Today’s focus will be on media and tech, inspired by a podcast on the modern news business from Puck’s Dylan Byers and Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and CEO of Axios. Their conversation hit on AI disruption, Axios differentiation, the Washington Post looking adrift, and it also included a fun CBS take from VandeHei that began with this: “This might not be the most popular opinion with legacy media: I don’t fully get the criticism of Bari [Weiss].”
We’ll come back to his reasoning, but I do get the criticism of Bari Weiss. More importantly, as someone who works on the internet, I can’t possibly escape it. Weiss was hired to be editor-in-chief of CBS News in October, after Paramount CEO David Ellison paid $150 million in cash and stock to acquire her Substack-hosted independent journalism outlet, The Free Press. Since then, she has become a terrifically polarizing figure who is mocked and reviled by most of the left and nearly all of the legacy media, including some of her subordinates at CBS (who are predictably resistant to change).
Some of the criticism has been embarrassingly catty, and some of it is blissfully oblivious to irony, like when host Nikki Glaser joked at Sunday’s Golden Globes (on CBS!) that “the award for Most Editing goes to CBS News. Yes, CBS News, America’s newest place to See-BS-news.” It’s unclear whether Glaser is aware that CBS News was at the center of a pretty big controversy after it edited a Kamala Harris answer on Gaza to be less incoherent. Regardless, the joke landed with a theater full of people who loathe Weiss and Ellison (a Trump donor who was also in the audience Sunday night).
Zooming out, I think a lot of the ire that Weiss attracts is an instinctive response to her Free Press-era goals of providing balanced coverage that takes arguments from both sides seriously and engages with differences of opinion absent emotion and moralizing. That approach threatens a modern liberal orthodoxy that uses moral urgency to enforce ideological conformity and vilify opponents as stupid or evil, tactics that often are employed at the expense of curiosity and humanity, and occasionally put liberals at odds with observable reality. For Weiss, the same heterodox, anti-woke impulses that once made her unpopular with peers at the New York Times make her even more unpopular with the Times and its readers now that she has founded and sold a successful company and finds herself running one of the most powerful legacy news organizations in the world. She is not MAGA, but she’s a liberal who became MAGA-tolerant, which makes her even more threatening to the orthodoxy. Thus the knives are out, literally every day, in print and on X. This week the early ratings for the Weiss-revamped CBS Evening News were widely framed as a 23% drop from the same period last year, which is technically true (Trump was taking over last January, and half of California was on fire), and pretty misleading (after one week, the number is slightly up from CBS’ Q4 rating).
To be clear, though, I’m not here to defend or earnestly litigate every editorial decision that’s been made under Weiss. I think her justification for holding that 60 Minutes segment was ultimately pretty reasonable, the segment about Marco Rubio memes was tonally incoherent and embarrassing, an internal directive to *be the news* would make me want to quit, and, though it appears “Whiskey Fridays” aren’t a real thing, I did enjoy this 30 Rock meme responding to the idea. But those are just my half-baked takes. I also have questions about whether CBS in its current state has the mettle to hold the current administration to account for clear abuses, though in all honesty, among my concerns with the Trump era, “a lack of institutional media scrutiny” is not one of them.
Rather than play judge and jury on CBS media ethics and what they mean for Our Democracy, I’m more interested in the broad strokes of what Weiss is trying to do, and why it will almost certainly fail.
Go back to what David Ellison said when he hired her in October. “Bari is a proven champion of independent, principled journalism, and I am confident her entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision will invigorate CBS News,” his statement read. “We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.”
That tracks with where VandeHei was going in the podcast with Byers. Mind you, VandeHei founded Politico and Axios, two of the most successful news organizations launched this century, and two organizations that built their businesses by spotting gaps in the media marketplace and filling them. Of Weiss, VandeHei noted that the three network news operations have been functionally identical for years, and all of them are likely to be irrelevant within 10 years. He continued:
It then, as a business proposition, makes a hell of a lot of sense to me that somebody would look at that and say listen, I want to make my own mark. I want to carve out my own space. I want to go where the other two networks aren’t. I want to be appeal to a different part of the country. I want to appeal potentially to a different subset of ideologies. I think if I can do that, and aggregate that, I might be able to build a business that then transitions from a TV-focused institution into something digital…
She’s come in, she’s trying to take the sensibilities of The Free Press, take the sensibilities that animate her. I don’t think — full disclosure I’ve had a long meal with her, I’ve texted with her, I’ve been on panels with her, I’ve listened to her podcast, I’ve read her stuff — I don’t think she’s a big Trumper! I think she’s a pro-Israel, anti-woke, centrist, or however the hell she would define it. So I don’t think she’s what her critics think she is…
Could she be leading better? Obviously because there’s a lot of people [at CBS] who seem unhappy with her leadership. But it was inevitably going to be a dramatic, controversial shift. But it’s not a stupid shift, if you’re just looking at it as a business, and you’re looking at market opportunity. There is actually an elegance to what she’s doing.
All of the above sounds reasonable, but there are two reasons I don’t see this project succeeding at CBS, and both are related to technological shifts that have completely upended media in the past 10 years.
