the media Research Center’s anger that Bari Weiss is being criticized for her stewardship of CBS News continued in a ranty Jan. 22 post by Curtis Houck:
This week, there was another cascade of sophomoric hit pieces against CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil for publicly expressing the need for CBS to regain the trust of more Americans. Hilariously, the smears ignored the newscast and wider network’s record of recent bias, including 96 percent negative coverage of ICE in Minneapolis.
Four separate hit pieces seethed over Weiss and Dokoupil as possibly overseeing a “pancaked, Wile E. Coyote-style” “death spiral” and state of “dysfunction” refusing to “value the standards held by veteran journalists” and instead turning to “bile” and “boilerplate jinoism”from half the country.
First, The Ringer thought it was edgy in “The Five Farcical Principles of the ‘CBS Evening News,’” but it came off like a sneering, prepubescent Mean Girl trying to humiliate a rival in front of the entire study body.
Brian Phillips screeched from the get-go that David Ellison “hired a conservative former New York Times opinion writer with no TV experience to remake the news division, and she gave Dokoupil, a cohost of CBS Mornings best known for accosting Ta-Nehisi Coates over Israel, the anchor’s job.” In other words, Phillips wants you to believe Dokoupil has little media experience (instead of decades at CBS, The Daily Beast, MSNBC, NBC, and Newsweek).
“It’s going horrendously. I don’t mean there have been a few minor speed bumps; I mean the bus is pancaked, Wile E. Coyote–style, against the side of the mountain. Ratings have nosedived. The broadcasts have been beset by basic technical errors,” he giddily said, citing Megyn Kelly as proof the right hates him too.
Most notably, he showed the power of The Borg known as the elite, legacy, liberal press as, when they want a narrative, they can will it into existence[.]
Houck went on to rant that his current favorite nightly newsreader who isn’t on Fox News or another right-wign channel, Tony Dokoupil, is getting panned:
As far as Dokoupil goes, Steinberg said his “nascent tenure….has been marred by awkward segments,” citing all the usual hits that left liberals triggered, whether it be the Rubio memes, speaking about parental rights in making medical decisions without derision, refusing to spend minutes on end marking January 6, and their Renee Good coverage.
Back in reality, Dokoupil’s CBS Evening News was actually more negative toward ICE than competitors on ABC and NBC and, in one show, called Good’s death a “murder.”
But given all these manufactured negative headlines, Steinberg expressed faux dismay that CBS’s “attention” has been “taken…away from actual scoops and newsgathering” and that Weiss is, for lack of a better term, a tough boss.
Houck didn’t explain how those takes on ICE and Good were in any way inaccurate — he’s just mad that they don’t conform to his preferred right-wing narrative.
Houck also made sure to rage at Oliver Darcy, as is the MRC’s custom:
Status’s snake of founder Oliver Darcy was spitting in his cup Tuesday night at Status over anonymous sources telling him that, prior to Sunday’s 60 Minutes finally airing the delayed piece on the El Salvadoran jail CECOT, “Weiss was busy working the phones with reporters…to shape the coverage around it.”
Huffing she “wanted to personally explain to reporters how it made its way to air and offer her perspective” on background, Darcy whines “it is rather unusual for a network boss to personally call reporters in the middle of such a controversy.”
Using plenty of anonymous sources, Darcy claimed “Weiss expressed significant frustration with Alfonsi, who had declined to make changes to her piece at Weiss’ behest” and that she would have the nerve to “complain…about” their workplace when “strong leaders keep disagreements within the house.”
Houck made no effort to disprove anything Darcy wrote; he just whined that Darcy’s sources were anonymous — a good move considering how desperate Houck is to unmask anyone who dares criticize Weiss and Dokoupil.
The next day, Tim Graham complained that CBS under Weiss wasn’t far-right enough:
The leftists on social media have hilariously caricatured CBS News under new Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss as “CBS Newsmax,” like it’s lurched dramatically to the right. But if you’re monitoring CBS in real life, there’s plenty of evidence that “classic CBS” is still operating. In recent days, CBS has proven to be worse than ABC and NBC in its tilt to the left.
A new NewsBusters study of ten days of evening news coverage of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after the death of Renee Good found that CBS statements on ICE were 96 percent negative, compared to 91 percent on ABC and NBC.
On CBS, 26 of the 27 sound bites were critical of (or, more often, outright hostile toward) ICE. Both ABC and NBC aired 21 such sound bites, versus each offering only two that were positive.
CBS never explicitly admitted that Renee Good hit ICE agent Jonathan Ross with her car moments before he fired at her. ABC and NBC did so only once each. CBS reporter Nicole Sganga even described this event as the “murder” of Good, despite no charges being filed yet.
Perhaps that was because Good did not, in fact, hit Ross with her car. Is Graham demanding that CBS make up lies about Good? It sure seems that way. He continued to whine that CBS under Weiss was being unfairly judged:
There are some examples of a better CBS – Minnesota-based Jonah Kaplan is the only broadcast TV reporter explaining the massive Somali fraud in that state. New Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s interview in Detroit with President Trump was firm, but respectful. The “CBS Newsmax” scolds would prefer classic CBS, where Dan Rather yelled at George H.W. Bush about ruining America in the eyes of the world. Later, Rather’s interviews would basically kiss the Clintons on both cheeks.
Everyone knows the entrenched leftists at CBS mock Weiss for having no experience in TV news, and making some rookie mistakes. But none of these “CBS Newsmax” people objected when NPR hired Katherine Maher, a CEO with no newsroom experience and a pile of crazy anti-Trump tweets. The issue isn’t the experience on your resume – it’s the perceived ideological tilt.
So there is a rash of panicky stories quoting anonymous leftists inside the network – the ones who don’t care about staying in third place for decades as long as they’re airing their rages – describing Weiss and Dokoupil’s arrival as a complete disaster.
Yet Graham did not contradict any point made by those “anonymous leftists” — and he didn’t explain why a person with no experience in TV news shouldn’t be judged regarding her leadership of a major TV news operation.