Trust Fund Media Brunchlords Can Only Fail Upward

In case you missed it, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison recently decided to gift his eyebrowless nepobaby son David not one (CBS/Paramount), but two (Warner Brothers) major Hollywood studios and media empires.

Truly heartwarming stuff.

The acquisitions serve two purposes. One, they allow Larry's son David to pretend he's a savvy media mogul who built something meaningful. Two, they allow Larry and the Trump administration to steadily lobotomize the already-dying remnants of corporate journalism at outlets like CBS News and CNN.

To accomplish this, the Ellisons hired Bari Weiss, a "contrarian" troll blogger, with no experience in broadcast TV, to run CBS News. Weiss' previous experience ranged from writing terrible opinion columns for the New York Times, to running a clickbait website that routinely just made up bullshit and propped up Trumpism.

Weiss was hired to "modernize" CBS and make lazy right-wing agitprop go viral, but she's largely proven incompetent; CBS News just saw its lowest ratings in a quarter century, and journalists at the network (and everywhere else) keep eviscerating Weiss for her incompetence and clumsy censorship efforts.

She's been firing CBS employees (especially the "woke" and minority ones), while simultaneously rocking a $10,000 per day security detail. She's a prototypical brunchlord: a rich kid who just endlessly fails upward, completely untethered from any sort of real-world credibility or competence.

She recently fired most of the 60 Minutes managers and replaced them with Nick Bilton, a former unremarkable tech journalist who seems best remembered among his peers for the time he tried to take credit for the Wall Street Journal's reporting on Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scam.

The thing is (and it's possibly the only thing that will save us in a country where Democrats appear to have no useful media reform ideas): none of these weird trust fund failsons and brunchlords have any Earthly idea what they're doing. And surprisingly, there's not much audience demand for boring right wing, billionaire-simping agitprop crafted by unremarkable dullards.

This all came to a head last week when 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley was fired for calling out Weiss and Bilton at a CBS staff meeting:

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” Pelley said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

“She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

You'll see this claim a lot that Weiss was hired to "destroy" CBS News. But I suspect the Ellisons would very much like it if Weiss turned CBS into an effective right wing propaganda mill that gets ratings, dictates the contours of modern U.S. discourse (whatever's left of it), and goes viral on social media.

Generally, what rich Republicans like to do is buy existing media companies (The Baltimore Sun, Newsweek, Twitter), hollow them out, then use their propped up corpse (and any accumulated brand credibility) to spread class, race, and gender propaganda that divides and disorients the electorate.

I don't think they really care if the patient dies on the operating table during the procedure, but I don't think "killing" CBS is genuinely the goal. They really do want to repurpose CBS into a lowest-common denominator infotainment and pseudo-journalism agitslop machine that influences people and makes money.

In more recent interviews, Pelley has revealed that Weiss repeatedly demanded he inject falsehoods and bias into his 60 Minutes segments, including one request to make ICE-murdered poet mom Renee Good look guilty.

None of this is really new outside of the scale of the stupidity. It's the continuation of a 50+ year war by rich old right wing white men on "liberal bias" (more specifically defined as any fact-based criticism of right wing ideology, systemic greed, racism, sexism, and unchecked corporate power).

Weiss, Bilton, and Ellison Junior can't really admit their real job is to help the extraction class wage open war on informed consensus. They genuinely want to believe they got where they are through grit, skill, and determination, and have some secret insider knowledge about young audiences and the internet.

You'll routinely see Ellison, Weiss, and Bilton propped up by shitty journalism at other brunchlord-addled outlets, professing they have some sort of unique vision for modernizing CBS in the tech age. But when you actually look at what their bold new idea is, it's routinely something inane and completely unoriginal:

Besides marrying the tech stacks of Paramount+ and Pluto TV, Paramount hopes to boost streaming engagement by adding vertical video clips and interactive features, such as a shopping tool.

Interactive shopping tools. Vertical video clips. Very exciting.

One of Ellison Jr.'s big ideas was to fire Stephen Colbert to make the President happy, then lease his timeslot to billionaire Byron Allen, who immediately filled it with a bunch of boneless laugh-track pseudo-comedy slop nobody wants to actually watch. Truly ingenious innovation.

By their nature, brunchlords are pickled by privilege and sycophancy, so when they run into people who can see through them – as was the case at 60 minutes – they don't appreciate the assault on the facade, and will immediately begin replacing you with the sorts of bobbleheads that don't ask questions:

“Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous,” Pelley said. “It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is.”

This sort of thing isn't just playing out at CBS News. It's playing out across the entirety of U.S. media. I watched it happen while writing for Vice News and Motherboard, their once-prominent and far-less-clickbaity tech reporting arm, disemboweled for no good reason by a rotating crop of trust fund failsons.

