Recent Items

Coffee Break: Bari Weiss’ CBS Not an Auspicious Beginning to Total Info Control

Posted on by

Bari Weiss’ CBS tenure so far shows that for Larry and David Ellison, buying a media empire is one thing, imposing total information control is another.

The Ellisons’ Master Plan for Media Domination

The plan was simple enough, if audacious in its ambition.

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, and briefly the wealthiest person on Earth, would buy controlling shares in TikTok, Paramount/CBS, and Warner Bros. Discovery and establish his nepo baby son David as a modern-day Citizen Kane, key Trump ally, and Hasbara enforcer #1.

The vision was breathlessly described by the tech dystopia enthusiasts at The Mirror Review as “building influence across three layers:

  1. The content people watch
  2. The platforms that deliver it
  3. The algorithms that decide what rises to the top.

Sounds unstoppable, irresistible, and better yet, inevitable.

Citizen Kane, Junior

New York Magazine’s Vulture has a cleverly-titled long-form profile of David Ellison, “The Son King” that outlines the Ellisons’ vision:

It’s possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past 20 years in the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth around $18 billion and couldn’t afford Paramount, which was valued at $22 billion. By last year, the $6 billion Larry spent to help David buy the company barely made a dent in his fortune, which briefly peaked in September at close to $400 billion.
…
Larry has long harbored more globe-spanning ambitions. Even before starting Oracle, he dreamed up a giant conglomerate he would someday build called Universal Titanic Octopus.
…
In the past year, Oracle has become central to the artificial-intelligence boom, providing back-end computing power for OpenAI and others looking to build the LLMs of the future. In September, after Oracle reported a potential windfall of AI-infused revenue, its stock shot up so much that Larry’s net worth increased by $89 billion in a single day.

Later this month, the company is also set to acquire a stake in the American version of TikTok. All of that combined with David’s ownership of one and perhaps two major studios, as well as one and perhaps two major news networks — Paramount owns CBS, and Warner owns CNN — has spurred concerns that the suddenly omnipresent Ellisons are building an empire that could dwarf even the Murdochs’.

TikTok and Paramount fell to the Ellisons in due order and they quickly put their stamp on CBS News.

Bari Weiss Didn’t Come Cheap

Bari Weiss, fearless centrist teller of “truth” to power, media rebel with a (zionist) cause, and re-imaginer of American college education was brought on board to run CBS News.

And it wasn’t cheap, either.

Paramount paid a reported $150 million in cash and stock for Weiss’ publication The Free Press, inspiring Adweek to write an article titled “Why Paramount Paid $150 Million for a $20 Million Media Company.”

Sage insights included:

Paramount is paying 7.5 times revenue for the outlet.

The multiple places the deal outside normal media economics, according to interviews with four digital media M&A experts. In most transactions, both legacy and digital outlets trade at five to 15 times EBITDA, not revenue.

But for Paramount, the tie-up is more of a strategic decision than a strictly financial one…

The company is not buying The Free Press for its profit stream today. Instead, it is making an investment in an outlet whose positioning, talent, and potential to scale could swell dramatically when plugged into the broader CBS News platform.
…
The acquisition also doubles as a high-profile acqui-hire.
Founder Bari Weiss — along with her network of contributors and relationships — is the core asset Paramount wanted

And what an acqui-hire she’s been.

Bari Weiss’ CBS Shiteshow

Somehow Bari Weiss, despite having zero experience as a reporter, news editor, television producer, or bureau chief, has not gotten off to a smooth start at CBS News.

The perception that the Ellisons were buying CBS to please POTUS Donald Trump enraged the MSM and put a bullseye on Bari’s back.

Real schadenfreuders might enjoy Zeteo’s recap of Weiss’ first 10 days at the network or Jezebel’s kick-her-while-she’s-down account.

I’ll jump to The New York Times’ summary of her tenure:

“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.”

Ms. Weiss has achieved that goal — perhaps not in the way she hoped.

