Literally No One Wants to Watch Diet Fox News

CBS’s big push to turn itself into diet Fox News under the “leadership” of a woman who’s only skill is flattering out-of-touch rich men’s biases may be coming to an end soon, according to Puck News. “As it closes in on its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount leadership has had informal discussions about changing Bari Weiss’s mandate at CBS News (and, eventually, CNN) in ways that would give her less control over TV,” they reported. This comes on the heels of 60 Minutes losing its big star who Bari Weiss hoped to anchor the CBS Evening News, Anderson Cooper, who signed off for the last time saying, “I hope 60 Minutes remains 60 Minutes.” What a ringing endorsement of how she “does the fucking news!”

Paramount denied this report to The Independent, saying that “Bari has the full support of Paramount and David Ellison as the editorial leader overseeing CBS News and 60 Minutes. Reports suggesting otherwise are inaccurate.” It’s possible that Puck’s Dylan Byers could be misinformed, but there’s a reason the most powerful people in American media leak to him, and it’s not because he’s in the business of alienating them. Not to mention, there is a veritable avalanche of evidence suggesting that Bari should lose her job for cause, and it would be strange if she wasn’t at risk. She is a failure by every objective metric.

I previously wrote before about how any serious media businessperson could see what a sham the acquisition of The Free Press was and how the notion that Weiss is some media savant is a farce. It was sold at 7.5 times its revenue, which makes Cox’s acquisition of an actual news outlet in Axios at about five times its revenue look like a screaming bargain. The idea that Bari Weiss created a unique financial success could only come from the out of touch boobs who read her and think she’s ever had a single insightful thing to say. She is very talented at one thing and one thing only: attracting rich conservative doofuses like David Ellison and convincing them to make bad investments with their time and money.

Under Weiss’s “leadership,” CBS Mornings had its worst ratings on record in the first quarter of 2026, seeing is lowest-rated April ever both in total audience and the coveted 25 to 54 demographic. NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America had nearly double the number of viewers for the week of April 20th, drawing roughly 3 million each versus 1.8 million for CBS. Just 310,000 viewers aged 25-54 tuned in to the new Ellison-owned network’s morning show that week, compared to 639,000 for Today and 508,000 for GMA. That same week, CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil, the man who won the job because he impressed Bari Weiss when he showed his ass to the whole world castigating Ta-Nehisi Coates over his trip to Gaza to see Israel’s apartheid and genocide first-hand, averaged just 3.8 million viewers—TV light years behind ABC’s World News Tonight at 8.5 million and a little more than half of NBC’s Nightly News‘ 6.1 million viewers.

In the first week with a new anchor who was certainly not Bari Weiss’s first or “seventh or eighth choice” given how many people reportedly turned the gig down, CBS’s Evening News lost nearly a quarter of its viewership compared to the year before she got her hands on it. CBS is a historic ratings disaster under Bari Weiss’s leadership, so what has Donald Trump’s favorite mainstream network executive done in response? Call TV ratings fake news of course. In what was described as a blistering internal January town hall in response to the complete and utter shitshow leaking like the Titanic that has been CBS under her so-called leadership, she told CBS News staff that “As we move forward, we are not competing primarily for ratings but for audience share. Our competitors are not just the other broadcast networks. We are competing for the attention of anyone in front of a screen.”

That’s all fine and dandy for someone talking out their ass about the future of media to Joe Rogan, but if I were an investor who paid broadcast network prices to acquire a broadcast network, I would want that broadcast network to compete with other broadcast networks, not Twitter and podcasts. Crazy notion! Right? But not in diet Fox News land, where a cadre of Very Serious rich conservative mostly men have convinced themselves that their self-serving political beliefs are actually the broad consensus that America is being denied by the dreaded liberal media. Trump won after all, so why do we have to cover anything to the left of him?

Because that’s not how media works, proving that yet again, the only conservative media owners who understand anything about media are those who run conservative media outlets. Glenn Beck has proven to be a far savvier operator than Jeff Bezos, and Tucker Carlson may as well be Ted Turner by comparison. The Washington Post is another unmitigated disaster of a pivot towards Dear Leader, and it has abandoned its status as a major newspaper in America under Bezos as it devolves into a more braindead version of the Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed section while losing $100 million a year. All these rightward shifts of established brands fundamentally misjudge who consumes what in America, and it’s a proven fact that Alex Jones and his gay frogs understand far more about the media landscape than David Ellison or Jeff Bezos.

