Rank amateur does what now?

Written by

Ophelia Benson

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If it ain’t broke why fix it?

In a bid to remake the country’s top-rated news program, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, on Thursday unveiled an overhaul of “60 Minutes,” replacing the show’s executive producer with a tech journalist and firing two of its on-air correspondents.

It’s the country’s top-rated news program, so why change it? Why change it??

Ms. Weiss named Nick Bilton, a former New York Times technology columnist and a filmmaker who has directed and produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix, as her pick to lead the 58-year-old Sunday show. Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in traditional broadcast news, will replace Tanya Simon, who had been at the show for more than three decades.

CBS News also fired Cecilia Vega, the program’s first Latina correspondent, and Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air abruptly last year by Ms. Weiss, who requested more reporting. It aired in full at a later date. Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor of “60 Minutes,” was also fired, as was Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer.

Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist with no prior experience in television, has made major changes at CBS since being appointed last year by the tech scion David Ellison. She has named Tony Dokoupil to helm “CBS Evening News,” hired new on-air contributors and personally booked some guests for interviews, a departure from the industry norm.

But the overhaul at “60 Minutes” is by far the largest gamble of Ms. Weiss’s tenure. The program remains appointment viewing for millions every Sunday night, and its viewership this season rose 9 percent from the year prior, according to Nielsen.

So why change it?

And why hire Bari Weiss to run it? Bari Weiss is basically a blogger – like me, except that I have no illusions that I should be running CBS News. You might as well fire the pilot mid-flight and tell Bari Weiss to fly the plane.

Ms. Weiss’s handling of “60 Minutes” has led to internal turmoil. Her decision to hold Ms. Alfonsi’s segment set off a firestorm, though it eventually ran with additional comments from the Trump administration. This week, Ms. Alfonsi told The Times that CBS was no longer separating editorial independence from corporate interests.

They’ll be eating our faces any minute now.

Comments

7 responses to “Rank amateur does what now?”

  1. Colin Day Avatar
    Colin Day

    https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditDayOf/comments/nx4ckk/those_smug_pilots_have_lost_touch_with_regular/

  2. Athel Cornish-Bowden Avatar
    Athel Cornish-Bowden

    Bari Weiss is basically a blogger – like me, except that I have no illusions that I should be running CBS News.

    Well, maybe, but I suspect you’d do a better job of running CBS News.

  3. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Fair point; I suspect we all would.

  4. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    Bari Weiss gives me whiplash.

    First, she was at the New York Times. She was kinda right-wing, but I figured that’s okay, I guess. Viewpoint diversity is good, et cetera. But then everyone else at the NYT was like, holy shit she’s horribly toxic; she’s oblivious to very basic principles of liberaldom; there’s something deeply wrong there; you must not trust her. She’s not just bad; she’s dangerous!

    And I was like, yes, that checks out. This seems true. I’ll buy it. Boo hiss, Bari Weiss = bad.

    Then she left the NYT and wrote about how it was a crazy cult of lefty true-believer cultists.

    And then I was like, hmmm… there seems to be some truth to that, too. I’ve interacted with some NYT journalists, and they were undoubtedly coastal-elite Kool-Aid-y jackasses. Not critical thinkers, but cheerlearders for their “tribe”. So there’s clearly some bias at the NYT and in the insular New York/DC/U.S. coastal mediasphere. Maybe I was wrong about Bari Weiss. Maybe she’s had a terrible injustice done to her. Maybe all that dross about how “dangerous” she was is a product of the same thing I’m going through: liberal purity psychology gone haywire. I can relate to that.

    So then I decided Bari Weiss is One Of Us instead of One Of Them. That went into overdrive when she joined Substack, a platform I’m on and which I’m very emotionally invested in. I love Substack almost as much as I hate Twitter. (I won’t even call it “X”.) So I decided in my mind that Bari Weiss is, tentatively at least, trustworthy, and her haters are on pause.

    Not long after that, her big promition to head of CBS News happened. There was a feeding frenzy in the mediasphere; it’s the apocalypse, they said. I figured almost all of it was the same shit I was going through in my personal life: nasty, gossipy hype; all smoke and no fire; groupthink bias gone haywire.

