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‘Death Spiral’ of ‘Bile,’ ‘Jingoism’; Liberal Tools Dump on CBS’s Dokoupil, Weiss
This week, there was another cascade of sophomoric hit pieces against CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil for publicly expressing the need for CBS to regain the trust of more Americans. Hilariously, the smears ignored the newscast and wider network’s record of recent bias, including 96 percent negative coverage of ICE in Minneapolis.
Four separate hit pieces seethed over Weiss and Dokoupil as possibly overseeing a “pancaked, Wile E. Coyote-style” “death spiral” and state of “dysfunction” refusing to “value the standards held by veteran journalists” and instead turning to “bile” and “boilerplate jinoism” from half the country.
First, The Ringer thought it was edgy in “The Five Farcical Principles of the ‘CBS Evening News,’” but it came off like a sneering, prepubescent Mean Girl trying to humiliate a rival in front of the entire study body.
Brian Phillips screeched from the get-go that David Ellison “hired a conservative former New York Times opinion writer with no TV experience to remake the news division, and she gave Dokoupil, a cohost of CBS Mornings best known for accosting Ta-Nehisi Coates over Israel, the anchor’s job.” In other words, Phillips wants you to believe Dokoupil has little media experience (instead of decades at CBS, The Daily Beast, MSNBC, NBC, and Newsweek).
“It’s going horrendously. I don’t mean there have been a few minor speed bumps; I mean the bus is pancaked, Wile E. Coyote–style, against the side of the mountain. Ratings have nosedived. The broadcasts have been beset by basic technical errors,” he giddily said, citing Megyn Kelly as proof the right hates him too.
Most notably, he showed the power of The Borg known as the elite, legacy, liberal press as, when they want a narrative, they can will it into existence (click “expand”):
A new exposé about the chaos inside CBS News seems to drop every day, stuffed with juicy quotes from staffers furious about Weiss’s leadership. (They’re also stuffed with bizarre details: According to a scorched-earth New York Times piece last week, one of the lieutenants Weiss brought with her to CBS is Sascha Seinfeld, whose main qualification seems to be that she’s Jerry Seinfeld’s daughter.) At one point, Dokoupil cried on the air.
“Let’s do the fucking news!” Weiss shouted at her staff during her first editorial meeting, on October 7. Well, here’s some of the fucking news CBS has done on her watch, as reflected in the headlines it’s inspired. “CBS Anchor Tony Dokoupil Is Stuck in an Endless Loop of Humiliation.” “This Tony Dokoupil Thing Isn’t Working.” “It’s Worse Than Even CBS Thought It Could Be.” “Tony Dokoupil’s ‘Embarrassing’ First Days at CBS Evening News Savaged by Staff.” ”‘Blood in the Water’: Bari Weiss’s Chaotic First Three Months in Charge of CBS News.” “The CBS Evening Debut of Tony Dokoupil Was Embarrassing in Ways I Didn’t Know Possible.”
As the headline indicated, he went through each of the show’s five principles and condescendingly tore them part as a “105-degree fever now dampening the pillow of one of America’s most storied media institutions.”
On the “We Work for You” plank, Phillips said this was “wildly inaccurate” because Dokoupil and Weiss actually work for “the Trump administration” with Weiss holding “anti-woke, anti-cancel culture, and pro-Zionist views” and thus she cannot possibly be a true liberal because those are “conservative conclusions.”
“If you’re a rich white man convinced that pronouns and trans athletes are the greatest threats facing America today, Weiss is there to assure you not just that you’re right, but also that your bile is proof of your intellectual fearlessness...Weiss will typically define “elites” exclusively as left-leaning academics and journalists, then depict the billionaires who feel aggrieved...as the leaders of a bold grassroots rebellion,” he screeched.
Along with whining about the Marco Rubio memes story and Dokoupil’s January 3 interview of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Phillips played prick saying Dokoupil’s Trump interview was a “shit-eating chat.”
On “We Report on the World as It Is” and “We Respect You,” Phillips again flaunted his word choice as a personality when it’s really a doltish fad to appear smart in attacking the lunacy of pretending the right is human too (click “expand”):
Principle No. 2: “We Report on the World as It Is.”
(....)
How does it sound? A little weird! This is literally just a description of how a news organization is supposed to work. Uniqlo doesn’t have to put a giant placard in the window reading, “We will sell you socks.” If it did, I’d feel suspicious.
