Bari Weiss Is Powerful, Establishment Media Is Not
Media consolidations are not drying up the well of discourse; it's overflowing with takes.
If CBS News staffers are throwing fits of apoplexy over the announcement that Bari Weiss will be their new overlord, they are mostly doing so in private. A few have leaked to other media reporters that the general sentiment is one of depression—"a throwing up emoji is not enough of a reflection of the feelings in here"—but we have yet to witness waves of public denunciation, resistance, or resignation.
Others seem stuck in the bargaining phase of learning to cope with trauma, which follows anger and precedes depression: One anonymous staffer suggested that everything would be OK as long as Weiss didn't mess with 60 Minutes. Next stop, acceptance.
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For Weiss, who exited The New York Times in 2020 during the summer of peak "wokeness" after her heterodox opinions on cultural issues alienated progressive staffers, this new gig constitutes a massive victory over the forces that sought to marginalize her. In addition to enlisting her to run the newsroom, CBS News' parent company Paramount has also purchased The Free Press, the news site Weiss launched on Substack three years ago, for $150 million.
It's not even clear that CBS News is the upper limit of Weiss' new reach. Paramount is now owned by Skydance, a media company run by David Ellison, who is the son of billionaire entrepreneur Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. Skydance has also set its sights on acquiring Warner Bros., which owns CNN. It's not impossible to imagine a future where Weiss runs CBS News and CNN—and is thus utterly dominant in the category of establishment television media.
These various mergers are not being received particularly well by progressive foes of Big Business. Lefty antitrust outlet The Lever, for instance, lamented this billionaire-backed "conservative media takeover," which in their telling is a disaster for the overall media landscape.
"Media companies are merging into ever larger conglomerates," says Lever Editor in Chief David Sirota, describing the results as "Orwellian."
The term Orwellian, of course, generally refers to a silencing effect. But what's striking about all these media industry consolidations is that they have not coincided with some vast, successful effort to muzzle dissident perspectives or clamp down on the domain of acceptable opinions in journalism. On the contrary, the broader media landscape is less centrally controlled than ever before. While it's true that mainstream, establishment, and legacy organizations are either dying off, getting bought up, or coming under the auspices of massive corporate behemoths—shrinking the number of direct competitors in this space—the impact of all this integration is negligible for news consumers.
If that assertion causes you to roll your eyes, consider that a merger of CBS News and CNN would make less of a difference to the overall market than at any previous moment in American history. That's because the dominance of the Big Four television channels—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News—no longer matters nearly as much. They now have to compete, not just against each other, but against streaming, social media, and the entirety of the internet.
Alternative news programs on YouTube routinely get millions more viewers than cable. More people are listening to Joe Rogan on Spotify than bothering to turn on their televisions for the latest episode of 60 Minutes. There are news shows hosted on Instagram Live, X, Substack, Rumble, and a variety of other platforms. The competition for people's attention is genuinely fiercer than ever before, and the existence of so many competitors means that no single perspective is dominant whatsoever. The rise of social media over the course of the 2010s led to a flourishing of conservative news programming, and the increased prominence of YouTube over the same time frame served the left political left extremely well.
Being worried about too much consolidation of television companies today is like being worried that a single firm might corner the horse-and-buggy market in the 1920s. When progressives—as well as certain misguided Republicans—propose antitrust as a solution to media mergers, they are always fighting the last war: These properties are all losing market share relative to the extensive catalogue of alternative platforms that also offer news, sports, and entertainment.
When politicians, activists, and media figures themselves complain about changes in the industry, their actual frustration is that people who share their politics no longer have nearly the same power to shape, curate, and gatekeep the limits of acceptable opinion and speech. There no longer exists a Walter Cronkite-esque figure—whose own liberal-leaning perspective was presented to viewers as objective—dominating the airwaves; this may be a disappointment to people who like and agree with Cronkite's progressive liberalism, but it's good news for everybody who would like to see more diversity, disagreement, and dissent.
But if you're really worried about Weiss' heterodox centrism coming in and ruining 60 Minutes, it's not as if that program represents some kind of last stand for hectoring progressivism: There are tons of similar, left-coded podcasts, newsletters, and shows all over the internet. (Zeteo, The Majority Report, and The Bulwark, to name just a few.)
To make a long story short, media consolidations are not drying up the well of discourse; it's overflowing with takes. That should make us more skeptical that it really matters who owns CBS or Warner Bros.
This Week on Free Media
I'm joined by Amber Duke and Niall Stanage to discuss the week's major media stories. And since several people have asked, the answer is yes—at some point, Amber and Niall will join me at the same time for some great triple commentary! I'm also filming with Reason's Andrew Heaton more and more regularly. Stay tuned to Free Media!
Worth Watching
I'm finally watching the latest season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and finding myself sadly underwhelmed. Aside from an extended 9/11 joke in the first episode, I've barely laughed. I feel bad knocking a show that has consistently delivered quality humor for 20 years, but this was the first-ever season that made me think the format might be running out of steam. (The previous season's finale, "Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day,"
was a series highlight.)