It has to be made clear that with spotty exception (like 60 Minutes) CBS News was not very good in the first place. It's your standard, punch-pulling corporate media outlet, too afraid of upsetting ownership, advertisers, sources, event sponsors, or right wing subscribers to be too bluntly honest about anything.

Especially right wing politics or corporate power.

Even before the Ellisons acquired Paramount and CBS the company had been working overtime to appease the country's surging authoritarian movement. Both by hiring more MAGA-friendly Republicans, and by paying Trump a $16 million bribe to settle a lawsuit they easily could have won.

A lot of the sacrosanct reverence we're seeing now for CBS and Pelley simply isn't deserved. Pelley, for example, revealed in a recent New York Times interview that 60 Minutes staff felt they needed to spend significant time making anti-ICE protestors look worse in their reporting, even before Weiss had asked:

I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively...We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss

Just a quick refresher that protesters at the time were responding to a masked gestapo full of unqualified racists and slobs who were murdering and beating up citizens in the street at the behest of a corrupt authoritarian zealot who operates at a third-grade reading level.

U.S. corporate power and journalism generally can't co-exist; the flaccid and feckless "view from nowhere" coverage of Trump's rise to power has driven that point home for many people who may have previously deluded themselves into believing the U.S. corporate press still functioned in some meaningful way.

That's not to say the new and bigger CBS isn't becoming exponentially worse. And because brunchlords can only fail upward (it's physics!), there's now rumblings that Weiss will also be put in charge of CNN's editorial direction should CBS/Paramount be allowed to buy Warner Brothers.

They're discovering she can't actually run a business or competently manage her staff, so they're going to try pairing her with an MBA to see if that helps:

CBS News boss Bari Weiss is likely to gain editorial oversight of CNN if and when Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is approved, according to a report. Paramount executives are said to have held preliminary discussions with several candidates who would come in and run the business-side operations next to Weiss while she continues to oversee editorial.

Weiss wasn't hired to to business operations or even journalism. She has no qualifications for either. She was specifically hired to craft propaganda. The problem for Weiss, as it turns out, is she's not good at that either.

All the stuff she's cooked up so far to reinvigorate CBS, like this town hall with Erika Cook nobody watched, or letting war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu pick his own softball interviewer at CBS to help him downplay his war crimes, are the kind of things that would appeal to a dying 90-year-old Republican man.

U.S. oligarchs desperately want to build the biggest right wing propaganda and infotainment machine ever constructed. One that pummels the misinformed plebs with soggy class warfare and divisive culture war agitprop. But they're all profoundly stupid, wildly overconfident, and drunk on sycophancy.

As a result, opposition to the Paramount/CBS merger with Warner Brothers, essential for the Ellisons to gain control of CBS, has been much hotter than it might have been if they'd approached the effort with some subtlety. Unions, creatives, activists, and the public all seem bluntly aware that the $111 billion superunion will result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier overall product.

As somebody that has covered media consolidation for decades, there's no actual debate. The huge debt from these deals is always paid for through layoffs, corner cutting, price hikes, and shoddier overall product. Every single merger Warner Brothers has ever been involved in has been a disaster.

And these Paramount folks not only seem far more greasy and incompetent than any of the company's past suitors, the deal is being heavily financed by the Saudis and the Chinese, raising national security and media influence concerns not seen in past disastrous deals (like AT&T's attempted merger with Time Warner).

A functional country with operational antitrust regulators would block all of these deals. While that's obviously not happening under the Trump administration, state attorneys general appear to be poised to file an antitrust lawsuit, which at the very least could drag things out for much of this year.

You can almost smell the growing desperation at Paramount, which in the last few weeks has floated between trying to claim that Netflix is secretly behind the hatred of their shitty deal, and insisting that merger opponents are "antisemitic":

Even if the deal is approved, there's a very good chance the massive debt load and the incompetence – potentially timed perfectly with Larry Ellison's overextension into the AI hype bubble, broader economic reverberations from said bubble popping, and the accelerating irrelevance of broadcast media in general – could create a superstorm of dysfunction for the bloated venture.

Whatever happens, folks like Weiss will always fail upward. If fully converting CBS and CNN into racist agitprop machines doesn't work out, she'll most assuredly be promoted to a major role at a key regulator, elected to public office, or put in charge of an entirely new disaster at a differently-doomed enterprise.

Anyway, here's where I remind you to cancel your Paramount Plus streaming subscription, stop watching CBS products, and give your money, where possible, to reliable independent and worker-owned media efforts. If you can't identify any of those, ask somebody you love and trust who can.