Why It Matters I’m trying to figure out a way to describe Weiss to those who are not familiar with her, especially those from outside the US. Perhaps this blurb from a 2019 Vanity Fair profile will serve our purpose “The Times op-ed writer is a Trump-loathing theater nerd who studied at a feminist yeshiva and used to date Kate McKinnon. She also led a controversial protest at Columbia, and popularized the ‘intellectual dark Web.’ The contradictions of a social-media lightning rod.” Meaning that Weiss has become the leader of a strain of intellectual thought (“the intellectual dark Web”) that is highly critical of the excesses of both the Right and the Left. Though—and this is key—each would tell you that Weiss is far more critical of their side than of the other. She very publicly quit the New York Times in 2020, accusing the paper of allowing progressive staffers to bully her and “caving to the whims of critics on Twitter.” But that is not where the story ends. The next year she started her own substack, The Free Press, and it has grown into a full-blown news outlet, breaking important stories and attracting a range of well-known writers and intellectuals who have been cast out from the broader left for breaking with orthodoxy, particularly on the topic of Gaza. This has turned Weiss into something of a pariah on social media, particularly on Bluesky, the Portlandia of social media sites (or the mirror of Truth Social, your pick) where she, JK Rowling and Hillary Clinton seem to form an all-female Axis of Evil. The final piece of context you need is that in a country where the most searched term on Google the week of the 2024 Presidential election was “Did Biden drop out?”, Weiss, her cohorts and her tormentors are unknown outside of a tiny, rather incestuous bubble That said, she does have a sizable audience—the Free Press has grown at a rather impressive rate—and Weiss is a frequent lecturer and guest on TV news shows. Which is why Ellison is bringing her in to run CBS News may be genius. Or, at the very least, a clever Hail Mary. Allow me to explain. For decades, American network TV news basked in its reputation of being straightforward and unbiased. Anchors like CBS’s Walter Cronkite were consistently named the most trusted people in the country. But as time went on, conservative voices felt the media had shifted too far leftward and Fox News was born, followed by MSNBC, for those who felt it was not left-leaning enough. You know the rest of the story. American media has largely turned into a scrum of left- and right-leaning voices, driven partly by politics and partly by owners who realize that angry viewers are loyal viewers. Ellison seems to be betting on the fact that there are a large number of viewers who are sick of the excesses of both sides, who just want to get the news without any sort of fixed ideological “our side” slant and that Weiss is the person to do that. That this will be met with mockery and disbelief from partisans on both sides is a given—the aforementioned Bluesky is already in Code Red Meltdown mode. But the Extremely Online are not the audience for CBS News. Their audience, should it emerge, will likely be older, more middle-to-upper middle class, the people who tell pollsters they are “Independents” and who feel that neither party really gets what they're saying. They’ll be old enough to know who Walter Cronkite was, and why CBS News was considered a source of unbiased truth. I have long argued that the network news divisions have a real opportunity these days. Their audiences are double and often triple that of any of the cable news networks. Their distribution networks wider. Their budgets bigger. What they’ve been missing is relevance, a sense that they are part of the national conversation. Weiss’s presence could change that. Make CBS News a place that media-savvy politicians go to get noticed. Where young reporters from major newspapers and magazines show up to jump start their careers. A place that contributes hundreds of meme-able clips each day to Twitter and YouTube and TikTok. It’s the place that CNN could have been, but for reasons best explained in a full-length book they dropped the ball. Now it’s possible that none of this works, that Weiss pisses off all sides equally and no one shows up for her. Or only one side, which would be even worse. But you know, I kind of doubt it. What You Need To Do About It If you’re Dylan Byers, you’d better hope your sources were right because if they’re not a whole lot of ink will have been wasted (and not just by me) speculating on this. If you’re Bari Weiss and this is true, take your victory lap and then get to work. Yes they left you for dead when you quit the Times, and yes there are all sorts of haters, but taking over someone else’s (largely moribund) business is a very different trick than launching your own. I’ll just leave one somewhat obvious piece of advice: most people under 70 get their news online, not from television. If you’re David Ellison, you can and should do whatever it takes to make this work. But understand it might not—TV news, or network TV news in particular, may be too far gone, the partisan divide may be too deep, the people claiming you are only doing this to suck up to Trump too convinced for it to happen. You never know. You might—since details on this are all speculative—put Weiss in charge of the softer side of your news division—the 60 Minutes side, where she can draw on her talent for finding interesting talking heads. If you’re a viewer and you are tired of news that sounds like a pep rally and/or seems designed to raise your blood pressure, hope that this is the fix. But know it may not be—it may be even more partisan than anything you’ve seen before. But before you slink back to TikTok or some newer social media, know that at least someone was making an effort. Or at the very least giving it lip service. |
