How to improve the news, CBS

Get back to who, what, where, when, how and why.

David Ellison bought CBS. Last week he hired Bari Weiss to oversee its news division. A veteran of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Weiss and her lover founded The Free Press four years ago. Ellison bought them out for $150 million.

Weiss takes over an enterprise that is bleeding viewers, bleeding advertisers and bleeding credibility.

Its reputation is in tatters as it managed to lose support from both the left and the right. This summer, CBS settled a lawsuit with President Trump over its deceptive editing of an interview of Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes, its showpiece news show. Trump said the attempt to show the idiot Harris as a person who can answer a simple question was election interference.

Lefties accuse—without evidence—the network of settling to facilitate Ellison’s purchase of the network, which required federal approval.

The facts state otherwise. On June 25, the Wall Street Journal reported, “A mediator has proposed that President Trump and Paramount Global settle his lawsuit over a CBS News 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris for $20 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

“The proposal would include a $17 million donation to Trump’s presidential foundation or museum, the people said. It would also include millions more in legal fees and public service announcements on Paramount-owned networks to fight anti-Semitism, the people said.”

That was pretty close to the eventual out-of-court settlement, which included money and fighting anti-Semitism. When it comes to fighting anti-Semitism, Weiss wrote the book on it—How to Fight Anti-Semitism.

Rebuilding the news department is another matter that will take some doing. The Independent reported:

The imminent arrival of anti-woke and stridently pro-Israel “heterodox” pundit Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News has left the newsroom’s staff “literally freaking out,” with sources telling The Independent that the Tiffany Network is “not a good place right now.”

The rising frustration among the network’s journalists has also been compounded by the fact that David Ellison, the chief executive of the newly merged Paramount Skydance, is preparing to implement brutal layoffs and slash up to 10% of CBS News’ staff—all while paying Weiss up to $150 million to acquire her digital media outlet The Free Press.

Meanwhile, Weiss seizing the reins of the network’s vaunted news division—which has been months in the making—comes as staff have grown increasingly disgruntled with Ellison’s transformation of CBS News, with many feeling that the new owner “lied” to them when he insisted he didn’t want to “politicize” the network.

Thus Weiss is up against a group of resentful people who believe they are entitled to do their jobs without regard to the desires of management and the man who signs their paychecks.

Make no mistake, Weiss is a pro-abortion, pro-LGBT lefty loon. What the CBS newsroom resents is she is pro-Israel. From the river to the sea, they want to be rid of she.

The problem isn’t that TV news is woke. The problem is TV news is boring because it is woke. The news media has become so darned predictable with hour after hour of The View—with different faces, of course—prattling on about nonexistent existential threats to our democracy.

The last decade has seen ratings desperate networks and cable news channels offer a perpetual Punch and Judy show in the hope that bashing Donald Trump will bring eyeballs in.

Weiss needs to look at the market and provide what is not there—an oasis of objectivity. PBS and NPR try but droning in monotone is not the same as being objective.

She has to retrain her journalists to do journalism. That should begin with boot camp.

Weiss must get her reporters and writers to stop being storytellers and begin being reporters again.

She should start by getting them to write simple declarative sentences that simply give the facts. As 19th century newspaper mogul E.W. Scripps said, “Give light and the people will find their own way.”

The straight lead is the most powerful tool in the journalist’s box. It is Sergeant Joe Friday giving just the facts, ma’am. Why so many people abandoned it, I do not know.

Ken Blake, an associate professor of journalism at Middle Tennessee State University, wrote:

A straight news lead should be a single paragraph consisting of a single sentence, should contain no more than 30 words, and should summarize, at minimum, the most newsworthy “what,” “where” and “when” of the story.

Example: “Fire destroyed a house on Main Street early Monday morning.”

The lead is a single-sentence paragraph. Note, please, that a lead should be written in ordinary English, not the clipped phrasing reserved for headlines like “Main Street home destroyed in early morning fire.” Headlines, which appear in large print above the stories they introduce, are written that way to conserve space. But people would consider you strange if you went around talking like that all the time. Your audience will consider you strange if you talk that way in your journalistic writing.

Your audience will also vanish.

The drill sergeant in Weiss can have them give her 30-word leads the first day. 25-word leads the next. And so forth until that final 5-word lead: Man lands on the moon.

Who? What? Where?

She also should give each staff member a copy of The Elements of Style, aka Strunk and White.

Dorothy Parker once wrote, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

Clear writing requires clear thinking—and clear thinking leads to the abandonment of liberalism.

As for fact-checking, CBS should limit fact checking to its own product, not the president or anyone else.

Who made journalists the sole arbiters of the truth? What are the consequences if you call the president a liar and it turns out you were mistaken? Do you resign your position? Does your organization forfeit its seat at the press conference? Do you pay him $30 million?

There are two sides to every story. A reporter’s job is to get both sides. Oh it is easy to get one side when some liberal insider leaks it, but the real job is getting the reaction in order to balance the story. Gaining the trust of conservatives is on the reporter, not them because they owe the press nothing.

This can be done. Bill Maher, a widely known liberal, has cultivated conservative guests by the dozens over the years because he treats them like human beings and not like Nazis. Charlie Kirk was on the show. There is no excuse for a television network not to earn some support from conservatives but here we are.

Every story must be reported in a fair and straight manner that allow the reader to decide who is telling the truth and who is lying. Usually it is a mixture of both.

As far as content goes, CBS reporters need to cast larger fishnets to catch news from conservative blogs and the like.

And by the like, I mean Fox.

For example, Red State cited a Fox report and said, “Venezuelan El Presidente and de facto dictator Nicolás Maduro has had his hands full with all the Venezuelan drug-carrying speedboats suddenly being converted to flying spare parts and their crews being turned into low-grade fish food, courtesy of the United States War Department. But now he is having a bad case of the smuggler’s blues, as the American FBI has taken down a huge money-laundering operation tied to the dictator through his kids.”

CBS must dial back the coverage of Washington and New York City. We have a large country and news is a-plenty. I am not talking about covering the bumpkins at the pumpkin festival, although that could be a nice change of pace. The rapid transit slashing of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte deserved Daniel Penny coverage.

While certainly Weiss must evoke Walter Cronkite in her messages to her staff, she never saw his show (it ended before she was born); no one under 60 did. He wasn’t that good or impartial. Conservatives complained to no avail but they were right.

He told Playboy in 1973, “I think being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause—but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it’s a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they’re not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they’re preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can’t be very good journalists; that is, if they carry it into their journalism.”

That is right. Saint Walter said if you are not a liberal, you are not a good newspaperman.

Huntley/Brinkley on NBC beat Cronkite like a baby seal in the ratings in the 1960s because they were not pushing causes. They were fair and impartial. She should review their tapes.

Or better yet, she should review the tapes of 60 Minutes and other CBS news shows. She should haul reporters in and review their interviews, demanding to know why they asked this and why they didn’t ask that.

The task is huge? So what? Weiss got a nice chunk of $150 million to take over CBS News. Good night, and good luck.

Actually Margaret Brennan did a good job in eliciting that response from JD Vance. His answer was revealing and illuminating—and very entertaining.