First, while I appreciate VandeHei for not letting reality derail a perfectly good take, you really could begin and end the conversation about CBS News with his initial premise that the networks as they exist today are in big, likely irreversible trouble. The economics of these businesses simply don’t work the way they once did, and they won’t be around much longer. Consider what we learned when Stephen Colbert’s show was cancelled last summer. Late Night with Stephen Colbert had the best ratings in late night, but the show was losing $40 million-per-year in a space where the total ad spend has been cut in half since 2018. As the Late Night model approaches extinction, then, it stands to reason that an expensive nightly news operation could one day be subject to a similar fate.
Thus far the biggest losers from the streaming era have been cable channels, but the bleeding won’t stop there. CBS receives retransmission fees from traditional cable and satellite TV subscriptions, which have been in steep decline for more than a decade now. This is the economic gravity that all networks will be fighting against for the next decade: cable subscriptions will continue to decline (costing networks guaranteed money), and as more people gravitate to steaming options, the audience will continue to decline, as well. Then, as audience declines, ad revenue goes with it. Again, none of this is hypothetical, as all of it has already happened throughout the legacy media market. It will get worse, though, and more pronounced. There will be even less of the money that once went to funding inefficient products like sprawling and ambitious network news operations. At a certain point, the survival of NBC News, ABC News and CBS News will depend on the generosity and vanity of their owners, and perhaps the political advantages of retaining those operations despite their losses.
In that context, the media’s ongoing fascination with Weiss and her agenda reads like an obsession with a team’s new general manger in a league that’s about to go about business. I don’t write that happily; most of these shifts are depressing and create some uncomfortable questions about where Americans will get their news 10 years from now. Nevertheless, the trends are real and worth keeping in mind.
Even beyond those trends, I’m skeptical about the market opportunity. On this point, it’s actually useful to distinguish between the opportunity VandeHei highlights and what Ellison promised last October. VandeHei talked about appealing to “a different part of the country,” and “a different subset of ideologies.” That makes sense. Ellison, on the other hand, said, “We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.”
The goal at CBS, then, is to appeal to everyone and win with balance. I’m not sure that makes as much sense as what VandeHei was envisioning. And yes, there’s a little bit of irony implicit in my take here. While I would argue a close reading of Weiss’ work over the years and CBS’ work now suggests she’s not the blind MAGA loyalist that her critics allege her to be, it might be better for the CBS business if she were. In that case, there’s at least a clear market (half the United States) and a clear playbook on how to cover the news.
Instead, what CBS is actually attempting is both laudable and unlikely to be successful. I’m thinking of Dokoupil’s sign-off from Minneapolis last week, broadcasting in the wake of the Renee Good killing, where he mentioned hearing from “protesters who haven’t slept since it happened, who want ICE out now, who don’t like masked men on their streets,” as well as “people who want to see our immigration laws enforced—legally, and peacefully, and with safety for all. Including the officers who in many cases are also parents, themselves.” He continued, saying:
These are both deeply American sentiments. But our job now is maybe the most American thing of all: it’s to find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us. To try to be fair to them, and in doing so, to make things better and keep things decent.
I strongly agree with that sentiment, but the night this segment aired, pretty much everyone who was familiar with the killing of Renee Good had already seen the videos on social media and had their understanding of the moment shaped by people with much stronger opinions than Doukopil. To those people, particularly those on the left who understood that scene to be a case of obscenely bad policing and/or state sponsored murder, a call for civility and decency sounds insufficient and borderline alienating. That sort of disconnect is a problem that will recur as CBS continues its experiment in talking to both sides in America about the news of the day.
Observing the overwhelming impact of social media on our society feels trite because it’s so obvious, but it can’t be overstated how much algorithmic feeds of commentary on photos, videos, and facts have warped everyone’s perception of the world. Today’s current events are mediated by platforms that incentivize users to frame the news as sensationally as possible, flattening life’s complexity into good and evil, massaging facts without institutional oversight, and forging an era of American life in which our political differences often look irreconcilable. If the wildly divergent understandings of the same tragic videos of Renee Good are not evidence enough of this phenomenon, then consider the lower stakes example of CBS’ aforementioned ratings. Reading a tweet from Variety would have you believe that Bari Weiss and her editorial changes have tanked a quarter of CBS’ audience; read another and the ratings are effectively flat.
That narrative schizophrenia is everywhere, and particularly acute with anything approaching political news. It’s why I’m skeptical that any attempt to calibrate for balance in this environment will succeed at finding a market full of satisfied customers. There’s no shared understanding of the facts among news consumers. Inconvenient evidence is met with suspicion. Most of America disagrees on what “balanced” should look like on any given night.
All of this does, for the record, validate the fundamental concern among Weiss and Ellison critics that whoever has the power to frame the news can skew our understanding of the facts. The problem for Weiss and Ellison, and their media critics, and maybe all of us, is a more fundamental reality of the modern media ecosystem: the content that is actually informing opinions is consumed on social media platforms long before any of it makes it to an evening news broadcast.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.