The right isn’t just grudgingly accepting half a loaf here – they’re wildly enthusiastic over such a generous dispensation from the new owners of this legacy media outfit.
Bari Weiss is neither a conservative nor a Republican. She has described herself as a “radical centrist” or a “left-leaning centrist.” In the (many) mainstream media profiles of her and her media venture, the Free Press, Weiss maintains that her ideological affinities have not changed. Rather, the political landscape has shifted under her feet. What was once liberal terrain has been ceded by the progressive left, which now makes enemies of the erstwhile allies who continue to occupy it.
And yet, you won’t find a happier bunch than conservatives and Republicans given the news that Weiss is set to ascend to the top of the heap at CBS News. Reportedly, when Paramount finalizes its purchase of the Free Press, it will make Wiess editor in chief of CBS News – long a bastion of left-wing like-think and a promulgator of the dubious narratives that such a condition incubates.
Rather, it is the left that is fit to be tied over Weiss’s ascension, even though she self-describes as one of their own. The right’s elation has nothing to do with the future CBS News chief’s ideological preferences. It is owed to the fact that, throughout her tenure in media, Weiss and the operations she runs have proven that they will not summarily dismiss or mischaracterize the right’s rejoinders to Democratic narratives. Occasionally, she and they will even find some merit in conservative critiques of center-left talking points.
The right isn’t just grudgingly accepting half a loaf here – they’re wildly enthusiastic over such a generous dispensation from the new owners of this legacy media outfit. And Weiss isn’t the only recipient of that sort of gratitude.
One of the more prominent Democrats in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Senator John Fetterman, has likewise ingratiated himself among right-of-center voters. According to Quinnipiac’s latest poll, Fetterman is viewed favorably by about as many Pennsylvania Republicans (62 percent) as is GOP Senator Dave McCormick (64 percent). Why?
It’s not as though Fetterman votes like a Republican. By some measures, his voting record in the Senate is more ideologically left-wing than one-third of his party’s Senate caucus. Fetterman has earned the affection of Pennsylvania Republicans merely by declining to endorse the flights of fancy encouraged by progressives on social media.
Fetterman has not jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon. He does not back shutting down the government merely to relitigate a lost argument over a spending bill that was passed into law three months ago. He won’t go so far as to claim that the president has overturned the constitutional order in the absence of evidence to that effect, even if he’s perfectly comfortable critiquing Trump and the GOP’s conduct in strong but defensible terms.
There is no end to the grief Fetterman gets merely for supporting America’s steadfast geopolitical partners and declining to call Trump Hitler. He is pilloried by his left flank in hyperbolic terms only for saying things like “there isn’t a constitutional crisis” when, objectively, there isn’t one.
To the extent that Fetterman has earned a second look from the GOP, it is only for refusing to reinforce his co-partisans’ worst impulses and deny them their most self-destructive indulgences. Something similar could be said of Weiss.
Republican voters – a critical mass of them, at least, of which the loudest voices on social media are unrepresentative – don’t need to see a reflection of themselves to like what they’re looking at. You might not know that from the characterization of the modern Republican Party in the legacy press.