CBS Fires Scott Pelley For Telling Bari Weiss The Truth

from the the-patient-died-on-the-operating-table dept

Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison hired blogtroller Bari Weiss to turn what was left of CBS News into a right wing safe space for oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu. If the patient died during surgery, I don’t think Ellison would lose any sleep. But I do think Ellison hoped that Weiss could at least turn CBS News into a viral, right wing propaganda vessel certain people actually wanted to watch.

But Weiss’ tenure has been a bumbling mess on all fronts. MAGA folks aren’t interested in CBS News’ bland agitprop. And most existing viewers have been running for the exits, resulting in CBS News recently seeing its worst ratings in a quarter century. Her clumsy attempted censorship of stories critical of the president have also caused a mass exodus of any actual remaining journalists.

Those who are left are even more pissed after Weiss recently fired 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon, her deputy, and two correspondents (Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega). In her place she put Nick Bilton, a former tech journalist and documentary filmmaker with no broadcast experience.

Bilton’s a fairly typical fail upward type remembered by many in tech journalism for the time he tried to take credit for the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal:

His introduction as the new boss of 60 Minutes did not go well.

Leaked audio of a recent meeting between Bilton and CBS News staff was dropped in the lap of the New York Times and Status. In it, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program, told Bilton he had “slender” qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program:

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

There are several parts of the meeting where Bilton and his staff clearly try to shut Pelley up, quite unsuccessfully:

CBS obviously didn’t take Pelley’s comments well and has now fired him. Pelley in response offered an even more blistering statement accusing Weiss and CBS News of “injecting falsehoods and bias” into his stories. After Weiss came in swinging an axe and dismantling 60 Minutes with a total disregard for journalism, history, or tact, she accused Pelley of creating a “hostile work environment”:

Weiss ran a small blog full of trolls and c-tier columnists whose primary purpose is to blow smoke up the ass of wealth and power and punch down and left. I genuinely do think Ellison hired Weiss thinking she had the savvy to revolutionize and modernize CBS News for the social media era. But Weiss has shown repeatedly that she’s marginally competent and has the media savvy of a 90-year-old Conservative man.

Rich Republicans certainly do love to destroy and attack journalism that critiques wealth and power. But they don’t just destroy their targets. They’ll purchase a traditional news brand or communications platform, then leverage any remaining reputation to seed the public with lazy, oligarch-friendly agitprop (see: Newsweek, The Baltimore Sun, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Twitter, TikTok, CBS, and soon CNN).

In a country with fairly terrible media literacy standards, it takes most of the public years to notice anything has changed at these hijacked zombie publications and platforms, if they notice at all. If you are cogent enough to notice and vocalize any resistance, like Scott Pelley did, you’re treated as a problematic rabble rouser undermining company interests.

If Weiss was competent, she’d make changes with some amount of subtlety resulting in a propaganda outlet that isn’t quite so ham-fisted. If she was competent, the end product at CBS News, however partisan, would already be something that was at least grabbing ad eyeballs. She’s not competent, or subtle. And the backlash is proportional.

Everybody’s piling on. Former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens praised Pelley and hinted at Weiss being a “fraud.” Santiago Campos, a recent student journalist recipient of the Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship, trashed Weiss and CBS News in a recent award speech:

“While I want to thank CBS News for funding this generous gift towards my education, I want to also acknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship,” Santiago Campos said onstage to enthusiastic applause from the audience.”

Management has already started to scale back Weiss’ responsibilities, and I strongly suspect she will be replaced by somebody worse (but better for ratings) by the end of the summer.

Filed Under: 60 minutes, agitprop, bari weiss, cbs news, journalism, larry ellison, media, media literacy, news, nick bilton

Companies: cbs, cbs news