When I was growing up in the early ’90’s, CBS was one of the four channels we used to get in our rural, hillside home in Upstate New York. If it didn’t come across the air, we didn’t get it, as there weren’t enough people living on our hill for the cable company to run a line up to us. We watched 60 Minutes every Sunday and Dan Rather was a regular voice on our screens in the evening.
I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about those grainy old pictures our TV would spit out back then. I don’t remember one particular story more than any other, but CBS News was one of my first windows into a world larger than just the small farm town I grew up in; the first glimpse of how big the world really is.
Earlier this week, it was announced that CBS’ parent company, Sundance Media, owned by billionaire David Ellison, acquired The Free Press—an anti-woke, loose-with-the-facts, digital-commentary outlet started by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. As part of the deal, Weiss herself was named as the editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Weiss, a bisexual woman who is married to another woman, has made a whole career out of claiming to be marginalized because of her self-described “radical centrist” views. In reality, she has been lauded and feted by multiple billionaires, whom she has a talent for flattering in her work. She’s never been a reporter, she wasn’t an opinion writer and she’s best known for flouncing from her role at the New York Times after and trying and failing to get the newspaper to fire her.
During the public fallout from the resignation of Times opinion editor James Bennet, which occurred after the paper published an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton that the paper later admitted didn’t meet the publication’s editorial standards, Weiss played a crucial role in attempting to drive public opinion toward believing that the paper had been taken over by leftist activist writers and reporters. She kept at, lashing further and further out, drawing criticism from the online left before quitting and pretending that she had been driven from the organization.
Yet now she’s heading one of the oldest and most prestigious newsrooms in the world. Now, you might be thinking here that it’s a good thing that an openly bisexual woman has such a powerful position now in the media—and you’d be wrong. The Free Press has been openly anti-trans from its inception, famously breaking news using the leaked medical records of literal trans children. A few months ago, it should be noted, the outlet published a freelance piece falsely accusing me of lying about the Trump administration ending funding for the LGBTQ2S+-specific federal suicide hotline.
In 2023, Weiss gave a speech to the notoriously archconservative Federalist Society, which has been responsible for identifying judges for Trump to nominate, including all of his Supreme Court nominees to date. In that speech, she said, “I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal … and that’s okay. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”
She is no political ally to queer people.
But that is only a small part of the story here. Her CBS hiring is emblematic of just how far our larger media landscape has crumbled over the last decade. Ten years ago, when I started out as a writer and reporter, the journalism industry felt somewhat robust. There were many online left-leaning news outlets who all covered the news of the day with large writing staffs. They were mostly profitable, but not profitable enough for the rich people who owned them. Managers and site owners who had no experience in news launched into cost-saving layoffs in an effort to generate even more profit, and have been stuck in a doom loop of continuous media layoffs and site shutterings ever since. So many iconic names in new media are either gone or are shells of their former selves, hollowed out by layoffs or private equity mismanagement.
In the meantime, local papers were being bought almost in bulk, consolidating under a small handful of billionaire-owned corporations who made a regular practice in laying off most of the newsrooms in a given city.
All of this has had an awful effect on the ability of an average citizen to get accurate news. But that’s not all that has happened to a once robust media industry.
At this same time, a different dynamic hit the more mainstream news game. With the online outlets soaking up the views of left-leaning readers, traditional outlets like the New York Times and The Atlantic leaned right, trying to draw in more conservative readers. They expanded their rosters with conservative minds and writers, who all, seemingly, have the same view on every issue without much daylight between them.
This launched traditional written media into a spiral of competing, yet stock standard anti-woke nonsense. “Trans people are problematic” or “maybe there’s too much anti-racism” or “maybe there are too many migrants” takes dominate the pages of these publications’ opinion sections. This is the environment in which Weiss’s career was born.
Earlier this week, I told my mom that CBS News shouldn’t be considered a trusted news source anymore and explained who Weiss is and what she is likely to do to CBS News. She responded with outright frustration. She’s been watching CBS News for 60 years and now it’s crumbling under the weight of a billionaire and his favourite news lackey.
There are few places left in this country where reliable news reports can be found. The list grows shorter by the day. It feels like I can only just look on in abject horror and despair.
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