Her reimagining of CBS News has faced heavy scrutiny, and even became a punchline on her own network: At Sunday’s Golden Globes, broadcast by CBS, the host, Nikki Glaser, earned one of her biggest laughs when she declared that CBS News was “America’s newest place to see BS news.”
…
That Ms. Weiss’s news division merited a mention at a Hollywood awards show speaks to how the disruptions at CBS have penetrated the culture beyond the media in-crowd — and underscored questions already hanging over her bumpy stewardship of a major news institution.

…problems have piled up. Mr. Dokoupil’s debut weeknight telecast on Jan. 5 was marred by a teleprompter issue that left the anchor grasping for words and shaking his head with frustration in front of millions of live viewers. “First night, big problems here,” he conceded. The blunder occurred in part because Ms. Weiss and her aides were rewriting the “Evening News” script up until minutes before the 6:30 p.m. airtime, three people with knowledge of the events said.

…(Weiss) caused a firestorm last month when, at the last minute, she postponed a “60 Minutes” segment that was critical of the Trump administration. The correspondent who reported the segment called the move “political,” and Ms. Weiss faced accusations that she was, at best, mismanaging staff and, at worst, censoring journalism to please President Trump.

The segment finally aired last night, apparently in an effort to bury it by putting it up against the NFL playoffs, but this screengrab of news coverage about the news segment shows Streisand was in full effect.

It’s not just the liberal MSM that’s been bagging on Bari, the poor girl is taking fire from the right as well.

The National Review dumped all over her work saying:

Weiss’s vision has got it all backward. The pursuit of virality, combined with the narcissistic goal of being the focus of the news, is a key reason why our industry is in the sorry state it is.

Recall that poor news judgment and a sense of self-importance are the very things Weiss criticized when she first gained prominence as an intra-industry critic of major media.

Megyn Kelly told the Turning Point USA audience that Weiss is “making anti-Semites” and went on to say:

“It’s this very loud group of pro-Israel activists that is trying to make this the litmus test about whether you get to call yourself a conservative, and they lack standing to do that,” Kelly said. “Bari in particular has made her career on the anti-cancel culture thing. Meanwhile, she’s never been canceled.

I’m not even going to get into the ridiculous “Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil” debacle.

Worst of all, from the Ellisons’ perspective, Bari Weiss’ CBS is bleeding viewers.

Variety has the deets:

Overall viewership for the first five days of Dokoupil’s official run on the venerable CBS News program was off 23% from what the program captured a year ago, when then-anchor Norah O’Donell was leading viewers through news of tumultuous California wildfires and the run-up to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Dokoupil’s first five days, from January 5 to January 9, won an average of nearly 4.17 million, according to data from Nielsen, compared with nearly 5.4 million in the year-earlier period

Among viewers between 25 to 54, the demographic favored most by advertisers in news programming, the audience also fell 23%, according to data from Nielsen. Dokoupil’s first five days captured an average of 533,000, compared with 690,000 a year earlier.

The numbers pale in comparison to results at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “NBC Nightly News,” which captured overall crowds of nearly 8.1 million and nearly 6.73 million, respectively.

And advertisers do not appear eager to associate their clients with Bari Weiss’ CBS News.

But that’s small comfort to Americans distressed to see CBS credulously repeating claims from the Trump regime that the “ICE agent who shot Renee Good suffered internal bleeding.”

The decision to run with that story created considerable internal concern at CBS, according to The Guardian:

The network’s top editor, Bari Weiss, expressed a high level of interest in the story on an editorial call on Wednesday morning, according to staffers who listened.

“There was big internal dissension about the ‘internal bleeding’ report here last night,” the CBS News staffer, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said. “It was viewed as a thinly veiled, anonymous leak by [the Trump administration] to someone who’d carry it online.”

“Felt to many here like we were carrying water for the admin’s justifying of the shooting to keep our access to our sources,” said a second network staffer, who was also not authorized to comment.

To add insult to injury, The Donald isn’t even playing nice with the eager-to-please-him network.

