"If all this comes to pass, it will cement [Bari] Weiss as a key figure in shaping the national news environment, just five years after her much publicized resignation from the New York Times..."

"... over what she characterized as a censorious and hostile workplace. This came in the wake of the resignation of the editorial page editor, James Bennet, after a staff uproar over the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece calling for military intervention against Black Lives Matter protesters.... If Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press goes through, Weiss will probably be in a position to recruit a network of snitches and rightwing thought police, both from within existing CBS staff and from her own publication, ensconced throughout one of the four largest US media conglomerates. CBS staffers are reportedly 'apoplectic' at the news of her impending role.... When Trump first ran for office, Weiss positioned herself as a 'Never Trumper'.... [Later] she saw the left’s 'overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him' as 'extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses'.... ... Trump could never operate in the kinds of spaces where Weiss has been able to flourish.... [S]he is uniquely well-suited to champion the prerogatives of those in academia, media, publishing and similar sectors who feel threatened by progressive social movements."

From "Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?/After leaving the New York Times, she turned her Substack into an unshakable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, Weiss is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites" (Guardian).

"This is the product of a bunch of hacky bad millennial writers sitting around in a room trying to think of something quirky that two Gen X past their prime comedians can do to appeal to Zoomers on TikTok, even though their actual audience is baby boomers."

Said Matt Walsh, on his podcast yesterday, trashing a Jimmy Fallon "Tonight Show" sketch:

 

And I liked this — at 00:30:32 in the link above — about cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show: "There's a lot of speculation that Colbert got canned by CBS for criticizing Trump too much, which is, I mean, total nonsense.... If you're firing somebody because you don't like what they're saying... you're not gonna give them another year on the air... to, you know, with nothing to lose... to continue criticizing Trump. It doesn't make a lot of sense." 

Giving Colbert 10 more months to speak seems to mean that CBS is not trying to silence him and probably is cancelling him for the reason it's giving: money. I would add that it also seems to mean that it wants even more speech from Colbert — much harsher, more aggressive attacks on Trump. CBS lit a fire under Colbert and turned him loose to express himself without the need to preserve the show.

That prompted me to prompt Grok like this: What are some movies where a character finds out he has only a short time left to live and because of the awareness of his compressed life span, he finds far greater meaning tha[n] had been available to him when he was rolling along living life as if death was only vaguely hovering about in the fog of the seemingly distant future? Obviously, there's "Ikiru." There's "Dark Victory." But there must be a thousand. Help me expand this list. (Grok's answer.)

In short — in jort — I think CBS wants the opposite of silence from Colbert. It wants bigger, broader, more stabbingly painful satire... even as it also must stop hemorrhaging money.

"Colbert gets no advertising and late night is a tough spot. Colbert might be No. 1, but who watches late night TV anymore?"

Said an unnamed person who, the NYT Post assures us, knows what he's talking about, quoted in "CBS canned ‘The Late Show’ over tens of millions in financial losses annually — not Stephen Colbert’s politics: sources."

Millions = between $40 million and $50 million a year.

Are these losses because people just don't watch what's "on TV" anymore? We've lost the habit of winding down at the end of the evening with the talk shows the network runs in that time slot? Or is there a problem of Colbert's show leaning to one side politically and spurning the opportunity to appeal to half the people in the country? 

RedBird’s Jeff Shell, the former head of NBCUniversal who will run the network once the [Skydance-Paramount] deal is done, has been crunching the numbers and finding that CBS is a “melting ice cube” with its losses and cost overruns, a source said. The plan is to enhance CBS Sports and invest in “truth-based” news at a network that conservatives have long ripped for its alleged liberal bias.

Are those the scare quotes around "truth-based"? Much as the quotes made me laugh and want to poke fun, I think they are more likely to signify that the Post is quoting Jeff Shell. Same thing with "melting ice cube." I don't think the Post was trying to help us idiots understand that that CBS is not literally a melting ice cube. They were just giving Jeff Shell credit for the turn of phrase. Now, the interesting question becomes what does Shell, who's about to be running the network, think "truth-based" means?

The Post has learned that Ellison is now telling people that with the [Trump's] lawsuit settled the Skydance-Paramount deal will get FCC approval by mid-August.

Ellison = Skydance CEO David Ellison, "the son of Donald Trump pal and tech billionaire Larry Ellison. 

