CBS News Under Bari Weiss Sees Worst Ratings In Quarter Century

from the you-are-TERRIBLE-at-this dept

When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby kid David) hired trolling blogger Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would completely modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” traditionally ignored by mainstream media.

As we noted at the time, that was all bullshit code for turning CBS into yet another outlet that panders to global autocrats, normalizes far right wing extremism, coddles corporate power, and generally shits all over progressive societal reforms.

Weiss wasn’t a journalist, had no serious journalism experience, isn’t good at journalism, and wasn’t hired to do journalism. She was hired specifically to do ratings-grabbing, viral, right wing friendly agitprop which the Ellisons mistakenly seemed to think there was a massive market for. But unfortunately for Weiss, she’s not good at that either.

And it’s just observationally true that nobody actually wants what CBS’ new ownership is selling.

Broadcast TV was already in trouble (just 20% of all TV viewing is now broadcast). The conspiratorial right wing MAGA movement already has countless propaganda outlets to choose from. And the folks who used to find CBS News semi useful aren’t sticking around. “CBS Evening News” ratings keep dipping below 4 million viewers; the kind of ratings that caused CBS to revamp things in the first place.

In fact, CBS News just saw its worst quarter of ratings in 25 years, and it’s not slowing down:

“Demo figures are perhaps even more alarming. “CBS Evening News” lost about 15% of its viewership in the adults 25 to 54 bracket for the first quarter of 2026. ABC is also off by around 4%, while “Nightly” is up 8%.”

Oliver Darcy put it this way over at his newsletter:

“Viewers are smart. They understand that under Ellison’s ownership, and with Weiss at the helm, CBS News has charted a new course … one that is friendlier to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he leads.”

It’s just not clear who Weiss thinks she’s appealing to. There’s no shortage of weird, timid, corporatist, center-right blandness across journalism. Countless outlets are making such a pivot the under Trump in an industry that’s being increasingly consolidated under the ownership of terrible rich assholes with increasingly extreme, anti-democratic ideals. And fewer and fewer people watch broadcast TV anyway.

It’s clear Larry Ellison and other right wingers envy and want to emulate the control of media Victor Orban enjoys in Hungary. Under most autocratic models, party-loyal oligarchs buy up all the major companies, pummel the country with propaganda, and the government sues, harasses, and strangles real journalism just out of frame. As it progresses and gets worse, journalists often wind up dead.

But America is much bigger and much more diverse than Hungary. People are also increasingly consuming media and news in short form snippets from a massive and expanding assortment of influencers (credible or not), independent outlets, and direct-to-consumer journalists. “Flooding the zone with shit,” (to use a Steve Bannon term) impacts everybody, and makes it hard for any one player to dominate modern media.

The folks who’ll rise above the noise in this fractured, new, badly automated, modern media landscape have to be either extremely clever, inherently gifted at pandering to the lowest common denominator, or undeniably authentic.

Bari Weiss is none of those.

Bari came into her job insisting she had the secret sauce to modernize CBS in the viral social media era, and by every indication there’s no evidence that’s actually true. Much of the stuff she’s introduced is just foundationally boring cack of interest to nobody.

As a result, I suspect Weiss’ tenure won’t last past the end of the summer.

I don’t want to give Larry Ellison any ideas, but you could see a future where he hires someone who actually is the modern hustlebro manfluencer version of Roger Ailes; somebody who can leverage CBS and Ellison’s new co-ownership of TikTok to create a truly modern, even uglier version of Fox News that seeds social media with inflammatory, pseudo-journalistic bullshit peppered with sports betting ads.

The thing is there’s just absolutely no evidence anybody at this new Paramount is remotely competent for good or ill, whether we’re talking about Weiss or Paramount President Jeff Shell (who was fired from Comcast for allegations of sexual harassment, and is now going through weird legal tangles at CBS).

Unfortunately, if all Larry Ellison accomplishes is the destruction of another cornerstone of U.S. journalism, he’s still broadly made the world a worse place in a way that benefits him personally. Though even then, you’d like to think there’s potential for people who actually have something ethical or authentic to say to build something useful from the ashes.

Filed Under: agitprop, bari weiss, billionaires, david ellison, evening news, hungary, journalism, larry ellison, ratings

Companies: cbs, paramount