“She is murdering 60 Minutes,” Scott Pelley said to his new executive producer, Nick Bilton, about Bari Weiss during a meeting on Monday that might as well have been live-streamed to our esteemed media reporter class (given the speed with which the remark was summarily spread online through what appears to be several recordings). “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
The whole spectacle of Weiss taking over CBS News is one of the most befuddling and perplexing to write about of the kerfuffles I’ve kerfuffled.
On one hand, repeated studies have shown that the group of people running big, mainstream institutional media since the 1990s is the most sanctimonious, full-of-themselves group of professionals ever assembled in human history.
Believe me, I worked at a giant media organization, and hardly an employee there didn’t think of themselves as the barrier against a new dark age. If anyone so much as suggested they might empty their wastebasket, a company-wide town hall was convened to assert the newsroom’s commitment to democracy. (That commitment rarely applied internally, however, as the mainstream media newsrooms were hierarchical, top-down workplaces to a degree that would make the military blush.)
Après moi, le déluge was the personal motto of every employee.
And as their work became steadily more mediocre and less relevant over the past few years, individual egos continued to swell to the size of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats.
So I get the instinct to roll your eyes at this one. Broadly, ensconced media lifers are the worst possible spokespeople for the cause of journalism and have been crying wolf so long that we are almost incapable of hearing them any longer.
But a funny thing happened. While they were busy crying wolf, the wolf showed up.
And now we’ve got to decide what we’re going to do about it. Because the problem with Hollywood is that an industry that has lost its way as deeply as this one invites the wolves in.
The Bari Trojan Horse
Entertainment used to be a pretty straightforward proposition – you produce hits, you make money.
It helped if you marketed them well. If you could cut some corners on the costs, you’d make a bit more money. There were gimmicks like sequels that milked ever more out of the hits. But basically, it was a business of hits.
Which meant that the people who ran it for generations, however venal or corrupt, could never stray too far from the idea that they needed the things they made to be good, to make people happy. And the various business models flowed out of that – how to make more money on hits and lose less on flops; if possible, to even have fewer flops.
Now, we find ourselves in a world where the programming no longer has any intrinsic value — apart from serving the goal of the greater firehose, the greater service. We don’t know what things cost, we don’t know how much they make, we don’t know what constitutes success when you spend $200 million to produce a season of a show.
Now we really don’t know a thing.
And increasingly for those companies, their Hollywood holdings are a tiny sliver of their portfolios.
So what’s all of this got to do with Bari Weiss?
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