Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Second rate reporter says what?

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

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Late Night Open Thread: Bari Weiss (& David Ellison) Not Having A Great Month

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One would actually suggest with the debt load paramount is carrying, the current trajectory of CBS is very dangerous for it.

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— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) March 27, 2026 at 10:12 AM

Noah Berlatsky, at his SubStack — “Bari Weiss Is A Losing Loser Who Is Losing”:

Bari Weiss, the fash-friendly new editor-in-chief of CBS News, has in six months turned a historic and respected news org into a punchline from which viewers are running like rats fleeing a ship that is sinking, on fire, and beset with plague. According to Oliver Darcy at Status, the network is “on track for its lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century in both total viewers and the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demo.” Darcy also points out that ABC and NBC have had viewership increases in both morning and evening—which means that CBS is bucking positive trends, and/or is bleeding viewers to its competitors…

And yet, whenever more news of her disastrous tenure hits the interwebs, many on the left insist that the disasters were all part of the plan. Billionaire asshole Trump cronies David and Larry Ellison wanted to destroy CBS journalism and align the network with Trumpism, the argument goes. They don’t care if it bleeds viewers and dollars as long as its reporting is kneecapped and it toes the party line.

It’s true that the Ellisons wanted to make CBS into a Fox News clone. But part of the allure of Fox News clone status is cloning Fox’s audience numbers and revenue. Oligarchs like the Ellisons and Jeff Bezos sincerely believe that taking their media properties hard right will be a financial bonanza. When it isn’t, they lose—and the rest of us win, not everything, but real ground….

…[B]illionaires like the Ellisons and their sycophantic boot-lickers like Bari Weiss all sincerely, truly believe that they speak for the real, true core of Americanness. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Ackman, Donald Trump—all these heirs and hedge fund assholes and grotesque corrupt swindlers bloated with avarice and hate—they all think they are the true voice of the common man, and that the branch-campus professors pointing out that racism exists, or the trans middle-schoolers who want to play basketball, or the Palestinian-Americans existing, are the out of touch elite who must be stifled and ridiculed in the name of the volk. The oligarchs see themselves not as disgusting parasites bleeding the public dry, but as bold everydudes whose success demonstrates both their brilliance and their understanding of white male cishet bigoted Joe Average, who has been sitting in front of his television all day every day just waiting for the chance to turn his TV from Fox News to Johnny-come-lately Fox News that’s somewhat more ambivalent about being state TV for Trump and somewhat less ambivalent about being state TV for Netanyahu.

Obviously if you are not paid to stuff your head up a billionaire’s asshole every day, you are probably aware that billionaires are not in fact psychically connected to the volk. Also, it may have occurred to you that the conservative marketplace is incredibly saturated already, and that CBS viewers probably would turn on Fox News if they wanted Fox News…

Weiss believes she is the voice of the people and the people have solidly rejected her and her bullshit. That has to be a foul pill for her to swallow. Less discussed, but perhaps even more humiliating, is her utter failure to turn CBS into a force in the right-wing marketplace.

Weiss’ blogging platform, The Free Press (which CBS acquired) carved out a position as a clearinghouse for supposedly highbrow right-wing screeds, making the intellectual case for DEI, transphobia and hate—a place for Ivy Leaguers and would-be Ivy Leaguers to come together and rigorously apportion footnotes to their genocidal impulses. Weiss clearly hoped that with the oomph of CBS behind her, she could move more forcefully into the right-wing media sphere, influencing the discourse and poaching the audience of quasi-Nazi bloggers, Christofascist podcasters and manosphere YouTubers alike…

Ellison did get some of what he wanted. But he didn’t get the monetary windfall he expected. He almost surely still believes that right-wing news is a goldmine if only he could put the right person in charge. Weiss is clearly not that person—which means that her job is by no means secure. Ellison has to be doing a real gut check, too, about whether Weiss—who has destroyed CBS’ ratings and influence—is the right person to helm his new acquisition of CNN.

So yes, CBS and probably CNN have been badly damaged, oligarchy has been strengthened, journalism and a free press are harmed. But it’s also true that Weiss humiliating failures serve as a helpful tonic for all the mainstream media bozos constantly looking with wistful envy at Fox News and dreaming of a conservative turn that drives up viewer or reader numbers.

