Her directive to ‘be the news’ reflects the precise opposite of what the industry needs to do.
Her directive to ‘be the news’ reflects the precise opposite of what the industry needs to do.
B ari Weiss may very well be the medicine that CBS News needs, but the suits might want to adjust the dose. Some of her opening directives raise questions about what exactly she thinks the ailing industry needs.
“Let’s make sure every single night has something with viral potential,” she said in a memo to CBS producers as they prepared for anchor Tony Dokoupil’s debut and his two-week tour of the country.
Weiss added, “The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to drive the news. We need to be the news for these 10 days.”
She was referring specifically to a gimmicky road show and Dokoupil’s debut as the new evening anchor, but even under these unusual circumstances, Weiss’s vision has got it all backward. The pursuit of virality, combined with the narcissistic goal of being the focus of the news, is a key reason why our industry is in the sorry state it is.
Recall that poor news judgment and a sense of self-importance are the very things Weiss criticized when she first gained prominence as an intra-industry critic of major media.
On the first point, virality should never be used to judge a story’s worth. This isn’t just theory or speculation, nor is it about sticking to some old journalistic concept. We’ve seen what happens when newsrooms prioritize clicks and metrics over actually serving the public interest. The chase for virality is how we ended up with the New York Times, the most powerful and well-known news organization in the United States, dedicating prime news space to a dispute between a birdwatcher and a dog walker in Central Park. The folks in Oklahoma surely appreciated that coverage.
The pursuit of virality is also how we get CNN mainstreaming cranks such as the Florida “Grim Reaper” or Rebekah Jones, who claimed, without evidence, that she was fired for uncovering a conspiracy to cook Florida’s Covid-19 death statistics. These people played well on social media, earning thousands of likes, retweets, and interactions. But they are also self-aggrandizing clowns of no real news value.
Virality is how we get the spectacle of White House reporters wasting their time in the Brady Room, asking administration officials to respond to Twitter criticisms of problematic rhetoric or other fleeting “scandals,” rather than asking about serious, real domestic and international affairs.
Virality is how we ended up with lightweights such as NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor asking former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who is black, to respond to critics who supposedly found it offensive that he said, “Do it for your abuela, do it for your granddaddy, do it for your big momma, do it for your pop-pop,” while encouraging Latino and black communities during the Covid-19 pandemic to temporarily abstain from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs.
“There are some people online that are already offended by that language,” she said. “Could you talk about whether or not — I guess have a response to the people that might be offended by the language?”
The pandemic would go on to kill an estimated 7 million people.
Speaking of Alcindor, Weiss’s exhortation for her staff to “be” the news is a terrible idea, not just because it goes against the journalistic mantra that a reporter should never become the story, but because the desire to be the main characters in one’s own reporting is how we got stuck with deeply unserious reporters such as Alcindor in the first place. Narcissism is nothing new in journalism, which, weirdly, often attracts a certain type of self-important person. But the high self-regard went off the charts during the first Trump administration (and it has hardly improved since) simply because self-centered, first-person storytelling and experiences came with big rewards, including TV appearances, book deals, and job promotions.
See: NBC News’ chronically unprepared and uninformed Katy Tur, who secured a role anchoring a political news show immediately after the 2016 presidential election, which, if you can believe it, was her first time formally covering a political beat.
See also: Ex-CNN reporter Jim Acosta, who similarly landed a TV show after spending all of Trump’s first term showing off at White House events, including a poetry recitation during a Brady Room briefing. Jim Acosta fighting with junior Trump White House staffers is not a pressing national news story, despite what Jim Acosta might claim. Yet he was rewarded for such antics.
See also: Alcindor and The Grio’s April Ryan, both of whom have gained significant intra-industry fame and plaudits despite breaking little actual news.
The point of this litany of examples — and there are many more where these come from — is to highlight the shoddy journalism of just the past few years, much of which was driven by a desire to go “viral” and “be the news.” These things only led to the deepening of the public’s already-intense distrust of our profession.
All of which is to say, Weiss may be on the track to correcting course and making CBS into something worthwhile, but not if she sets virality and “being the news” as the network’s guiding principles. That’s no way to run a newsroom, and we can say from experience that it’ll only produce further resentment from viewers — rather than the restoration of public trust Weiss hopes to achieve.