BREAKING: Bari Weiss Could Be Ousted From CBS News
Whether she stays or goes, the damage is done.
A different title for Bari Weiss won’t bring CBS News back.
Puck News is reporting that executives at Paramount are quietly moving to strip Bari Weiss of her day-to-day control over CBS News. Seven months into her tenure, the brass wants to bring in a more experienced executive and push Weiss toward digital, away from Evening News, CBS Mornings, and 60 Minutes.
Fewer people saw this coming. More people should have been watching from the start.
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Everyone in media knows that leadership experiments don’t always work out. New executives take time to find their footing. But Weiss isn’t being pushed out because she failed. Weiss accomplished exactly what she was sent there to do.
What has happened at CBS isn’t a cautionary tale about a bad hire. If you can hollow out a news division that once gave us Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — and do it in seven months — you can hollow out anything.
The same systematic transformation of American media brought you a gutted Washington Post, a Fox News that functions as state media, and a cable landscape indistinguishable from the people it’s supposed to cover.
The oligarchs didn’t buy the outlets to make money from them. Cable news has been bleeding viewers for years. They bought them because controlling information is worth more than any subscription revenue.
And now they’re methodically dismantling it.
CBS isn’t alone. What’s happening there is happening across the landscape. Veteran reporters fired, beats that make the people in power uncomfortable quietly shuttered, and the gradual replacement of journalism with something that serves different masters.
That’s exactly why AlterNet America exists.
We don’t answer to a billionaire with a political agenda. We don’t have a corporate parent making quiet decisions about which investigations might complicate a merger or irritate a senator. We answer to you.
We answer to readers who understand that if independent journalism disappears, it doesn’t come back.
In two months, we’ve launched a whole new brand. Corinne Straight gives you all the morning news. I get evenings and Saturday coffee with you. We’ve hosted Substack Lives with independent journalists Erin Reed and Hamilton Nolan, so you can get all your progressive news in one subscription.
If you’ve been reading AlterNet America, you already know what independent journalism looks like. You know what it means to have coverage that doesn’t hedge, that doesn’t lie, that doesn’t treat the demolition of media as just another news cycle.
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What happens to Bari Weiss next is almost irrelevant. The damage is already done. The question is what you do about it. Join us.
— Ryan Rose, Co-Founder & Managing Editor of AlterNet America
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