While Ellison is predicting imminent regulatory approval, it will come at a cost: FCC chairman Brendan Carr is likely to demand conditions to remedy what he believes is left-wing news bias in programming that violates agency “public interest” rules that govern local broadcasting as opposed to cable.

More quotation marks. I'm just going to guess that the highly abstract term "public interest" is something in the vicinity of "truth-based." Or... maybe it's something more like the word that got us started on Stephen Colbert — "truthiness."

"Truthiness" was The Word of the Year 2006. Colbert launched it thusly, back when he began his excellent show "The Colbert Report":

And on this show, on this show your voice will be heard... in the form of my voice. 'Cause you're looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I will speak to you in plain simple English.

And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, "Hey, that's not a word." Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart.

ADDED: Here's Colbert, in July 2016, relocated to "The Late Show," talking about his old word "truthiness" and presented the new word "Trumpiness":

"An Anonymous Source Goes Public/Ali Diercks, who was crucial to a major #MeToo story involving the CBS executive Les Moonves, talks about why she started sharing information."

That's the headline for today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast.

We hear the Times reporter Rachel Abrams speaking with a lawyer, Ali Diercks, who chose to leak information about the document review she was doing for CBS after Les Moonves resigned from his position as the company's chairman and chief executive.

Here's the story Abrams co-authored back in 2018, based in part on the confidential information Diercks shared with her: "'If Bobbie Talks, I’m Finished’: How Les Moonves Tried to Silence an Accuser/A trove of text messages details a plan by Mr. Moonves and a faded Hollywood manager to bury a sexual assault allegation. Instead, the scheme helped sink the CBS chief, and may cost him $120 million."

Diercks's law firm, Covington & Burling, unsurprisingly, figured out that she was the source of the leak and she lost her job and her law license.

Diercks to Abrams: "Our career trajectories were thrown in diametrically opposed orbits by the same thing, the same catalyzing event. You know, a scoop like this is going to make your career and ruin mine at the same time."

Abrams, summing up: "She lost her career and struggled in isolation. I got a bigger profile and ended up with a book deal."

Glenn Greenwald taunts the ridiculous entity known as CBS News PR.

CBS News has decided it's once again safe to use Twitter - but only for the moment!

They are continuing to "assess security concerns" and "monitor the situation."

If there are more outbreaks of free speech or hearing from people journalists dislike, they may retreat again. https://t.co/o0ZtgFshCk

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 20, 2022

Somebody... or everybody... is lying.

"President Trump claimed last week that 'some' former presidents privately confided to him that they support his mission to build a border wall. As of Monday, every living president has said otherwise" (CBS News).

ADDED: A comment by sdharms makes me see how it could be that no one is lying. The comment is "so? HRC talked to Eleanor Roosevelt and no one had a problem with that." It could be that none of the living presidents have confided to Trump that they support building the wall, but some of the dead presidents have communicated with him. It's possible that George H.W. Bush, while still alive, spoke to Trump about the wall, but Trump said "some," so it must be more than one, and so something supernatural is needed for it to be true that no one is lying.



OH, WAIT: I'm working my way further into the CBS article, because I wanted to see exactly what Trump said and to think about whether there's weaseling over the question of what it means to "support his mission to build a border wall." The quote you see there is CBS's paraphrase of whatever it was that Trump said. Trump might mean that he's spoken to former Presidents who support some sort of physical barrier at the border, and the former Presidents who want distance from Trump are denying support because they don't support exactly the kind of wall that Trump has been talking about. But as I read the article, I was astounded — because I'd relied on "every living president has said otherwise" — to find this:

Mr. Obama is the only living president who has not explicitly denied having this conversation, and his office did not return a request for comment from CBS News. But Mr. Obama has repeatedly spoken out against Trump administration immigration policies and made clear since the 2016 campaign that he does not support a proposed wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Politico also pointed out that Mr. Obama and his successor have not had any extensive conversation since the 2017 inauguration.

"The departure of Mr. Moonves marks a stunning reversal for an executive who is credited with turning CBS into television’s most-watched network..."

"But he has been under intense pressure since July, when The New Yorker published an article by the investigative journalist Ronan Farrow in which six women accused Mr. Moonves of sexual harassment. On Sunday, the magazine published another article by Mr. Farrow in which six more women detailed claims against Mr. Moonves.... When the most recent television season ended in May, CBS was the nation’s most-watched network for the 10th consecutive year — an accomplishment that had made Mr. Moonves one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood... By the time Mr. Moonves left Warner Bros. to lead CBS Entertainment in 1995, he had a record-breaking 22 series on the air, including megahits like 'ER' and 'Friends.' At that time, CBS was last in the ratings and catered to an older audience that enjoyed series like 'Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman' and 'Touched by an Angel.' Mr. Moonves finally turned things around for good in 2000, when 'Survivor' and 'C.S.I.' debuted within a few months of each other.... Hit after hit started to appear on CBS, from 'NCIS' to 'The Big Bang Theory.'"

From "CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves Steps Down After Sexual Harassment Claims" (NYT). There have been 2 articles about him in The New Yorker, both by Ronan Farrow, one published just yesterday, the day his resignation was announced. There has been an investigation of him going on since the first article was published last March. Leading the investigation were Nancy Kestenbaum and Mary Jo White, both lawyers who are former federal prosecutors. White was head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Obama administration.

Here's the new New Yorker article, which has an update stating the Moonves stepped down 3 hours after it was published. Excerpt:

One of the women with allegations against Moonves, a veteran television executive named Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb.... Moonves, she recalled, came into her office in the middle of a workday and suggested the two of them go out for lunch. Instead of taking her to a nearby restaurant, she said, Moonves drove her to a secluded area. When Golden-Gottlieb began to ask if he was having trouble finding a parking space, she said that Moonves “grabbed my head and he took it all the way down onto his penis, and pushed his penis into my mouth.” She said he held her head in place forcibly. “He came very quickly,” she recalled. “You sort of just go numb. You don’t know what to do.” Distraught, Golden-Gottlieb demanded that Moonves take her back to the office. When she got there, she said, she vomited. “It was just sick,” she told me. She didn’t report the incident at the time because she was a single mother supporting two children and feared for her career. “I realized he was the new golden boy,” she told me. “I just kept quiet.” But the incident, she said, “never left me.”

After she rebuffed Moonves, Golden-Gottlieb said that Moonves retaliated against her professionally, moving her into ever smaller offices. “Every two days, he’d find a darker space, or a place downstairs, or something,” she recalled. She told me that her career in the entertainment industry suffered, which she attributed to his influence at Lorimar and, later, CBS. “He absolutely ruined my career,” she said. “He was the head of CBS. No one was going to take me.”

"Incidents of sexual misconduct by Charlie Rose were far more numerous than previously known..."

"... according to a new investigation by The Washington Post, which also found three occasions over a period of 30 years in which CBS managers were warned of his conduct toward women at the network."

An additional 27 women — 14 CBS News employees and 13 who worked with him elsewhere — said Rose sexually harassed them. Concerns about Rose’s behavior were flagged to managers at the network as early as 1986 and as recently as April 2017, when Rose was co-anchor of “CBS This Morning,” according to multiple people with firsthand knowledge of the conversations....

“I had been there long enough to know that it was just the way things went,” said Sophie Gayter, now 27, who worked at “60 Minutes” in 2013 when, she said, Rose groped her buttocks as they walked down an office hallway to a recording studio. “People said what they wanted to you, people did what they wanted to you.”

People? So not just Rose.

Lots more at the link.

"CBS boss told me to sleep with coworkers to get ahead..."

Alleges Erin Gee, referring to Robert Klug of “CBS Evening News,” the NY Post reports.

Klug... said “she should ‘have sex’ with [the] video editor who had been difficult to work with to ‘break the ice,’ ” according to court papers.

“I couldn’t believe that was his advice,” Gee said. “I was looking for help, and he looked at me like, ‘You don’t matter, and this is what you should do to make this guy like you.’"...

Klug was eventually promoted to executive director for CBS News, and shortly after, another male boss told Gee that Klug “had asked him whether he had had sex with her or the other women under his supervision,” the suit says.....

Gee reported that incident internally, and she was later demoted to weekend news.

"Letterman’s replacement: Can he (or she!) please be a grown-up?"

