Depending on which news sources you choose to believe, Bari Weiss is either about to expand her media empire to include editorial control of CNN or she is one banana peel away from oblivion at CBS News after her dust-up with 60 Minutes practically sent her into hiding.
Either way, it is a fitting illustration of the problem Weiss is ostensibly attempting to combat. Trust in the legacy media is at or near an all-time low. In response to this fact, viewers, listeners, and readers are increasingly retreating to information bubbles that entertain, titillate, and affirm at least as much as they educate.
While in theory, and sometimes in practice, this leads to a free market in information that gives consumers choices, it often means that we have the ability to live in a fantasy world of our own creation, sustained by a carefully cultivated media diet that seldom troubles our preexisting political prejudices.
Even the coverage of the coverage is susceptible to this siloing phenomenon. Whether Weiss’s (figurative) Paramount stock is up or down would seem to be an objective apple-or-banana question, even as different sources within a large company are probably going to have different viewpoints.
Branching out into the wider dispute over what Weiss and her employers are trying to accomplish in the first place, subjective values apply. To some, it looks like she and her servile MAGA billionaire buddies are attempting to defang a proud network’s tough coverage of a corrupt and unpopular administration. To others, she is attempting to restore a semblance of fairness and balance to a legacy media that has abandoned such values.
In the 60 Minutes brouhaha, both sides in the dispute behaved a bit like the caricatures their critics would draw of them. While the show’s brand is as stodgy and dated as it is venerable, it isn’t in a state of terminal decline like the Kimmel and Colbert clapter fests. Scott Pelley, for his part, displayed a level of entitlement that would be unfathomable to most people employed in other industries, as well as a Ted Baxter-level of befuddlement at trends in public opinion that have been evident since Spiro Agnew chastised the nattering nabobs of negativism well over a half-century ago.
The problem of widespread perceptions of media bias isn’t the only challenge facing newsrooms across the country. But it would seem to be the easiest to solve. One might suppose that surely, given all the other difficulties media outlets must deal with, limiting one’s potential audience to a particular political faction is a suicidal business model?
But even that may be simplistic, at least for the biggest newspapers and television networks. The problem is that it is difficult to win back the audience you have spent decades losing without alienating the audience you have left. This certainly was one of the issues the Washington Post confronted during the unpleasantness of a few months ago and beyond.
When Weiss launched the juggernaut that is The Free Press, she was able to go to (figurative and literal) war with the army she had. But at CBS, there is a lack of agreement about the mission and plenty of high-profile staffers who fancy themselves as conscientious objectors. (Some genuinely are probably something close to that, even if elite journalists comparing themselves to soldiers in combat is more than a little gross, while others merely object to being conscientious.)
It’s not easy to turn around a massive ship that has been on its present course for decades (Dan Rather, long seen as a symbol of liberal bias, became the anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News before Weiss was born). It is doubly so when all the travelers who deserted it have already set sail elsewhere, many of them years ago.
Before mainline Protestantism began its final descent into theological progressivism and cultural irrelevance, many conservatives and traditionalists devoted years to trying to reverse liberalizing trends and restore their churches to their past greatness. This was known as the renewal movement, of which I was long a well-wisher and ally within my own United Methodist Church.
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The evangelical churches to which most conservative Protestants were fleeing had their own flaws and theological problems, much like the outrage-addled alternatives to legacy media. Renewal seemed like a better bet, and did achieve some successes—until even the combatants involved concluded they would be better off in new churches of their own.
Just because something is hard to do doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing or can’t be done. Perhaps 1990s-style New Republic liberals are not the best people to restore balance to the Trump-era media. Either way, it will take more than a few months.
But it won’t be easy.
