In the last few years, the Supreme Court has been paying a lot more attention to the internet than it ever has before, and the cases keep on coming. This is already having a big impact on how the internet functions, and it doesn’t look likely to stop any time soon. Given all that, this week our own Cathy Gellis joins the podcast for a discussion all about the past, present, and future of SCOTUS and the internet.
If you’ve been napping, 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 destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant and create an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to be “restoring trust in journalism.”
“Thursday morning on her Free Press platform, Weiss said that taking on CBS News is a “huge responsibility,” before continuing, “So here is the news: ‘Honestly’ is taking a little bit of a pause. I know it is hard to hear that, it’s definitely hard for me to do that because I love doing this show. But I think and I hope that you will understand why.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not forever; we’ll be back in just a few short months,” she added.”
There’s a dash of hubris there for Weiss to think that she can fix the problems at CBS in “just a few short months.” There’s every indication Weiss not only has absolutely no idea what she’s doing, but that she lacks the introspection to be able to realize that she’s the problem and to adjust accordingly. That likely means she continues to flounder until she’s inevitably replaced by somebody even worse.
As we’ve noted previously, the problem for Weiss isn’t that she’s bad at journalism (though that’s certainly true). The problem for Weiss is that she’s bad at ratings-grabbing propaganda, the primary function she was hired for. If you’re going to create noxious state race-baiting propaganda, you have to at least make it entertaining — something Roger Aisles understood well.
Weiss’ incompetence is trouble for a CBS/Paramount parent company that has not only seen ratings in free fall at CBS, they’ve watched their stock drop 40 percent since Larry Ellison’s clumsy hostile takeover attempt of Warner Brothers (and CNN, HBO).
Ellison, fresh off his new co-ownership stake in TikTok, clearly wants to dominate both old and new media and to create a modern version of state television. The sort of thing we’ve seen in countries like Russia and Hungary, where autocrats have hollowed out what was left of media and turned it into an extension of the state (something we’ve already seen across much of U.S. corporate media and Fox News):
During the Soviet era, at times of govt instability, the state broadcaster would typically preempt scheduled broadcasts by airing performances of Swan Lake
If there’s any bright spot to this mess, it’s that absolutely nobody in this chain of dysfunction, from the trust fund nepobaby son of Larry Ellison, to the weird contrarian culture war trolls they’re hiring to spread agitprop, have the slightest idea what they’re doing.
If U.S. media and democracy is saved from these zealots, it won’t be thanks to competent media reforms by the opposition party (which pretty broadly don’t exist in the United States, yet), it will be thanks to the raw, blistering hubris and incompetence of folks like Bari Weiss and David Ellison.
In the last Ctrl-Alt-Speech of the year, Mike and Ben round up the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation with the following stories:
The relationship between journalism and AI has been off to an antagonistic start, with multiple court cases underway and plenty of discourse about what should happen next. There are various proposed approaches to setting up a better interplay between the two, but one person with an especially unique idea is Professor Jeff Jarvis, who joins the podcast this week to discuss the concept of an API for news that would help journalists embrace AI in a positive way.