Despite Bari and Donald excitedly kissing one another on the cheek when they met at the site of CBS’ interview with the POTUS, the administration threatened to sue the network (again):

Moments after President Trump finished taping a 13-minute interview on Tuesday with the “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil in Michigan, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, approached Mr. Dokoupil and his colleagues to convey a message from the president.

“He said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape, make sure the interview is out in full,’” Ms. Leavitt said in an even tone, according to a recording of the exchange obtained by The New York Times.

“Yeah, we’re doing it, yeah,” Mr. Dokoupil responded.

Ms. Leavitt replied: “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”

But check this out from Dokoupil’s interview with Trump (Via Due Dissidence):

Trump: I’ve only been here for 11 months, okay? And you know, the first few months were really rough if you look at them because I inherited a mess.

I inherited a mess of crime. I inherited a mess of inflation. I inherited a mess of places closing up and going to other countries.

And now we have the hottest country in the world. Tony, we have now the hottest country in the world. And a year and a half ago, our country was dead. We had a dead country.

You wouldn’t have a job right now. If she got in, you probably wouldn’t have a job right now. Your boss (Larry Ellison), who’s an amazing guy, might be bust. Okay?

I doubt it in his case, but you never know. Let me just tell you, you wouldn’t have this job. You wouldn’t have this job. Certainly, whatever the hell they’re paying you, our country is rocketing right now. We have the hottest country in the world.

I put the Donald’s message to Larry Ellison in italics, translation: “If it wasn’t for me you could be bankrupt. Well, maybe not in your case, but you never know.”

And bullying is the least of the betrayals Trump has inflicted upon the eager to please Ellisons and their nascent empire.

But to tell that tale, we’ll have to leave poor Bari behind and get into the Ellisons’ attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.

The Ellisons Might Not Get WBD

David Ellison’s Skydance acquired Paramount in early August of 2025.

Within six weeks, The Wall Street Journal was reporting that the Ellisons were preparing a bid for WBD.

Variety tried to explain the Ellisons’ timing:

Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait until WBD splits in half — to form Warner Bros. (HBO Max and studios) and Discovery Global (TV networks) — a transaction CEO David Zaslav says is on track to be done in April 2026? The WBD separation is designed to boost the value of its streaming and studios businesses by carving off the declining TV arm. Paramount Skydance could make a play for the standalone Warner Bros. without assuming the baggage (including the lion’s share of WBD debt) of the entity that will house CNN, TNT, TBS, Discovery and other nets. And through a deal for standalone Warner Bros., Paramount Skydance would still get its hands on the key growth driver going forward: HBO Max. (The mind reels at what a fused HBO Max-Paramount+ might be rebranded.)

One possibility is that a Larry Ellison-backed M&A play for WBD has been part of the Skydance strategy all along. The idea would be “to consolidate media assets during a period of industry-wide instability and build a conglomerate with a streaming-first focus wrapped with TV and film studios and potentially a larger linear television portfolio,” MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman wrote in a research note Thursday.

And the advantage of moving now is that it could “preempt a potential bidding war for only the Warner Bros. Streaming & Studios assets post-split,” Fishman noted. “By acting now, [Paramount Skydance] positions itself to secure the entire company before rivals can cherry-pick the most attractive assets.”
…
MoffettNathanson’s Fishman speculated that Paramount Skydance could see big benefits by pooling its TV business with WBD’s. “Overall, we would expect material cost synergies from the overlapping cable networks,” he wrote — i.e., layoffs. Fishman added there there are “presumably a high level of synergies from combining CBS News with CNN plus the long-term existing partnership between CBS and Turner with the NCAA’s March Madness Final Four.”

As for why the Ellisons wanted WBD to go with Paramount, these charts (via the Entertainment Strategy Guy) go a long way toward explaining the motivation:

As strange as it might seem, in 2026 Paramount and WBD are relatively minor players in the streaming wars. Without WBD’s assets (primarily HBO), Paramount will be a barely-profitable also-ran.

Plus WBD owns CNN, and it’s well known that The Donald wants to see CNN under new management.

