The New CBS Is A Clown Show

For decades America's extraction class has waged a highly-successful war on U.S. journalism, steadily buying up media companies and replacing public interest reporting with a rotating crop of hollow infotainment and propaganda across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable, and now the internet.

As the affluent have grown more fearful of a young, diverse electorate with increasingly progressive ideals, their information warfare has accelerated. See: Elon Musk's acquisition (and ruining) of Twitter, Jeff Bezos acquisition (and ruining) of the Washington Post, or Larry Ellison's ongoing destruction of CBS.

If you weren't aware, Ellison, a Trump-allied billionaire and owner of tech giant Oracle, recently purchased CBS/Paramount for $8 billion. He then immediately set to work making CBS a safe space for right wing ideologies and increasingly-unpopular global autocrats like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

To help him in this quest, Ellison (and his nepobaby son David, a dead ringer for a trust fund villain from an 80's ski comedy) hired Bari Weiss, a troll-economy opportunist with no actual journalism experience, to convert CBS News into a dumber, somehow more boring version of Fox News.

In her short tenure Weiss has repeatedly proven that she's not just bad at journalism (because she wasn't hired by Ellison to do journalism), she's terrible at her primary job: ratings-grabbing agitprop.

The result has been a parade of dysfunction.

Weiss’ inaugural “town hall” with right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud. Her reforged CBS nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone mess (the network's new evening anchor, Tony Dokoupil, appears to have been chosen by Weiss specifically because he was once obnoxious to Ta-Nehisi Coates).

The debt load from this giant merger, as is always the case with pointless media consolidation, is being paid for by mass layoffs. Weiss' attempted murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps triggered a revolt and mass exodus of journalists and network mainstays like Andersen Cooper.

Former CBS News producer Alicia Hastey wrote in a recent departure note that a “sweeping new vision” at the network is making it increasingly “impossible” to actually report on stories that matter:

“Stories may instead be evaluated not on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”

That's a polite way of saying that the new owners of CBS aren't interested in journalism, they're interested in blowing smoke up the ass of wealth and power. Folks employed in corporate media can't be too pointed about this sort of thing, lest they risk lateral opportunities at similarly compromised institutions.

A few weeks ago, Weiss announced that CBS News was hiring 19 new contributors of questionable pedigree. Among them were two medical influencers: one, a personal discipline influencer just two years removed from a scandal where he was found to be lying to six sexual partners simultaneously; the other prominently featured in the Epstein files.

The latter, wellness influencer Dr. Peter Attia, appeared more than 1800 times in the files engaging in often enthusiastic interactions with a sex trafficking pedophile. Weiss, echoing the anti-accountability standards of the MAGA movement, recently decided firing him would be "woke":

“Everyone internally unofficially concluded he was staying as of about a week ago,” one CBS News staffer told the outlet, speaking on condition of anonymity. Another added: “We’re pissed off about it.”

This week CBS made headlines yet again after "Late Night" host Stephen Colbert said CBS lawyers barred him from broadcasting a planned interview with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico. CBS legal was worried it might upset our full-diapered toddler in chief and his censorial FCC:

It's important to understand that Larry Ellison and CBS are lobbying the Trump administration for help killing Netflix's planned merger with Warner Brothers, because Larry wants to own Warner Brothers (and CNN and HBO) himself. He's already held chats with Trump about which CNN anchors they want to fire.

CBS (and ABC, NBC, and Fox) have also been lobbying the government for years to eliminate rules preventing the big four networks from merging. Which is to say these giant media conglomerates have multiple, overlapping regulatory incentives to be feckless chodes in blind subservience to our mad idiot king.

The corporate press is disincentivized from being honest about it, but the U.S. right wing is openly building a media akin to what we've seen in countries like Orban's Hungary; a system of outlets owned by autocratic allies, working tirelessly to pump out an endless flow of propaganda and distraction.

