers of six directors, Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963), Steven Soderbergh (b. 1963), David Fincher (b. 1962), Paul Thomas Anderson (b. 1970), David O. Russell (b. 1958), and Spike Jonze (b. 1969), through the making of their signature 1990s films, Pulp Fiction, Traffic, Fight Club, Boogie Nights, Three Kings, and Being John Malkovich. The book argues that a self-taught generation bent a risk-averse studio system toward its own ends before corporate consolidation closed the opening. It became a Los Angeles Times bestseller and remains a standard account of the period.
Her second book, Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World (2008), returned to the international reporting that launched her. Drawing on interviews with museum directors, among them Philippe de Montebello (b. 1936) of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and James Cuno (b. 1951) of the Art Institute of Chicago, she examined the legal and ethical fights over the ownership of antiquities. She set the resistance of Western museums to repatriation against the recovery campaigns of source countries such as Italy and Greece, and she anticipated debates that grew louder across the following decade.
Waxman’s journalism has held a consistent shape. She reports on the structures that move modern entertainment, corporate ownership, executive power, financial incentives, technological change, and shifting patterns of consumption, and she treats Hollywood as a global business whose decisions reach culture and commerce far beyond Los Angeles. In recent years she has widened her commentary through her WaxWord column to questions of public trust, political polarization, artificial intelligence, and the economics of digital publishing, arguing that news organizations must rebuild credibility through reporting and enterprise rather than inherited advantage. She now also contributes to the opinion page of the New York Times. In 2021 the Los Angeles Press Club named her Online Journalist of the Year and honored WaxWord as best blog.
Her success has drawn scrutiny as well. In October 2021 The Daily Beast published an account in which twenty former employees described a harsh workplace and high turnover under her leadership, charges she has rejected while continuing to run the company. She remains founder, chief executive, and editor in chief of TheWrap.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…
If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a reinterpretation of Sharon Waxman.
While mainstream media commentary views Waxman through a liberal, professional frame—celebrating her as a champion of independent reporting, institutional transparency, and female leadership initiatives—Mearsheimer’s realism strips away this idealism. It frames her legacy as a highly rational adaptation to structural disruption and a masterclass in coalition-building within an anarchic professional ecosystem.His realism alters the understanding of her work across three key areas.
Before Waxman founded TheWrap in 2009, legacy Hollywood trades like Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter operated as an information oligopoly. They managed industry communication in close cooperation with the major studios and talent agencies, pacing information to preserve institutional stability.
If Mearsheimer is right, Waxman did not launch TheWrap simply out of an abstract commitment to “independent journalism.” Her platform emerged as a rapid optimization tool during a period of massive structural disruption—specifically, the rise of digital media and the initial fracturing of legacy studio dominance. By breaking stories in real time and aggressively pursuing investigative pieces, TheWrap denied the traditional studio establishment its monopoly over timing and narrative control. Waxman proved that in an anarchic professional landscape undergoing rapid change, a fast, digital intelligence asset can force entrenched corporate giants to adapt their public strategies to survive.
Waxman has spent significant organizational capital building the Power Women series and the annual Power Women Summit, framing these initiatives as an ideological crusade to elevate underrepresented voices and advance structural reform in entertainment.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, strips the sentimentality from this framing. Human language, moral framing, and collective assemblies do not exist as disinterested pursuits of universal equity. They are the tools groups use to coordinate behavior, manage reputations, and capture status. The Power Women network functions structurally as a highly cohesive, elite domestic coalition. By uniting around a shared moral creed and institutionalizing a clear ideological standard, Waxman and her partners successfully claimed cultural authority, managed collective reputations, and built an alternative power center to compete against the legacy male-dominated studio hierarchy. Her summits are not post-political spaces; they are highly effective instruments of group alignment and status optimization.
In her recent commentary, Waxman tracks the severe economic contraction of Hollywood, noting massive job losses, studio mergers, and the looming challenge of artificial intelligence. She frequently frames this “doom loop” as a crisis of creativity or a challenge to democratic storytelling that can be overcome if “creators” seize new opportunities.
Mearsheimer’s ranking of human faculties reveals that independent creative reason and artistic willpower rank last among the forces driving institutional behavior. Hollywood states—the massive streaming platforms and consolidated media conglomerates—are structured survival vehicles. Faced with rising material costs and technological shifts, these corporate actors act exactly as structural realism predicts: they ruthlessly maximize efficiency, cut human capital, and leverage automated tools to preserve their relative power and market dominance. Waxman’s appeal to the independent spirit of individual creators overestimates the power of autonomous agency. The structural logic of the corporate vehicle always outlasts the individual actor, and the consolidation she chronicles is the standard behavior of a dominant tribe optimizing its defenses against systemic instability.
If David Pinsof is right, Waxman’s career is a masterclass in how an intellectual pivots from old-guard institutions to build her own independent engine for status, moral authority, and coalitional power.
Waxman frequently highlights that TheWrap is the last truly independent digital news organization covering Hollywood, drawing a sharp contrast between her site and the massive media monopoly owned by Penske Media Corporation (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline). She frames this independence as a noble, public-service defense of objective journalism, arguing that an industry as powerful as Hollywood needs an independent watchdog to hold it accountable.