WaPo's Hank Stuever asks, and I'm more interested in why one would ask for a "grown-up" than in who the grown-ups are who could actually do the old-fashioned gig that is a late-night talk show. Me, I'm beyond grown-up. I'm old. Not as old as Letterman, but old. I watched a good bit of Johnny Carson back in the 60s and early 70s, in the days before you could record a TV show, when the fact that a show came on late actually meant something. And my kids and I eagerly consumed TiVo'd Letterman back in the 90s.

This blog began in '04, and when I look through this blog's Letterman tag, I don't find material that is based on my watching the show as a show, just news stories and clips I consumed because things were being talked about on-line. In 2009, I had "Is it really so terrible that David Letterman has a bachelor pad in the building where he tapes his show?" and "Oops, Letterman really is the lecher he seems to goofily pretend to be." How did he survive that? I guess the Women Warriors of America were not so fierce 5 years ago. And that was not long after he got in so much trouble mocking Sarah Palin that NOW took Palin's side of the argument.

Sharyl Attkisson resigns — after 2 decades with CBS News — "frustrated with what she saw as the network’s liberal bias..."

"... an outsize influence by the network’s corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said."

She increasingly felt that her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air.

At the same time, Attkisson’s reporting on the Obama administration, which some staffers characterized as agenda-driven, had led network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting. She is currently at work on a book — tentatively titled “Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington” — that addresses the challenges of reporting critically on the administration.

The book can be pre-ordered at Amazon, here, but its scheduled publication date isn't until November 4, 2014. That's election day, which is an odd choice. Why not get it out before election day... as long as you're fighting for truth? Maybe she's planning on writing it over the course of the election season, covering the elections, and hitting the airwaves after the election, analyzing things and selling the book.

CBS News says Sharyl Attkisson's computer was hacked by a "sophisticated" intruder.

"The intrusions were detected in December, when Attkisson was reporting almost exclusively on the government’s response to the terrorist attacks on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.... Attkisson has previously investigated the Department of Justice’s gun-tracking operation known as 'Fast and Furious.'"

Attkisson said she had noticed unusual activity in her CBS-issued laptop and her home computer, such as dormant computers spontaneously “waking up” at odd hours. The unusual activity, which also had included disruptions on her home phone line, predate the December 2012 breach that CBS confirmed....

“This wasn’t any ordinary malware of a phishing attempt,” that is, an effort to gain personal information, she said. “I assume someone wanted to see what I was working on.”

“The privacy and security of every American citizen in his own home, not to mention the work of a journalist, is sacrosanct. The idea that an unknown party could come into your home electronically is upsetting and disturbing. . . . People should be disturbed that a reporter would be spied on and intimidated this way. I do feel that this was an attempt to make me feel intimidated.”

"I don't know why you guys ask me, I'm just here to bring diversity to this set, give kind of the white man's perspective."

Doug Gottlieb on CBS before Marquette-Miami game last night.

Later in the evening, having noticed the criticisms on Twitter, his co-commentator Charles Barkley said:

"I know this has nothing to do with the game. I wanna say something about Doug Gottlieb. He made a joke earlier tonight. All those people on Twitter who are going crazy, which I would never ever do, listen me Kenny, Greg Anthony, and Greg Gumbel didn’t take that personally so all you people at home who've got no life who are talking bad about Doug Gottlieb get a life. It's no big deal."

Big deal or not, Gottlieb apologized — "It was not a smart thing to say and I apologize" — which I take it is kind of the white man's perspective.

"What President Obama really said in that '60 Minutes' interview about Benghazi."

"Two days before the election, CBS posted additional portions of a Sept. 12 '60 Minutes' interview where President Obama seems to contradict himself on the Benghazi attack."

Why wait until exactly now? Why not earlier or after the election? 3 letters: CYA. And: They think Romney will win.

CBS distorts what Ann Romney said about Mitt Romney's "mental well-being."

The headline at CBS is:

Ann Romney: If elected, "mental well-being" Mitt's biggest challenge

She was asked what her "biggest worry is if her husband does in fact become President." I got the quote from the video here at 6:14, where you can see that the inquiry is about Ann Romney's feelings. She answers:

"I think my biggest concern, obviously, would just be for his mental well-being. I have all the confidence in the world in his ability, in his decisiveness and his leadership skills, in his understanding of the economy, in his understanding of what's missing right now in the economy - you know, the pieces that are missing to get this jump-started.... So for me I think it would just be the emotional part of it."

