Five days ago, I was fidgeting on line at the Bank of America across from the Splice Today office (this branch is almost always empty, so it’s a matter of time before it closes and leaves Baltimore with another boarded-up eyesore) and, through no fault of the teller, the men ahead of me, shuffling papers, were taking forever. But… one of the guys, mid-50s, was an eBay throwback to the mid-1960s. He was wearing a red polka-dot shirt with a black patch on the right sleeve, striped flares that were pressed, a maroon cap and spiffy suede loafers. I lapsed into a brief reverie, thinking he might be an unheralded blues guitarist, part of a band that opened for the Stones in a mid-sized Leeds venue in 1964.
Poof, and it was back to business.
The media-reports-on-media story of the week, and maybe it has legs (more than Colbert and Kimmel), was the announcement that CBS’s parent company Paramount hired Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, and acquired her successful (but unremarkable) website The Free Press for “a price said to be about $150 million in cash and stock, according to Weiss’ former employer The New York Times.
The seven-alarm media blaze began minutes after the official news release, with contrasting social media posts about Weiss’ ascension to the MSM media she’s hungered for after leaving over the Times in 2020 over in-staff bullying and a “hostile work environment.” I have no interest in any broadcast news, no matter the political bias, and don’t think many other Americans do either. As such, the ongoing flap is, to me, just another example of the media talking to themselves, as if the fate of the country (they took a break from Trump the Fascist) hinged on a nearing-its-death-bed medium.
I don’t care for Weiss’ writing, or, as noted above, the mostly centrist (aside from Israel; the now-irrelevant onetime blogger Andrew Sullivan called Weiss an “unhinged Zionist,” which pleased her) articles published at The Free Press, essays so anodyne that without a logo and byline people who follow the “news” would have no idea of the source. The articles, like this one about the rise in pre-nups could’ve, and probably did, appear in the Times, Washington Post or Journal. Kara Kennedy writes: “In the 1990s, around eight percent of married couples had one. Prenups were whispered about in scandalized tones, the province of the paranoid rich, the famous, or the twice-divorced. You knew about them because Donald Trump famously had one with Ivana, or because soap operas featured conniving heiresses demanding them, or because your uncle muttered about it after his first wife cleaned him out. To actually admit you had a prenup was to admit that you didn’t really believe in love.”
It’s always the uncle, whether he’s a MAGA creep loaded before 11 on Thanksgiving, or complaining about money.
Or Shilo Brooks’ essay about how reading books “made him a man.” I’ve seen similar iterations about 100 times since May, and the few I’ve skimmed are exercises in vapidity.
I’ve never listened to her podcast and, good God, didn’t even know that Weiss and her FP confederates “throws parties for readers under 30; it throws parties for former world leaders, Google executives and ‘MAHA’ influencers.”
Nevertheless, any fair-minded person who follows such matters has to give credit to Bari Weiss: she’s an entrepreneur, self-promoter and woman out for vengeance who channeled all that for an enormous payday (not that she’ll pocket all of the $150 million; other FP investors got slices of the Paramount cherry pie). I’m glad she did: snookering a company like Paramount isn’t just a wedge of cheddar, it’s the whole fucking wheel.
That doesn’t mean she’ll exert more than a negligible influence at CBS news (despite the initial chatter), aside from firing on-air personalities like John Dickerson and Nora O’Donnell (anyone could’ve done that, and should’ve several years ago) and not-ashamed-of-left-wing-bias others whose identities I couldn’t possibly name.
Not so! At least according to Jessica Testa, a Times “new media” reporter (plucked from BuzzFeed in 2017), who couldn’t come up with more superlatives even if a drone editorial writer was hunched over her shoulder. Testa: “[Weiss] was just handed the sterling silver keys to the Tiffany network… In its nearly 100 years, CBS has not seen a leader quite like Ms. Weiss. Neither has the media industry. Ms. Weiss, 41, has ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot… She is richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers… She has come to symbolize the power and potential of independent media.”
Let’s not carried away. Weiss isn’t an online upstart on purpose: after graduating from Columbia she worked at The Forward, The Wall Street Journal and Times before those in-house fights over “wokeness” caused her to leave the latter daily. She grandly calls herself a “radical centrist,” the meaning of which is vague; maybe one of her influencer friends came up with it. She’s pro-Israel, may have voted for Kamala Harris, is married to Nellie Bowles, with whom she’s raising two children and attended the wedding of Jeff Bezos. She’s an operator, now, one guesses, a wealthy one, but not a journalistic “trailblazer.” She’s returned to her desired “media elite” after a brief, and profitable, hiatus.
The picture above is of Michael Cohen (New York Press’ first Advertising Director) and Jamie Day (affable husband of NYP Associate Editor Phyllis Orrick) helping out the cops in Lower Manhattan and pretending to take a union break.
Look at the clues to figure out the year: Steve Erickson’s Tours of the Black Clock, Robert B. Parker’s Playmates, Keith Waterhouse’s Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell and Pauline Kael’s Hooked are published; Ted Bundy is executed; the year of “the Central Park Jogger”; Los Angeles school teachers go on strike and receive 24 percent raise as settlement (imagine that happening today!); Nintendo’s Game Boy is released in North America; Nolan Ryan notches 5000th strikeout; North Carolina celebrates its bicentennial; Candace Owens is born and Huey Newton dies; The Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon and Simple Minds’ Street Fighting Years are released; and Easy Goer wins the Belmont Stakes.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023