Elizabeth Lopatto, back in October, after Bari Weiss was first named editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount:
This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa
Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Nancy Dubuc
at Vice without the string of hit TV shows. You’re Linda Yaccarino
at Twitter without the advertiser relationships. You have been
hired as a sop to a Trump administration that is actively hostile
to the actual free press, and you will be made to oversee wave
after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired and the entire
news division is shut down in a final spasm of cost-cutting after
the next inescapable media merger.
The only thing Lopatto missed in her prescient piece is that Weiss might not last long enough to still be leading CBS News by the time Ellison gets to layoffs. It’s simply untenable for a partisan propagandist to be leading a legitimate news organization. Two months into the job and Weiss has already made a complete fool of herself. Her ham-fisted (but failed) attempt to censor a fair and well-reported piece critical of the Trump administration’s deportation policies comes just one week after a televised town hall with Erika Kirk (widow of Charlie Kirk), which Weiss herself hosted, for which the commercial spots were filled by direct marketing dietary supplements and, I swear, Chia Pets.
It’s been an inauspicious two months on the job for Weiss, to say the least.
