This isn’t news, nor is it politics. But given networks’ actual competition these days, tech seemed a safe home to share.
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 shit 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.
This is a pretty brutal assessment of the state of the media ecosystem.
Bari Weiss didn’t have a bright career ahead of her if she just dodged this gig. Her career is being a professional stooge for conservatives, not rising on merit as a journalist and leader. This is exactly the next step and she’s getting a ton of money for it (from them buying her trash blogging site for far more than it was worth).
There it is; I was looking for someone to point this out.