The story of CBS and the Washington Post over the last two years is a cautionary tale about right-wing branding. The country does not have some huge untapped well of underserved rabid fascists; Trump’s narrow 2024 victory did not herald a massive cultural shift for all time. Oligarchs and their minions who ignore that truth are going to lose (a lot) of money and (even more) status. And yes, billionaires hate to lose money and status. Not enough to admit they’re wrong, perhaps. But enough to take it out on people like Bari Weiss.

If I understand correctly, David Ellison is doing all this on his Daddy’s dollars. Of course, Oracle can afford to throw away a billion here & there, and Larry has been extremely indulgent of his #failson’s grandious fantasies… but one would suspect that eventually, the old man is gonna decide that it’s time for a little #tough love, yes?

Bari Weiss was given a role outside of her skillset. She’s good at finding issues the enemy coalition is cross-pressured on and relentlessly hammering them from a facially neutral position. But doing that from a Substack is different from doing it at CBS.

— William B. Fuckley (@opinionhaver.bsky.social) March 18, 2026 at 10:06 PM

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Open Thread: Warner Bros. Paramount’d

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Paramount'd

Maybe I’m just a Cynic, but this whole saga reads to me like one of the We are no longer bound by your puny Rules!!! indicators that come just before a major economic crash. Per the WSJ, “Six Months, 9 Offers and $81 Billion. How Hollywood’s Nasty Takeover Was Won” [unpaywalled version]

For six months, the son of one of the world’s richest men kept hearing the same unfamiliar word: No.

Even before he closed a deal to combine his company with a much bigger one, David Ellison was already plotting to do it again. Once his Skydance Media took control of Paramount, he turned his attention to a Hollywood icon, launching an audacious takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery that would give the Ellison family control of a sprawling media empire.

His first offer was swatted away. So were his second and third. By the time Ellison made his sixth offer, Warner Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav stopped responding to his texts. Even when Warner officially accepted a rival offer from Netflix, Ellison refused to take no for an answer.

As the battle dragged on, Ellison sweetened his offers, ratcheted up the pressure, took the hostile bid directly to shareholders, threatened a bruising proxy fight, brought in President Trump allies to lobby, and treated the existing term sheet like paper waiting to be shredded.

On the ninth offer, the wealth and influence of the Ellisons finally won…

And once Netflix dropped its own $72 billion deal for Warner’s studios and HBO Max streaming business, the scion of software billionaire Larry Ellison was poised to become one of the most powerful people in a town that once derided him as a nepo-baby.

Ellison, 43 years old, as Paramount chief executive will now control much of our attention: the shows we watch, the news we consume and the screens we stare at all day long, with a family portfolio that will include HBO, CNN, CBS News, the historic Warner Bros. studio lot and crown jewels such as DC Comics and Harry Potter.

As much as Ellison and his team had been telling anyone who would listen that his business would ultimately prevail in buying a company five times its size, the reaction on Friday from Hollywood to Washington to Wall Street was astonishment…

On Friday, Paramount paid a breakup fee of $2.8 billion to Netflix.

 
At NYMag, “Paramount Wins, Everybody Loses”:

Backed by his billionaire dad’s bankroll and the full support of many in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Paramount CEO David Ellison won the battle for Warner Bros. on Thursday, successfully quashing a surprise bid by Netflix to take over the storied movie and TV company. Ellison is no doubt celebrating his victory over the streaming powerhouse, ditto Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders who stand to gain from Paramount’s sweetened offer. But for everyone else, this deal feels like a colossal dud, one that will result in a new company burdened with billions more in debt — almost surely leading to thousands of layoffs, fewer movies and TV shows getting made, and the creation of a combined CBS News–CNN operation likely to lean well to the right of where either is now.

In fairness, Netflix closing a deal for Warner Bros. would have had numerous downsides too. Many in the film business, including notable figures such as director James Cameron, were vehemently opposed to the streamer getting its mitts on WB given its business model to date has had no real use for theatrical distribution. And as the Writers Guild told Vulture in December, “The problem is the acquisition and pending consolidation of two media giants, not who the buyer is.” Industry consolidation in this century, including Disney’s purchase of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox entertainment assets or Amazon’s gobbling up MGM, has rarely been good for everyday people. A Netflix “win” wouldn’t have been great news for the average viewer or moviegoer either.

But as one Warner Bros. veteran told me late last year, the Netflix bid felt very much like the “least worst option,” and I think that’s exactly right. For all the downsides the tech giant’s now-dead deal would have had, Paramount’s winning is the worst-case scenario for Hollywood — and America.

