CBS’ Remaining Journalists Seem Confused As To Why Bari Weiss Sucks At Journalism

from the this-arsonist-seems-bad-at-firefighting dept

We’ve noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run CBS News for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power (particularly Trump and Netanyahu), validate and amplify right wing grievance and engagement bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism. Even if she fails and CBS is ruined, Larry Ellison wins.

Bari’s problem so far isn’t that she’s not good at journalism or unqualified (which is true and irrelevant), it’s that she’s not doing a particularly good job at the task she was hired for: engagement agitprop and semi-cleverly coddling the status quo.

Her recent town hall with Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, her new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her ham-fisted killing of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps continues to plague the network and cause a continued revolt among remaining journalists:

“Journalists at CBS News say that Weiss still has not laid out a clear strategy for how she wants the network to change and adapt, though she is expected to do so as soon as this week, sources say.

“I’m constantly confused by what her definition of ‘making news’ is,” a second current CBS News staffer said. “It seems like she only cares about big names saying controversial things. That’s not the same as newsworthiness.”

Most of the news coverage of Weiss tends to downplay the fact that she was hired specifically by the Ellison family not to improve CBS journalism, but to either destroy it, or distort it into a right-wing-friendly engagement slop. Even journalists at CBS still seem confused as to why Weiss doesn’t appear to be good at journalism, when it’s very clear that’s not what she was hired for:

“We are a prideful newsroom, and she’s rubbing people the wrong way,” a third network staffer said.”

Weiss will inevitably be a glass ceiling casualty of the new 80s ski-villain movie brunchlord culture at Paramount, who will probably replace her with some younger hustlebro chode better suited for trolling the Internet in order to “sex up” the ratings for their culture war agitprop.

And again, it’s important to remember that contrary to some breathless media missives, CBS was, with spotty exception, not a great news organization before this all started. Network leadership’s very first response to rising 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.

The best outcome for everyone is probably a complete institutional collapse at the hands of the network’s new nepobaby brunchlord leadership, accelerated by the fact that nobody in any position of authority at the new CBS seems to have absolutely any idea what they’re doing. Both in terms of journalism, or in terms of building a modern right-wing-friendly grievance and propaganda empire.

Filed Under: agitprop, bari weiss, cbs news, david ellison, disinformation, journalism, media, network news, propaganda

Companies: cbs