    Wow; it’s true! I thought. The haters are crazy about their hate for Bari Weiss. She’s just an unbiased reporter who calls it as she sees it, and, just like what was done to me, that makes people go mad with tribal defensiveness.

    But then Jonathan Chait wrote an Atlantic piece. He was trying to suss out a neutral ground in this deeply polarized landscape surrounding Bari Weiss. She’s clearly a Rorschach test: you either dismiss all the criticism of her or you dismiss all of the praise. It’s very difficult to make out what’s really going on outside the tribal noise. But Chait is good at sifting through that kind of noise to get to the “natural reality” of things. (Well, he usually is, but not always. I did fisk him once, gently. Because Chait, too, is not as good at getting to the “true reality” of things as he thinks he is. At least when it comes to trans and women’s rights. He’s got his biases, too.)

    Chait’s argument was firmly, urgently, that Bari Weiss was NOT an arbiter of neutrality, but a biased player, too invested on the side of the Trumpists. She was performing at being neutral and above-it-all in a way that appealed to a certain class of bigwigs and tech-bros, who put their massive bags of money behind her because they fell for her shallow artifice of “neutrality”.

    So I looked and looked and did a tedious deep dive. And yes, she’s a Trump nut, masquerading as a middle-grounder. She’s the Ayn Rand of journalists. Not nearly as smart as she thinks she is, and not nearly as good a writer, either, but she’s very good at hoodwinking narcissistic rich people who are self-absorbed and self-invested. They’ll cling to anything that flatters their egos.

    But I needed Jonathan Chait to help me get there. Here was a moderately trustworthy source — one who I’d publicly, vocally disagreed with, no less — whose opinion still meant a lot to me. There was a modicum of trust there, that I’d forged by deep-diving into his moral character. I couldn’t sort out the Bari Weiss Puzzle without it. I needed to rely on other people’s eyes and ears, and in Chait, I found a pair I could trust. From there, I could triangulate an objective locus of reality from which to evaluate Bari Weiss.

    And that’s the true nature of the media landscape we’re in: many, many, many, many people latch onto the idea that you can’t trust the news anymore, and through that window they invite dubious characters into their private, mental palaces of trust, and they very quickly shift people’s political polarity.

    And it’s through “trans” that many liberals take that first step: the distrust of the baseline of reality that liberal news feeds us. From there, they quickly migrate to MAGA.

    We need outside eyes to buttress our own perspective, and we don’t have those anymore in the liberal media, because of trans!

    Bari Weiss is a good example of how even moi — my very self — can’t sort out what’s true and what’s not without having a reliable network of trustworthy sources to help me. And my own network of trusworthy sources is buckling under trans — I almost dismissed Chait as a good one — and that has almost led me to completely switch my polarity on the Bari Weiss question.

    The whole “fake news” thing is deeply scary, because it’s really, truly, affecting all of us.

    Bari Weiss is a strange litmus test of it, because she thrives in the middle area between half-truths and half-batshittery. She’s of the same class as Jordan Peterson in that way. Not evil, but nutty in a strangely dangerous way: dangerous because midwits, or just busy people whose minds are focussed elsewhere, fall for it so easily. Hence the danger. Their midwittery makes them actually persuasive to the people we don’t want to be persuaded to the other side.

  5. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Not evil, but nutty in a strangely dangerous way: dangerous because midwits, or just busy people whose minds are focussed elsewhere, fall for it so easily

    Not evil, no. From what I’ve seen (and I admit I haven’t done a deep dive; I haven’t the stomach), it looks like she’s narcissistic and self-centered, and almost certainly oblivious to the fact that people who are not her might have differing opinions without being wrong. And they have a right to that. She has been quite self-serving, if I’m remembering her right. Isn’t she the one who did that ‘think tank’ thing and put a lot of freethinkers on her board…without asking them first?

  6. twiliter Avatar
    twiliter

    Thanks for articulating this, Arty. I have mixed feelings about her too, one minute she sounds like a well reasoned champion of good, the next she seems to be a political shapeshifter bent on being contrary for it’s own sake, or worse. I don’t know, if in her mind, she’s trying to avoid being too partisan and possibly identifies this in others and finds it bad?

  7. twiliter Avatar
    twiliter

    I’m not sure that being a self identified “radical centrist” is any better than being a radical anything else.

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