Techdirt is off for the holiday! We'll be back with our regular posts this weekend.
CBS News Under Bari Weiss Sees Worst Ratings In Quarter Century
from the you-are-TERRIBLE-at-this dept
When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby kid David) hired trolling blogger Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would completely modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” traditionally ignored by mainstream media.
As we noted at the time, that was all bullshit code for turning CBS into yet another outlet that panders to global autocrats, normalizes far right wing extremism, coddles corporate power, and generally shits all over progressive societal reforms.
Weiss wasn’t a journalist, had no serious journalism experience, isn’t good at journalism, and wasn’t hired to do journalism. She was hired specifically to do ratings-grabbing, viral, right wing friendly agitprop which the Ellisons mistakenly seemed to think there was a massive market for. But unfortunately for Weiss, she’s not good at that either.
And it’s just observationally true that nobody actually wants what CBS’ new ownership is selling.
Broadcast TV was already in trouble (just 20% of all TV viewing is now broadcast). The conspiratorial right wing MAGA movement already has countless propaganda outlets to choose from. And the folks who used to find CBS News semi useful aren’t sticking around. “CBS Evening News” ratings keep dipping below 4 million viewers; the kind of ratings that caused CBS to revamp things in the first place.
In fact, CBS News just saw its worst quarter of ratings in 25 years, and it’s not slowing down:
“Demo figures are perhaps even more alarming. “CBS Evening News” lost about 15% of its viewership in the adults 25 to 54 bracket for the first quarter of 2026. ABC is also off by around 4%, while “Nightly” is up 8%.”
Oliver Darcy put it this way over at his newsletter:
“Viewers are smart. They understand that under Ellison’s ownership, and with Weiss at the helm, CBS News has charted a new course … one that is friendlier to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he leads.”
It’s just not clear who Weiss thinks she’s appealing to. There’s no shortage of weird, timid, corporatist, center-right blandness across journalism. Countless outlets are making such a pivot the under Trump in an industry that’s being increasingly consolidated under the ownership of terrible rich assholes with increasingly extreme, anti-democratic ideals. And fewer and fewer people watch broadcast TV anyway.
It’s clear Larry Ellison and other right wingers envy and want to emulate the control of media Victor Orban enjoys in Hungary. Under most autocratic models, party-loyal oligarchs buy up all the major companies, pummel the country with propaganda, and the government sues, harasses, and strangles real journalism just out of frame. As it progresses and gets worse, journalists often wind up dead.
But America is much bigger and much more diverse than Hungary. People are also increasingly consuming media and news in short form snippets from a massive and expanding assortment of influencers (credible or not), independent outlets, and direct-to-consumer journalists. “Flooding the zone with shit,” (to use a Steve Bannon term) impacts everybody, and makes it hard for any one player to dominate modern media.
The folks who’ll rise above the noise in this fractured, new, badly automated, modern media landscape have to be either extremely clever, inherently gifted at pandering to the lowest common denominator, or undeniably authentic.
Bari Weiss is none of those.
Bari came into her job insisting she had the secret sauce to modernize CBS in the viral social media era, and by every indication there’s no evidence that’s actually true. Much of the stuff she’s introduced is just foundationally boring cack of interest to nobody.
As a result, I suspect Weiss’ tenure won’t last past the end of the summer.
I don’t want to give Larry Ellison any ideas, but you could see a future where he hires someone who actually is the modern hustlebro manfluencer version of Roger Ailes; somebody who can leverage CBS and Ellison’s new co-ownership of TikTok to create a truly modern, even uglier version of Fox News that seeds social media with inflammatory, pseudo-journalistic bullshit peppered with sports betting ads.
The thing is there’s just absolutely no evidence anybody at this new Paramount is remotely competent for good or ill, whether we’re talking about Weiss or Paramount President Jeff Shell (who was fired from Comcast for allegations of sexual harassment, and is now going through weird legal tangles at CBS).
