CBS Ratings Continue Nosedive Under Bari Weiss
from the keep-up-the-great-work,-champ dept
When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison 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” she claimed were being “ignored by mainstream media.”
In reality, she was hired by the billionaire to take what she did at her weird little troll blog (troll people for clicks, coddle the extraction class, punch left) and weave it into CBS News in a way that would get ratings and go viral on social media. She wasn’t hired to do journalism, she was hired to do attention-grabbing class and race agitprop to entertain and befuddle the electorate for a billionaire.
Weiss’ problem: she’s not good at that either.
CBS News ratings had already hit their lowest point in a quarter century back in March. And it’s now spread across the CBS News ecosystem, from CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes to CBS Mornings:
“Damage was particularly bad at CBS Mornings, hosted by Gayle King, which has long held the third-place ratings spot among network morning shows. But that recently changed: CBS Mornings averaged 1.8 million total viewers earlier this month, then dropped to 1.59 million on June 3, the day after executives fired Scott Pelley, the de facto face of CBS News.
That amounted to an 11 percent slip in audience following what was already the “worst-rated May on record” in CBS Mornings history, according to the ratings data.”
It’s not that you can’t make right wing and oligarch friendly propaganda entertaining. There’s no shortage of those sorts of options across AM radio, broadcast TV, Fox news on cable, and the internet. Bari Weiss just isn’t good at anything. Not running a major newsroom. Not converting a longstanding network into an oligarch apologist-machine, not managing human beings, and not even entertaining people.
She’s a fairly prototypical media industry brunchlord, the type that just keeps failing upward in a way that’s in no way reflective of her competency or what she’s actually accomplished.
Reports from within CBS News have been uniformly negative, and there continues to be rumblings that Weiss will be replaced or at least see her responsibilities scaled down. There’s potential here for Larry Ellison to fuse CBS News, his looming acquisition of CNN, and his co-ownership of TikTok into a very effective propaganda machine. Fortunately for democracy, Larry doesn’t seem all that competent either.
Filed Under: agitprop, bari weiss, david ellison, journalism, larry ellison, media, news, ratings
Companies: cbs
Comments on “CBS Ratings Continue Nosedive Under Bari Weiss”
I can’t wait for a significant amount of Ellison’s net worth to be wiped out when Oracle goes under after OpenAI aren’t able to meet the payments the whole overleveraged business is banking on…
The Lawnmower
Don’t make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
Part of me thinks or wants to believe that these people are only a subset of humanity.. About 25 to 30% that is VERY LOUD so they managed to sway another chunk into their delusions.
But when they finally get the opportunity to put their ideas to practice it goes so wrong and it turns out to be so dumb that those who were swayed by their speech cant help but realize they are full of shit. So if someone isn’t really into Fox, home of the dumb and the despicable, then it’s natural that people start backing off from places where MAGA and the likes congregate.
Sadly, it seems to be a cyclical movement. took us around 80 years to go back to dumb and violence.
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Sounds about right tbh; when your grandparents or great-grandparents were the last to deal with this crap it doesn’t have the same impact that it would otherwise. It’s probably a generational thing.
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I mean I get you’re talking about Hitler but there’s been some other violence since then.
You can’t just yadda-yadda the ’50s and ’60s.
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But in the 50s and 60s, the U.S. did not chide other NATO members (a defensive treaty) to refuse joining into its unilaterally started wars. Nor did the U.S. threaten to attack other NATO members for regional gains. Nor did the U.S. threaten to meet its treaty obligation to come to the aid of other NATO members (guess which country in the history of NATO ever actually invoked article 5).
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Ah yes, and there’s Israel systematically killing and displacing Palestinians since its creation in 1947 (if memory serves), the US engaging in multiple coups and unilateral wars, ditto Russia and Europe (with their former colonies). The list goes on. But at least nazism had become ugly and there was some social evolution overall. What we are seeing now is a lot of regression towards bigotry and very problematic ideas.
Re: Re: Re: displacement goes back to 1917
The founder of Zionism Theodor Herzl initially considered Argentina for the Jewish state. He stated that gradual infiltration of Jews would not work, they required sovereignty and would achieve it through a scheme of ‘overpaying’ for large areas. This method would remove land from Argentine open real estate markets, ie it could never be sold back. Only this way could they establish a Jewish exclusive state. They ultimately implemented this scheme via land purchases in Palestine which were themselves the start of Palestinian displacement. These began around 1917, 30 years prior to Balfour. The Herzl correspondences often mock the naivete of both Argentine and Palestinian landowners.
Cunning Plan
Ellison is 21 century Baldrick
CBS getting it Right
Thank God CBS has finally given a voice to all of the right wingers who were silenced by Obama and Biden! You know, the ones we kept hearing, ad nauseum…
CBS
Why does CBS expect people to leave their current right wing programming for CBS?
Right wing propaganda isn’t about entertainment. It’s about confirmation: give them what they want to see, want to hear–only the things that confirm their existing bias, and they’ll be “entertained.” They’re too stupid to know the difference, so it’s all good. (And, by the way, is Larry Ellison the funniest (as in weirdest) looking guy you’ve ever seen or what? …maybe a cross between a chipmunk and beaver? I mean, straight out of some graphic novel or the old Batman show… needs a super-villain name…)
Fox news viewers are already watching Fox news and Bari isn’t smart enough a propagandist to actually be able to reach and convert an audience who do not want that and were watching 60 minutes for actual journalism. What she needed to do was assure people there would be no changes then slowly apply pressure over time and make more ‘classical liberal’ hires, but the misanthropic satsuma she was put in place to appeal to wanted journalism to be executed publicly, not slowly fazed out and nobody wanted to see that.
What’s the bet that if, and when, the Democrats win both houses and the presidency vile creeps of like the Ellison’s suddenly dump Weiss and magically try to show that they’ve always been on the side of goodness and niceness and that they were led astray by Donald?
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You’re fifth booster shot has wrecked havoc on your brain. Good luck with all that.
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Nothing quite like basic spelling errors when calling someone else stupid.
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That’s not a bet. That is just history repeating itself.
I just had a quick glance at BW’s troll blog, and without taking in much of the resignation letter that came up first, suddenly it hit me.
Her initials are BW, perfect opportunity to call her blog the Bum Wipe.
In case you don’t get it, in Australia we call them bums, not butts. I doubt I needed to explain this, but I did it anyway. Because I don’t take bets on people understanding foreign cultures these days.
And it will continue to nosedive with this person. What was “the think tank” thinking? This must be an example of “The Peter Principal”! Good grief!
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Bari Weiss
Buy a subscription to the Free Press. Read the articles that are both conservative and liberal They are written by some of the most well-educated and knowledgeable people in the world. If you can read, you will find that Bari Weiss is centrist on most issues, conservative on some, and liberal on others. Most likely, you won’t do this because you want to trash Bari Weiss. No matter what she does, it would be wrong to a person who is full of Jew Hatred. People could be supporting her and hoping she does well. Oh no, no,no. She shook Trump’s hand. OMG! (sarcasm) FYI: I don’t even know about this blog. You must have low ratings – never heard of you.
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The hell, did someone tell an AI chatbot to do a low-energy Donald Trump impression?
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It’s not an AI, look at the name. There is only one person who tend to make up names like that when they want to imitate a reasonable person but their specific use of certain words and phrases immediately stand out.
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Yet it can never disguise its complete lack of humanity.