I'm Skeptical About The Whole David Ellison - Bari Weiss CBS (Maybe Also CNN?) Thing

Does the new crew know how to speak to the American center?

There’s obviously been an enormous amount of interest in the early going in the plans under David Ellison for a turnaround for CBS — both financially and ideologically resetting a lagging brand whose once prominent programs have fallen on hard times. This week saw the first real decision-making post-hiring Bari Weiss: a slashing of 1,000 jobs, as well as the departure of several prominent anchors — most notably Gayle King. These led to the predictable backlashes from people who view any industry hires as a threat to journalism itself — or worse, racist — but it’s only going to get more heated with reportedly another 1,000 layoffs coming soon. These needed to happen, in all likelihood, because the shows in question just couldn’t justify their overhead. But given that it’s CBS, there are a lot of these secretaries and producers who can do the sympathetic “I’ve worked for this network since the early days of Bob Schieffer” thing. Not a great look.

The real question is the goal, and the plan to achieve it. When announcing the initial moves at CBS, David Ellison said “we believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.” I agree, on a certain level (I have some caveats). But the important question is: what does that look like? By whose definition? If your definition of centrism looked until recently like The Wall Street Journal or The Atlantic, you’ve kind of gone in different directions, right? Is it just a network that doesn’t hate Israel and maybe has a few more Trump sympathetic commentators? That doesn’t chide Tony Dokoupil for asking Ta-Nehisi Coates questions? No offense, but that wouldn’t be much of a change. Your average viewer might not even notice it unless you do the most dangerous thing, which is mess with Jane Pauley.

Do not under any circumstances mess with Jane Pauley.

One sign about the difficulty of achieving even a slightly more centrist CBS News is this: At least according to Puck, the fallback from a tease of Bret Baier as a potential Bari Weiss hire to lead the CBS Evening News (who dismissed rumors that he’d be a candidate for the job in an interview with my wife this week) is none other than noted balanced journalist beloved by left and right alike… Anderson Cooper.

No, really.