Unfortunately, if all Larry Ellison accomplishes is the destruction of another cornerstone of U.S. journalism, he’s still broadly made the world a worse place in a way that benefits him personally. Though even then, you’d like to think there’s potential for people who actually have something ethical or authentic to say to build something useful from the ashes.
Filed Under: agitprop, bari weiss, billionaires, david ellison, evening news, hungary, journalism, larry ellison, ratings
Companies: cbs, paramount
Comments on “CBS News Under Bari Weiss Sees Worst Ratings In Quarter Century”
If you’re going to pivot rightwards, you do it slowly, Facebook didn’t start out enabling right wing nutters from day one, it took a while to get where it is now as an engine for making sure boomers vote for fascists and die alone. Ellison and Weiss decided to go the Elon route and do it in a way devoid of all subtlety and the frog kept from the pot before it reached boiling point.
Re:
Though Facebook has the advantage of possibly still having people you want to talk to using it. So if you want to switch, you need to cut tie with them or pull them with you.
CBS News is much easier for viewers to replace.
Oh, he was way ahead of you but his first choice got sniped in the neck in front of a live audience.
Fact-based news and MAGA are mutually exclusive. MAGA doesn’t want news; they want to be stroked.
Fundamentally, does it matter if CBS news utterly flops? Consider, if CBS made $0, flat nothing, if the Ellison family just wrote a big check for the whole thing every year in perpetuity, would it be worth it for the information control alone?
I think it’s been made pretty clear that taking over CBS News wasn’t a business decision. They don’t have a grand plan for making tons of money using it. What they are doing, clearly, is a hostile takeover of any opposition.
Re:
Perhaps, but these are also men with fragile egos who love keeping score and hate being humiliated. As Noah Berlatsky put it:
Re:
If viewership is down, that means that viewers are going elsewhere. Somewhere that CBS can’t control what they see.
It matters where they are going. If they are going to somewhere more to the right, that’s a win for Trump. If they are going to somewhere left of where CBS News, that’s a bit of a loss. Left of where CBS News used to be, it’s a bigger loss of information control.
Re:
It’s still damaging, but it’s less damaging than if they were competent.
Pretty sure wrecking the brand is an acceptable outcome. They’ve taken the legacy of guys like Murrow and Cronkite, and made sure it’ll never happen at CBS again. That’s likely worth a lot more than what they spent on it.
The Bezos Post ain’t doin’ so hot, either.
Well, Jeff wanted to focus on free speech and free markets. Looks like 20% of his (then-) customers were more than happy to have that conversation.
Deaf ears
There is news that billionaires want and there’s news that most of the people in this country want. We live in very different worlds. The ones that are willing to get on board with their thinking already watch Fox news. Hey Larry, here’s an idea…make a public split with Trump and his need for all news outlets to be pro-Trump/republican propaganda mills. We’re not interested. I’m not really sure what the word means, since it has been used and abused so much, but bring back “woke”. It’s better than the sociopathic direction ABC is headed.
Remember: The destruction of CBS News isn’t actually the goal of the Ellisons or Bari Weiss. They want CBS News to succeed on their terms. But as plenty of others have pointed out, if the Ellisons and Weiss wanted to turn CBS News into Fox News Lite, they had to contend with Fox News still being a thing. And given how CBS News wasn’t doing so hot even before Bari got her hands on it? This move was destined to be a failure.
You LIbtArdS need to understand, its not about ratings, its about kissing the ass of a pedophile!
The people interesting in watching Fox are already doing that
The problem people like Weiss keep running face-first into is that there isn’t a market for Fox-lite. The people who want to watch the propaganda channel that is Fox already watch Fox, and the people who weren’t watching Fox already aren’t going to be interested in what is essentially a (currently) watered down version of Fox, they’ll just leave, as the numbers are showing.
Re:
Basically you can’t make this post truth era crap legitimate to people who can read.
Trump fluffers don’t sell.