The American social critic Eric Hoffer once wrote that “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket”. That’s pretty much how the American media is regarding Paramount Skydance’s stunning purchase of Bari Weiss’s populist right website, The Free Press, for $150m, and its elevation of the 41-year-old Weiss to the position of editor-in-chief of CBS News. In the most generous version of this view, Weiss began as a principled rebel driven by revulsion against a destructive woke culture, fomented a media-based movement of sorts consisting of outraged liberals with no place to go, then packaged her principles, and her legions of subscribers, into the same sort of lucrative, controversial media organisation that the woke once flourished upon. Irresistibly attracted to lucrative, controversial media organisations, Paramount’s covetous corporate eye could hardly resist.
It seems that what drew Paramount to Weiss was her right-leaning views. In the current moment, with Trump heightening his assault on American democracy – he has just called on Truth Social for the mayor of Chicago and the Illinois governor to be jailed because of their opposition to Trump sending federal troops to Chicago – Weiss’s elevation to the helm of CBS News concerns many. The CEO of Paramount is David Ellison, who is the son of Oracle billionaire, Larry Ellison, the world’s second richest man after Elon Musk. Along with Musk, Larry Ellison shares Trump’s plans for the American future. Together, Musk’s and Ellison’s billions can buy a lot of democracy. At present, David Ellison is soliciting funds from a group of other right-wing billionaires like Marc Rowan and Stephen Schwarzman to buy, among other media properties, CNN. Owning CBS and CNN means controlling a large part of America’s most influential news landscape, never mind the countless alternative news sources.
Weiss is a canny hustler. She is also smart, daring and resilient. She became a figura with a burst of courageous eloquence. In July 2020, she walked away from her position as columnist for the New York Times in a scathing letter of resignation that she published on her website. In it, she accused the paper of imposing on its employees the idea that “truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else”. She maintained that “Twitter has become [the paper’s] ultimate editor” and said that whenever she strayed from the Times’ oppressive, self-flattering pieties, she became “the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views”. “The paper of record,” she declared, “is more and more the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.” That pretty much sums up America’s liberal establishment today, which continues to pander to inane sectarian appetites. It’s a shame that by throwing in her lot with the Ellisons, Rowans, Schwarzmans and the rest who are abetting Trump in his destruction of the American republic, Weiss is betraying the principles of decency and democracy she so gratifyingly and admirably struck a blow for in her resignation letter.
I never cottoned to The Free Press, which often offers a predictable contrarian answer to the left’s blunders into identitarian dead ends, in the process missing the conflagrating forest of American democracy for a few dangerously illiberal trees. Even as it became clear that Trump’s second term was a radical break from American reality, Weiss’s website droned on in one anti-woke vein or another, criticising Trump here and there even as it bent over backwards trying to find some glimmers of positive value in his terrors and tantrums. As I write, you can see a piece by a Yale law professor using Shakespeare to justify Trump’s campaign of revenge against his critics and political opponents. Weiss’s blind, heartless defence of Netanyahu and Israel’s actions in Gaza I find morally repugnant, but, as Weiss would say – once more or less bravely, now profitably – it’s a free country (for now).
For all that, the dramatic handwringing over Weiss’s elevation to the top of CBS news is not, fundamentally, about the political direction she might take the network. It’s about her getting $150m for bucking the corrosive liberal groupthink – Trump’s amniotic fluid – that the reigning media powers thought was the formula for economic success. It was one thing, prior to her Tiananmen Square moment defying the New York Times, for Weiss to have obviously made sure that all her ducks were in a row, having established herself as a cable star and public personality before her j’accuse. But it is entirely another for someone regarded by liberals as a hustling turncoat to be rewarded far beyond the wildest secret dreams of the hustling pious.
Yet anyone dismayed by what has become Weiss’s racket, and who looks without envy at her ascension, should take heart that this sometime right-wing provocateur has now been embraced by mainstream American commerce. What is striking and unique about the country’s authoritarian turn is that it is less authoritarian than what you might call businesstarian. Like everything in American life, it is being driven by the profit motive – such ideology that lies behind it is an entirely original hybrid of extreme laissez-faire economics and a command/control economy. Singapore American-style, if you will. The right, and increasingly the left, in America are more and more driven by social media sites and podcasts run by people who check their audience stats and subscriptions before they sharpen their ideological sights for the day ahead. Even as Trump takes Soviet-like control of the market, he cannot jail or repress the spontaneous order that makes him the market’s ultimate plaything. Even as he churns his sea of right-wing posters and podcasters, he or his minders – keeps a wary eye on their responses.
A vast, immensely wealthy and powerful corporation will have the same bottom-line effect on Weiss. Even now, as David Ellison, whose status as a media power-player is largely thanks to his father’s fortune, begs for money to add to his empire, the billionaires he is supplicating are laying out the conditions for their investment. As the son strives to prove himself independent of his father, he will do what the father-figures around him tell him to do. In this clashing aggregate of egos, CBS – and CNN if it becomes part of Ellison’s portfolio – will settle into that occasionally exceptional American middlebrow mediocrity that, beyond his vindictive fevers, is Trump’s cultural safe-space. The new acquisitions might do Trump’s bidding, as when CBS announced that it was ending Trump-bashing Stephen Colbert’s show just as Paramount needed federal approval to complete a pending merger. Or they might not, as when ABC restored Trump-bashing Jimmy Kimmel’s show after a brief cancellation despite Trump’s wishes that they keep Kimmel off the air permanently. The question of money is supreme.
It could well be that David Ellison, who seems to be at a loss as to exactly why he is becoming a media mogul, who seems to have not the slightest idea of what he would like to do with the media properties he is buying – it could be that acquiring and elevating the strongly opinionated Weiss is his way of seeming to have some sort of “vision”. If that is the case, Weiss may find herself in jeopardy every time Ellison has an impulse or sensation that he believes is an “idea”. It is, in fact, highly unlikely that CBS, or CNN, would evolve in Weiss’s hands into another Fox network, for the simple reason that there already is a Fox network. Weiss is trapped between David Ellison’s rapacious ego, flailing about atop his Oedipal drama, and the pressures of a mainstream commercial market that will not be satisfied with a monotonous contrarianism. People still tune into CBS and CNN precisely because they are not The Free Press. If I were Citizen Weiss, I would make sure to have another j’accuse in the hopper.
[Further reading: The UK’s sense of decline is terminal]
Content from our partners
Related