Unfortunately for the Ellisons, Netflix swooped in and seems to have won WBD with a counter-offer.

I won’t try to summarize the blow-by-blow, but The LA Times has a good timeline of the war for WBD.

For our purposes it’s enough to know that Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos thought to personally woo Trump before making the offer.

CNN’s Brian Stelter caught Trump at the Kennedy Center Honors and reported that:

Trump confirmed that he met with Ted Sarandos recently & called Sarandos “a great person,” but expressed reservations about the combined market share of Netflix-Warners. Newsiest quote: “I’ll be involved in that decision.”

That didn’t stop the Ellisons from counter-lobbying, per the WSJ:

Ellison’s father, billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a Trump ally, called the president after the Netflix deal was announced and told him the transaction would hurt competition, according to a White House official and a person familiar with the matter.

…

During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN, a common target of President Trump’s ire, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.
The White House declined to comment. A White House official said they don’t comment on Trump’s private conversations.

Unfortunately for the Ellisons, our Donald is a slippery one who doesn’t appreciate being taken for granted, from the same WSJ piece:

Trump has so far avoided publicly backing a bidder. “None of them are particularly great friends of mine,” he said at a White House roundtable on Monday. A person close to Trump said the president will want Paramount and Netflix to compete for his approval of a deal.

Trump has told aides he wants to be kept regularly apprised of any potential antitrust probe into Netflix’s deal for Warner. A spokesman for Attorney General Pam Bondi said while it is still early days, she and the DOJ’s antitrust division will oversee this merger.

Trump continues to toy with both bidders via social media posts.

But when it comes to putting his money where his mouth is, the conflict-of-interest-in-chief might be betting on Netflix, per Variety:

President Donald Trump bought at least $500,000 worth of bonds in both Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery within the two weeks following the two companies’ deal, under which Netflix is to acquire WB’s studios and streaming businesses.

According to a financial disclosure form released Friday by the White House, Trump bought between $250,001 and $500,000 of Netflix debt securities on two separate dates, Dec. 12 and Dec. 16. He also bought the same range of bonds for Discovery Communications (a WBD subsidiary) on those same dates.
…
According to the White House, Trump’s financial portfolio is independently managed by third-party financial institutions — and neither Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested

That’s got to be a kick in the teeth to the Ellisons.

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had been among the financial backer’s of Paramount’s bid for WBD, pulled out of the deal as well, per Axios:

Affinity Partners, the fund tied to President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, has backed out of Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
…
“With ​two ​strong competitors ​vying to secure ​the future ​of this ​unique American ​asset, ​Affinity ​has ​decided no longer to pursue ​the opportunity,” an Affinity spokesperson said.

“The dynamics ​of the investment have changed significantly ​since we initially became ​involved ​in October. We ​continue to ​believe ​there is a strong strategic rationale for Paramount’s offer.”
…
Affinity Partners never had a substantial stake in the bid, sources told Axios, but some believed Kushner’s affiliation with the Paramount offer could help Paramount with any regulatory scrutiny.

Some 60% of the $40 billion in equity funding for Paramount’s latest offer came from sovereign wealth funds, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Company and the Qatar Investment Authority.
Kushner is believed to have helped Paramount broker some of those funding relationships.

But the Ellisons are not giving up and The Hollywood Reporter has the details on their most recent move:

On Jan. 12, Paramount sued Warners, escalating its fight and seeking an order that would force the company’s board of directors to show its work, betting that bringing that information to light will help its case. And Ellison also announced his intent to launch a proxy fight for Warner Bros. should the company continue to not engage.
…
To be clear, a proxy fight is not yet a sure thing. Paramount is betting that its lawsuit can pry out new data that could sway investors or force WBD to engage, which is its preferable course of action. The suit and proxy threat are simply the logical next step in the process.

The window for WBD to set its annual meeting opens in about three weeks, and Paramount could nominate a slate of nominees that would force deal talks. If WBD scheduled a special meeting to approve the deal beforehand, Paramount could wage a proxy campaign to vote “no.”

