from the bullshit-everywhere dept
For fifty years or so, U.S. media academics warned anybody who would listen about the perils of letting your media companies consolidate in the hands of a bunch of rich assholes and giant, amoral corporations. Not only did America ignore those recommendations every step of the way, the avoidable issues our ignorance created are rearing up like a dragon to take the country’s head clean off.
The evidence is everywhere. Consolidated corporate media has been an utter feckless embarrassment as the country gets stripped for parts by authoritarian zealots operating at a third-grade reading level. At the front of the feckless class is CBS News, which recently paid our idiot king a $16 million bribe to cement its sale to one of Trump’s biggest billionaire donors, Larry Ellison.
Larry Ellison’s nepobaby son David is already hard at work lobotomizing whatever was left of CBS News. That recently culminated in a decision to ban normal time and length interview edits after some utterly baseless whining by Kristi Noem. There is absolutely every indication that this new CBS will be utterly subservient to Trumpism (and keep in mind, CBS was already very cozy with Republicans).
To expedite this transition into right wing propaganda mill, the Ellisons are finalizing a deal to have Bari Weiss oversee the direction of CBS News’ dying journalism efforts:
“David has been courting Bari for almost a year, and formally pitched her on acquiring the company at the Allen & Co. conference in July. Those talks have progressed in recent days, and I am now told that the two sides have agreed in principle to a deal and lawyers are hard at work finalizing a formal agreement.”
Weiss is a shameless opportunist, whose media venture the Free Press routinely engages in no limit of bullshit and distortions, largely in service of the right wing. This is portrayed by Weiss as some sort of bold and adversarial truth-telling journalism, but as many have dissected, she’s really just chasing the real money maker in modern media: inflammatory bullshit and telling the powerful exactly what they want to hear.
It’s clear the Ellison family want to convert CBS and Paramount into a more modern version of Fox News and Fox, where the “news” arm (propaganda) is funded by the lowest-common-denominator, engagement-chasing, infotainment wing (see Paramount’s 7 year, $7.7 billion deal to acquire the rights to MMA). It’s also clear they’d like to acquire and integrate TikTok into the project.
Watching the U.S. media industry cover itself (and this arrangement) directly reflects the embarrassing state of U.S. journalism. None can point out Weiss isn’t operating in good faith. Business Insider frames Weiss as someone of a “different sensibility” known for “bucking liberal and conservative orthodoxy and taking strong stances on particular topics like Israel and college-campus speech.”
You know, she’s “fair and balanced,” just like the propagandists over at Fox News. She’s “sticking it to the man,” much like the Trump-earlobe nibbling multi-millionaire Joe Rogan and his army of talentless, sycophantic, anti-woke, Austin scene comics. She’s “just asking questions,” just like a parade of right wing engagement grifters like Matt Taibbi.
Except Weiss has the backing of a major news network and one of the nation’s top right wing billionaires (Larry Ellison funded $6 billion of the $8 billion Paramount/Skydance merger).
What the broken U.S. media can’t or won’t tell you: with this deal, two of our four major broadcast networks will now be dedicated to right wing propaganda. And one of the remaining two (ABC), owned by Disney, recently paid Trump $15 million to settle a baseless lawsuit. The other (NBC) is owned by Comcast, which just got done spinning off most of its struggling cable news networks.
It’s not all doom and gloom; traditional media is very much dying, and there’s a very real possibility that this mish-mash of nepobabies and opportunists won’t be able to navigate the tides as traditional media’s core elderly audience passes away. Every major media outlet, from the Washington Post to CNN, is pivoting toward being friendlier to unpopular radical authoritarian ideology, something that, historically, isn’t what you’d call a sure long term bet.
That’s not to say that this isn’t utterly terrifying in the way it mirrors the death of journalism and its repurposing as propaganda by authoritarians in countries like Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary. But on the flip side, these are simply not competent, serious people, there is a limited market for kissing elderly authoritarian ass, and modern, younger media consumers will still have some say in the matter.
The new CBS could end up as one of the most successful multimedia propaganda and infotainment machines ever constructed. Or it could, like so many major media gambits before it (see: AT&T, Time Warner, Discovery), simply end up a flaming, whimpering turd on the information superhighway.
Filed Under: authoritarian, bari weiss, david ellison, journalism, larry ellison, media, media consolidation, mergers, news, propaganda
Companies: cbs, free press, paramount, skydance
