It pays to not believe in anything. Sometimes it even pays really, really well.
On Monday, Paramount made official what had been rumored for weeks: It will buy frivolous Substack pamphlet The Free Press for $150 million and name its founder and owner Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News. Thus does Weiss complete her five-year journey from junior editor who rage-quit The New York Times because the whole place was a hornet’s nest of wokeness or something, to running a right-wing rag funded by billionaires she has sweet-talked into giving her money, to heading up one of America’s greatest historic news organizations.
One hundred and fifty million dollars for a website with a reported 175,000 or so paying subscribers. This is like buying a garage on Long Island for $10 million and telling the public it’s an estate that was once owned by the Vanderbilts even as any people touring it quickly note the collapsing roof and the nest of rats in the corner.
Excuse us for just a moment while we pour one out for the legacies of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and the entire crew of 60 Minutes past and present. Except for Andy Rooney and those overgrown shrubbery hedges he called his eyebrows. Our nightmares are still filled with images of those vast wilderness tracts yelling at us about how much they hate Daylight Savings Time and fancy coffee.
The list of sins against journalism committed by The Free Press under her tutelage is too long to note here. But it includes a recent piece positing that the media, in reporting on the famine in Gaza, had unfairly used as examples of starving kids a couple of children who had other pre-existing conditions like cystic fibrosis. Thus had the media painted a distorted picture of the crisis. Only The Free Press dared to tell the truth: all those kids suffered from other diseases, so why is everyone being such a bunch of dicks about the Israeli Army starving them to death?
That’s the kind of hard-hitting journalism we can now expect to pop up on CBS, we guess. That is the person David Ellison, in a company-wide note on Monday, said “brings a passion for reaching broad audiences through rigorous, fact-based reporting and a relentless commitment to amplifying voices from all corners of the spectrum” to her new job.
All corners of the spectrum! From conservatives who think transgenderism is a liberal plot to let men use women’s bathrooms, to conservatives who want to see the National Guard put all immigrants on an ice floe and shove it out to sea? With zero recognition that the Venn diagram of those two groups is a perfect circle?
Ellison also told his staff that “trust and facts will remain our guiding principles.” Well, there’s a first time for everything, we guess!