[Header Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash]
If trending matters on social media, a consensus is building that Bari Weiss has ushered in the death of CBS, a nail in the coffin of mainstream media:
Many things can be true at once even when they seem to be somewhat contradictory, and here is such a case.
First, Weiss being hired by and then allowed to shape one of the original major networks in the US—associated with Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather—does deserve the criticism being leveled at both Weiss and CBS.
However, lurking beneath this hand wringing about the death of the mainstream media are interrelated realities—media and journalists have a long tradition of seeking to remain unbiased and nonpartisan, but they are both perceived by the public as liberal.
Over my 40+-year career, I have worked in two professions that share reputations for being liberal (education and journalism) even though both professions demand that teachers and journalists remain unbiased and nonpartisan, essentially not political.
Here is what many people miss about the Weiss/CBS controversy: Journalists/media represent a body of workers who are often disproportionately progressives or moderates but who have historically in the US (mostly because of standards around remaining unbiased and not political) perpetuated conservative and traditional values, often to the exclusion of pursuing truth and accuracy.
Yes, Weiss pulling (or delaying) the 60 Minutes episode is a grossly extreme example, but this action isn’t substantially different than how mainstream media has always worked. And that includes the nostalgia often associated with Cronkite and the Golden Era of broadcast television.
Journalists and media performing their work in unbiased and objective ways is not possible (all human endeavors are biased) but that standard also works as a veneer for maintaining social and political norms—which is a conservative bias.
Mainstream media has never really disrupted the political and economic status quo of the US; media has mostly served that status quo and those profiting from it.
My work as a public scholar keeps me in constant contact with mainstream media. This past summer, I had a commentary in The Washington Post, and while I found the journalists and experience very professional and supportive, the very long process tended toward softening my analysis of the reading crisis and shifting the discourse toward normative beliefs instead of critical evidence.
But I also had an experience with 60 Minutes in the spring of 2024.
A producer at 60 Minutes had read some of my public work on the current reading crisis movement, the “science of reading,” and he found my perspective unique, surprising. He emailed, and we set up a phone conversation.
We talked for over an hour and a half, and while the producer was engaged and interested, the discussion was mostly punctuated with him asking me to repeat key points that contradicted the norms of what people believe about reading and teaching reading.
He seemed most disoriented by my explaining what NAEP reading scores and achievement levels mean and how that tends to distort how reading proficiency and reading at grade level are understood.
By the end of the conversation, the producer concluded that everything I shared was important and even fascinating, but as he explained, there was no story there for a 60 Minutes segment.
Not long after this, however, 60 Minutes ran a segment on Moms for Liberty, an extremist right-wing group that also happens to perpetuate the exact reading misinformation that does provide the sort of story that media loves (compelling even though it is misleading or even false).
Frustrated and angry, I emailed the producer who responded by stating he had not been aware of the M4L segment, but that producers didn’t interfere in each other’s projects. You see, a compelling story trumps an accurate story.
Again, the Weiss/CBS controversy is a valid concern, but David Brooks—often considered not just a credibly journalist but an elite one—was a lower-key version of Weiss’s nonsense well before anyone knew her name. And Brooks enjoys a mostly uncritical acceptance and even celebration of his conservative ideology thinly wrapped in astute public commentary.
And The New York Times as well as Education Week have long been viewed as high-quality journalism that the public believes to be liberal while routinely producing conservative journalism and traditional stories.
Yes, many journalists (and educators, especially in higher ed) self-identify as progressives and moderates. But mainstream media is ultimately a business, and as the Trump era has shown, the public can be self-defeating in its retreat from anything critical, accurate, or counter to what most people believe.
Before Weiss, CBS was not liberal mainstream media or a Gold Standard of journalism; it was corporate media, often negligent while maintaining a veneer of being unbiased.
After Weiss, who has completely perverted the already problematic both-sides approach to journalism, CBS seems to believe that dropping the mask of objectivity will be the sort of story that sells—even when brazenly eradicating truth and accuracy.
You see, Weiss didn’t murder a robust and mature media; she just nudged it into the grave from Hospice.
Having just re-watched 28 Days Later last night, I am prone to suggest that while we mourn the death of CBS, let’s not rush to raise the dead.
In corporate America, there has never been either a liberal or unbiased mainstream media.
The Weiss dumpster fire is razing the garbage that most Americans pretended not to smell rotting right under their noses.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 