Nobody (Including Advertisers) Cared About Bari Weiss’ New CBS ‘Town Hall’

from the nobody-actually-wants-what-you’re-selling dept

We’ve already explored at length how Bari Weiss was hired by the billionaire Ellison family to make CBS even more friendly to billionaires and authoritarians after their embarrassing capitulation to (and bribery of) U.S. autocrats. This isn’t really a pivot real people were actually asking for, it’s simply extension of the right wing extraction class’s assault on informed consensus and real journalism.

The goal is to consolidate what’s left of our sorry ass establishment corporate media, then create a simulacrum of actual journalism that blows smoke up the ass of wealth, power, and the U.S. right wing’s phony victimization complex. While hoping the public doesn’t notice the difference.

And while Weiss likes to pretend she’s shaking things up at CBS with audience-focused innovation, most of her early moves have fallen completely flat. Like Weiss’ recent new town hall effort, whose inaugural episode featured a softball interview with right wing activist Erika Kirk. The interview was pretty much what you’d expect, with lots of downplaying of Charlie Kirk’s role as a radical, divisive, inflammatory bigot.

But as we’ve noted previously, the U.S. media market is already well-saturated with news organizations focused on telling affluent, white, right wingers what they want to hear. In Weiss’ case, the new CBS is a gambit to make men like Donald Trump, Larry Ellison, and Benjamin Netanyahu happy. The actual, real-world interest in this bizarre pseudo-journalistic kayfabe is arguably very limited.

As Weiss quickly found out, as her inaugural chat was relegated to a hollow ratings hour filled with ads for products like the Chia Pet:

“The news special aired at 8 p.m. on Saturday, one of the least-watched hours in broadcast TV. And that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top advertisers appearing to support the show. During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.”

Mainstream advertisers are reticent to affix themselves to absolutely anything deemed remotely off-putting, whether that’s an exposé on mass shootings, or a softball interview with the grieving wife of a right wing propagandist paid by U.S. billionaires to sow division and stall consensus-oriented reform.

Weiss, a shameless opportunist without much actual journalism experience, made all manner of proclamations when she was hired about how she was going to “shake things up,” solve CBS’ perceived bias, and restore journalistic rigor. Yet her very first major move not only involved platforming herself, it involved elevating a fringe, right wing activist who isn’t particularly of interest to most normal people.

Again, she had the opportunity here to platform any of the amazing scientists, academics, artists, thinkers, athletes and doers America has on offer, and settled on a fringe right wing activist of fleeting interest to CBS’ actual news audience.

Larry and David Ellison are very obviously trying to buy up the dying remnants of U.S. corporate media (plus TikTok) in the hopes of creating yet another Fox-esque right wing propaganda mill. But again, there’s no real evidence there’s an actual audience here. Surviving and profiting in media is already difficult; but it’s going to be extra treacherous if CBS’ focus is weird fringe gibberish nobody wants.

Larry Ellison’s efforts to dominate what’s left U.S. media should be extremely alarming, but there’s a single, solitary bright spot: there’s very little evidence anybody involved in this strange collection of trolls, brunchlords, and nepobabies has any actual idea what they’re doing.

Filed Under: activism, bari weiss, billionaires, consolidation, erika kirk, journalism, media, press

Companies: cbs