Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Is Bari Weiss Winning? W/ David Klion / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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Is Bari Weiss Winning? W/ David Klion / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now is the time of monsters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: With those words from Gramsci, I welcome you to the time of monsters podcast, which is sponsored by the nation magazine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm G.T.
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[SPEAKER_00]: here, a writer for the nation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This week, we're gonna take up two old favorites.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One is a favorite subject, very wise, who, from some perspectives, can we see in as one of the rake of monsters of our time, at least in the world of the media,
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the other favorite speaker and guest of the program, David Clion, who writes for the nation, Jewish currents and reading other publications.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And who I think should be credited as the world's foremost very wise expert.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think he's like, monitor your career.
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[SPEAKER_00]: more than anyone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And she's written the news lately.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Recently there were some firings of like senior producers and reporters at 60 minutes.
0:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's reopened the whole issue of very wise and what exactly she's up to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So without further ado, Leila, let's, first of all, David, thanks for being on the program.
1:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me as always.
1:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to work with the assumption that people who are listening to this have a basic idea who Barry Weiss is.
1:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we've covered it before in the podcast about linked with our articles.
1:14
[SPEAKER_00]: If people want more background, but I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm busy with what's your current position?
1:19
[SPEAKER_00]: What does she like?
1:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm going to I'm going to assume people are up to spamming her current position as editor and chief of CBS News and depending on which media reporter you trust, she may or may not have that power over CNN
1:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But the way I want to frame this might be my thinking on her right now.
1:35
[SPEAKER_01]: She's been at the CBS job for 8 or 9 months now, or it was announced 8 or 9 months ago.
1:43
[SPEAKER_01]: We've had some time to observe some patterns.
1:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And I want to say, I think among Barry Watchers, and there are a lot of Barry Watchers, there are basically two schools of thought about Barry's 10 year at CBS.
2:01
[SPEAKER_01]: friends of the show and so on who are of the other and and of course the truth is probably somewhere in between so one school of thought which is not mine but it is a popular one it's one that I've seen for instance Adam Johnson spows or Owen Higgins who we both know says that
2:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Barry is doing everything she is doing for a single audience, which is David Allison who hired her and ultimately for Donald Trump.
2:30
[SPEAKER_01]: The sole function of everything that Barry does is to make Donald Trump happy, so he approves the Warner Bros. Paramount Merchant, which is all that finalized.
2:39
[SPEAKER_01]: very understands that Larry and David Ellis and understand that everything that we think looks like a disaster is actually a success because it's humiliating the lips.
2:51
[SPEAKER_01]: It's destroying one of their beloved institutions, CBS news, 60 minutes.
2:56
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, you know, showing that that area is this unstoppable force that could just wreck anything in our path without consequences.
3:05
[SPEAKER_01]: as Owen puts it, always bet on Barry, a Bob.
3:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one school of thought.
3:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's basically like, and to put a more big picture gloss on it, then just kind of like mystifying Barry and her destructive genius or whatever, I think this is really a school of thought about the political economy of the second Trump era, in which what we're saying is, what you thought capitalism was about, namely like,
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: products perform well, causing, you know, they're stock to go up, causing them to be a more valuable and that, you know, basically that in some way, like there's some relationship between producing.
3:43
[SPEAKER_01]: normal shareholder value through like actual qualitative innovations, that's obsolete.
3:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, we live under like a Putinist gangster state in which the actual value of anything is totally wrapped up in the relationship between the oligarch who owns it and the regime.
4:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So the only thing that matters is what is the Ellison family's relationship development drop.
4:07
[SPEAKER_01]: CBS News is a rounding error, network news is going to be obsolete soon.
4:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Barry is spectacularly succeeding.
4:14
[SPEAKER_01]: She's dizzy with success.
4:16
[SPEAKER_01]: That's one school of thought.
4:17
[SPEAKER_01]: That is not my school of thought, though I acknowledge that some of it is probably true, and it's worth taking serious life.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: My school of thought, the other school of thought, is that while it is true that the Allison's want to suck up to Donald Trump and while it's true that putting very wise in charge of CBS News is part of how they're doing that, and that's clearly true.
4:40
[SPEAKER_01]: That Barry Weiss actually does believe her own.
4:44
[SPEAKER_01]: believes that she is an actual media genius who understands what like the media and American news consumer wants.
4:52
[SPEAKER_01]: She believes that her tastes are like the correct tastes.
