Funeral services for CBS News, day and time, TBA (but real soon)

The Substack-page-owning Bari Weiss is now editor-in-chief of Cronkite and Murrow's old CBS News, which at present is owned by Paramount, which is owned by Skydance, which is owned by the billionaire Oracle scion David Ellison. He expressed "confidence" in her "drive and editorial vision."

Ellison's vision drove him to forking over $16 million to Donald Trump to settle a lawsuit he could have easily won. His vision also led him to pay $150 million for Weiss' Substack page, The Free Press. A Substack page.

Weiss, captured on film by the L.A. Times as she was "getting the joke."

In a howdy memo to CBS News staff, Ms. Weiss sketched the "core journalistic values" she holds and "will continue to champion." That's a big problem. For one of her values is a dubious allegiance to "fairness" and "facts." Let's take a look at both, beginning with her Substack assessment of President Biden's June debate.

She wrote, "For me, it always seemed easy enough to say: Biden’s 81. He’s fading. Most 81-year-olds do." Do they? Is that a fact? Was it fair of Weiss to say that as a fact? I don't know if "most" 81-year-olds are "fading" — and neither did Bari Weiss. That much was evident in her absence of evidence about a subject that strikes me as rather quickly researchable.

The journalism problem here lay not in Weiss's "observation" of Joe Biden's mental state. The problem was that her appraisal of it was "easy enough." Too easy. A veteran news reporter and commentator once asked the young, inexperienced me if a certain person with our radio network was a legal affairs correspondent. I made the huge mistake of answering, "I think so." (That was easy enough.) The veteran reporter shot back, "I don't care what you think. I need to know."

Another of Weiss's memo-ed values is "hold[ing] both American political parties to equal scrutiny." Logic suggests this applies to American politicians as well. So let's look at the scrutiny she applied to both Biden and Trump, same issue. About Biden, she said the June debate was "alarming—the person we saw onstage is our commander in chief. He holds the nuclear football."

Fair enough. But here we're interested in how Weiss exercised her prized journalistic value of equal scrutiny. Trump was but three years behind Biden in age. If he went on to win the 2024 race, in 2028 he'd be a fading year older than Joe Biden was at debate time. So how did Weiss address also geriatric Trump's mental acuity? An issue she carefully named as potentially apocalyptic?

First we need to back up a bit by looking at some of Donald Trump's contemporaneous cognition. On the campaign trail he was asked about the vast evidence of climate change. He answered: "We went into rural parts of the country and fixed people’s water. They were drinking such terrible water. We were — it was very important to me. All of that’s important. At the same time, you can’t give up your country. You can’t say that we’re not going to have any jobs anymore. [Then something about green energy and $93 trillion.] So I always feel that with the climate, and I have been a great — I have been an environmentalist. I built many things. I own Doral [golf club] right next door, and we did that in a very environment."

A month earlier, at the Economic Club, what "legislation to make child care affordable [would he] advance?" His reply to this specific question began with: "But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t—you know, there’s something. You have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly."

From there he trailed off — expansively — into "having no deficits" and reducing "waste and fraud." He finished, at last, with: "This is about America first." No, the question was about child care and what specific policy would he promote — not taxing foreign nations, not wiping out deficits, not campaign slogans.

With all that said, we can get back to Bari Weiss and her equal scrutiny of American politicians — especially now that we have evidence of Trump's mental acuity to balance her proffered evidence of Biden's. So let's proceed and see how she applied an equal scrutinization of Trump. Well, we could proceed — if Ms. Weiss had offered any. But her piece was all Biden, all fade, all why in hell would voters allow an 80-something named Joe to again hold the nuclear football.     

The closest she came — though a parsec away — to holding the two politicians to equal scrutiny: "It seemed fair to still argue that a faded Biden is better than an all-there Trump." A what Trump? "You may disagree with the conclusion, but it’s a coherent argument." As arguments go, that one was altogether incoherent, and so no one of even the vaguest objectivity made it. "It’s ... an argument that relies on the denial of reality," she continued. Oh, my ellipsis? What she wrote was that it's not a reality-denying argument. Good grief.

Those last two words are what remains to be said about the future of CBS News with Bari Weiss as its editor in chief. Still, as for her? As for only Bari Weiss? I'll say this much: It took an unfathomable extraterrestrial kind of astronomical genius to peddle a Substack page for $150 million.

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Cross-posted in Substack.