She was asked about her worry, not what his biggest challenge would be. She didn't say he was mentally challenged. She expressed confidence in his ability to do everything, and then characterized herself as caring for his emotions, which is the traditional wifely role. To present that as some sort of secret revelation of emotional problems is just wrong.

Memo to CBS and Katie Couric: Release the unedited Palin video.

In "Going Rogue," Sarah Palin criticizes CBS for editing long interviews into the most damaging soundbites and making her look stupid and irritable. There's an easy solution: Release the unedited video. There is a lot of material in the book making assertions about all sorts of trenchant comments Palin supposedly made. Palin says she was asked the same questions over and over in an effort to elicit a bad answer. She says that some of her answers were clipped after some simple beginning and before she delved into details that would have made her look smart and knowledgeable. It would be very easy to check if we had all the video. Put it up on line.

Sarah Palin on prayer and homosexuality. (And I find a blunder in the CBS transcript.)

From Couric's interview with Sarah Palin:

Couric: Your church sponsored a conference that claimed to be able to convert gays into heterosexuals through prayer. Do you think that gays can be converted, governor?

Palin: Well, you're absolutely wrong, again, on the facts. My church, I don't have a church, I'm not a member of any church. I get to visit a couple of churches in Alaska when I'm home, including one, Wasilla Bible Church, and that's the one that you're talking about.

Couric: Right. I think James Dobson's group … had a convention or a meeting there. And your church…

Palin: No, I think they …

Couric: …supported it.

Palin: The Wasilla Bible Church had a flyer that was part of a bulletin or something …

Couric: But you know what? That doesn't even matter. Let me just ask you the question.

Palin: Well, it matters, though, because, Katie, when the media gets it wrong, it frustrates Americans who are just trying to get the facts and be able to make up their mind on, about a person's values. So it does matter …

Couric: … you're correcting us.

Palin: But you are talking about, I think, a value here, what my position is on homosexuality and can you pray it away 'cause I think that was the title that was listed in that bulletin.

It seems obvious to me that it should have been transcribed: "what my position is on homosexuality and 'Can You Pray It Away?'"

Palin is referring to the title of a program that was listed in a church bulletin. Not transcribing it as a title, in quotes, makes it seem as though she might be expressing an opinion. Indeed, that original transcript flaw seems to have led a copy editor to make it into a much worse blunder.

Look at the CBS article reporting on the interview with excerpts from the interview:

But what you're talking about, I think, value here, what my position is on homosexuality and you can pray it away, because I think that was the title that was listed on that bulletin.

See that? "[M]y position is on homosexuality and you can pray it away...." It's not a question anymore! "Can you" has become "you can," and not presenting it in title form makes it seem as though she might be expressing the opinion you can pray it away.

The video clip with the article does not include that line, so it's very unlikely many readers will notice the way the words got rearranged, and I think many will read that as an initial statement that you can pray homosexuality away.

Back to the original transcript, as she goes on to refuse to say what she thinks about the power of prayer and sexual orientation:

And, you know, I don't know what prayers are worthy of being prayed. And I don't know what prayers are gonna be answered or not answered. But as for homosexuality, I am not going to judge Americans and the decisions that they make in their adult personal relationships. I have, one of my absolute best friends for the last 30 years who happens to be gay. And I love her dearly. And she is not my "gay friend." She is one of my best friends who happens to have made a choice that isn't a choice that I have made. But I am not gonna judge people. And I love America where we are more tolerant than other countries are. And are more accepting of some of these choices that sometimes people want to believe reflects solely on an individual's values or not. Homosexuality, I am not gonna judge people.

This seems to reflect good Christian values. I hear the echo of Jesus's words: "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible" and "Do not judge, or you too will be judged."

Now, Palin does speak of choice: "She is one of my best friends who happens to have made a choice that isn't a choice that I have made." Does that mean she thinks sexual orientation is a choice? It could simply mean that the friend has chosen to act in accordance with her sexual orientation. Oddly, that interpretation would mean -- if we apply logic -- that Palin too has a homosexual orientation. Settle down. Think about it.

If Palin believes sexual orientation is not a choice, then she should have said: "She is one of my best friends who happens to have made a choice that isn't a choice I have had to make." If I were to hold Palin to high linguistic standards, I would conclude that unless Palin is saying that she herself is a lesbian, she is saying that that homosexual orientation -- and not just homosexual behavior -- is a choice.