The Tiffany Network has become a battlefield in the billionaires‘ war on journalism
Twenty years ago, when Dan Rather was pushed out from CBS News following a controversial 2004 report on former President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, it was a massive scandal. While many remember it for being predicated upon shaky documents, it was also incredibly prophetic about the future media landscape: One that’s rapidly consumed by corporate interests, political pressure and the erosion of editorial independence.
After a 24-year tenure in the anchor chair of the “CBS Evening News,” Rather did not depart quietly. “They sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain, and in so doing, I think they undermined a lot at CBS News,” he told CNN’s Larry King in 2007. “Somebody, sometime, has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news.” Rather filed an unsuccessful $70 million lawsuit against the network, and in the years that followed, he delivered a series of prescient warnings about the chilling effects of political appeasement.
Despite the narrative pushed by the right-wing campaign against him — which was led by Bush’s White House — Rather remained adamant, even through reputational degradation, that the real threat to journalism wasn’t liberal bias or declining ratings, but the corrosive takeover of the fourth estate by corporate and ideological power. Now, two decades later, CBS News has reached the end of a long corridor he warned us would lead to disaster.
Tech billionaire Larry Ellison, whose Oracle Corporation was just handed virtual control of TikTok in the U.S. by President Donald Trump, and whose company Skydance just bought CBS through a purchase of its parent company, Paramount, is now reportedly pushing to install Bari Weiss as the new head of CBS News. A former New York Times opinion page editor who resigned after she claimed to have been “silenced” amidst the George Floyd protests in 2020, Weiss went on to found the Free Press on Substack. With roughly 1.5 million subscribers, the newsletter built its audience on contrarian opinion columns and critiques of “the woke left.” Weiss has cultivated a reputation as a reasonable dissident, eliding outright partisanship and granting her the appearance of neutrality while claiming the mantle to question progressive orthodoxy.
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that Ellison’s move to acquire the conservative outlet would value Weiss’ operation at around $150 million.
