The Bell & Howell of Media

One of the bits of the effluent in the MAGA firehose (h//t Steve M) is Bari Weiss’ takeover at CBS. Her latest genius move is to hire a bunch of right wing hacks, including Niall Ferguson and Reihan Salam. She’s not really a journalist, so when she’s put in charge of a formerly great news network, she stocks it with her kind: pundits. She doesn’t realize that the Internet is oversupplied with takes, and undersupplied with facts, so she’s going long on something that nobody really wants, especially from CBS.

What people don’t realize is that the network news divisions had a limited lifespan. Weiss is just turning a slow descent into a death spiral. 60 Minutes, the CBS News marquee program, is American’s #1 News Program but it averaged a little over 8 million viewers per episode last year. There are YouTubers and TikTokers who get those kinds of views regularly, and they’re not using a staff that costs millions of dollars a year. (Of course, after Weiss held back the episode on CECOT, 60 Minutes lost half of its viewership. Like the rest of MAGA, everything she touches dies.)

I don’t think that a lot of people mourning CBS News don’t realize just how bad the current network news product is, with the possible exception of pre-Weiss 60 Minutes. I’m back in the Dakotas and I watch network news (ABC) on occasion with my Dad, and there’s about 10 minutes of real news at the start, and the rest of it consists of drug ads, “gee-whiz how did that happen” videos harvested from social media, and other not-really-news short segments. At the dawn of TV, network news as a 15-minute segment. I think the 50’s era news program delivered more real news than the current version.

As political activists, what do we do about this? One option is to follow every twist and turn of the CBS under Weiss, and keep saying that Walter Cronkite is rotating in his grave. Another is to realize that this is the culmination of years of decline, that only a certain kind of Democrat watches network news, reads papers like the still-unfortunately-beloved Times, and subscribes to magazines like the Atlantic (the New York Times of monthly periodicals, which just hired David Brooks).

In other words, CBS News was more of a brand than a functioning organization. Yes, every fact-based news outlet is important, and it’s too bad that they’ve been snuffed out by the Ellisons as part of their purchase of Paramount. But the demographic that matters most to Democrats, young people, wasn’t watching CBS News anyway. Our job should be to pressure the party to put a few millions of the billions it raises every year into creators who are reaching young people. It’s obvious yet difficult.

(In case the title reference doesn’t make sense, Bell & Howell is an example of an American company that basically went out of business, but someone bought the brand and slapped it on junk from China. Also, is anyone surprised that Bari Weiss’ wife is in the Epstein files kissing ass?)