4:58
[SPEAKER_01]: She has tastes.
4:59
[SPEAKER_01]: She is trying to run CBS news successfully.
5:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Successfully according to the metrics we would normally associate with success.
5:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's ratings go up.
5:10
[SPEAKER_01]: She is obviously if that's true, spectacularly failing at it.
5:14
[SPEAKER_01]: like could not be doing a worse job.
5:16
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really remarkable.
5:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It fills those of us who espoused this view with a certain amount of shot and friday.
5:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really fun to see Barry fail.
5:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really fun to see her failure be as we see it unmistakable.
5:28
[SPEAKER_01]: She is clearly very, very bad at running a TV news channel.
5:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hilarious.
5:33
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand,
5:34
[SPEAKER_01]: as Owen points out to me regularly, she is still in charge of CBS News, and it still seems very much on the table that you could take over CNN.
5:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Though, here's where things get interesting, because CBS is such a leaky place right now that there must be at least half a dozen media reporters who were basically on the full-time Barry Beat publishing,
5:57
[SPEAKER_01]: virtually every day dispatches from inside CBS News, which, by the way, is not something you normally associate with an organization that's being well run.
6:06
[SPEAKER_01]: usually when an organization is being well-run, it means that people generally like and trust the boss and want to keep working for them, at least on balance, and therefore don't leak lightly.
6:18
[SPEAKER_01]: But clearly, everybody at CBS is leaking constantly to every single news organization, because it's fairly obvious the vast majority of people working at CBS News hold Barry in utter contempt.
6:30
[SPEAKER_01]: She is reviled.
6:32
[SPEAKER_01]: So again, the question is,
6:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it good or bad that Barry is despised by every single one of the, I think, several thousand people who work for her?
6:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, what does that mean?
6:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm curious which side of this divide you fall on, Jade, or if you think that it's a false choice, or there's some other way of looking at it.
6:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, like, I, first of all, I think you laid out very clearly and I have to say, I think about you like on the, on the other side, in the sense that I don't think it, she's engaged in the business operation except to the extent that it is a business operation.
7:12
[SPEAKER_00]: geared towards pleasing billionaires.
7:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a business operation with a small audience in mind.
7:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I will say maybe I'll expand it beyond saying she wants to please just Donald Trump and the Ellison family.
7:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a wider cohort of
7:27
[SPEAKER_00]: billionaires, Silicon Valley billionaires, that are also her audience.
7:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And beyond them, I think that there's a cohort of people who aren't like ultra wealthy, but let's say like upper middle class, classic meal conservative types of people who are like leaders of Woodrow.
7:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Huh?
7:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The free press on you.
7:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The free press on you.
7:49
[SPEAKER_00]: People who are like, I would say doctors, lawyers who have succeeded in the American meritocracy, who are socially liberal on, in a sort of 1990s way, like pro gay rights, perhaps pro gay marriage, very freaked out about trans issues.
8:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The, I'm very pro Israel.
8:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that is her audience and her court and her business model through every crowd,
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: going back to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the free-press, has been to try to capture this audience, because that is the world she came from.
8:29
[SPEAKER_00]: She genuinely thinks that this is the sort of center of American life.
8:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a lot of ways, it has been.
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I should mention, Dave is working on a history of sort of meal conservators, and I think one way to understand,
8:44
[SPEAKER_00]: of history is that she's a product of this neoconsert affection, which has been powerful well outside its numbers, like it's never been more than, you know, like what has been like wildly generous, like maybe a few hundred thousand people, right?
9:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Like in a nation of three hundred million.
9:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But
9:06
[SPEAKER_00]: because it occupies specific positions within like sort of like media, intellectual life.
9:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And also because it is a, it is a genuinely centrist faction that sense that it swings between Republicans and Democrats.
9:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore is something that like both local parties have pursued.
9:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very powerful faction.
9:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think to the extent that she is like sort of like carrying on the sort of torch of neoconservative
9:34
[SPEAKER_00]: and trying to please that audience even era where like neoconservantism is actually like in a lot of arguably in a lot of trouble on both political parties.
9:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Both as heravial traditional democrats you know like are moving wildly towards the rejecting Israel on human rights grounds.
9:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the Republican parties like you see a lot of people also rejecting the sort of neoconservative
10:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I selected an anti-Semitic grounds on basically Christian National's grounds that like, you know, like, we don't want the Jews.
10:09
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a Christian country and why are we letting the Jews wear our foreign policy.
10:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
10:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So, so, yeah, I mean, but precisely because Neo-Concertum is endangered because that old sort of like centrist establishment interest politics is now threatened and in danger, that means that people are invested in it.
10:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And that this, you know, basically means like if we're being frank,
10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: like a lot of people are billionaires, a lot of people are like, you know, like very wealthy, are very still vested in this politics.
10:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They are willing to like back in because they still think as very wise does that this is actually like set the real center of America, we just have to sell it.
10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So she doesn't believe her own, I have to say we're under FCC rules.
10:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So she believes her own BS, but like all good sort of con people, but it's also the case that the main thing is to
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: She has been tasked with selling a product that really is not popular anymore, but will still be put on the marketplace because you know, the that core audience of very wealthy, very elite people still want to try to like, you know, sell it to the American people.
11:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So I agree with most of what you said.
11:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I obviously agree, and we'll argue in my book, the barriers in air to the near-conservant of tradition, if not the air.
11:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I agree with your assessment of neo-conservatism's numbers.
11:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It's passed influence out of proportion to its numbers.
11:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It's current decline in popularity and how it's sort of hanging on tenaciously in elite positions despite that with buried being a real case in point.
11:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I agree with all of that.
11:42
[SPEAKER_01]: The, to me, the, the central question as long as we're focused on Barry though is, does she understand that, like,
11:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Does she understand that, in fact, this is not going to work from our ratings and popularity point of view?
11:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It may very well work from a, you know, Donald Trump approves the merger, view it probably will, and a, you know, the Allison's get richer as a result, going to view, although how much richer could they possibly be?
12:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, there's no question she's rich, there's no question she's powerful, and there's no question that she's an ideal log.
12:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Is she, does she intend to destroy the news network?
12:24
[SPEAKER_01]: She's been put in charge of and leave it with, you know, half the audience that had before or does she actually believe that she's going to compete and win?
12:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Because let me, let me just lay out some pieces of evidence.
12:37
[SPEAKER_01]: for the scope of the destruction, as well as what I think is her earnest attempt to make it otherwise.
12:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's start with CBS Evening News, right?
12:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Barry, it has been widely reported and not refuted, asked two different people for the CBS Evening News job who turned her down.
12:54
[SPEAKER_01]: One of them was Anderson Cooper, and one of them was Brett Bear.
12:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Now Anderson Cooper is most famous for CNN, where he has a contract.
13:02
[SPEAKER_01]: He also had for like 20 years been appearing on
13:05
[SPEAKER_01]: 60 minutes the the the hottest property on CBS, which we'll talk about in the sack.
13:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And he turned her down and he left 60 minutes.
13:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So she not only didn't get him as a nightly news anchor, she also lost him in in another core property she runs.
13:21
[SPEAKER_01]: she clearly likes him or she wouldn't have asked him.
13:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it would be a real stretch to call Anderson Cooper, Neocon or conservative.
13:28
[SPEAKER_01]: He's certainly establishment.
13:30
[SPEAKER_01]: He's certainly like a known quantity.
13:33
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not a leftist or a radical in any way.
13:35
[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't think he's in any sense an idealogue or someone you would pick if you were trying to suck up to Donald Trump.
13:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that getting Anderson Cooper away from CNN is purely a prestige play.
13:46
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the kind of thing you would
13:50
[SPEAKER_01]: got see an ambitious head of a TV network, and you were just trying to make successful TV and get your ratings up, and it failed.
13:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Brett Bear is at Fox News, so he's kind of conservative coded, but he's seen as a straight shooter and a serious news anchor.
14:07
[SPEAKER_01]: He also turned her down, and there was a recent interview with Semaphore, where Ben Smith and Max Tani tried to get him to
14:15
[SPEAKER_01]: about Barry's tenure and he was very cagey about it, but I definitely got the impression he doesn't respect her much at all.
14:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Cooper clearly doesn't respect her much because of the way he went out on on 60 minutes and the message he gave there, which was universally interpreted as a jab at her and which he was reportedly furious about.
14:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So her first two attempts, both at kind of middle of the road anchors, maybe one a little left of Santa, one a little right of center failed
14:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyone who thought, for instance, oh, Tony DeCouple is getting the job because, you know, he's a right-wing Zionist who embarrassed Tana-Housey Coates a year earlier.
14:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's true that he had this terrible exchange with Tana-Housey Coates a year earlier and it's true that Barry registered it and it probably turned into the memo that helped her get higher.
15:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's pretty well established that DeCouple was the third person at most that she asked to fill this role.
15:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, he's not, despite his pro-Israel politics, considered a right-winger or an idealog in any way.
15:18
[SPEAKER_01]: He's basically a genial dufist morning newshouse, which is, which he was good at, but which is a very different skill set.
15:26
[SPEAKER_01]: then being a prime time news anchor he doesn't have the gravitas for it so he came in and his whole debut was a series of catastrophic amateur hour errors both from him and from Barry and her production and their ratings are terrible their ratings are so bad that even though
15:44
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, Barry Defenders might argue well, you know, as Barry has implied very times that in a few years like broadcast news won't exist.
15:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, in the short term, ABC and NBC are actually growing at CBS's expense.
15:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how badly they're doing.
15:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They're waiting to decline at her own network.
16:02
[SPEAKER_01]: and helping her.
16:04
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to need to slow down the decline.
16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know.
16:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So no aspect of the story.
16:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I've just told, I think, squares with a narrative that says, oh, this is what she wanted.
16:14
[SPEAKER_01]: This is exactly how she wants it to go.
16:16
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, I wouldn't say everything she does is a sort of like business success, but I do actually think that there's the ideological project is what is guiding it and I would also say, I mean, first thing about it, like in a sort of like broad sweep of Neil conservative history and then what she represents from that, I think the fact that she wants to get sort of like mainstream voices to be part of this project is consistent with Neil conservativeism.
16:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we've emerged, you know, as we will see in your forthcoming book, which we're all like you're really waiting for, you know, emerged out of Cold War liberalism, which went through a crisis in the sixties with the rise of the new left.
17:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And
17:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's most, I think, successful phase, which is in the 60s and 70s, the neoconservatives were able to recruit a lot of former liberals, they themselves were former liberals, but also present a kind of liberal phase to it.
17:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They were saying, like, where liberals were mud by reality.
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
17:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And when it looks at it, like they served commentary of the 60s and even like going up to 1973, often featured Irving Howe, who's like Mr. Social Democracy, like they were leading social democratic intellectuals, but was like,
17:33
[SPEAKER_00]: publishing articles in commentary against the new left.
17:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the ideal position that they had, which is that if you could present someone who's like, you know, respected and loved by the left liberals to critique the left, you can like most persuasively push liberals to the right.
17:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that has been the project.
17:53
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I think what Neil can say.
17:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Very totally lacks this, though, as is evident at the free press, she basically cannot persuade a person who's respect on the left to work for her or really will see exactly that.
18:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think we're at a different phase of history, like that sort of, I mean, I think that Neil served Neil Conservatives over the 60s and 70s was very successful, partially because there was a lot of legitimate things, one could attack
18:16
[SPEAKER_00]: the left forever there were a lot of people coming from a liberal background with notes about the new laugh and we're able to like land a lot of real punches and then why is she because the people were running for them we're actually like came from the laugh and we're came from an actual laugh they actually were cold were liberals but had a deeper roots right in uh the anti-stalinist trotskyous laugh
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And so therefore they could land punches and could like actually knew the arguments now We're in a sort of like that was like 60 years ago, right?
18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: We're in a sort of like decadent phase of neoconservativeism Where no longer has that ability to persuade not only they can't they person find like left-wing Turing codes to make their arguments.
18:57
[SPEAKER_00]: They can't find liberal Turing codes to make their arguments for the most part except for you know like very sad people like Matt IEB or whatever He doesn't count anymore
19:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're, you know, like people are like, you know, people are like, you know, Tracy, you know, like people are like genuinely pathetic weirdos.
19:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so her, I mean, I think her, the problem with her, like ideal, she has the same ideological project, but it's running through real difficulty because that's a hard to recruit any liberal, you know, even like someone like Andrews and Cooper, like who I just think is a genuine, you know, middle of the world's centrist type.
19:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, it doesn't want to be part of like white washing like Trump, right?
19:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I do right.
19:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The Trump presidency is so odious.
19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many people on so many different ground.
19:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not just about Trump.
19:43
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just about Trump.
19:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll put it in white.
19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The white are right.
19:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not just about the white are right.
19:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's even more basic than that.
19:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I think.
19:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Barry Weiss is a commissar.
19:53
[SPEAKER_01]: She's not a journalist and I think she's pretty universally understood is such right now, even her supporters basically say that they just say it as if it's a good thing.
20:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Barry Weiss is not someone who is committed to journalistic ideals.
20:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I say this, I want to make clear like what I like how strongly
20:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean that because there are a lot of people who I vocally publicly have a lot of issues with who I think fail in various ways at true journalistic objectivity or have a pretense of journalistic objectivity that is belied by some of their actual decisions.
20:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But I want to say that I think Barry is another category.
20:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of those are people who have been in the past tight with Barry, it's unclear if they still are.
20:41
[SPEAKER_01]: People like Atlantic, Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, or CNN Anchor, Jack Tapper, who may or may not soon be working for Barry.
20:49
[SPEAKER_01]: These are two guys who share a lot of Barry's ideology, especially when it comes to Israel, pretty clearly.
20:54
[SPEAKER_01]: and I think related to her for that reason.
20:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is this persistent blind spot in I think American mainstream media where being extremely pro Israel is not seen as a departure from objectivity at CNN Pre-Berry, we have Dana Bash who clearly is a prosperous propagandaist.
21:13
[SPEAKER_01]: We have Wolf Blitzer who has worked directly for the Israeli government.
21:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's really something.
21:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, there's examples of this that the New York Times and elsewhere, too.
21:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Even so, I think Barry takes it to another category.
21:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I think even those people, though they genuinely and delusionaly believe that their pro is religion.
21:34
[SPEAKER_01]: is simply objectivity and, you know, not open for debate and doesn't compromise their objectivity as journalists, I think they still believe in the concept of objectivity as journalists.
21:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they still believe and on like a wide variety of issues that they can cover things in an objective and balanced way and following certain, you know,
21:56
[SPEAKER_01]: journalism 101 norms of, you know, getting the right number of sources to confirm a thing or, you know, making sure that a source is not compromised in some way, you know, with some conflict of interest.
22:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Some just basic things like that.
22:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think even in the breach, guys like that usually respect.
22:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And Barry Weiss has no journalistic ethics or integrity whatsoever.
22:22
[SPEAKER_01]: working anywhere close to her level and there aren't many people at her level anymore with her current job, but even going back like a year before she had this job of like prominent people in media, I think she is quite possibly the most ethically bankrupt.
22:38
[SPEAKER_01]: She's certainly way up there.
22:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, she just does not like journalism to her is purely a vessel for propaganda.
22:45
[SPEAKER_01]: You know,
22:47
[SPEAKER_01]: She sees CBS that way.
22:48
[SPEAKER_01]: She wants to turn CBS into a propaganda channel.
22:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the things that she did with the SeaCot story at 60 minutes have essentially nothing to do with Israel, right?
22:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know that like, like, various history actually is not particularly as an anti-immigration voice.
23:04
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, in the first Trump administration, she very, when she was still kind of casting herself as an idiot,
23:17
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, clearly in that camp a decade later.
23:20
[SPEAKER_01]: In Barry's case, she, you know, one of the reasons she parted ways with Trump was that she thought that his rhetoric on immigrants was horrible.
23:29
[SPEAKER_01]: She said so publicly.
23:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, maybe she was cynically positioning herself then, she probably was.
23:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We live in a different world now.
23:36
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's just to say,
23:37
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Barry has always been a pro Israel fanatic.
23:40
[SPEAKER_01]: She has always fought against the Israel critical left and against Palestinians.
23:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a through line of her entire, no back to college at least career.
23:49
[SPEAKER_01]: The immigration stuff is not a through line at all.
23:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did she do the sea cut stuff?
23:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, presumably to suck up to Donald Trump.
23:56
[SPEAKER_01]: But that,
23:58
[SPEAKER_01]: like was step one in basically destroying 60 minutes.
24:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So to talk about 60 minutes a little bit, 60 minutes is successful.
24:06
[SPEAKER_01]: 60 minutes was up, you know, 9% in ratings during the last year, mostly under Barry's watch, because she mostly, it probably is the most successful brand.
24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: in certainly like television news and arguably in American journalism, right, you know, that's like super like popular, well-known and respected.
24:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So the cover story, you know, the cover story that Barry and the elephants have about how they need to remake, you know, the news because it's dying really doesn't fit 60 minutes even if it fit everything else that CBS is doing.
24:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And 60 minutes
24:44
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Kingdoms, so while the people there may not have been happy about what she was doing, I think they generally understood that if she left 60 minutes alone or, you know, mostly left alone, they would be fine.
24:56
[SPEAKER_01]: She has not left it alone.