And Netflix could still adjust its offer, either by raising the price, or by moving to an all-cash deal, a move that could box Paramount in and force them to reraise themselves.

The Ellisons may be going to the mattresses to get WBD, but their war chest isn’t as full as they might wish.

Oracle Ain’t What It Used to Be

What a difference six months makes. Oracle’s stock is down 20% from it’s high in September due to cooling enthusiasm for their AI investments.

And Oracle’s debt is doing even worse (chart from December 12, 2025 via Bloomberg)

And now Oracle bondholders are taking them to court, per CNBC:

Oracle was sued on Wednesday by bondholders who say they suffered losses because the company chaired by billionaire Larry Ellison failed to disclose it needed to sell significant additional debt to build out its artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The proposed class action was filed in a New York state court in Manhattan on behalf of investors who bought $18 billion of notes and bonds that Oracle issued on Sept. 25, two weeks after Oracle announced a $300 billion, five-year contract to supply OpenAI with computing power.

These investors said they were blindsided when Oracle returned to the capital markets seven weeks later to obtain $38 billion of loans to fund two data centers to support the OpenAI agreement.

Looks like it’s easier for a billionaire dynasty to announce its intentions than it is to pull them off.

Short Term This Is Funny, Long Term, Not So Much

David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher put things in historical context for The Guardian in “Bari Weiss’s ascent at CBS News was 50 years in the making” from October when Weiss was hired:

…as abrupt as this Orwellian turn may seem, it is no sudden pivot – it is instead the culmination of a scheme launched a half-century ago by some of America’s most influential power brokers…

…almost exactly 50 years before Weiss’s appointment, CBS’s own president was boasting of his support for a conservative, antidemocratic political project and bragging about his efforts to shift his news division’s media coverage away from scrutinizing corporate power.

…a prominent tobacco industry attorney named Lewis Powell penned a 1971 call to arms for the nation’s largest lobbying group, the Chamber of Commerce, and its corporate members.

“Much of the media – for varying motives and in varying degrees – either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these ‘attackers’, or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes,” Powell wrote. “The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs, but to the daily news analysis, which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system. Whether this criticism results from hostility or economic ignorance, the result is the gradual erosion of confidence in business and free enterprise.”

They take it back to today at the end of the piece:

In the Trump era, there is no longer any attempt to obscure what’s really going on. Nine years ago, as Trump was starting his authoritarian ascent and bashing journalists, CBS’s CEO didn’t sound an alarm – he instead seemed thrilled, declaring that the circus-like environment “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”.
…
It’s right there in our faces – which means we can start calling all of this what it has always been: not merely a crass short-term business play, but a decades-long effort to destroy whatever’s left of the fourth estate that is supposed to deter authoritarianism.

Powell’s effort succeeded in reducing the Fourth Estate to the rubble through which Bari Weiss scurries as she attempts to avoid the stomping feet of King Kong Donald Trump.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but this kind of thing makes me appreciate info-shelter provided by the Naked Capitalism community.

Related Posts:

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Subscribe to Post Comments
3 comments

  1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

    I didn’t even mention the absolutely pathetic numbers CBS is getting on YouTube and X. Zero “virality.”

    Also there was some analysis on Due Diligence about there being no audience for CBS News — the oldsters who have been watching CBS News remember Dan Rather and Walter Cronkcite and hate what they’re seeing; no younger people are demanding interviews with Alan Dershowitz et al.

    Reply ↓
  3. ambrit

    It is very “interesting” to see YouTube listed as an Information Source alongside the old style news media and new style streaming services. I have always viewed YouTube as an Internet content source. Does YouTube underwrite any “new” content? I believe that it is simply an aggregator of ‘content’ produced by others. This ties in with the point made above about Weiss wanting to actually “be the news.” All this sounds eerily like Welles’ character Charles Foster Kane ‘creating’ a war to boost circulation.
    Like everything else today, the News has reverted to its status during the Robber Baron Era.
    Stay safe.

    Reply ↓

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *