from the fixing-bias-with-more-bias dept
For more than fifty years the U.S. right wing has embraced a neat trick: by claiming that literally anything in factual opposition to their beliefs is “biased” and therefore must be discarded as unreliable, they’ve bullied U.S. media into becoming a feckless mess terrified of accusations of “liberal bias.”
Of course, if you ask the actual media academics who study U.S. media bias, they’ll quickly tell you that the U.S. media generally veers toward center-right corporatism because we’ve let it consolidate at the hands of center-right billionaires. The obvious result is a hot feckless mess that lacks the courage to speak truth to power, something that became obvious to even the most obtuse with the rise of U.S. authoritarianism.
Still, this idea that the U.S. media is “too woke” and “has a liberal bias” is central to the generational Republican mission of creating a press that only exists to make affluent Conservatives happy.
Enter the billionaire Ellison family, who recently announced that they’re hiring right wing engagement troll Bari Weiss to run whatever is left of CBS News after its disastrous and utterly feckless capitulation to the Trump administration. The $150 million purchase of Weiss’ weird, trolling blog is part of a massive Ellison family acquisition spree aimed at dominating what’s left of U.S. media and making it even friendlier to the exact people who’ve long ruined it.
Ellison’s clearly using Weiss as a prop to turn CBS into yet another hollow right wing propaganda mill tasked with blowing smoke up the ass of Netanyahu and Trumpism. So of course Weiss’ first day at CBS News involved asking 60 Minutes (or whoever still works there) why they’re so “biased”:
“The inquiry was met with stunned awkwardness, according to three people who recounted details from the private session in Midtown Manhattan. The staff of “60 Minutes,” the nation’s most-watched news program, view their coverage as firmly nonpartisan and reject criticism from President Trump and his allies who argue that it has a liberal slant.”
60 Minutes is fairly centrist and tame. But it’s the same old trick: if you say things Republicans or corporate power don’t like, you’ll be branded as foundationally untrustworthy. That, more than anything, results in a broader public distrust in U.S. journalism, which the modern, corporatist, brunchlord, far right alliance then exploits and insists can only be fixed by pushing news coverage even further to the right.
Neat trick, right?
It’s worth reiterating that Weiss has no experience in real journalism. She doesn’t own a television. Her tenure at the New York Times involved writing a few opinion columns and helping to turn the New York Times’ op-ed section into a rightward-lurching contrarian troll farm. She’s been hired to turn CBS into the same thing, with the help of a Trump-appointed right wing “ombudsman” providing a fake veneer of authority with some feigned furrowed-brow seriousness.
The goal isn’t objective journalism, it’s to help center-right billionaires further put their thumb on the scale of the consensus definition of objective journalism, shoveling us deeper down the rabbit hole of an anti-democratic state run by the whims of our richest sociopaths. And while it’s only been a week or two, Weiss’ goal here is really not subtle, especially as it pertains to validating Netanyahu:
“As a Middle East peace deal came into view, Ms. Weiss shared numerous pro-Israel opinion pieces from The Free Press, and an editorial that said Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, had failed ‘the Hamas test.’”
If you want to remain employed in a highly consolidated U.S. journalism industry owned by rich oligarchs, you’re supposed to pretend none of this is happening, or that it’s perfectly normal to put a right wing troll with no journalism experience in charge of one of the nation’s biggest news operations. At worst, you might be allowed by your editors to hint that Weiss is “controversial” and “unconventional.”
But make no mistake: Weiss is being used as a prop by the billionaire Ellison family to encourage U.S. media’s steady lurch rightward as a necessary anti-woke corrective to mainstream media’s non-existent liberal bias. The primary goal is to undermine the kind of academics, progressive reformers, scientists and marginalized communities that actually speak truth to consolidated wealth and power.
Our broken, consolidated, billionaire-owned press can’t really explain any of this clearly to the public, so you get a bunch of hollow, weird, feckless coverage of what Weiss is up to that largely frames her as a good faith outspoken critic of the very media rot she’s long helped to perpetuate.
You’d like to think, at some point, the American media and public could awake from this generational con. But the only way to truly fix the U.S. media’s real bias is to untether it from consolidated billionaire ownership and the distorted incentives created by advertising engagement. But because that’s going to make billionaires less money and result in real journalism, it’s always deemed a bridge too far.
Filed Under: 60 minutes, bari weiss, consolidation, david ellison, journalism, larry ellison, liberal media, media, right wing
Companies: cbs, paramount, skydance
