CBS News can’t fix itself if it can’t even see what’s wrong.
As the prospect of the conquest of CBS News by Free Press founder Bari Weiss looms ever larger, some of the institution’s remaining defenders are retailing their growing status anxiety as mere professional anxiety.
Semafor’s Ben Smith has the goods. In a story ostensibly focused on FCC administrator Brendan Carr and the Trump administration’s effort to publicly muscle entertainment companies into reining in their outspoken liberal talent, Smith’s piece veered into a discussion about the future of news media — CBS News, in particular.
“I spoke recently with someone involved in the Skydance acquisition of CBS, who was mulling the many questions floating around that deal,” Smith wrote. “Can an opinion editor really run, much less save, a TV network? Can anyone at all save CBS News?”
The answer he got from the unnamed insider was too precious for words:
There was another question, too, the person acknowledged. Can CBS News ever recover from the impression that its owners traded away its independence for regulatory favors?
The person I spoke to was optimistic: All CBS News has to do to restore its credibility, they said, is to offer unsparingly tough coverage of the president.
This isn’t a diagnosis of what ails media. It’s self-flattery. Embedded in this gratuitous dig at all and sundry — CBS brass for caving to regulators’ implicit threats, the regulators for making them, and Weiss for having the temerity to coexist alongside legacy media outlets, much less take charge of one — is the unstated but plainly conveyed notion that CBS is doing everything right. How else might a dispassionate observer describe its present approach other than “unsparingly tough coverage of the president”?
The challenges before those of us in the news business are so overwhelming that no one could possibly make any meaningful improvements, the source might as well have said. But maybe, if we change nothing at all, we just might beat the odds.
The myopic focus on the president is part of the problem here. It’s not that they’re getting Trump wrong — it’s everything else that’s getting short shrift.
Take, for example, a ponderous report anchored by CBS host John Dickerson on Monday in which the anchor and his expert guest attributed Charlie Kirk’s assassination to something as nebulous as “nihilistic violent extremism” — murderous violence in which the “motive remains elusive” and the perpetrator “isn’t tied to a clear political ideology.”
The following day, prosecutors in Utah would lay out the facts of their case against Kirk’s assassin, most of which indicated that the alleged killer most certainly did subscribe to one particular ideology. CBS might have hedged its bets if it had put more stock in statements from Utah Governor Spencer Cox indicating as much, or reports in mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal, which provided the same indications. But even if you had no knowledge of any of that, a cursory familiarity with the uptick in left-wing political violence in America — a phenomenon that’s been hard to miss — might have spared CBS the embarrassment.
Maybe the newsroom was just simply bereft of such people. Well, it won’t be for long. That will be good for CBS and good for America, too. Those who are genuinely invested in the health of that institution should welcome a change at the top that would make it a more competitive player in the news business. Those who don’t are probably more invested in their own personal stock than CBS’s.