CBS Ratings Continue Nosedive Under Bari Weiss

from the keep-up-the-great-work,-champ dept

When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired trolling blogger Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would completely modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” she claimed were being “ignored by mainstream media.”

In reality, she was hired by the billionaire to take what she did at her weird little troll blog (troll people for clicks, coddle the extraction class, punch left) and weave it into CBS News in a way that would get ratings and go viral on social media. She wasn’t hired to do journalism, she was hired to do attention-grabbing class and race agitprop to entertain and befuddle the electorate for a billionaire.

Weiss’ problem: she’s not good at that either.

CBS News ratings had already hit their lowest point in a quarter century back in March. And it’s now spread across the CBS News ecosystem, from CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes to CBS Mornings:

“Damage was particularly bad at CBS Mornings, hosted by Gayle King, which has long held the third-place ratings spot among network morning shows. But that recently changed: CBS Mornings averaged 1.8 million total viewers earlier this month, then dropped to 1.59 million on June 3, the day after executives fired Scott Pelley, the de facto face of CBS News.

That amounted to an 11 percent slip in audience following what was already the “worst-rated May on record” in CBS Mornings history, according to the ratings data.”

It’s not that you can’t make right wing and oligarch friendly propaganda entertaining. There’s no shortage of those sorts of options across AM radio, broadcast TV, Fox news on cable, and the internet. Bari Weiss just isn’t good at anything. Not running a major newsroom. Not converting a longstanding network into an oligarch apologist-machine, not managing human beings, and not even entertaining people.

She’s a fairly prototypical media industry brunchlord, the type that just keeps failing upward in a way that’s in no way reflective of her competency or what she’s actually accomplished.

Reports from within CBS News have been uniformly negative, and there continues to be rumblings that Weiss will be replaced or at least see her responsibilities scaled down. There’s potential here for Larry Ellison to fuse CBS News, his looming acquisition of CNN, and his co-ownership of TikTok into a very effective propaganda machine. Fortunately for democracy, Larry doesn’t seem all that competent either.

Filed Under: agitprop, bari weiss, david ellison, journalism, larry ellison, media, news, ratings

Companies: cbs