Eoin Higgins writes:

Only a billionaire could look at the sclerotic state of network television news and conclude that the problem is that coverage is not sufficiently to the right.

Yet that seems to be exactly the conclusion drawn by David Ellison, the billionaire whose company Skydance just bought CBS through a purchase of its parent, Paramount. Ellison’s latest move was to acquire the conservative outlet The Free Press and make the site’s founder Bari Weiss the editor-in-chief of the massive CBS News journalism operation.

CBS News has not exactly been hostile to right-wing politics in the U.S., but Weiss’s elevation drops the pretense of any independence at the network.

Both Ellison, son of billionaire tech mogul Larry, and Weiss are known for their uncompromising support for Israel and demonization of Palestinians and their advocates — the Free Press has gone so far as to stoke genocide denial — and neither the billionaire nor the conservative pundit could have been pleased with CBS’s coverage of the war on Gaza in the past year.

After Tony Dokoupil implied in an October 4, 2024, interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates that the writer was an antisemite for writing about Israel’s system of apartheid in Palestine, the network’s editorial leaders told staff the “CBS Mornings” anchor’s tone did not meet its standards. Weiss’s Free Press published a retort on October 7 from “The Editors” bemoaning that CBS was marking the anniversary of the attack “by admonishing Tony Dokoupil.”

Days later, The Free Press went after CBS again because the head of standards at the network cautioned journalists at the network to, in line with international law, not refer to contested Jerusalem as “being in Israel.”

These are the sort of mild-mannered positions on Palestine we can expect the network to abandon completely — the canary in the coal mine of CBS’s turn from its current, Ellison-led purported independence with a conservative bent to out-and-out right-wing propaganda shop. [Continue reading…]