\n<\/p>\n
You could be forgiven for not knowing how much people love CBS News. I certainly didn\u2019t until a few weeks ago, but the hoary institution is once again being described as the \u201cTiffany network\u201d\u2014Edward R. Murrow saying, \u201cGood night and good luck\u201d; Walter Cronkite taking the manliest moment in all of live television to get control of himself after announcing the death of John F. Kennedy; and \u2026 the trail grows cold. Dan Rather in a turban?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know and neither do you, because it turns out that fans of the network were willing to do whatever it took to save the network\u2014except watch CBS News. It\u2019s the least watched of all three little-watched network news programs, each weeknight a valiant struggle to report news that everyone\u2019s been refreshing all day long\u2014or more likely not, because \u2026 NATO?\u2014and close with a human-interest piece, like one last bedtime story.<\/p>\n
But now\u2014cry havoc and write a hit piece\u2014CBS News has been desecrated, a Slurpee sloshed on William Paley\u2019s Picasso. The network is owned by Paramount Skydance. Paramount is now run by Larry Ellison\u2019s son, David, who also bought Bari Weiss\u2019s publication, The Free Press<\/em>, and selected her as the new editor in chief of CBS News. Weiss is a hugely successful journalist and entrepreneur, and the target\u2014especially from others within her field\u2014of Bari Weiss\u2013derangement syndrome.<\/p>\n Weiss famously resigned from The New York Times<\/em> in 2020\u2014she\u2019d been an opinion writer and editor\u2014after publishing a blistering letter of resignation enumerating the ways that the paper had abandoned the core principles that had made it great: the sharp line between opinion and reporting, and an approach to the news and editorial vision that wasn\u2019t prey to the whims or axioms of political ideology or popular sentiment.<\/p>\n Apparently, sufferers of BWD include \u201ceveryone\u201d at CBS; they are freaking out, no, they\u2019re \u201cliterally freaking out,\u201d a staffer told The Independent<\/em>\u2014\u201cit\u2019s not a good place right now.\u201d The Washington Post<\/em> reported on Saturday that the network\u2019s journalists \u201creeled\u201d as they \u201cdigested\u201d the news, although by yesterday morning, the Post<\/em> had downgraded the mood at CBS to (per one employee) \u201cnoticeably uncomfortable,\u201d with \u201cpockets of hopefulness\u201d\u2014both good signs, because reeling while digesting is misery. Apparently, there is also anxiety about coming layoffs, an understandable fear but a long-standing one.<\/p>\n Weiss; her wife, Nellie Bowles; and her sister, Suzy Weiss, are the founders of The Free Press<\/em> and close friends of mine, a friendship born when I met Bari over coffee when she was at the Times <\/em>and learned that we share the same disgust at what has become of so much of the mainstream, legacy press. When I was growing up, the Times<\/em> didn\u2019t reflect the truth; it was<\/em> the truth. In school, we were always encouraged to read at least one front-page story a week in the San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>, with the regular reminder that, as good as our local paper might be, it was a pale shadow of the great New York Times<\/em>. When I moved east and began reading the Times<\/em>, the thought of doubting something it had reported was the furthest thing from my mind. Now I often have to shake the reported facts (which are almost always accurate) free from the omissions, biases, and willful imposition of narratives.<\/p>\n After Weiss left the Times<\/em>\u2014in a blizzard of respect but also of derision\u2014she started a Substack. That\u2019ll show \u2019em! And it did: It became The Free Press<\/em>, which currently has 1.5 million readers and for which Paramount reportedly paid $150 million in cash and Paramount stock. (This last fact may be driving as much of the hysteria as anyone\u2019s ideological beliefs; as Christopher Hitchens said in a different context, \u201cIt\u2019s not just the principles. It\u2019s the money of the thing.\u201d)<\/p>\n Weiss\u2019s hiring at CBS isn\u2019t a reeling-and-digesting story. It\u2019s a business story. Everyone in journalism has known for years that there\u2019s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism\u2014reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness\u2014to subjects that either don\u2019t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. If creating such an enterprise seems simple to you, you don\u2019t know the territory. It\u2019s one of the hardest things you can attempt in media: it\u2019s hugely expensive, and it has to fight for space in the attention economy at a time when Americans\u2019 drive for knowledge seems to be powering down.<\/p>\n That she will somehow denigrate the storied CBS News\u2014it has been reported that some staff members have delivered minatory instructions to not \u201cmess with the Golden Goose(s) of \u201860 Minutes\u2019 and \u2018CBS News Sunday Morning,\u2019\u201d as though West 57th Street were the O.K. Corral\u2014is a complete misreading of her and her vision, which is to bring the traditional methods of American journalism back to the news, and also to build a culture of ideas. This is exactly what she\u2019s done at The Free Press<\/em>, which covers a variety of stories, the most popular of which\u2014Uri Berliner\u2019s explanation of NPR\u2019s decline, for example\u2014are those that hold powerful institutions to account.<\/p>\n This is exactly the kind of journalism that made CBS News so justly respected in its great era. Weiss\u2019s understanding of the network\u2019s role in the American imagination\u2014both as a trustworthy source and as a holder of cultural continuity in a fractured time\u2014is obvious in the opening of the letter she sent the staff yesterday: \u201cGrowing up, CBS was a deep family tradition. Whenever I hear that tick, tick, tick <\/em>or that trumpet fanfare, it sends me right back to our den in Pittsburgh.\u201d I\u2019m sure there are plenty of people at CBS News who aren\u2019t freaking out but are excited about this turn of events.<\/p>\n Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press<\/em> being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.<\/p>\n When there\u2019s a big media story like this, everybody eats. The haters write hateful stories; the hateful stories alert new readers to the existence of an outlet they might like, and instill in those readers a fierce loyalty to it because the criticism is so absurd. A current beef against Weiss is that she\u2019ll fail because she lacks broadcast experience. The beef against Weiss when she left the Times<\/em> was that she would sink into obscurity. And the beef against her when she started to become successful was that she was selling out. If there\u2019s one person in the world I wouldn\u2019t bet against now, it\u2019s Bari Weiss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You could be forgiven for not knowing how much people love CBS News. I certainly didn\u2019t until a few weeks ago, but the hoary institution is once again being described as the \u201cTiffany network\u201d\u2014Edward R. Murrow saying, \u201cGood night and good luck\u201d; Walter Cronkite taking the manliest moment in all of live television to get<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[5310,1810,1326,15758],"class_list":{"0":"post-26652","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bari","9":"tag-bet","10":"tag-dont","11":"tag-weiss"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}