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Nobody (Including Advertisers) Cared About Bari Weiss’ New CBS ‘Town Hall’
from the nobody-actually-wants-what-you're-selling dept
We’ve already explored at length how Bari Weiss was hired by the billionaire Ellison family to make CBS even more friendly to billionaires and authoritarians after their embarrassing capitulation to (and bribery of) U.S. autocrats. This isn’t really a pivot real people were actually asking for, it’s simply extension of the right wing extraction class’s assault on informed consensus and real journalism.
The goal is to consolidate what’s left of our sorry ass establishment corporate media, then create a simulacrum of actual journalism that blows smoke up the ass of wealth, power, and the U.S. right wing’s phony victimization complex. While hoping the public doesn’t notice the difference.
And while Weiss likes to pretend she’s shaking things up at CBS with audience-focused innovation, most of her early moves have fallen completely flat. Like Weiss’ recent new town hall effort, whose inaugural episode featured a softball interview with right wing activist Erika Kirk. The interview was pretty much what you’d expect, with lots of downplaying of Charlie Kirk’s role as a radical, divisive, inflammatory bigot.
But as we’ve noted previously, the U.S. media market is already well-saturated with news organizations focused on telling affluent, white, right wingers what they want to hear. In Weiss’ case, the new CBS is a gambit to make men like Donald Trump, Larry Ellison, and Benjamin Netanyahu happy. The actual, real-world interest in this bizarre pseudo-journalistic kayfabe is arguably very limited.
As Weiss quickly found out, as her inaugural chat was relegated to a hollow ratings hour filled with ads for products like the Chia Pet:
“The news special aired at 8 p.m. on Saturday, one of the least-watched hours in broadcast TV. And that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top advertisers appearing to support the show. During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.”
Mainstream advertisers are reticent to affix themselves to absolutely anything deemed remotely off-putting, whether that’s an exposé on mass shootings, or a softball interview with the grieving wife of a right wing propagandist paid by U.S. billionaires to sow division and stall consensus-oriented reform.
Weiss, a shameless opportunist without much actual journalism experience, made all manner of proclamations when she was hired about how she was going to “shake things up,” solve CBS’ perceived bias, and restore journalistic rigor. Yet her very first major move not only involved platforming herself, it involved elevating a fringe, right wing activist who isn’t particularly of interest to most normal people.
Again, she had the opportunity here to platform any of the amazing scientists, academics, artists, thinkers, athletes and doers America has on offer, and settled on a fringe right wing activist of fleeting interest to CBS’ actual news audience.
Larry and David Ellison are very obviously trying to buy up the dying remnants of U.S. corporate media (plus TikTok) in the hopes of creating yet another Fox-esque right wing propaganda mill. But again, there’s no real evidence there’s an actual audience here. Surviving and profiting in media is already difficult; but it’s going to be extra treacherous if CBS’ focus is weird fringe gibberish nobody wants.
Larry Ellison’s efforts to dominate what’s left U.S. media should be extremely alarming, but there’s a single, solitary bright spot: there’s very little evidence anybody involved in this strange collection of trolls, brunchlords, and nepobabies has any actual idea what they’re doing.
Filed Under: activism, bari weiss, billionaires, consolidation, erika kirk, journalism, media, press
Companies: cbs
Comments on “Nobody (Including Advertisers) Cared About Bari Weiss’ New CBS ‘Town Hall’”
Yeah, it’s always depressing to learn that some people use their brain out there, outside your personal echo chamber.
But don’t worry Bari, Mr Chief Executive Officer is about to congratulate you dearly. If not, you can do it yourself, for example:
“MASSIVE shout out to @bariweiss for doing GREAT journalism! Left anarchic legacy media outlet journalist scumbags NEED to STOP criticizing me or the USA. The USA have never been so GREAT since FOREVER!! Thank for your attention to this matter. DJT”
A questionable strategy
Converting CBS News into a Fox News lookalike seems futile. It drives away the loyal viewers but gains little new viewers. Why should someone leave Fox News to watch the Bari Weiss re-formed CBS News? What does it have to offer (that doesn’t already exist)?
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They could do a Newsmax and compete with Fox from the right.
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Billionaires like Ellison don’t care about the long term in that manner.
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Long term is that they continue painting CBS as “liberal media,” and the Overton window shifts rightward.
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Well, yeah. After all, the whole “I’m really just this progressive liberal who simply asks hard questions and speaks inconvenient truths that leftists don’t want to face” narrative is Bari Weis’s whole schtickt.
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Of course. Her whole schtick is, “Ack-shull-y, I’m really just this deeply serious, very progressive journalist who simply asks some questions and reports certain truths — inconvenient questions and awkward truths that unfortunately most liberals are reluctant to face and unwilling to deal with”.
You might say she’s a “conservative”, in liberals clothing. Shifting the Overton Window right is her agenda, and doing so under the guise of rescuing the left from itself is her modus operandi.
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Billionaires only care about “more”. The long-term generational damage they stand to create in their pursuit of having more money, more power, more everything will always have no meaning to them. If you need any further proof, look at how they treat global climate change.
