Is there a media organization that’s fallen harder or faster in the Age of Trump II than CBS News? You might point to The Washington Post, but Jeff Bezos has thus far left its news coverage alone, contenting himself with taking a wrecking ball to the opinion section.
By contrast, CBS’s corporate overlords earlier this year settled a bogus lawsuit brought by Donald Trump against the network’s premier news program, “60 Minutes,” for $16 million in order to grease the skids for a sale to Skydance Media, headed by the Trump-friendly David Ellison.
And now comes the next act in this tragedy. According to a story first broken by Puck and since confirmed by other news outlets, Ellison is on the verge of acquiring The Free Press, a prominent right-leaning opinion outlet founded by Bari Weiss, the celebrity former New York Times opinion editor. The price tag could be somewhere between $100 million and $200 million. The idea is to bring Weiss inside the CBS tent and give her a major leadership role over CBS News.
What a revolting development. I’m not a regular reader of The Free Press, but its reputation is not so much right-wing as it is anti-anti-Trump. As CNN media reporter Brian Stelter wrote in July, when talk of a Weiss-Ellison alliance was starting to bubble up: “Earlier this year New York magazine described The Free Press as a media organ that ‘both wants to excoriate liberals but not fold fully into the MAGA wing.’”
Perhaps The Free Press’ most notorious piece was a takedown of NPR by one of the network’s former top editors, Uri Berliner. As I wrote at the time, Berliner’s screed was shot through with intellectual dishonesty, as he built his argument that NPR had fallen victim to liberal bias on a scaffolding of mischaracterizations and outright falsehoods. Look at its homepage this morning and you’ll see clickbait such as “How Zohran Mamdani Could Kill New York’s Schools,” “Is There a Dumber Housing Policy Than Rent Control?” and “The Democratic Socialists of America Don’t Know If They Should Condemn Murder.”
Media reporter Oliver Darcy on Wednesday wrote an excoriating takedown of the pending deal and the absurd notion that The Free Press is somehow worth $100 million or more, saying in part:
Ellison appears determined to replicate the John Malone playbook at CNN: nudge the newsroom into a posture more deferential to Trump, launder that shift as “balance,” and hope the MAGA crowd will suddenly reward him. But this formula is already tired and simply doesn’t work. Meddling at CNN, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times has only destabilized those institutions. It chases away the core audience, while failing to win over the right-wing demographic, which has no interest in embracing legacy news brands no matter how many concessions are made. These audiences celebrate the destabilization of news institutions, not because they will ever turn to them for information, but because they despise them and want to see them burn to ash.
CBS News was never quite the “Tiffany network” of legend. Edward R. Murrow was gradually sidelined during the years after he publicly called out Red Scare-monger Joseph McCarthy. Dan Rather, still going strong at 93, was eased out as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and producer Mary Mapes was fired after the short-lived “60 Minutes II” aired a report in 2004 about then-President George W. Bush’s sketchy service in the Air National Guard that was, admittedly, based in part on phony documents.
Never, though, has CBS News fallen as far as it has this year. Giving Bari Weiss some sort of oversight role may represent a new low, but I have a feeling that will soon be eclipsed by some other outrage. Walter Cronkite weeps.
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I’m curious about one thing: does that mean that The Free Press would leave Substack? Or would it remain through some deal with Paramount?
Dan, were the Bush “Memogate” documents ever proved to be fake, or was CBS just unable to verify that they were real? I remember that, within a day or two of the broadcast, everyone in the right-wing blogosphere was suddenly an instant expert on Microsoft Word fonts and kerning; I do not remember any independent forensics experts weighing in. Certainly, Rather and Mapes were sloppy to have run with the memos without nailing down their provenance, not least because their blunder allowed the right to hijack the narrative; it became about CBS’s supposed smear of the president, not W’s mysterious absences from Guard service. I remember The Boston Globe doing significant reporting on Bush’s questionable service timeline, well before Rather’s story aired. Following up on the Globe’s work, 60 Minutes II could have raised the same questions about Bush’s service without the memos, so rushing the story to air without vetting them was not only counterproductive but entirely unnecessary.
Really, I’m not sure why you would bring it up now. This one egregious incident from 21 years ago, along with CBS’s sidelining of Murrow 65+ years ago, are hardly indicative of a current pattern of journalistic malpractice so unprofessional and biased that it requires a solution as drastic as buying out Bari Weiss.
Gary, yes, they were fake. I’m not sure it was ever definitively proven, but it was proven to my satisfaction. I wrote about it quite a bit at the time, including for The Guardian, and I brought it up now because I thought it was worth mentioning. Rather has quite a checkered past, most of it involving gullibility. And as I also wrote at the time, CBS News’ sloppiness ended up casting a shadow on the Globe’s excellent reporting four years earlier.
This does not strike me as a balanced representation of Weiss and TFP. I guess that’s part of what makes me unsympathetic to a certain species of progressive kvetching.
TFP frustrates me with its conservativism — which I would characterize as Hoover Institution-like. Most frustrating is the wackadoo pro-Trump Israeli reporter, Batya Ungar-Sargon; that woman is bat___ crazy. And there are areas where its coverage has been pretty impressive. Their pre-election panels were diverse and prescient.
TFP has served as a haven by those turned off by liberal excesses in elite spaces — for those of us who are Claudine and Roxanne Gayed out — tired of the anti-intellectualism, the tropes, the replacement of argument with activism, with intellectual monocultures. That is, for those of us who see how excesses on the Left paved the way for the gross and terrifying hysteria on the Right.
Similarly I’m a fan of Greg Lukianoff’s FIRE nonprofit that calls out free speech issues on both sides of the aisle.
Bari has pulled off something pretty impressive. She and her wife, both formidable journalists, pushed back against what they experienced as a sort of cultural tyranny and bullying they experienced as a consequence of their resistance to conforming to the Times culture. Weiss arose from those ashes to create an influential media player and create a university committed to viewpoint diversity. Clearly the woman has some skills. Dismissing her as a Trump apologist does not factor in the magnitude of these achievements.
a few edits needed but i can’t figure out to do it
Nan, not only did I not call her a Trump apologist, I went out of my way to make it clear she’s not a Trump apologist. You know that. Why are you claiming otherwise?