Bari Weiss and the post-liberal media order

I, in large part, criticize liberal media for a living. Not the “liberal media” of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News paranoid imagination, but liberal with a small “l,” liberal media that largely leans Democratic in its preferences but first and foremost sees its role as policing populist and radical elements. A liberal media that is, in the aggregate, racist and reactionary but still reserves 10% of its resources for the occasional genuine piece of journalism covering workers, or the poor, or the plight of Palestinians, or corporate and government abuses. A media that still feigns interest in liberal credibility, with institutional validation, scientific accuracy, and a baseline––to use a popular buzzword from eight years ago––shared reality. This liberal order is a deeply flawed framework, pernicious precisely because it uses the veneer of objectivity and universalism. As I’ve spent the better part of 10 years documenting, this framework uses selective empathy, excludes dissenting or marginalized voices, and employs loaded rhetorical frameworks like fake concern for “human rights” and a host of other sophisticated modes of propaganda to protect the status quo and promote US imperial and capital dictates. But it did, at least, pretend to care about shared reality and institutional credibility. It at least sought approval from academia, international rights groups, and other liberal validators. It at least pretended to care about universal ideals.

This pretense, this last 10%, seems to be on its way out. Without commenting on whether shedding this pretense will be good or bad in the long run for the world’s poor and dispossessed, it’s essential to document its demise, and the grim media landscape it portends. The recent installation of third-rate tabloid editor Bari Weiss into the role of editor-in-chief of CBS News is the latest, most brazen example of this post-liberal media trend and, I will argue, marks a meaningful escalation into a post-Shared Reality future. 

Soon after David Ellison, the son of mega-billionaire and largest private donor to the IDF Larry Ellison, bought CBS’ parent Paramount, he “bought” Bari Weiss’ Free Press and made her the head of CBS News. Unlike traditional arrangements, Weiss will report directly to David Ellison and police the newsroom in an open acknowledgement that CBS News must reflect the ideological preferences of its billionaire owner—namely, his fidelity to zionism and the broader project of US imperialism. 

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Weiss’ Free Press knows its number one issue is covering the genocide in Gaza in the most dishonest, sloppy, and lurid manner possible. From libeling undergrad protesters as being in league with Hamas to denying mass starvation contra the entire consensus of the human rights world to producing genocide denial schlock that’s gleefully shared by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on social media, the Free Press is a deeply unserious tabloid that cares little for liberal credibility. It is overtly racist, one-sided, aggrieved, and conspiratorial. It is zionist but, unlike corporate media, it is not even liberal zionist. It is hate-filled and solipsistic; it is Likudite and cruel. The founder of Free Press taking over CBS News is an indication this same ethos will––no doubt––slowly take over the once-storied CBS brand. Within the next year we will likely see investigations about Hamas influence on US campuses, interviews with Palestinians who desperately want to be bombed by Israel and other cartoonish zionist propaganda, all with the 60 Minutes brand. Which, for only 2% of his family’s approximately $400 billion fortune, Ellison bought on the cheap. 

Ellison the younger isn’t bothering with the normal pretense of liberal credibility because he is wagering, probably correctly, it simply doesn’t matter anymore. As his father Larry takes control of the TikTok algorithm, and the Ellison family also seeks to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which controls CNN and HBO, the need for firewalls and high-minded journalistic pretense seems less and less necessary, replaced with overwhelming media control, scalable AI slop, and spectacle––all layered atop the the normal steady state of NCIS spin offs, NFL, March Madness, and laugh-track sitcoms. In this business model, the line between more sophisticated liberal propaganda and overt right-wing propaganda seems less important than it did just a few years ago. A similar dynamic, as I’ve laid out in these pages before, is playing out in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. Once a pillar of Liberal Seriousness and institutional buy-in, the paper is now openly embracing right-wing ideology and Silicon Valley triumphalism in hopes doing so won’t matter. And thus far, it hasn’t. Like with Trump’s attacks on universities, the courts, law firms, media outlets,and other pillars of liberalism, what’s most remarkable about the past nine months is how little these attacks on the liberal order have garnered pushback. A fact Trump himself has taken to mocking: 