How accurate is it? Not particularly! I don’t mean Dokoupil lies on camera, or even distorts narratives Fox News–style. It’s more that the tone of his reporting, which combines a professionally folksy everyman demeanor with low-calorie pseudo-gravitas, smooths away the sharp edges of events, favoring vibes of unity and healing over real understanding, particularly when the causes of a tragedy lie in right-wi ideology. Conservative media reacted to the killing of Renee Nicole Good by trying to convince you she had it coming; Dokoupil, by contrast, delivered a much-mocked soliloquy filled with high-toned rhetoric that, on close examination, didn’t seem to mean much at all. “There is so much to say about the last 24 hours,” he intoned, “but sometimes, what matters most is what is yet to be said at all, and what we all still need to hear.”
The effect of this speech was to turn an event with very clear and specific political causes into a lukewarm bath of emotions. The real tragedy, Dokoupil seemed to say, isn’t that ICE shot Good; the real tragedy is our national mood, and our national mood can be rescued by Dokoupil looking into the camera and taking it very, very seriously. All the words, in this case, were weasel words.
(....)
Principle No. 3: “We Respect You.”
(....)
How does it sound? Like an influencer about to drop four minutes of anti-vax propaganda?
How accurate is it? Hmm. I can’t say I felt hugely respected by CBS’s decision to push the transparently ludicrous claim from anonymous Trump officials that the ICE officer who killed Good “suffered internal bleeding” during the incident. (A bruise, technically, is a form of internal bleeding.) Nor did I feel trusted to make up my own mind when Weiss yanked a 60 Minutes segment that might have made the administration look bad. If you think I’m so smart and discerning, don’t you think I’ve noticed that this sort of deferential wise-centrist rhetoric—there are always two sides, and they must be presented with equal weight so that viewers can decide for themselves—is almost always a cover for incorporating right-wing misinformation into the news?
When it came to point four about “We Love America,” Phillips came off like a tortured soul over the “boilerplate jingoism” when a real CBS News, in his mind, should be waging war and not “enabling the forces working to subvert” the country and “undermin[e] access to accurate information.”
Point five was “We Respect Tradition, But We Also Believe in the Future” and concerning how people consume news, so of course Phillips was deliberately obtuse in mocking this acknowledgment.
Over at Variety on Monday, Brian Steinberg leaned into the descriptive words to claim CBS News is teetering on the edge of destruction because Weiss has dared to do things differently than the network has for over half a century.
With “ten people familiar with the workings of CBS News” at his disposal, Steinberg boasted CBS News “is veering toward dysfunction” because of Weiss refusing to “value the standards held by veteran journalists” to the point the only way to fix the network’s “value and credibility” would be if “producers and reporters challenge Weiss more regularly.”
Unfortunately for these out-of-touch weasels, it’s doubtful the person who signs their paychecks (Ellison) would appreciate it.
He did get someone to speak on the record in a Yale dean saying Weiss’s “degradation of CBS News” is on the verge of becoming “‘a death spiral’ that is ‘hard to reverse.’”
On the news-y front, Steinberg revealed Weiss could soon shift her focus from the CBS Evening News to CBS Mornings, starting with the obvious reality that, given the hemorrhaging bottom lines of old media, co-host Gayle King’s salary of “around $15 million a year...is no longer viable.” Thus, he revealed, Weiss could grant King “a special correspondent role” or extend her another year for a farewell tour.
As far as Dokoupil goes, Steinberg said his “nascent tenure....has been marred by awkward segments,” citing all the usual hits that left liberals triggered, whether it be the Rubio memes, speaking about parental rights in making medical decisions without derision, refusing to spend minutes on end marking January 6, and their Renee Good coverage.
Back in reality, Dokoupil’s CBS Evening News was actually more negative toward ICE than competitors on ABC and NBC and, in one show, called Good’s death a “murder.”
But given all these manufactured negative headlines, Steinberg expressed faux dismay that CBS’s “attention” has been “taken...away from actual scoops and newsgathering” and that Weiss is, for lack of a better term, a tough boss.
He found one arrogant anonymous source to tell him CBS News staff were already “doing our damn jobs and doing them well.” If that was the case, why have they been in third place for a lifetime in a profession with an approval rating in the high 20s?