Fun fact: conservatives have their own centibillion-dollar media environment. They can watch Fox News or Newsmax, read The Daily Wire (although they are having their own financial issues, recently going through a huge round of layoffs), listen to the endless array of seventeen-hour podcasts from non-subject experts, let YouTube’s algorithm take them down conspiratorial rabbit holes, or visit the vast constellation of conservative websites that have existed since the days of Drudge. This is not a difficult dynamic to wrap your head around, yet for David Ellison and Jeff Bezos, the inherent media bifurcation in America may as well be an alien planet.

There is a genuine belief by this kind of conservative investor that they can just buy brands that are consumed by liberals and make them conservative while still retaining the brand’s value. That is not how any of this works! Do they think they can buy McDonald’s and maintain the business pivoting to salads? Imagine if a conservative bought Jezebel and Splinter and tried to push them right, what a fun way to light money on fire! I’m not sure it’s possible to get negative clicks, but if it is, that’s how you would do it.

CNN already went through this predictable failure in 2022 to 2023, when they hired Chris Licht with a mandate to win back independent and conservative viewers. They really thought they could steal Republican viewers from Fox News with a diet Fox News product, and they posted the network’s lowest ratings in nine years. There is a vast disconnect between the worldview of wealthy conservatives and the red meat MAGA base they are allied with, and the wealthy conservatives fail to see this time and time and time again. 

In 2004, Air America launched as a liberal alternative to talk radio. The idea was to build up a counterweight to Rush Limbaugh, and the effort was so successful that many of you are reading about this radio station for the first time in your lives (it did birth the political media careers of people like Rachel Maddow, Al Franken, and Marc Maron). Air America filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2010, demonstrating the inverse of the law that conservative media owners like Ellison are failing to grasp. Liberals consume mainstream media. Conservatives consume conservative media. It’s stunning that this even has to be explained to many media owners in America, but such is the decrepit state of this dying industry.

The Onion now has more print subscribers than The Washington Post. Hasan Piker’s election night Twitch stream had double the viewers that CBS’s new nightly news is averaging. WaPo and CBS’s financial disasters are exactly what you should expect given the plans both conservative media owners are executing. The rightward pivot was noticed by the liberals and centrists who constitute most of their existing audience, many left, and the hope was that any liberals they lost would be replaced with more conservatives. It’s the famed Chuck Schumer quote that for every rural voter Democrats lose, they will pick up two more at Panera, but for clueless conservative media owners. 

Conservative media that tries to appeal to liberals will attract neither liberals nor conservatives to it. Conservatives have the red meat media they want and they will not consume a watered-down version of it, and just because Bari Weiss’ Free Press blogs worked to gin up rage clicks while flattering the preconceived notions of a dwindling wealthy minority doesn’t mean she can replicate that effort at scale in one of the most difficult and complex jobs in America. Being the head of CBS News takes actual skill, and being a one-note troll is not a skill. It’s a grift on a widely despised capitalist class that Bari has executed to perfection.

But she is realizing the limits of this power, and trying to say that CBS is now competing with the For You tab on the MechaHitler CSAM site is not likely going to satisfy Paramount shareholders. David Ellison took out seventy-fucking-nine-billion dollars in debt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, and if its flagship network is aiming to be competing with Twitch streamers now, then this acquisition is in big, big trouble. Add in the fact that his father who is the source of this failson’s riches, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, is also heavily leveraged and making the stock market very nervous, and a big pullback could mean that we may enter the Cool Zone for the Ellison clan where things go boom. If the S&P 500 drops 30% or more and Bari continues losing viewers to her chosen competitors like Facebook AI slop, it’s quite possible that CBS could find itself with another new owner in the coming years.

Any schmuck like me who spent several months studying finance could have told you that the acquisition of The Free Press was wholly ideological, and the exorbitant price that Ellison paid for it cannot be justified by any other industry benchmark. Bari Weiss fleeced David Ellison, and now she is captaining a ship that could very well sink his hopes to become this next generation’s Rupert Murdoch. She really might wind up being the single most effective resistance to the conservative media takeover in the wake of Trump’s election.

Just because I don’t like apples doesn’t mean I do like oranges, and this is the key aspect of the 2024 election that the David Ellisons of the world still don’t understand. All these out of touch rich boobs were so excited to think that young people actually agreed with them for once in their isolated lives, and the rightward media gold rush after the election completely ignored the fact that an estimated 19 million 2020 Biden voters didn’t vote in 2024. The story of that loss is a historical collapse in Democratic Party support, not a permanent rightward shift in American culture where everyone under 25 is Joe Rogan now, but I guess it shouldn’t be shocking that wealthy folks who would pay 7.5x revenue for Bari Weiss’s blog don’t understand basic math.