The Difficulty of Reform in Journalism

I watch the Fox news with Bret Baier most nights and then I dip into the CBS evening news. Interesting contrast. Baier plays his news pretty straight, but he annoys me at times, especially in his interview sessions, when questions go unasked. But there are real interviews almost every night. And he does give toughness a go, even with conservative guests. The overall quality of the Fox news coverage—from the White House, Capitol Hill, State and Defense Departments and overseas correspondents—is solid and sometimes quite good, well within the forty-yard-lines on most issues; it leans away from liberal assumptions common on other networks, while slouching into some from the right. The presidential debates Fox has broadcast have been stronger, as a rule, than those on the other networks. The election night unit (sometimes to Karl Rove’s dismay) and polling operations are independent and excellent. The Baier show is an hour, so there’s a lot more of it—but it seems more substantial than the traditional network shows, which on some evenings slouch toward extended weather reports. Fox can be good, even if its evening roster of hyperbolic hosts is mostly despicable.

I watch CBS out of habit, respect and loyalty. I spent years as a commentator there, mostly on weekends and election nights. Some of the best people I’ve known in the business—and some of my better friends—come out of that shop. But the nightly news is lighter than most feathers these days. Hard news drifts into snowstorms within minutes. Stories about policy are few and far between. After the first and second blocks, you’re into human interest and celebrity stories. Most nights, you get about 12 minutes of actual news, which rivals the old Camel News Caravan with John Cameron Swayze (he had 15, packed solid with newswire dispatches). There is strong investigative reporting, still brilliantly handled, on 60 Minutes, and the CBS Sunday Morning News is often delightful…but there is something missing. It’s been missing on all three of the traditional networks, and also on CNN, in recent years—and that is true balance on the most sensitive issues. In a way, the problem began with Walter Cronkite, who came out against the war in Vietnam (at least, he recognized it as the disaster it was) after the Tet Offensive. I thought it was heroic at the time; I more than agreed with his assessment; the war was an abomination.

But the door was open after that…and a new generation of journalists—my peers—came storming out of the Ivies, intent on napalming past traditions. Skepticism about politicians—which is the appropriate journalistic posture—was supplanted by cynicism…and cynicism is much too easy (and safe) for most journalists. Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre. Beneath the casual sneer, there was a default position—against the police and small business, and the culture of the military and people of faith. This is accompanied by the reflexive blessing of well-intentioned, but ineffective, government programs. The mainstream press, like the Democrats, think a government program has “succeeded” when the bill is passed and the funding distributed. Rarely do we ask: is this well-managed, well-conceived? Does it actually work? (Tim Walz, ineffably clueless, is Exhibit A.)

Head Start, for example, is beloved—and unquestioned—by libs. There was a massive government study more than twenty years ago that showed the damn thing didn’t work. No one followed up on it. Why was that? The pilot programs, carefully run by educators, usually succeeded. The theory of early education was sound. So I asked Barack Obama’s domestic policy advisor why the results in the study were so dismal. “Because,” she said, “it’s a jobs program not an education program.” That seemed outrageous, a vestige of 19th century urban political machine corruption. Educating poor kids should be a top priority of good governance. But the liberal establishment came down on my head when I wrote about the study, bristling with vitriol and anecdotes (“I work for a really good head start program!”). And deeper, and more outrageous, was the leftist belief, usually sotto voce, that the corruption and ineffectiveness didn’t matter so long as money was going to poor communities.

When I became aware of the prevailing bias, especially regarding racial issues, it was difficult to unsee. It was subtle, but near-universal. For years, for example, the left has been selling the fantasy of black voter suppression and the mainstream media have been lapping it up… without ever noting that blacks tend to vote as a higher proportion of the electorate (14%) than their demographic strength (13%). This stands to reason: The state means more to them. Blacks have gotten disproportionate support from the government since the mid-1960s. They represent 18.7% of the federal work force. They vote their interests. (There is an equally foolish right-wing fantasy, nourished by Fox: election fraud, which is practically nonexistent.)

At the same time, the network news workforce has been “democratized” and “sensitized” and “diversified”—and, I dare say, sanitized—to a trice. You feel it constantly, mostly in the absence of complexity. Or, at times, in the absence of voices like Stephen Miller, obnoxious as he is, in pieces about the dreadful CECOT prison camp in Salvador. The subtle drip of illiberal poison was so bad, and so taken for granted, that Tony Dokoupil, of the CBS Morning News, was nearly defenestrated for daring to ask the intellectually sloppy Ta-Nehisi Coates tough questions about his dashed-off, third-rate, arguably anti-Semitic book about the Middle East.