Status’s snake of founder Oliver Darcy was spitting in his cup Tuesday night at Status over anonymous sources telling him that, prior to Sunday’s 60 Minutes finally airing the delayed piece on the El Salvadoran jail CECOT, “Weiss was busy working the phones with reporters...to shape the coverage around it.”
Huffing she “wanted to personally explain to reporters how it made its way to air and offer her perspective” on background, Darcy whines “it is rather unusual for a network boss to personally call reporters in the middle of such a controversy.”
Using plenty of anonymous sources, Darcy claimed “Weiss expressed significant frustration with Alfonsi, who had declined to make changes to her piece at Weiss’ behest” and that she would have the nerve to “complain...about” their workplace when “strong leaders keep disagreements within the house.”
The anonymous 60 Minutes source showed how narcissistic CBS News and liberal, elite journalists are by insisting Weiss should have come in and kissed their feet instead of “insult[ing] us” or “say[ing] we’re biased” (click “expand”):
A “60 Minutes” staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly, sharply criticized Weiss’ conduct. Weiss, the staffer said, was “deflecting” the widespread criticism she has faced just months into the job by “blaming us.”
“The reality is the ‘60 Minutes’ staff are the best of the best,” the staffer told Status. “These are people who have been doing ‘60’ stories for 30+ years. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they do it exceptionally well. That’s why the show has been No. 1 for as long as it has.”
“Of course, there’s going to be friction when Bari walks in acting like she owns the place. These are the people who built it,” the staffer added. “You don’t gain and build trust when you insult us, come in and say we’re biased, don’t learn the place [and] how we work, the fact checking and research involved.”
Unsurprisingly, Weiss’ private criticism of Alfonsi is not likely to land well with staffers.
The longest piece was nearly 10,000 words in The New Yorker that took a comprehensive view of Weiss’s life from birth to the present (and, in between her entrance and well-publicized exit from The New York Times.
Also relying on a slew of anonymous drama queens and a hilariously hypocritical caricature of Weiss as an unsavory elitist (in one of the world’s most elitist magazines), Clare Malone said it’s become “apparent to many inside the network that Weiss...was an uneasy fit” more concerned about the “de-Baathification of CBS” and “align[ing] her[self] with a tech-billionaire class more willing than ever to indulge Trump to protect the sanctity of shareholder value.”
Malone would often provide on-the-record or anonymous quotes to paint Weiss as obtuse and a prick, but another read would lead one to conclude she’s tenacious and hard-charging in an ultra-competitive industry.
Conceding she’s still a liberal, Weiss’s anti-woke and pro-Israel planks have thus made it unsatiable in these circles, including at The New Yorker.
When it came to the present, Malone strongly implied the CECOT segment was put on ice — despite having been “fact-checked and vetted by the network’s legal department” — because of Paramount Skydance’s pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery and thus wanted to avoid irking the Trump administration “since regulatory approval would be required.”
Malone offered her own anonymous sources inside CBS about 60 Minutes and that Weiss has expressed alarm at the Trump administration’s actions (click “expand”):
A former CBS executive told me that, even if Weiss’s concerns had been valid, her decision to cut the segment at such a late hour had opened her up to charges of corporate interference: “It makes you wonder, Did someone call once they saw the promo on the air and then she spent more time on it because there was some big complaint?” Sources close to Weiss and Ellison said that Skydance leadership had zero involvement in the story and did not screen the piece.
These sources also told me that Weiss “readily realizes and admits that she was not as knowledgeable as she should have been about the timing of the marketing and promo process at ‘60 Minutes.’ She brings the sometimes chaotic energy and work ethic of a startup, but she also realizes she needs to work on having more executive discipline.” Weiss also seemed to be struggling with the fact that, at a time when the Trump Administration is routinely lying to the public and straining to justify blatant abuses of executive power, often with violent or deadly consequences, she was still wedded to the idea of news coverage as a contest of ideas, in which both sides of the debate are equally valid. Privately, she has expressed alarm at many of the Administration’s actions, a person close to Weiss told me. But, in her role as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, her main concern is being able to book its main players on her network’s shows.
And because it’s seemingly required to argue the CBS Evening News is a MAGA outfit, The New Yorker decried January 6 receiving only a news brief as proof the newscast is “not...more successful or journalistically sound than what came before.”
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