Dem
47
GOP
53
We had a piece yesterday about how one cannot take seriously the Trump administration's claims that it is interested in combating antisemitism. But for lack of time, that was supposed to be paired with this piece, asserting that one also cannot take seriously the administration's claims that it is interested in promoting meritocracy. Sure, Team Trump is rabidly anti-DEI, but that is because they believe DEI helps liberals and minorities at the expense of conservatives and white people. The administration is perfectly OK with setting aside merit if we're talking about a family member, or a willing lackey, or someone whose views comport with those of MAGA.
Case in point is Bari Weiss, formerly of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Her politics, for those who haven't followed her career, are... a little hard to characterize. She describes herself as a left-leaning centrist, but that's really just cosplay. Yes, she was once critical of Donald Trump, but that was many years ago, and she's dropped that entirely (along with countless other conservatives). Her two signature issues are Zionism and combating wokeness. The former of those can indicate right- or left-wing politics these days, while the latter is right-wing all the way. And just last year, Weiss wrote that the "political left... makes war on our common history, our common identity as Americans, and fundamentally, on the goodness of the American project." That could have been a Donald Trump tweet (excepting that it's a little too erudite for him). In any event, if you wanted to call Weiss a right-leaning centrist, that would at least be in the ballpark. Most people, and most outlets, just call her a conservative.
A couple of years ago, Weiss left the Times in a blaze of glory, with a column that accused her colleagues of being mean to her because she did not adhere to liberal orthodoxy. She moved on to found The Free Press, which is heavy on culture wars, and attracts a readership roughly equally divided between disaffected lefties (e.g., Bill Maher), Silicon Valley skeptics (e.g., Jeff Bezos) and MAGA (e.g., Larry Ellison). Those are all groups that tend to have money, often a lot of it, and so the Free Press has done quite well, even though the quality of the content is mid at best.
Earlier this week, as part of the overall takeover of CBS/Paramount by the Ellison family, it was announced that Weiss would sell the Free Press to CBS/Paramount for $150 million, and would be named editor-in-chief of CBS News. Mind you, she has absolutely no business being promoted to such a position. She has zero experience running a newsroom and zero experience with broadcast journalism. She was a terrible manager of The Free Press, and turnover has been huge over the last couple of years. She is also very clearly lacking in journalistic ethics; one cannot simultaneously be a culture warrior and a "just the facts" reporter. And if there is any doubt about that, there have been numerous high profile incidents where the Free Press printed falsehoods that verged on defamation, like accusing U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of covering-up a sex trafficking operation (sound familiar?) or falsely claiming that famine in Gaza was a lie perpetrated by staffers at the United Nations.
In short, Weiss is the beneficiary of the right-wing version of Affirmative Action (Conservative Action?). The question is exactly how much influence she will have in her new position. CBS News President Tom Cibrowski, who had been running the newsroom thus far, will remain on the job. Cibrowski said earlier this week that he and Weiss would be "co-leaders." That sounds good for soundbite purposes, but in a newsroom the buck has to stop with someone. It could be that Weiss is largely a figurehead, installed to persuade Donald Trump to keep his hands off CBS and to refrain from filing any more lawsuits.
On the other hand, Weiss will report directly to David Ellison, meaning that she will be able to go over Cibrowski's head anytime she wants. So, she might end up with her fingerprints all over CBS' coverage (and if that happens, expect Cibrowski to resign). If this is the plan... well, we don't quite get the vision. In theory, it might seem that if one of the three major network news operations veers rightward, then right-wing messaging will reach a much wider audience. But we very seriously doubt it will work that way in reality. Viewers/readers today have an embarrassment of options when it comes to news, and they gravitate toward whatever editorial slant they prefer. If CBS dramatically changes directions, the viewers are mostly going to jump to ABC, or NBC or maybe PBS. Remember, even Fox has not tried to take its cable "news" model to the broadcast network. And all of this is before we note that most people don't watch network news anymore.
In short, we don't see Weiss becoming anything like the next Walter Cronkite. But whatever happens, it will certainly be interesting to observe. (Z)