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To: Bari Weiss
RE: Good luck, babe!
I honestly cannot believe you’ve willingly decided to go into the worst kind of job that exists: management at a dying company.
Managing sucks! It sucks even when you like the people you’re managing and it’s a low-stress position! And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you: running CBS News is not a low-stress position. You are going to get blamed by everyone above you for decisions that are made by people below you, and you are going to get blamed by people below you for the decisions that are made by people above you. You’re also going to get blamed for your own decisions, just for kicks. You have elected to take a job where the primary purpose is for you to eat ---- and own the death of broadcast TV news, a thing that is going to die no matter what you do. Nice work!
This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Nancy Dubuc at Vice without the string of hit TV shows. You’re Linda Yaccarino at Twitter without the advertiser relationships. You have been hired as a sop to a Trump administration that is actively hostile to the actual free press, and you will be made to oversee wave after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired and the entire news division is shut down in a final spasm of cost-cutting after the next inescapable media merger.
No one can save CBS News, because it was made for a media ecosystem that is now dead. Broadcast television is slowly circling the drain, its aging audience drifting toward the great inevitable. Younger people are getting their news from TikTok and Instagram in ever-greater numbers, and they trust institutional media less than ever. CBS in particular — that’s your new company, now — has the oldest audience in primetime TV. These folks aren’t The Free Press’ assiduously courted “classical liberals,” either. It’s normie grandparents, a bunch of whom are planning to appear at the next No Kings rally. I might invoke Edward R. Murrow, but they remember him. They don’t have any goodwill toward you. They don’t know who you are at all. And they are not going to defend you when you screw up.
You are now stuck claiming your goal is to win back younger audiences, which you cannot do, while your real job is to manage decline. There is no way to win here, only slightly better ways to lose.
https://www.theverge.com/business/793525/bari-weiss-cbs-news-glass-cliff
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Memo to Bari Weiss Re: CBS News: You’re doomed