The Wrecking Crew

Bari Weiss and MAGA rule by ruining

When Anderson Cooper noped out of CBS News, I saw a bunch of stuff like this from both insiders and non-insiders, suggesting that Bari Weiss had fucked up, driving this big star away with her maladministration:

“This is another black eye for Bari,” an unnamed “industry observer” told Oliver Darcy at Status. “Another Black Eye for Bari,” headlined Mediaite. Etc.

But Weiss is only fucking up if her job is to improve or even maintain the performance and reputation of the network’s news operation. There’s no reason to believe that.

It was much remarked when rightwinger Larry Ellison’s son installed Weiss at head of CBS News that she had no relevant credentials. I can’t think of another non-reporter opinion journalist whose only previous editorial management experience was running a newsletter before becoming the boss of a major news organization.

Many observers caught on that Weiss, previously considered a neither-left-nor-right contrarian by the Serious People, had been given the job because she and Ellison and his MAGA buddies shared a political goal: To make sure CBS News would be less troublesome for the Trump administration going forward. Some longtime Weiss fans lamented either that they had been deceived or that Weiss had recently undergone an unforeseeable transformation. The Daily Beast took to calling Weiss “MAGA-curious,” which was as far as they were prepared to go.

Weiss immediately began alienating and firing staff, installed a puppet as nightly news anchor, spiked a big CECOT exposé, and lost a lot of viewers. This was taken as a sign that Weiss’ intended overhaul of CBS News was in operation but not going so well — hence the catty response to Cooper’s departure.

But this mistakes Weiss’ mission. She wasn’t hired to make CBS News more rightwing. She was hired to destroy it.

Something you may have noticed about the second Trump administration is its vengefulness. But while Trump may have a personal grudge against many of his targets, he’s not just picking off people who have done him wrong; the people and institutions that he and his administration have most egregiously attacked are those that the American conservative movement have hated for decades.

Trump doesn’t have political principles as such, but he long ago instinctually grasped that conservatives share his resentments; also, his most powerful advisors, like Miller and Vought, are old-school rightwingers, and as Trump himself disintegrates they supply most of the thinking and direction for his administration.

Thus: Conservatives hate what they see as liberal bureaucracy, so Trump sent Elon Musk’s DOGE wrecking crew to sabotage it; they’re racist, so Trump disproportionately fires black people; they’re misogynists, so they labor to cut back women’s rights, including the right to vote; they despise higher ed, so Trump shakes down major universities, etc.

It’s the same thing with journalism, culture, and media. Trump’s war on Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, the Kennedy Center, Bad Bunny, the Smithsonian, and the news organizations he’s constantly suing or threatening to sue, is absolutely in keeping with the American Right’s decades-long “culture war” — which, I have observed more than once, is a war on culture.

So with CBS News. Trump and his goons aren’t aiming to make it more conservative — they’re on a punitive expedition to smash it up. The John Birch, Liberty League, and Moral Majority descendants with whom Trump runs want revenge for the years that Bill Paley, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and that whole effete corps of impudent snobs harried and belittled them.

As their cats-paw Weiss mismanages and hollows out CBS News, it will no doubt produce ultra-shitty journalism — which will inevitably have the effect of making it more conservative, if not in actual political slant (though that will probably follow, as the example of Sinclair suggests), then certainly by making a once trustworthy voice impossible to credit or respect, and increasing the general ignorance and paranoia on which conservatism thrives.

Hell, they’re doing it to the Washington Post, too. And they’ll do it wherever they get a foothold until they’re stopped.