CBS Staffers Jump Ship Ahead Of More Layoffs From Another Pointless Media Merger
from the inevitable-outcomes dept
U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster child for this phenomenon.
After paying Trump his $16 million bribe, CBS and Skydance (Trump’s friends in the Ellison family) recently finalized their $8 billion merger. It didn’t take long for the company to announce that the only way it could pay for the debt of the pointless deal is by firing a whole bunch of people in “painful” fashion.
Despite a lot of promises last summer by Paramount executives that the layoffs would come in one fell swoop, CBS News boss Bari Weiss has implemented staggered cuts as she converts what was left of CBS into yet another safe space for right wing autocrats and their dwindling cult.
Apparently “a lot of people” at CBS News are taking Weiss up on a January town hall promise of buyouts for those insufficiently deferential to Larry Ellison’s ambitions:
“They include at least six producers out of the show’s total of roughly 20, according to another source, who added: “Seems like people are jumping ship.”
“It’s a lot of people,” a CBS insider said.”
In her head, I really do think Weiss believes she’s reshaping CBS News into a better news organization. In reality, Weiss was specifically hired by billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison to convert CBS into yet another autocrat-friendly safe space for the perpetually aggrieved.
Weiss’ problem to date has been that she’s not just bad at management, judgment, and journalism, she’s bad at ratings-grabbing agitprop — the real reason she was hired by billionaires in the first place.
Weiss’ inaugural “town hall” with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, her new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps — and the network’s decision to air a story lying about the ICE murder of Nicole Good — spurred a revolt among the CBS journalists who hadn’t quit yet.
Weiss’ weird ego trip is playing out alongside the old traditional failures of mindless media consolidation, the last refuge of executives who are all out of original ideas, but desperately want to goose quarterly earnings, generate temporary tax cuts, and get “savvy dealmaker” stamped on their LinkedIn profile.
The thing is, merger related promises both before and after the deal are always meaningless. The layoffs are driven by debt from acquisitions, and the new CBS has been making plenty of those, including a new $7.7 billion deal to acquire the exclusive rights to MMA fights, a costly campaign to steal Warner Brothers, and that $150 million deal to acquire Bari Weiss’ lazy contrarian propaganda blog.
Larry Ellison clearly wants to hoover up what’s left of corporate media (including CBS, CNN, HBO) — and fuse it with his co-ownership of TikTok to create a sort of Hungary-esque autocratic state media. The only thing saving us from this outcome to date is the fact that absolutely nobody in this weird assortment of nepobabies and brunchlords appears to have absolutely any idea what they’re doing.
Filed Under: bari weiss, cbs news, consolidation, journalism, larry ellison, layoffs, media, mergers
Companies: cbs, paramount, skydance
Comments on “CBS Staffers Jump Ship Ahead Of More Layoffs From Another Pointless Media Merger”
Monopoly (the game) is pretty didactic on how unshackled, unregulated capitalism works. And now we are watching it in real time. The game just doesn’t consider the fact that money usually concentrates into the hands of really awful people because they’ll ignore laws and humanity of others to grab whatever money they can. And nazis.
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Considering how the game turns you into a landlord and makes you charge exorbitant rent on properties in which you “invest” (via housing) in the hopes of bankrupting other players? No, I’d say Monopoly pretty well captures the idea that awful people are the ones who end up richer than everyone else.
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True. You can’t bribe officials to persecute other players, use the govt machine to your benefit or use semi-slave workforce in the game though. But you do have a point.
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Not with that attitude, you can’t. I’m sure someone’s got house rules for that sort of thing. (And they’re probably Republicans.)
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I once played a variant where you were allowed to pay the bank to adjust a die roll up or down by 1 per 10 dollars to land on whatever square you wanted. And other people could also pay to adjust your die rolls. Surprise: people with more money could force others to land on squares they owned and get even more money out of them.
Great idea in theory, didn’t do much in practice, except make the game end a bit faster.
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That was, after all, the original goal. For those who didn’t know, it was based on The Landlord’s Game:
In the 1930s, Charles Darrow modified it a bit, re-branded it, and claimed full credit. And people have been playing it while missing the point ever since.
NeoFox, I mean CBS, is dead. Keep merging, trust and eyeballs are leaving. They’ll blame AI, like like they do for all of the quiet firings.
Don’t worry. They’ll still downsize the same number of people during the merger regardless of how many leave early.
No, not “always”. Only when they’re not actually legal promises, or when weak or sycophantic governments are not able or willing to hold them to those promises—or, worse, just cancel them, like how the Trumpers recently let Verizon out of its promise to stop locking phones. Verizon had actually been upholding its end of the promise till then.
But some governments have sued over broken promises, with actually-punishing results. Even past U.S. governments—just not recently, although the courts do still uphold broken contractual promises between merging companies (notably break-up fees, such as in Kroger’s failed merger of last year).