On Bari Weiss, CBS, and Legacy Media's Tears

From The Nation’s subtle, “Vile Grifters Are Taking Over Establishment Media”:

Bari Weiss has been making the world worse for a long time… If we lived in a less terrible time and place, Weiss would be dismissed as a crank and a bigot, and never heard from again. But we live in the waking nightmare that is the United States in 2025. So instead Weiss is being rewarded with a prize that even she must think is kind of wild… That prize? CBS News.

The person handing this gift to Weiss is David Ellison, the billionaire nepo baby who just merged CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, with his company, Skydance Media. Ellison, Puck’s Dylan Byers reported on Wednesday, is paying somewhere between $100 million and $200 million to buy The Free Press and install Weiss somewhere at the top of the network.

Of course The Nation calls Weiss a “grifter,” because that’s how they view a process once known in the industry as “making money.” Since the icon of irrevocable media revenue loss was last profitable in, well, never, it naturally has a lot to say about the wisdom of paying millions to the conroversial The Free Press editor. They weren’t alone. Recapping protests from the peanut gallery:

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An aside: a million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and The Nation was the oft-ignored home of original journalism that challenged both parties, I was invited by magazine leaders to consult on how it might attract a wider audience. A contributor, I was asked to write a memo on how The Nation could be more entertaining, and specifically funnier. In hindsight I should have kept a copy — the idea was hilarious. The only thing I remember was proposing a Noam Chomsky recipe column, an idea that was of course rejected.

I wrote features for The Nation, but in 2004 was offered a job by Rolling Stone and quickly took it. Asked why I would leave the flagship of American liberalism, I mentioned Rolling Stone was offering about five times the Nation rate, an answer that didn’t strike them as convincing (I’m not the only Nation vet to have this experience). Later, after a staff revolt led by editor Joan Walsh and Katha Pollitt, The Nation effectively banished Aaron Maté, whose work for the magazine won him the Izzy Award for independent journalism. The Nation’s griped that Aaron was “playing into the hands of the Trump administration” by questioning the Trump-Russia story. The magazine also exiled esteemed Princeton professor Stephen Cohen (husband of editor Katrina van den Heuvel), and Walsh told The New Yorker she believed Glenn Greenwald’s disdain for the Russia story was due to his unhappiness about “the ascendance of women and people of color” in the Democratic Party.

In other words, The Nation closed the door to three of the most bankable writers on its side of the political aisle and burned one of its most ardent supporters in Cohen as a witch at the end of his life because a) it wouldn’t pay real wages and b) it was committed to faceplanting the Russia story. Now it’s slamming CBS for entering into a $200 million deal with the “vile grifter” Weiss, whose political views might not be everyone’s cup of tea but sure busted her ass to build The Free Press from nothing into a financially healthy news organization.

Of course, The Nation’s Jack Mirkinson wasn’t the only complainer. Jill Filipovic, who covers gender for the New York Times, moaned that CBS would now be covering meaningless topics like “whatever trans kids are up to.” (Jill has written roughly infinity features on trans bathrooms and other weighty matters.) None other than former Washington Post, New York Times, Daily Beast, Daily Mail and Business Insider bylinist Taylor Lorenz, who’d sell hamster pee as lemonade if she thought she could get away with it and spent considerable energy trying to sink Substack before joining when she had no choice, had the gumption to tweet, “The right wing grift economy is undefeated”:

I’ve had differences with Bari Weiss. I’ve disagreed with her politics more than once and mistook her arrival on the Twitter Files project as a sign that I would be squeezed out. I also wasn’t sure about the decision to pick the statt of work on the Twitter Files as the moment to launch The Free Press. As a reporter with zero business sense I couldn’t imagine taking on something else at that harried moment. But this is who Bari is. She combines an innate sense of audience with rare entreprenurial energy. Additionally she understood, in a way her spineless now-complaining former colleagues from the mainstream press world never did, that in order to survive and retain her audience, she would need to take risks and bet on herself.

For instance, when 1,000 of her New York Times peers signed a Khmer Rougian denunciation of former Editorial Page Editor James Bennet in 2020, securing his resignation for running an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton calling for National Guard against anti-police protesters, Weiss balked. She went public, explaining the business was plagued by a schism between believers in “safetyism” and civil libertarianism, then soon after resigned from a plum job in the Times opinion section.

Two years after that she launched TheFP. While lunatic former Times workers were looking around the office to see whose career they could destroy next (star health writer Donald McNeil was a subsequent project), Bari pushed Elon Musk in ways I could not and got him to physically show us what a Twitter “P2” viewer looked like — this was a display screen that showed Trust and Safety executives the history of Twitter user accounts in visual shorthand. That single moment led to pictures of Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya’s “trends blacklist” notation, an image which exploded myths about shadow-banning and had far-reaching implications, leading to a Supreme Court case and an incredible future change in NIH leadership.

Just three years after that moment, after building a broad roster at The Free Press, she’s taking a $200 million offer to save desperate, near-extinct CBS News. Naturally, every entitled fat-keistered slob clogging the rolls of non-functional news organizations is crying she doesn’t deserve it. How many of these plaintive mannequins denouncing her “grift” would have the guts to leave one of the cushiest gigs in the print media and bet on themselves in the open market? Zero-point-zero percent, as in not one.

Journalism is dying because of a succession of factual disasters, but the major cross-industry problem is a universal belief that audience is owed. From the Nation episodes to the insane New York Times staff-led purges, modern journalists think your eyeballs belong to them. They see worrying about commercial success as demeaning and are often happier if their work isn’t widely read, because they believe America’s audience is a Great Moron. There was a time when journalists understood that getting the story was only half the battle, that you have to sell the public on why they need to read it, too. Not this current crew. They’ve been trained to judge themselves on green room invites, speaking fees, and letters to the editor from the sociology faculty of Snidepole University. They’re like spaniels who not only expext their master to feed them, but to cut the canned food in bits.

What a bunch of jealous, worthless losers. Ironic that this happened the same week that Malcolm Gladwell admitted he wasn’t packing anything down there. The set on Bari is visible from space, and that’s why she’s getting paid. That, and a lot of hard work. How miserable do you have to be to begrudge that?