Can Super Bari Save Moribund CBS? Fiery RFK Jr. Hearing. Don’t Be So Defensive—It’s the War Department. Time Running Out for NYC Mayor’s Race. And More
Gob smacked by a second Trump administration, the legacy media has all but turned up its heels and died. Yet just when we thought it was RIP for the MSM, CBS (of all places) is poised to possibly do something radical. Puck News reports:
With Paramount securely in his pocket, David Ellison is on the verge of acquiring Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and tossing her the keys to CBS News. The deal is on the 1-yard line, I’m told.
National Review suggests that CBS is “rethinking its life choices.” Dan McLaughlin writes:
What’s interesting, and suggests a broader rethinking of the future of CBS, is that this comes six weeks after Paramount and CBS pulled the plug on The Late Show and sacked its host, Stephen Colbert. Taken together, the two moves imply that an ossified, closed-minded, smug, and unreflective liberalism just doesn’t have a future in attracting a mass audience in today’s shifting media landscape.
Maybe nobody does, and maybe a benefit of bringing in Bari Weiss, like a benefit of ending The Late Show rather than recasting its host, is simply to cut costs by eliminating a whole lot of well-compensated people who have been working on money-losing ventures for the network for a long time. But either way, this may not be your grandpa’s CBS for very much longer.
Liberals are fuming about this development:
“David Ellison vowed not to politicize Paramount — yet his first big move at CBS News is a major bet on Bari Weiss, one of the most polarizing figures in media,” Oliver Darcy began his newsletter Wednesday night. “Weiss, the stridently pro-Israel, proudly anti-‘woke’ culture warrior, has built her brand on polarizing political commentary — supposedly the type of material Ellison signaled to reporters that he wishes to run away from.”
Darcy warned, “Handing Weiss the keys won’t broaden trust — it will further erode it among the people who actually watch the network, reinforcing suspicions about Ellison’s agenda. In effect, the move will set CBS News on a course to squander its hard-earned credibility with the audience that reveres its history and demands it stand unbowed to power.”
Further erode trust among the people who actually watch the network … this is a small number, who cares? Weiss already has proven with The Free Press that she can produce first-rate journalism valued by readers on both sides of the aisle. Weiss is not conservative, but rather a classical liberal. Still, successful journalists who are snapped up by legacy outlets rarely fare well. Think how long it took for Megyn Kelly to regain her footing after her stint at NBC. But if anybody can do it, it’s Weiss.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hearing before the Senate Finance Committee yesterday was fiery, and Kennedy gave as good as he got. Reviews were mixed. Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel’s review (“RFK Jr.’s Goat Rodeo“) can be summed up in one word: ouch. Strassel writes:
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has married ineptitude to pet obsessions, producing a goat rodeo for the ages. New week, new mess: purgings, resignations, policy reversals, conflicts of interest, elimination of transparency. The agencies Mr. Kennedy oversees—the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health—already had problems after years of politicization and squandered credibility. Now they have problems on RFK levels of testosterone.
RFK’s MAHA base will seek to make this about ideology, to claim their hero is being attacked because of his views. Those views certainly provoke criticism, but that isn’t the root of the problem. Strip away how one feels about food dyes or processed food, Covid boosters or failed “experts,” and you are still left with a mess. Consider the HHS secretary on the metrics of good (political) business: strategic goals, performance, customer satisfaction. Especially as this agency oversees a quarter of federal spending.
One big problem: RFK alone among Mr. Trump’s cabinet members is pursuing his own agenda, not the president’s vision.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal (“RFK Jr.’s Operation Warped Memory”) charged that Kennedy did not “keep his vaccine story straight.” Vice President J.D. Vance defended Kennedy on X. There was plenty of grandstanding, little decorum, and harsh questions from both Democrats and Republicans.
Kennedy did take a scalp—it belonged to Senator Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren: “I know you’ve taken $855,000 from pharmaceutical companies, Senator,” Kennedy told her. No biggie. “Everybody in this room took Big Pharma money,” said Senator Bernie Sanders. The Washington Times credits Kennedy with “beating back Senate Democrats’ blistering barrage of attacks Thursday accusing him of eviscerating vaccine policies.” Jesse Watters said last night on Fox that Kennedy had caught out Dems in lies.
Score One for Harvard? Maybe not. A federal Judge has ruled that the Trump administration illegally canceled $2.2 billion in grants, but an editorial in the Wall Street Journal calls it a Pyrrhic victory for Harvard, as President Trump won’t quit his efforts against the Ivy League school. The issue is antisemitism at Harvard.
After the Trump administration sank a speed boat carrying 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang of “narco-terrorists” and a cargo of death-dealing drugs, the Left is lionizing the late gang members. “Leftists Add Narcoterrorists to Their Mt. Rushmore Heroes” at American Greatness is worth a read.
We’re learning more about former President Biden’s autopen from a new batch of emails. Based on the new emails, we may now know more than Biden ever did about “his” sweeping grants of clemency in the waning days of his administration. A concerned staffer said that Biden didn’t even “review the warrants.” More on the fiasco here.
Meanwhile, the former president has been spotted in recent days with a bandaged head from skin cancer surgery (he also has stage 4 prostate cancer). We wish him well in his recovery.
Billionaire Bill Akman has done a stunning U-turn and is now backing former Governor Andrew Cuomo for Mayor of New York. If President Trump has a plan to thin the race, in an effort to prevent socialist Zohran Mamdani from becoming the Mayor of the financial center of the country, time is getting close. The New York Times recently tried to soft-pedal Mamdani’s self-proclaimed socialism. Ken Girardin writes in City Journal that voters need to take Mamdani’s socialism very seriously.
Mamdani’s latest is that he wants to debate President Trump one-on-one. Mamdani seems to have rejected the more realistic idea of debating one of his actual opponents, Andrew Cuomo, who has challenged Mamdani to debates:
“Let’s cut out the middle man. Why should I debate Donald Trump’s puppet when I could debate Donald Trump himself?” Mamdani’s campaign told Fox News Digital in a statement. “If Donald Trump is serious about intervening in the mayoral race, he should come to New York City and debate me directly about why he’s cutting SNAP benefits for hungry New Yorkers to give tax breaks to his wealthy donors.”
President Trump is signing an executive order today restoring the original name—the War Department—to what we have called the Defense Department since 1947. It will take an act of Congress to restore the old name. Powerline’s Bill Glahn applauds the name restoration in an item headlined “The End of Euphemism.”
I’ve mentioned author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell’s admission that he had lied about his views on a panel a few years ago. Gladwell pretended he approved of men in women’s sports. Douglas Murray is brutal:
Gladwell’s schtick might be to say banal things in ways that appear spicy and new. But he has made a very good career of it and been lauded by his peers.
Yet this week, he admitted that he is a coward….
In fact, in all the decades I have debated my own views in public, I don’t think I’ve often come across someone so willing and indeed eager to debate in bad faith.
But his admission helps us to understand something about the incentive structures in our own society.