It's important to think not of Weiss as a traditional hire, but more of a political appointment, sent specifically to CBS to convert a once-storied media brand into a lazy simulacrum of journalism (though as Spencer Ackerman recently noted, CBS' decline was well underway long before Weiss walked through the door; the previous owners' first response to authoritarianism was to hire more of them).

Weiss' job is to coddle affluent establishment ideology and divide the plebs so they get distracted on their way to roll out the guillotines (see: Weiss' fake "anti-woke" university, just a few blocks away from Joe Rogan's "anti-woke" comedy club, as well as her past controversies propping up lies about trans people).

Most objective media scholars and critics will tell you that U.S. media suffers from an obvious center-right, corporatist, pro-capitalist bias.

Yet the U.S. right wing has waged a successful fifty year campaign to seed the discourse with the idea that any factual challenge to this ideology somehow constitutes a liberal bias and should be inherently discarded as unreliable (here's a clip of them doing this exact same boring routine way back in 1971).

The grand irony is that Weiss is propping up corporatist right wing bias while pretending to be fighting bias. She's being paid a small fortune to help an unholy coalition of corporate power and autocracy dominate establishment media while simultaneously pretending to be censored and unfairly cancelled.

Generally, it takes the public years to realize a once-trusted media brand like CBS has been corrupted and is no longer a reliable narrator, assuming they ever do.

Newsweek, for example, was purchased by religious Conservatives in 2013 and hollowed out as a lifestyle brand used to launder and normalize right wing ideology. I still routinely run into people who don't know it's effectively a "zombie magazine" whose reporting hasn't been innately credible for more than a decade.

The right wing quest to coddle white male affluent establishment power surprisingly isn't all that popular when stripped of its veneer. But the GOP realized long ago that mass media platitudes and propaganda work well on a poorly-educated, inadequately informed electorate.

So they set to work filling AM radio with a bottomless well of right wing race-baiting paranoia. Followed by the conversation of most local broadcast news outlets into right wing friendly grievance machines. Culminating in the creation of Fox News, arguably the most successful propaganda operation in human history.

All to a backdrop of brutally repetitive claims that this noble course correction was necessary to address a "liberal bias" problem that never really existed.

At the moment, Trump Republicans are busy eliminating what's left of media consolidation limits to ensure that loyal tech companies, dutiful local broadcasters, cable TV networks, and telecoms can all happily merge and further consolidate their power in service to our burgeoning kakistocracy.

These belligerent autocrats have also taken direct and deadly aim at whatever was left of U.S. public media; knowing full well it's one of several tonics to the obvious failures of ad-driven, consolidated corporate media.

Some claim Ellison's purchase of CBS and CNN don't really matter because they're aging relics of an irrelevant television sector. But recall that Ellison, alongside several other Trump-allies (including Rupert Murdoch), also just gained control of TikTok with the help of bumbling Democrats.

The intention here is not subtle. What is happening is not open to debate. The richest right wingers in America are buying up the entirety of mass modern media with an eye on building a permanent autocratic oligarchy coddled by wall-to-wall corporatist, right wing bullshit and propaganda.

Democrats, unfortunately, have generally been abysmal when it comes to media reform policy. And you won't find many left-leaning billionaires keen on funding a media counter-movement, because they know a functional press means deeper scrutiny of the means and methods of their own immense wealth hoarding.

Reality desperately needs a better public relations department.

Instead, we've been saddled with a corporate media genetically incapable of honestly explaining reality to a disoriented electorate in a country devoured by artifice. A press financially incentivized to pretend there isn't well-funded, well-coordinated information war being waged against informed consensus.

While there has been some useful resistance via the rise of worker-owned media outlets and direct-to-consumer-newsletters like this one, it's unclear if these fledgling alternatives can scale to meet the moment.

One bright spot: there's little indication that the kind of nepobabies and brunchlords devouring CBS have any Earthly idea what they're actually doing (not that this is a perquisite for lasting harm). American consumers, for now, also still have agency to scrutinize which media deserves their money and attention.

With a little luck, the hubris of unremarkable zealots may burn establishment media to the ground long before their terrible vision comes into full focus.