Liberalism, at its core, is a reformist ethos, a release valve that takes populist forces and channels them into contained outlets to maintain the status quo. When it works well, it can operate in concert with the Left and more radical elements to usher in reform that genuinely ameliorates the conditions of the underclasses. When it works poorly, which it does most of the time, especially of late, it offers cosmetic or trivial changes. It operates not in the realm of policy and bureaucracy but of PR and counterinsurgency. The primary vehicles for this liberalism over the past few decades have been the (1) nonprofit world and our (2) media, both of which take bottom-up anger––over inequality, racism, imperialism, climate change, pick your injustice––and channel it into reformist nonprofits, endless academic studies, Soros or Ford Foundation-funded activism and journalism, or a scattering of progressive electeds. This isn’t meant to be a pejorative analysis, some of these efforts can do actual good, but it is important to understand that is the basic arrangement. A handful of liberal––which is to say savvier––billionaires throw scraps to the agitated classes and give them a sense of progress, of changing this from the inside. Corporate media sets aside its 10% to indulge these same forces with the occasional good report on police violence, the once-every-six months deep dive into Palestinian child amputees in the New York Times––just enough crumbs to give those upset with the status quo a feeling they have buy-in, that things can change without labor agitation, taking to the streets or, god forbid, seeking violent means. The parallel effort to this basic arrangement is the carceral state, which operates as a stick to the carrot of nonprofitism. Mass surveillance, the longest prison sentences in the developed world, militarized borders, and the world’s largest caged population loom large, employing more brutal methods to keep populist forces at bay while preemptively locking up the poor, black, and other populations more likely to agitate in unsanctioned ways.  

This is, of course, a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s the basic outlines of liberalism as it existed post-Vietnam. But, of late, with the rise of Trump’s more cartoonishly autocratic second term and the total withdrawal of liberal institutions from this arrangement, there’s good reason to believe that liberalism’s carrot is increasingly being replaced with only the stick. Liberal billionaires are pulling back on funding the nonprofit world just as the Trump regime is openly laying out its plans on gutting it, inch by inch, by lumping it in with an entirely fictional rise in “left-wing terrorism.” Stephen Miller is on cable news seemingly every hour railing against the Tides foundation and other liberal billionaire organs, rhetoric being matched with White House lawfare and Congressional Republican efforts to shut down these groups and those like it. It’s a parallel universe but it doesn’t matter. If it wasn’t so genuinely dangerous, Miller talking about the Tides Foundation and Color of Change like they’re the Baader Meinhof Complex would be funny. 

But it’s all too real. These dynamics have been accelerated by the genocide in Gaza which––either due to necessity or hubris––has stripped the so-called liberal rules-based order of any of its remaining credibility, emboldened the forces of reaction and demoralized the remaining True Believers of liberalism. The ADL defending Elon Musk’s clear-as-day nazi salute because Musk promotes pro-Israel propaganda while the ADL poses as a civil rights organization was the nail in the coffin. What’s the point of pretending anymore? This dynamic has given added incentive to wealthy liberal donors to sit back and watch as Trump attacks their mutual enemies, namely “woke” types and pro-Palestine protestors whom they correctly view as more of a threat to their status than the tax-cutting, Epstein-defending Trump. 

Bari Weiss taking over CBS News is simply another symptom of this broader shift in elite tactics and ideological production. The pretense of liberal credibility still exists, but it is fast losing purchase. Liberal credentialism is annoying and often wielded cynically but, as the Trump era has shown, it was in fact holding back something dark, something with limitless capacity to inflict suffering. Many in the ruling class, emboldened by Trump’s brazen—and thus far successful—attacks on liberal institutions, correctly smell blood. But Trump’s radical fence-testing is not sufficient enough explanation. They likely see the rise of AI-assisted Palantir-like surveillance systems, in concert with big bets on AI-slop content as meaningfully reducing the need for the more sophisticated and softer version of liberalism via media and nonprofits. If the underclasses can be sufficiently neutralized with slop and mass surveillance, with incarceration and National Guard occupations, and we have a Democratic Party primarily paid to punch left and promote genocide while offering little in the way of real political oppostion, then what’s the point of all the high-minded nonprofits, fact checkers, and academics? What’s the point of shared reality? There isn’t one. Reality can be invented, increasingly with Sora-level verisimilitude, by virtue of simply owning the means––whether CBS or CNN or TikTok––in which reality is constructed.