So let’s talk about Bari Weiss. There has been a big hoo-hah on the left about her ascension to the presidency of CBS news. The drones have been targeted her way since her journalistic venture, The Free Press, was bought for $150 million by the Ellisons, who were, simultaneously, seeking approval a big media merger from the Trump administration. As Jonathan Chait recently argued:

[E]ven if Weiss’s objections were completely merited and followed procedure, it is impossible to take them at face value given the context in which she is operating.

By this logic, in order to maintain her credibility, Weiss would have had to make a bold stand in favor of the DEI and the flaccid illiberalism into which CBS News had fallen. Indeed, the opposite is true: Weiss’s larger purpose in delaying the 60 Minutes story about the CECOT prison may be, I hope, to challenge the prevailing culture and assumptions of network news, to try something new—something, I’d hope, as smart and fresh as The Free Press, which surprises and challenges me almost every time I click on. Here is the important thing about Weiss: she is, defiantly, not a populist.The Free Press is clever and complicated—and it eschews the fake news and foolish pap of the Trumpist right, as well as the inane wokery of the left. It is the best sort of honest broker: variable in its points of view, and vehemently written. If Weiss turns CBS into a sibling of The Free Press, the sanity caucus will be thrilled. It is a voice we need.

A good part of Weiss’s problem with the left is her support for Israel, which tends toward Likudnikery and is too vehement for my taste. But she makes no bones about it; it isn’t a hidden bias and other views about Israel are welcome. A deeper part of the left’s problem with Weiss is its inability to grok irony. A lefty website recently began a piece:

“The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax.” This is what Bari Weiss’s The Free Press wrote in April about CECOT.”

The piece went on to suggest that Weiss delayed the CECOT story because she was soft on concentration camps, or the Salvadoran dictator, or trying to aggrandize Trump, or all three.

But I remember the story in question. It was written in TGIF, the weekly truth-satirical column supervised by Weiss’s clever wife, Nellie Bowles. It was written, pen in cheek, about the pols who suddenly wanted photo-ops at the infamous cage. Bowles goes on:

The El Salvador supermax prison is becoming the new Ohio Diner. It’s the new Iowa State Fair. It’s the new Jeffrey Epstein jet: It’s where every political leader needs to visit, the place to see and be seen if you’re ambitious and in politics today. Journalists will be hanging out at the prison to get everyman voices from the El Salvador supermax. Lobbyists will be standing by the metal detectors, pollsters in the outdoor gym yard. A gorgeous steakhouse will open up in the nearby shantytown (I actually have no idea what’s nearby the supermax, but I assume it’s a shantytown). And at the rate we’re going, soon TGIF will be written from inside one of the cells.

Get it? Bowles is taking aim at the inevitable banality of the current media process, impaling left and right and mushy center.

TV—and illiberalism—abhors irony, I suppose….unless it is neon-labeled “This is Irony” and deposited in late-night precincts, like The Daily Show, which shares Bowles’s outlaw spirit (from a far more conventional direction). Ideologues can assay sarcasm—speaking of sneers, I give you Greg Gutfeld—but irony is too delicate a trope.

Network TV has come to abhor tough questions, not just in interviews, but in the stories it chooses to cover—and to avoid the gruesome realities of this world, like war. Talk about sanitizing! How often do you hear: “Some of these images may be disturbing.” Not compared to the real thing. How about showing what battle wounds actually look like? How about not using loaded, and inaccurate, terms like “gender-affirming” therapy?

And that is where I hope Bari Weiss is heading. Uncomfortable truth and un-woke questions would be a start. She may not get there, the institutional forces against her are formidable and their pomposity beyond imagining—but I sense they may be exhausted, and not as formidable as they think. The overkill is in full flutter now. Every day brings a new Bari story. This is the callous and shallow and evanescent way that J School pundits and professional media critics work, tethered to their easy chairs. And when they are proved wrong, they do not look back and acknowledge their mistakes. (Believe me, I’ve been through that wringer several times.)

It will certainly take far more than a few months to make any real judgment on Weiss’s CBS. I hope she takes chances and makes mistakes along the way; it will show she’s trying new stuff. But you can count on this: If she does succeed in renovating TV journalism—and turns the network evening news into something worth watching again—you won’t hear about it from the sour tribe now trying to tear her down.

And the sale is still on! Refitted for the New Year, if you can bear the thought. You can still subscribe for free, but it would be nice if you kicked in: