Bari Weiss Is Sad That People Aren’t Enjoying Her Clumsy Destruction Of CBS News
If you missed it, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to “run” CBS News. And by “run” CBS news, I mean destroying what little journalism was left at the media giant and creating an alternate-reality safe space for right wing billionaires and their increasingly radical ideologies. While pretending to be “restoring trust in journalism.”
It’s… not going well.
Weiss’ inaugural “town hall” with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, Weiss’ new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps continues to plague the network and cause a continued revolt among remaining journalists. Meanwhile, the new CBS is now the butt of jokes at the Golden Globes.
Weiss is, according to a new New York Times article, not enjoying all the criticism and, like any good leader, blaming her subordinates for the problems she’s causing:
“Privately, Ms. Weiss has been deeply frustrated by the negative reaction to her decisions, and has blamed some subordinates for not stanching the criticism, three people familiar with internal discussions said.”
It’s always important to reiterate that CBS wasn’t doing all that well when Weiss got there. The network’s previous owners’ very first response to surging U.S. authoritarianism was to hire more on-air authoritarians. The last act of the outgoing CBS leadership was to bribe our authoritarian president to get a terrible new merger approved. It’s only gone downhill since then.
The “entertaining” bit is that Weiss doesn’t appear to be good at either journalism (because she’s barely done any) or agitprop (arguably the whole reason the Ellison family hired her). That’s causing some weird frictions, including this bit in the Times article where Weiss insists she doesn’t want CBS to report the news, she wants it to “be” the news:
“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.”
That is an intentional misrepresentation of journalism’s function by somebody who wants to be an effective engagement troll that chases virality, but clearly doesn’t really know how to go about it at this sort of scale. Weiss built a weird little contrarian trolling blog, but that’s a completely different animal from creating a mass media propaganda machine. Just ask Roger Aisles.
I think, like many in the extraction-class funded engagement trolling industry, Weiss has deluded herself into genuinely believing she’s helping fix journalism. But again, that’s not what the weird mishmash of 80s ski comedy villains at Ellison’s Paramount want. And I suspect that if Weiss doesn’t start doing a better job of lying to the electorate in a more exciting and ratings-grabbing way pretty soon, she’ll be replaced by a much bigger asshole (and more effective culture war troll) before the summer arrives.