If you thought that the transformation of the Washington Post into the Bezos Bugle was alarming, wait until you see what becomes of the CBS Eye (eye eye eye.) It’s about to go bloodshot and stay that way. David Ellison is buying the network and Rick Wilson says that he “wants an identity transplant for CBS: faster, louder, “anti-woke,” and calibrated for the Twitter-fight du jour. It’s Less Cronkite, more culture war with Fox-style chyrons.” Sweet Jesus on a bagel. For those of you who were alive in 1963 during the Kennedy assassination and remember Walter Conkrite in the role of America’s kindly uncle, guiding us through the tragedy, that’s all on the funeral pyre now. Wave goodbye to the ashes of that dream and brace yourself for the new reality.
Here we go again: another billionaire boy-king buying a legacy news brand so he can strip it bare while programming it like a knockoff OANN. Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison is reportedly set to anoint Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press and patron saint of “I’m just asking questions” contrarianism, as editor-in-chief of CBS News, with a neat turn of the knife: she’ll report directly to Ellison, not the CBS News president. That’s not a reorg; that’s a message. It says the newsroom answers to the throne now, not to journalism or standards.
If the deal lands as described, Ellison is also snapping up The Free Press for roughly $150 million (chump change in Daddy’s bank) and slotting Weiss atop a venerable network she’s never actually worked inside. Broadcast news is a beast of logistics, standards, and institutional muscle memory. The point here isn’t her résumé; it’s the project.
Ellison wants an identity transplant for CBS: faster, louder, “anti-woke,” and calibrated for the Twitter-fight du jour. It’s Less Cronkite, more culture war with Fox-style chyrons.
Cue the brand happy talk about “ideological diversity.” Translation: put a thumb on the scale, appoint a White House-approved internal snitch and political commissar, and call it balance.
CBS once sold itself as the church of news, a place with storied traditions in journalism dating back to before television itself. Now, under a newly merged parent company, the church is renting pews to the click economy. And yes, that merger matters: the Skydance–Paramount tie-up consolidated power in ways that always end the same way; fewer editors with spines, more executives with dashboards, and a C-Suite dedicated to keeping the Trump Administration happy. The press release described it as a “next-generation media company.” That generation speaks fluent EBITDA, not Edward R. Murrow.
Before the right starts high-fiving, a reality check: this won’t hand them a house-trained CBS. Weiss is sharp, ambitious, and perfectly willing to clash with institutional orthodoxies, and I suspect her prickly character won’t make her entirely predictable.
But the incentives are the real boss. When a newsroom’s top editor reports to the CEO, the newsroom’s mission becomes whatever moves the stock and soothes the board. If that means turning “60 Minutes” into 18,000 “both sides” segments about whether gravity has gone woke or trans giraffes, so be it.
For journalists inside CBS: sharpen the shivs. Fight for your standards, on paper and in public. Demand firewalls. When a story comes down from Mount C-Suite, push it back up with footnotes and phone logs. Make management own their edits. The only cure for corporate capture is costly resistance.
For Ellison: if you want credibility, let Weiss build it the old-fashioned way; by backing reporters when their work cuts against your friends, your feed, and your financial interests. Give the newsroom the power to say “no” to your favorite narratives. Otherwise, you’re not reinventing CBS; you’re shrinking it into another personality brand.
I’m not chock full of hope on this matter.
Nobody with two functioning synapses would be. Pulling the plug on Stephen Colbert was the bellwether event that signalled where CBS already was, on the edge of the abyss and ready for the downward plunge.
It’s not surprising that this has happened. In many ways it was only a matter of time. Broadcast journalism is a bastard relative of real journalism and always has been. News anchors look like movie stars and get movie star-level salaries. That capitulation to show biz values, on its face, was bound to lead to some kind of a shakeup at some point. Any time image is key and form replaces depth and substance, you’re on shaky ground. And we have seen just that happen to TV news, an institution not even 100 years old.
The fourth estate functions best when it’s in the hands of journalists and people who understand that the function of journalism is speaking truth to power and getting news out there that will make some people uncomfortable. As Mark Twain opined, “a newspaper is not just for reporting the news but for making people mad enough about it to do something about it.” He also said, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
CBS just made a gigantic leap about away from journalism and into right-wing public relations. I don’t know what this new freak show will look like but 60 Minutes could devolve into a discourse on whether gravity is a woke concept. For damn sure there will be some both sider version of the climate change issue. I think that you can depend on that. And look for a lot more interviews with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene. That was considered an ill advised move when CBS 60 Minutes made it, but now we see that event merely foreshadowed what is to come.
very few watch CBS anyway. It’s the proverbial dinosaur.
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
Mr Twain had it right all those years ago.
All things must pass, including traditional media. TV news supplanted newspapers for millions, then internet news wooed them away from The Idiot Box. Whether or not this is a good thing is moot: it’s inevitable that things will change or die. Those of us who actually care about world affairs will continue to seek out and find reliable sources of info, while those who don’t, won’t.