Pinsof might say that Waxman’s fierce defense of independence is not a selfless crusade for truth; it is a premium branding strategy. In a highly consolidated media landscape, an intellectual cannot compete on raw capital against a multi-brand conglomerate like Penske. By weaponizing the concept of independence, Waxman turns a business disadvantage into a supreme moral signal. She tells her readers and sources: “The corporate trades are compromised, but I possess the pure, uncorrupted lens.”
This framing allows her to carve out a highly profitable market share and secure her personal status as an indispensable powerhouse in the industry’s attention economy.
Waxman is the creator of WrapWomen and events like the Power Women Summit, which are explicitly designed to promote women’s leadership and achieve equity in entertainment and media. These initiatives are framed through the classic misunderstanding myth: that industry inequality is a legacy of outdated biases and structural blindness that can be cured by raising consciousness, hosting panels, and fostering cross-industry dialogue.
Pinsof might say that the Power Women Summit is an elite alliance engine. Human primates do not gather at high-end virtual and physical summits because they need to learn that women are capable leaders; they gather to exchange social capital, form protective coalitions, and lock down opportunities.
By positioning herself as the master of ceremonies for this network, Waxman extracts immense personal status. She becomes the gatekeeper of a high-value progressive space, allowing her to cultivate relationships with top-tier talent and executives under a highly moralistic pretext. The summit does not alter the zero-sum Darwinian competition for jobs and greenlight authority in Hollywood; it simply ensures that Waxman’s coalition holds the moral high ground and a dominant seat at the table.
Following major political shifts, including populist election victories, Waxman has written columns arguing that the media needs a complete reinvention because it has failed to bridge the gap between coastal narratives and the rest of the electorate. She frames polarization as a failure of communication—a dangerous misunderstanding where news organizations got trapped in their own bubbles and lost public trust.
Pinsof might say this call for reinvention is a standard defensive maneuver to protect the professional utility of her class. When populist movements bypass the mainstream press, it signals that the public no longer values elite intellectual curation.
Waxman frames this as a communication breakdown because it implies that the solution is better journalism—which means society still desperately needs her and her peers to fix the problem.
Pinsof’s essay shows that the public does not reject mainstream narratives out of a misunderstanding. They reject them because they are locked in a zero-sum fight against the very coastal establishment the media represents. Waxman diagnoses this as a structural error in the press to avoid admitting a brutal reality: the world is operating exactly as natural selection designed it to, and the masses have simply stopped buying what the gatekeepers are selling.
Applying the Alliance Theory of political belief systems to Sharon Waxman’s career since she launched TheWrap in 2009 offers a strategic, network-based framework for understanding the operations of an independent Hollywood media outlet. According to Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton in “Strange Bedfellows”, belief systems and public narratives do not derive from abstract moral principles. Instead, they are generated by shifting alliance structures to advance the strategic interests of allies and oppose rivals.
When applied to Waxman’s tenure running TheWrap, Alliance Theory clarifies several key aspects of her journalism and business trajectory.
Alliance Theory emphasizes that individuals and organizations position themselves within networks of supportive or antagonistic relationships. Waxman explicitly positions TheWrap as the only remaining independent media company covering Hollywood, frequently contrasting it with competitors like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline, which all share a single corporate owner.
From an alliance perspective, this independent branding is a structural maneuver. By remaining outside of the dominant media conglomerate, TheWrap forces a distinct competitive boundary. Waxman can mobilize support from industry players who are wary of a single corporate monopoly by framing her outlet as the necessary independent balance in Hollywood media.
A core assumption of Alliance Theory is that humans possess a common cognitive toolkit of “propagandistic biases”—including victim, perpetrator, and attributional biases—which they strategically apply depending on their proximity to a target.
In the high-stakes ecosystem of Hollywood trade journalism, coverage of executive shakeups, corporate scandals, and box office failures rarely tracks abstract objectivity. Alliance Theory suggests that an editor’s reporting will naturally deploy:
Perpetrator biases (minimizing harm or highlighting mitigating circumstances) to protect crucial industry sources and informational allies.
Victim and attributional biases (emphasizing responsibility and internal incompetence) to aggressively scrutinize or break negative scoops about industrial rivals.
The theory shows that these shifting evaluative standards are not random cognitive failures, but predictable tools used to protect interdependence with key sources.
The theory notes that humans choose allies based on interdependence—favoring those who reliably provide mutual benefits and advance shared goals. Following the launch of TheWrap, Waxman expanded her brand’s footprint by creating industry events like TheGrill business conference and the WrapWomen platform (including the Power Women Summit).
Rather than viewing these summits purely through the lens of abstract values like industry convergence or leadership, Alliance Theory interprets them as coordination devices. These platforms allow TheWrap to institutionalize its alliances with powerful networks of executives, creators, and underrepresented groups. By providing these figures with social capital and visibility, Waxman secures structural loyalty, creating common knowledge of who is aligned with her network.
Pinsof et al. argue that public actors frequently use moralized rhetoric—such as appeals to fairness or solidarity—as a strategic instrument to draw third parties to their side and signal group allegiance. TheWrap has earned significant recognition for its investigative reporting on systemic industry misconduct, including its award-winning coverage of the aftermath of the #MeToo movement.
Alliance Theory suggests that while these investigations rely on a shared backdrop of tacit moral agreement, the act of aggressive public moralization serves an outward-facing strategic function. It allows an independent outlet to challenge entrenched institutional power structures, rally public and industry support, and penalize rivals who violate network norms—all while strengthening the outlet’s own alignment with reformist factions in the entertainment ecosystem.
