GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Pauline Kael-ism is Alive and Well in the Hollywood Press.
Hyper-partisan rage bait content is fundamentally boring. It’s nothing but chicken soup for the Progressive Resistance soul. It reveals nothing important and it appeals only to the fragile emotional state of a notoriously tiny ratings demographic. But the networks do it anyway, because “Resistance” to TrumpHitler has become the moral imperative of their lives.
And that is why reliably liberal Bari Weiss, of all people, is suddenly such a threat. The Left cannot risk a CBS News that is not automatically oppositionally defiant to Trump. And so, the Hollywood Press has reflexively attacked Weiss. Variety called her a “provocateur”, a label they conspicuously did not apply to Jimmy Kimmel, despite a deliberately provocative Charlie Kirk monologue which got him (temporarily) pulled from the air and triggered a liberal media orgasm. John Oliver went on his HBO show and waved away Weiss’ entire body of work by declaring it “irresponsible and deeply misleading” and “right-leaning”… without providing a single example. Other outlets complained that Weiss has no experience running a news organization, this despite having built a successful $150 million media company from scratch. You would think that a media which celebrates Meghan Markle as a “female founder”, and where iconic American media companies are disappearing more often than they are being created, might hail Bari Weiss as one of the most important media figures in recent American history. Alas, that is not the world in which we live.
What’s most unbelievable about all this is the fact that whatever Bari Weiss does with CBS News, it will remain a liberal media outlet, perhaps even a progressive one… it just won’t be propaganda, that’s all. But Weiss cannot be allowed to pull back on the reins of one of the left’s most beloved propaganda machines even a little bit. She must be destroyed, or at least fatally hobbled, before she can show the world what it looks like when a news organization follows the facts wherever they lead, calls balls and strikes without fear or favor and isn’t reflexively hostile to anything not of the Progressive Left. Because if she is successful, and if Ellison can use her success as one part of building a successful studio which is not dependent on partisan rage and anti-Trump ODD, then the entire progressive media resistance project could collapse entirely.
Weiss has already collected her first scalp:
The head of CBS News’ standards and practices unit — who presided over some of the network’s recent controversial, woke reporting — is out as new boss Bari Weiss looks to bring more balance to the left-leaning network.
Claudia Milne, who ran the division responsible for the moral, ethical and legal implications of CBS programming, is the first senior executive to leave the network since Weiss arrived as editor in chief earlier this month.
Although Milne’s job had been “slowly phased out,” a CBS source called her departure “significant.”
“She was part of the woke mob at CBS News. It shows an editorial shift in how CBS will operate,” the person said, speculating that “this is Bari’s first scalp.”
I don’t know if “scalp” is the right word, but I do know that Milne would probably prevent it from being uttered on air out of concerns that it might offend two-spirit indigenous people.
Milne, who oversaw her unit since 2021, played a pivotal role in a host of eyebrow-raising decisions. Those ranged from coverage of the transgender Nashville, Tenn., shooter and spiking an Elon Musk interview to the network’s recent reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict, among other issues.
As previously reported by The Post, in 2023, Milne and then-news division president Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews banned staffers from using the word “transgender” when reporting on the Nashville shooter.
The decision sparked outrage at the network because police working the case had identified the killer, Audrey Hale, as a transgender woman. Sources said Ciprian-Matthews and Milne spent 15 minutes telling staffers not to report Hale’s identity because it may not be relevant to the shooter’s motive.
You can see why she had to go. Failure to report Audrey Hale’s status as a transgender person stripped the story of its most important fact: the motive of the killer. She went on that rampage BECAUSE she was transgender; it was not an incidental and hence unimportant tidbit.
For years, we’ve run these two tweets by Iowahawk and Jim Treacher as “evergreen.” If Weiss can actually strip them of their “evergreen” status, she will have accomplished a major change to how television news is reported:
Related: Debra Saunders adds: The New Editor-in-Chief of CBS News Is Not Like the Others. “Some critics actually are arguing that balance requires that CBS and Weiss not hire with an eye to adding non-liberals to the workforce. They don’t acknowledge that, under their watch, the pendulum went way too far. It’s laughable because Weiss, 41, is hardly a hardcore conservative. She’s a married lesbian who supports abortion rights, for crying out loud. But these days, if you support newsrooms with diverse thinkers, that makes you a right-wing tool.”