Bari Weiss Is Sad That People Aren’t Enjoying Her Clumsy Destruction Of CBS News
from the bad-at-being-terrible dept
If you missed it, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to “run” CBS News. And by “run” CBS news, I mean destroying what little journalism was left at the media giant and creating an alternate-reality safe space for right wing billionaires and their increasingly radical ideologies. While pretending to be “restoring trust in journalism.”
It’s… not going well.
Weiss’ inaugural “town hall” with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, Weiss’ new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps continues to plague the network and cause a continued revolt among remaining journalists. Meanwhile, the new CBS is now the butt of jokes at the Golden Globes.
Weiss is, according to a new New York Times article, not enjoying all the criticism and, like any good leader, blaming her subordinates for the problems she’s causing:
“Privately, Ms. Weiss has been deeply frustrated by the negative reaction to her decisions, and has blamed some subordinates for not stanching the criticism, three people familiar with internal discussions said.”
It’s always important to reiterate that CBS wasn’t doing all that well when Weiss got there. The network’s previous owners’ very first response to surging 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. It’s only gone downhill since then.
The “entertaining” bit is that Weiss doesn’t appear to be good at either journalism (because she’s barely done any) or agitprop (arguably the whole reason the Ellison family hired her). That’s causing some weird frictions, including this bit in the Times article where Weiss insists she doesn’t want CBS to report the news, she wants it to “be” the news:
“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.”
That is an intentional misrepresentation of journalism’s function by somebody who wants to be an effective engagement troll that chases virality, but clearly doesn’t really know how to go about it at this sort of scale. Weiss built a weird little contrarian trolling blog, but that’s a completely different animal from creating a mass media propaganda machine. Just ask Roger Aisles.
I think, like many in the extraction-class funded engagement trolling industry, Weiss has deluded herself into genuinely believing she’s helping fix journalism. But again, that’s not what the weird mishmash of 80s ski comedy villains at Ellison’s Paramount want. And I suspect that if Weiss doesn’t start doing a better job of lying to the electorate in a more exciting and ratings-grabbing way pretty soon, she’ll be replaced by a much bigger asshole (and more effective culture war troll) before the summer arrives.
Filed Under: agitprop, bari weiss, journalism, larry ellison, media, propaganda, trolling
Companies: cbs
Comments on “Bari Weiss Is Sad That People Aren’t Enjoying Her Clumsy Destruction Of CBS News”
There is no way this dopey bitch didn’t realize she was trashing the place. Is there? Does she really not understand what she was hired to do? She actually showed up thinking she was going to do something productive instead of destructive? I just don’t buy it.
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Simply put, Bari Weiss does not know what journalism is.
If you’re going to try and co-opt and then radicalise an audience, you have to do it slowly, people notice when you go from naught to nazi and hop out of the pot. It took Facebook a few years to start trying to make a generation of boomers so radicalised they have no family life beyond the page.
'I want our lies to be the only thing people think of when they hear 'news'.'
“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to drive the news,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to be the news for these 10 days.”
Really giving away the game there that she doesn’t want CBS to engage in journalism or report on the facts but rather to shape the narrative into what she and the regime want it to be.
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Yeah, try to explain to Weiss that BS in CBS doesn’t stand for “bullshit”. And good luck.
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That’s literally the joke Nikki Glazer made at the Golden Globes. She called it “See B(ull) S(hit)”
Can't hide...
Ratings and advertisers can’t be faked. The truth will be revealed at CBS.
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That’s only the case if your goal is to make a profit or provide quality content. If you’re a billionaire that wants to mislead and produce propaganda to drive wealth to the top then the proof is in the account balance.
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And how the hell is the propaganda supposed to work if nobody is watching it? It would be a failure even as a subsidized propaganda outlet.
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Lol, you are very sad your propaganda machines are being dismantled. Just as you were very upset with Twitter. (which was more about censorship, but if you ban all dissenting views the remainder is a form of propaganda, too)
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Agreed. I didn’t understand the article either. 🙁
A walk down the Roger aisles
… I’m looking in the the aisle but can’t find any Rogers. ??
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I found ales in these here aisles; what’s Captain Morgan’s first name?
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Henry.
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Capt. Dexter Morgan
SURPRISE, MUTHAF***A
Apropos nothing at all…
When Ellison went on his little buying spree, I saw a number of political commentators on YouTube and social media, who noted that although they had several times the audience that Bari Weis’s little media enterprises had, somehow no one ever offered to buy their boutique operation for 150 million dollars…
Fixing Journalism?
“Weiss has deluded herself into genuinely believing she’s helping fix journalism”
I think you’re being much too charitable, in fact, I think you’re dead wrong. She’s a propagandist. She has an agenda and so do the Ellisons, and it has nothing to do with journalism.
But if by fix journalism, you mean Fixing The Game, then I agree with you. She was hired to do this. They are all disingenuous liars, all the way down. Her incompetence is another story, they’ll fire her in time if needed.
The viewers are the marks. They are dancing on the grave of the “reality-based media” just as Karl Rove bragged 20 years ago. We’re still searching for a solution to their fuckery. It has only gotten worse since then.
Bari is doing a great job!
“We need to be the news for these 10 days.”
She’s sticking to the mission perfectly. In the last weeks I’ve heard:
– She’s pissing of every serious journalist that still remains at CBS (I refrained from scare-quoting journalist, because I’m a nice guy)
– She’s spending inordinate amounts of money on private security and rolls up in a motorcade
– Her Dokupil protegé is FFing bad at anchormanning and only has a job because the Orange Man got elected.
– She tried to clumsily suppress a story her overlords didn’t like about Alligator Auschwitz and failed spectacularly
– She’s setting up a show called “Whiskey Fridays with Dokupil”, allegedly sponsored by Jack Daniels
(Jack Daniels sponsoring a show with Whiskey in the name is an atrocity on a whole other level)
– Now I hear she’s sad
(Note, I didn’t have to Google anything, this is just from memory. There’s probably more)
So, everybody is talking about how shitty a job she’s doing. Despite the fact that there are a few other (minor?) things happening in the US right now. Mission Accomplished!
The Truth
The first casualty of war is the truth.