The Media Research Center continued pretending nothing much has changed under the leadership or new CBS News chief Bari Weiss in Tim Graham’s Dec. 19 podcast:
CBS News hasn’t changed much so far under new Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss. Scott Pelley recently boasted at the Walter Cronkite Awards that no one’s been messing with 60 Minutes as it continues to rail against Trump. But Weiss’s Saturday night town hall with Erika Kirk was attacked by the Brian Stelter Brigade of media reporters as a “lackluster” performance in the ratings. But was it?
A quick Google search told us CBS Saturday nights, especially at 8 p.m., typically draws around 2 million viewers, and the Weiss show came in at 1.9 million. Their magazine shows like 48 Hours also draw modest numbers, around 1.5-2 million for specials/repeats, though ratings fluctuate with programming. Wherever Weiss puts on conservative views in this town-hall format — whether alone or paired with a liberal — the media reporters hate it. These are the same people who wanted to deplatform Fox News.
Graham devoted a Jan. 1 post to complaining that Weiss’ hiring was criticized:
There’s something hilarious in the lefty Hollywood trade magazine Varietychanneling George Clooney attacking CBS News as falling apart and apparently not holding Donald Trump accountable. The leftist press never holds George Clooney and his fellow Hollywood Democrats accountable.
Executive Editor Brent Lang is a typical cozy kitten in this Clooney cover story, channeling his view that Trump’s lawsuits against the media were “frivolous.” Variety is frivolous.
Variety‘s headline emphasized Clooney’s “GFY” bravado: “If CBS and ABC had challenged those lawsuits and said, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ we wouldn’t be where we are in the country. That’s simply the truth.”
[…]Clooney has energetically pushed the leftist myth of CBS News standing up against McCarthyism under Edward R. Murrow, and constantly comparing that hackneyed leftist crusade to the present day, and who cares if the Soviet Union actually infiltrated the country with spies after World War II? Who cares about The Truth again? Not Clooney. He’s naturally pissed at Bari Weiss for daring to move CBS one inch toward the center.
“Bari Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak,” Clooney says. “I’m worried about how we inform ourselves and how we’re going to discern reality without a functioning press.”
For her part, Weiss handled Clooney by inviting him in, sending Variety this statement: “Bonjour, Mr. Clooney! Big fan of your work. It sounds like you’d like to learn more about ours. This is an open invitation to visit The CBS Broadcast Center, where I’m spending the holidays working to relaunch the Evening News with my colleagues. Tune in January 5.”
Rather than actually address Clooney’s claims, Graham raged at him instead:
To the Clooneys, a “functioning press” means going Full Jim Acosta all the time. It’s in the pose and in the lunge at The Right-Wing Enemy, not in the facts. Clooney thinks the Glory Days at CBS apparently include Dan Rather’s Fake News about George W. Bush’s National Guard record, not to mention Rather screaming at his father about Iran-Contra. But he let Robert Redford embarrass himself with the Fake News Movie on that front.
When the Rathers and the Steve Krofts cuddled up to the Clintons or the Obamas, well, that was not “dismantling CBS News.” Because its purpose is to advance the “right side of history,” not holding that side accountable.
Remember that last year, Graham and the MRC had a meltdown when CNN brodcast a performance of the Clooney-starring Broadway show “Good Night And Good Luck,” and columnist Christian Toto personally attacked Clooney.
We documented how Curtis Houck tried to rage on Weiss’ behalf in a Jan. 3 post, touting alleged “messages of support” for the “reimagined CBS News” without saying who made them.
He went on to huff that Status writer Joe Passanatino’s idea of rebuilding public trust “sure seems to be one of authoritarian submission and forced acceptance of liberal progressive narratives where all that ails the country is the fault of moronic, uneducated conservatives.” As if Houck’s idea of public trust is for networks to push right-wing narratives where all that ails the country is the fault of liberals. Indeed, Houck accused both Passantino and UK Independent writer Justin Baragona of launching “mean girl smears” at Weiss and Dokoupil.
Graham returned to grouse in his Jan. 7 column:
The British socialist newspaper The Guardian is upset that CBS News might become less radical, publishing an article provocatively titled “‘Blood in the water’: Bari Weiss’s chaotic first three months in charge of CBS News.” They want Bari to bleed.
This spin announces an agenda: Weiss Must Be Stopped! The Left cannot stand any outlet on their side moving two degrees toward the center. Any tiptoe to the middle is “anti-journalism.” Any hint at an opposing conservative view is a slippery slope to “misinformation.”
Guardian “media & power reporter” Jeremy Barr quoted a pile of anonymous CBS staffers in service to his anti-Weiss agenda. He referred in this story to a previously unreported November 6 “blow-up among staffers about language choices when writing about transgender individuals.”
[…]Now this is where the rubber meets the road. Wokeness dominates the elitist media. “Style books” are surrender manuals to ideological manipulation of terminology. Facts are shredded in favor of feelings. So you get Orwellian terms like “gender-affirming care” to describe trying to erase your actual gender.
Graham didn’t explain why he opposes such terms — instead, he ranted that non-right-wingers say such things:
Don’t mention biology. “Noun phrases like biological men, biological males, biological women, or biological females are often used by anti-trans groups to invoke a person’s assigned sex at birth as their ‘real’ gender, in contrast to their gender identity.” You have to love “real” in quotes.
Don’t say the ideologues are ideological. The term “gender ideology” is described as “a charged term commonly deployed by anti-trans commentators and activists that implies trans people, merely by being trans, are participating in a political activity or have a political agenda.”
They are. That’s obvious. That’s why they are intimidating the media into a political lingo.
Of course, Graham is trying to do the exact same thing — intimidating the media into a transphobic political lingo. He’ll never admit that, of course.
Meanwhile, the MRC refused to mention things that don’t reflect positively on Weiss, such as her claim that President Trump used “anti-Jewish tropes” in a 2020 interview.