24:58
[SPEAKER_01]: The Sea-Cot thing was lately bad management except in so far as it
25:03
[SPEAKER_01]: probably made a good impression on the Trump administration.
25:06
[SPEAKER_01]: As a result of it, she ended up firing a bunch of long-time employees, which infuriated Scott Pellie so much that he had a meeting that was covered by every single reporter, even though it should have been a private meeting.
25:19
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, told her new toady Nick Bilton that he has no qualifications for the job and that Barry has no qualifications for the job and got applause from a whole room of 16 minutes employees
25:33
[SPEAKER_01]: building it twice pretty much had to fire Scott Pellie.
25:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's such rank and subordination.
25:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And they did.
25:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, though, built in is desperately trying to to keep the remaining town at Leslie Stalin's cell on from leaving, they've put out a message basically saying if there's any more editorial intervention from Barry, like that won't be tolerated, we'll see who's bluffing there.
25:56
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's clear that Barry has done enormous damage to 60 minutes, and I don't think anyone thinks it's over.
26:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think anyone thinks, and so I just have to ask, like, is that really what she and Allison want for like the single most valuable TV news brand there is, which they own to just be a shell?
26:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, is that was that the goal, and to like lose all of its audience?
26:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I don't think they want to lose their audience, but I think it's a phrase to that they're willing to pay for the larger project, which is, first of all, to please Trump, and then also to remake CBS News, including 60 minutes, as a sort of Trump-friendly right-wing friendly place.
26:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like I think, I think that she has convinced the
26:46
[SPEAKER_00]: of wealthy people that, you know, the way to save news is to replicate Fox News that there's a lot of people who have turned out to wait for mainstream news because it's too liberal.
26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she sold them at story.
27:00
[SPEAKER_01]: The abundant rating evidence to the contrary.
27:03
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no.
27:03
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I'm not saying that they were able with what she's doing.
27:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It is successful or coherent or like makes sense.
27:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is what she wants.
27:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that the Ellison family are willing to go on with it because it is the case that they're pleasing crap.
27:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one could also say something that Barry White was not involved with, which is the, you know, counseling of Stephen Covera, didn't make a lot of sense on a business angle.
27:28
[SPEAKER_00]: All of Covera's audience or a seems to have gone over
27:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So they basically, you know, have enriched their rivals, but it was something that made Trump very happy and made of like a prove it.
27:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think all of this is like, what kind of, all these with the program that you're arguing with, which is what, what I sort of believed, which is, you know, like she is involved in a sort of ideological, political project.
27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: for which, you know, making money is secondary, and she has a luxury of it being secondary because the people that she's trying to please, I will see it for other reasons.
28:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They're wealthy, because of this merger, they're wealthy, because America's a plutocracy.
28:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, I mean, the plutocrats are willing to lose some ratings.
28:15
[SPEAKER_00]: in order to have like a stranglehold on mainstream news to both promote Donald Trump.
28:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And then also to make sure that like criticism of Israel is tamped down upon.
28:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, also, so there's a business successful business model.
28:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we can agree that it's not.
28:32
[SPEAKER_01]: but do they have a stranglehold on mainstream news?
28:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they don't control every channel.
28:36
[SPEAKER_01]: They're losing ratings to the channels that aren't doing this.
28:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And also Donald Trump is most likely not going to be president in two years or so.
28:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And like at some point, there will be Democrats in office again.
28:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So like what?
28:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Who is it?
28:49
[SPEAKER_01]: They're chasing exactly.
28:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, I'm on a different side, like I actually do think that like one aspect of this is it's a symmetrical right like if Donald Trump is unhappy he will punish CVS and the others in family.
29:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, if I mean, I love Democrats are mad that we at the nation are complaining.
29:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but what are they gonna like do we actually think that is gonna be your appraisals?
29:14
[SPEAKER_01]: No of course.
29:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it would be, we would, we would live in a, you know, what's that mean?
29:20
[SPEAKER_01]: You see on Twitter where people post the like futuristic synonyms, okay?
29:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, like, the,
29:28
[SPEAKER_01]: that, but for the prospect of like AOC run FCC that just like, you know, destroys the, the Ellison Empire.
29:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:36
[SPEAKER_01]: This is that.
29:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we should be so lucky.
29:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah.
29:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
29:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just like, yeah.
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, within that asymmetrical background, we're like, you know, one party is like willing to hurt you and the other party will roll over.
29:48
[SPEAKER_00]: than like, I think a lot of what Seem is doing with the Ellison family are doing makes sense.
29:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it is the case that Gary personally cares at all that like she will go down in the history books is basically someone who destroyed American institutions for like terrible ratings and was just like like does that bother her at all?
30:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Like someone who once wanted to like the
30:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, it's a question whether, you know, like, I'm more prop.
30:22
[SPEAKER_00]: He's guiding it.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like, again, I returned to the sort of like, uh, history of Neil conservative as a like, and one can compare it as a figure like Norman Potter, it's where like on the one hand, like he lost everything, right?
30:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he had wanted.
30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: to be a respected New York intellectual, to be praised in the New York Review of Books, to have people like Hannah Renn and Mary McCarthy say, you're the young genius.
30:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And through publishing and making it and then his right-wing turn, all the people he's respected wanted, basically said, you're an idiot, right?
30:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And then like letters came out where Hannah around and very McCarthy are writing back and forth.
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you believe this Norman Potter it's he's an idiot and he has to read all these letters for the people who's like the thinking most wanted the respect of these people and realize that everyone that like he's his approval he craved thought that he's one of the biggest morons in history it is it is on the other hand on the other hand.
31:16
[SPEAKER_00]: he got, like, became a powerful figure in American politics, got the presidential, mental or freedom, you know, be, be, let a movement that, like, we shape the Republican party and it's like, let the war in Iraq and it's now leading the war in Iran.
31:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So, so, so he, well, let's play it, but yes.
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I thought she was a little bit, but I actually didn't think she was a musician at all.
31:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess he died in December, but there had been some initials.
31:42
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a sign in last year, he missed the fall scale war by like two months.
31:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, so so so basically like if you think that like what a figure like part of it's once is our more prof like you know like the respect of people Who's respect I crave then he was a total loser if you think like you know like what he wanted was to be a powerful figure in American life Then like you know he was he was unfortunately one of the most powerful intellectuals that we've had the last 70 years
32:18
[SPEAKER_00]: pretty directly responsible for like at least two or three major wars.
32:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I largely agree.
32:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's only so much credit he personally deserves, but I largely agree.
32:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, it's a certainly occurred to me that there's a lot of spiritual DNA from Norman Pat Horitz and in, where, where, where, where, where, where, where,
32:38
[SPEAKER_00]: and a lot more like what he thought of him as well not just like that he got the political benefits but he got a lot of financial benefits.
32:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He got plunocrats to constantly fund this money losing magazine so he could live like a good upper real cost life and he got them to subsidize his idiot unemployable son.
32:56
[SPEAKER_00]: You know who would not otherwise have a job and they continued to fund him after he's dead.
33:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they're so
33:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So this was the did Norman Potter's loser, did he win?
33:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the same applies very much.
33:12
[SPEAKER_01]: The last line of my obit I wrote in December was one must imagine Norman Potter's happy.
33:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, my answer on this.
33:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, I think this could all be right.
33:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, maybe Barry really does want, but that said, no one ever put Norman Potter hearts in charge of a major media empire.
33:32
[SPEAKER_01]: He ran a money losing magazine, but they're all money losing.
33:35
[SPEAKER_01]: and commentary was, you know, fuzzy and influential.
33:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, similarly, I think that if you rewind a year, Barry is doing quite well on something like the Norman Pardard's trajectory, you know, she left the New York Times because,
33:52
[SPEAKER_01]: she'd flamed out because all the liberals hated her.
33:55
[SPEAKER_01]: She had her sort of dark side turn where she just embraced the right.
33:58
[SPEAKER_01]: She founded the free press.
34:00
[SPEAKER_01]: She got a bunch of rich people to fund it.
34:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And the free press was succeeding.
34:03
[SPEAKER_01]: The free press, or at least had to give the appearances of succeeding.
34:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, who knows how much of this was inflated or whatever, but you know, it certainly seemed to have a large paying subscriber base.
34:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have a much larger non-paying subscriber base.
34:16
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, you know, punching above its way.
34:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It had a big staff.
34:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, no, no, it's okay.
34:20
[SPEAKER_01]: We're taking, because she, she could, she could, she could credibly go around town and did in, in the year before she got the CBS job.
34:29
[SPEAKER_01]: She could credibly go around New York, which she'd return to from her exile in California.
34:33
[SPEAKER_01]: She could credibly go around being like, I showed you all.
34:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I showed you all that I can, uh, uh,
34:38
[SPEAKER_01]: on my own, through my own, Brilliant's and Talent, create a digital media site which is you know, basically in our fallen world, the equivalent of a small, you know, of a little magazine like commentary.
34:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I can found something like that and it can be a success by any normal standard of what would be successful there.
35:01
[SPEAKER_01]: But the thing is a success for a site like that is like you have 100,000 paid subscribers or whatever, who, and you know, everyone who works for that site is someone who wanted to work for Barry Weiss's site, right, though there are stories about her horrible management of them too.
35:16
[SPEAKER_01]: But setting that aside, there are people who bought into what they thought her ideological project is.
35:20
[SPEAKER_01]: they signed up for the job, they applied for that job, they wanted to work for the free press, not for somewhere else.
35:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And so she could run a place built, that was very much the very white show.
35:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I criticized Terva Ciferously during that period, but and I criticized the free press as ethics and the way it covers things.
35:43
[SPEAKER_01]: But I didn't
35:46
[SPEAKER_01]: like it seemed totally like she was within her rights to create such a site and I had to sort of grudgingly acknowledge that it seemed to be going well for her.
35:55
[SPEAKER_01]: But she has no business running CBS news and she certainly has no business running CNN and she's now running an organization staff by thousands
36:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Literally every single person down to the lowest intern is better qualified to run a TV news channel than she is.
36:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They all know it.
36:11
[SPEAKER_01]: They all know she's there because of her ability to suck up to a billionaire who is himself a fail son who didn't earn any of his fortune.
36:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The end for ideological reasons.
36:23
[SPEAKER_01]: She has no relevant experience.
36:26
[SPEAKER_01]: The circle of loyalists around her.
36:28
[SPEAKER_01]: People like Adam Rubenstein also have no relevant experience.
36:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And the audience, like, I think it's like CBS evening news.
36:36
[SPEAKER_01]: She's managed to take it from 4 million to 3 million or something like that.
36:40
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a very rough numbers.
36:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But like, it's just an order of magnitude, bigger at least than what she was dealing with with the free press.
36:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So like, the,
36:53
[SPEAKER_01]: it only works if you believe that they really do welcome all the chaos and all the destruction and all the like if if i mean the first line in her obituary is going to be like she destroyed cbs news and she destroyed sixty minutes you know like that is that is the thing she is accomplished in her life significant uh... but it's not it's not like what most people consider accomplishment
37:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know, but from the her point of view and the others is one of you, it's like, we have 60 minutes is like, you know, small price to pay.
37:28
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I get it, especially from the others.
37:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is, I mean, like, you know, like, it's Machiavelli, like, you know, is better to be feared than loved, because if they hear you, they will love you.
37:38
[SPEAKER_00]: In the end.
37:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So, well, I think what we have seen is that although there are people who fear her.
37:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Almost no one loves her, except her loyalists.
37:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sure, but does it matter as long as people fear you?
37:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like this is a kind of end game of, you know, her type of politics and really frankly her type of Zionist.
37:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it doesn't matter.
38:00
[SPEAKER_00]: if, you know, people love Israel as long as they fear at.
38:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't matter if like Israeli advocates in America are respected or love, you know, as long as people like fear them and certain ideas and criticism of Israel are all off limits.
38:18
[SPEAKER_01]: For the first time in anyone's memory, I think it is plausible that within a few years,
38:25
[SPEAKER_01]: neither party will, will be reflexively pro Israel.
38:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And that will be a sea change in Israel status and the status of the Israel lobby.
38:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can see the panic everywhere.
38:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know, but the panic helps her in the short term because that's why you know, the elicence, what a supporter.
38:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yeah, in the long term, I mean, she's tied to like what I think it was a dangerous and doomed project.
38:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, just in crass political terms, like
38:52
[SPEAKER_01]: we could have the party of Tucker Carlson and the party of, you know, A.O.C.
38:57
[SPEAKER_01]: very soon.
38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Very soon.
39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no.
39:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd be like, in essence, like, whether she'll get what she wants is questionable, but like in terms of like trying to shore up the positions that like she and her cohort have and they they want to maintain.
39:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, she is, you know, getting what she wants.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yeah.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
39:19
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the time will tell, but there might be a good note in that, so I've got to go and thank David Cleand, it's always great talking about Barry Rice, and I think maybe given a wider context to where he stands and then is otherwise available.
39:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope so, always a pleasure.