CBS News Further Beclowns Itself With Bari Weiss’ Hire

“What the fuck?” said one CBS News source to Prem Thakker of Zeteo upon news of her hire. The new media outlet started by Mehdi Hasan that has infinitely more journalistic integrity than Bari Weiss could ever dream of reports that they spoke with “five sources across the CBS newsroom who describe an atmosphere rife with insult over the new hire, concerns about Weiss’s ability to do the job, paranoia about speaking out, and fears that editorial quality will suffer.” This is yet another example of how even though I condemn America’s hopeless mainstream media, I remind everyone that there are real journalists working throughout all of these very large organizations, and it is another example of how management across America is failing to build the future it says it wants. That said, CBS News was on the decline before Ellison fully Weissified it. I get worrying about AI virgin slop ruining CBS News’ editorial quality, but you guys have long positioned Tony Dokupil as some sort of real journalist and not a discount Fox News hairpiece, so this is the direction CBS News was headed well before they decided to sell their soul to Trump.

Last week I wrote about the globe’s ninth richest man getting caught by a podcaster in what looks like the NBA’s biggest scandal ever, and today we will return to the Forbes billionaires list to talk about Larry Ellison, someone so rich that broke bitch Steve Ballmer and his fraudulent carbon credit sponsor has a net worth closer to zero than Ellison’s $355.6 billion. The son of the Oracle founder is now head of CBS News while his dad is the new Tik Tok overlord, and the younger Ellison is plotting a takeover of CNN next. The billionaires are here. They’re destroying the past to create a present dedicated to their world-historic fragile egos, and this is where Bari Weiss comes in.

Bari Weiss is actually very savvy. She is not the doofus who blindly publishes garbage like allegations that George Floyd’s murder—something we all witnessed—was actually due to his drug use and not Derek Chauvin kneeling on his back for nine minutes. Radley Balko did a great job detailing how this bullshit notion she helped spread on the right is bullshit, but the point of publishing something like that is to pretend to be interested in discourse. The details are secondary to the game at foot.

You see, you hate free speech if you say that something has no factual basis and is a lie entirely made up in service of a reactionary political agenda. You are a woke scold if you say that facts do not care about this portion of conservative media’s feelings, and you hate discourse if you reject their clear bad faith attempts as anything other than the purest form of the Socratic Method that even Socrates himself would be jealous of. You must accept Bari Weiss’ long career of telling rich and powerful men who are giving her money that they are very smart and savvy and handsome and that their 19th century gutter racism is actually high-level contrarianism us simple peons just can’t grasp.

And to her credit, it’s brought her all the way to being editor-in-chief of CBS “News.” She’s proven what works in America as much as anyone this century. She is what a successful media career looks like now. Being a professional liar in America is a gilded gig, because billionaires are easy marks for professional yes people. A woman who became famous for trying to cancel her professors convinced a bunch of wealthy people that she is the diametric opposite of cancel culture. It is supposedly us barbarians on the left documenting things she has said and done that you can find on her Wikipedia page who are opposed to open discourse and the notion of personal responsibility. Bari Weiss has branded herself as a Very Serious Person on the right who is willing to publish a range of takes (except anything to her left), even the kind of slop that uses the phrase “AI virgin.” In a world where the six richest men are wholly dedicated to building a 21st century right-wing fascist project with them at the top of it and at least one of them is disturbingly horny for AI characters, that is a very lucrative brand (in order: Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos then Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

The modern billionaire Axis of Evil is trying to trap us inside a right-wing propaganda media environment because their competitor filled with Ben Shapiro’s and Matt Walsh’s and Charlie Kirk’s failed to break through the conservative echo chamber. Ellison was handed Tik Tok by Trump and idiotic Democrats who can never think two steps ahead, and now we have to deal with the mess they’re all creating. Ellison is wiping out any shred of journalistic integrity left at CBS News and is coming for CNN next. If you go to YouTube, its content and algorithm is overwhelmingly right wing, all while Page and Brin leverage Google to do more to destroy actual journalism than anyone in the last few centuries has. Musk bought Twitter to turn it into MechaHitler, and Facebook isn’t much better while we’re very lucky that alleged human Mark Zuckerberg’s only demonstrated skill is keeping a too big to fail advertising business rolling while copying other people’s ideas.

There are widespread reports of CBS News staffers who are “apoplectic” over a blogger who has never worked a reporting job now holding the most powerful gig in one of America’s oldest journalistic institutions. David Ellison is clearly not interested in journalism, no one who hires Bari Weiss is, and her elevation to the top of American journalism is another step in America’s descent from a constitutional republic into being a fascist playground for six of the most widely reviled and powerful humans to ever exist.