Re: Re: Re: Musk is planning his escape
Musk thinks he can escape to Mars on some future SpaceX flight… Life there will be hard for him, he will have to do manual work like growing his own food.
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Yes, that’s the part of going to live on Mars that he’s being unrealistic about.
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Reading comprehension 101: What is the author of the post above yours attempting to make you feel by choosing the seemingly easiest problem to solve as the problem to highlight instead of a more difficult or immediate one?
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He’ll have servants who will have their oxygen privileges revoked if they don’t suck up enough or didn’t pack enough ketamine.
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Elmo’s mind already lives on Mars, it’s just that his body hasn’t caught up with it yet.
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Oh, but we can’t possibly regulate the press to keep things like this from happening! It would violate ‘Freedom of speech’.
Why it would be un-American to set rules stating that news reporting must be truthful!
The first amendment is as outdated as the second one. The founding fathers had no more conception of Twitter than they did of AK-47s.
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— from A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
You won’t win this fight. You won’t even get anyone on your side. You are hopelessly outclassed and outnumbered here. Now scurry along back to the swamp from which you congealed and find a nice rock to live under.
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If people want Fox, they’ll go to Fox, not CBS-pivoting-to-Fox-lite. It’s certainly a questionable strategy.
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The point isn’t to add a new right-wing voice to the din. The point is to remove a “left-wing” voice.
Nobody listening to a “not-quite as right wing” (because describing CBS as “left wing” could in less dire circumstances be laughable) voice is almost as effective as viewers listening to one channel more of the same MAGA propaganda.
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The strategy is to flood the zone with shit. So you buy the already over-agglomerated media outlets and turn them into shit farms. The goal is for them all to be shit farms.
Of course nobody cared. Charlie Kirk was something of a fringe figure even before his neck exploded. After all the hullabaloo about his death died down, most people went right back to not giving a shit about him. If people didn’t care about him before and (especially) after his death, why would they ever care about his opportunistic widow, who—so far as I know—wasn’t even really a public figure until after her husband died?
Who? n/m, not important.
Man, but the push to lionize him was bizarre. Like, the comments I saw posted about him were unhinged in a way that was a bit uncanny valley or something. Like you could tell it wasn’t a real person behind much of it.
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It makes sense when you view it as MAGA’s attempt at a Reichstag Fire or 9/11 moment. They were trying to exploit a tragedy to silence their enemies and bulldoze civil rights.
They miscalculated, because (1) most people had no fucking idea who Charlie Kirk was and (2) people like Charlie Kirk have spent the past 25 years conditioning Americans to accept shootings as a normal fact of life and forget about them after a couple of days.
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Also: The people who knew who Charlie Kirk was, regardless of their political affiliation, also knew he wasn’t deserving of being lionized as “the current-day MLK” or whatever. A couple of days of “he was a huge bigot and here’s actual video proof of him saying bigoted things” sucked the air out of that “he was a civil rights icon” balloon before it could even inflate.
The legacy of Charlie Kirk is a lot like that of Rush Limbaugh, in a way. Both men spewed hate every chance they could. Both men influenced conservative thought to some degree. And both men’s post-death cultural legacies amounted to someone farting in a bathroom, in that nothing they did in their lives mattered to culture in general and was largely forgotten about after all the obituaries were done and over with.
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Well, not Ezra Klein.
I never hear anybody talk about Limbaugh anymore, but I’d say his legacy is pretty secure. It’s a deeply shitty legacy, but a significant one. The reason he was so insignificant by the end is that he spawned so many imitators — every far-right asshole on AM radio or cable TV is following the trail he blazed.
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That’s part of my point, yeah: Limbaugh’s schtick was so easy to replicate that by the time he died, he wasn’t going to be missed. He’d already been culturally irrelevant for years prior to dying; his death didn’t do him any extra favors that his life hadn’t earned.
Charlie Kirk was in nearly the exact same position. His youth and his manner of death made his death more shocking, yes. But as with Rush, Kirk’s death didn’t do him any extra favors that his life hadn’t earned. His wife is arguably making things worse by turning her grief into a moneymaking endeavour.
there is an audience
I th8ink there is an audience there. Not only is Faux News still around, but it has company in the forms of all those entities willing to sign the Pentagon Power Pledge to be allowed in parts of the building.
Stock buyers may want to look into Reynolds, because the tinfoil hat industry is sure to benefit from all this ``news” reporting.
Well I, for one, am interested. Tell me more about this “Chia Pet”!
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Well, a chia pet is a houseplant. Smarter than those who watch Fox news, and now CBS.
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You can get one that looks like a hedgehog or a kitty or a dog or Barack Obama. Also, apparently one that looks like Trump. Easy when the terracotta naturally mimics his unnatural color. Although the chia bit for the hair cannot hold a candle to his ungodly coif. (Although i would, if i could get away with it.)
If none of those suit you, try a Smorkin’ Labbit (no typo), a Bitcoin, or the American Gothic couple.
Wow, they really went downhill.