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Interesting Read: “What mermaids can teach us about misinformation”

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Interesting Read: <em>What mermaids can teach us about misinformation</em>

 
I found this while trawling for the weekly Plagues & Pandemics post. Matt Morgan, at the British Medical Journal:

… Wandering through the Enlightenment gallery, I came across something unexpected. Behind glass lay a small, shrivelled figure, the upper half of something vaguely simian stitched to a fishtail: a Japanese “mermaid.” She was assembled nearly two centuries ago from monkey, fish, wood, and papier-mâché and was shipped to Europe to delight, deceive, or both. She looks like the outcome of a drunken bet with a taxidermist.

She is, however, not a creature of the sea but one of belief. Early collectors cared less about authenticity than spectacle. If a mermaid brought visitors through the door, who cared what was under the stitches? Mermaids were debunked long ago, but this revelation didn’t kill them—it created an industry. “Feejee mermaids,” as they were sometimes known, toured fairs for decades. Being fake was simply another marketing hook.

As I stood there, my phone buzzed with updates from the UK’s covid inquiry: muddled messaging, communication failures, public trust quietly combusting. It felt appropriate—we’re still surrounded by mermaids. They now arrive by WhatsApp rather than sailing ship, sometimes with official logos attached.

Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect. Repeated statements feel more believable, regardless of accuracy. Familiarity does the work. The effect is stubborn and democratic, fooling experts and amateurs alike. Evolutionarily, repetition once served us well. Reliable information rarely echoed endlessly unless it mattered. Then we built the internet, a machine that can repeat anything forever. We weaponised a useful shortcut.

During the pandemic I spent what little time I had outside intensive care trying to debunk misinformation. Vaccines don’t alter DNA. The 5G network doesn’t cause covid. Masks are irritating but are not a rehearsal of government tyranny. In each interview I had to use phrases I’d rather not have mentioned: when I said that “vaccines don’t cause infertility,” some listeners simply stored “vaccines plus infertility” in their memory again. The illusory truth effect doesn’t care which side you’re on—it just counts repetitions. “This is not a mermaid” posters are, to the mermaid, still free advertising…

The writer Naomi Alderman has argued that we’re living through a third great information crisis, after the invention of writing and printing. Her advice includes finding fact checkers you trust and not wading into hopeless online arguments—a form of social distancing for the frontal lobes. For doctors this avoidance feels like heresy, but replying to every mermaid only serves as unpaid public relations…

Back in the museum, the mermaid has been defanged. She’s no longer a fraud but a teaching aid. We see the stitching. We understand the history. We can enjoy the story without believing the biology.

The lies we now face are harder to keep behind glass. They arrive from people we love, wrapped in friendly fonts and “just asking questions.” Perhaps our task is the same as the museum’s: illuminate the construction, explain the motives, and make sure that a better story is already in place. Because the more we parade the myth, the more real it can seem.

Interesting Read: <em>“What mermaids can teach us about misinformation”</em>Post + Comments (47)

Media Open Thread: Jack Ketch Lost the King’s Favour

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… And he seemed like such a nice man, as long as you were on the right side of his axe!

According to the Financial Times, it was the Super Bowl photos.

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— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) February 7, 2026 at 7:09 PM

Looks like Will Lewis, the recently ousted WaPo publisher who couldn’t be bothered to attend the zoom meeting to fire a third of his staff, was being paid $3m open.substack.com/pub/genewein…

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 8:48 PM

Gene Weingarten, formerly at the WaPo, on “Three Million Reasons to Facepalm”:

… I just was shown a government document listing the 2025 salaries of Washington Post employees who were immigrants temporarily admitted to the United States under H1B visas. Their skills are considered “special.” It lists their base yearly incomes, before bonuses, overtime, golden parachutes, or what have you.

I scanned the list. The base salaries ranged from $60,000 for a designer to $223,000 for a vice president.

Then I hit the outlier. It was $ 3 million. It went to a “CEO.”…

That would be Will Lewis, the man whose two years of incompetent stewardship, editorial cowardice and less than ethical conduct brought The Washington Post to where it is today, a dreadfully diminished, professionally humiliated institution, drained overnight of nearly a third of its staff.

Three million dollars could have paid roughly 27 of the 300 reporters, photographers and editors who were sacked by Lewis before he took his own professional life and resigned under pressure. His resignation came in a particularly shabby fashion, after he was caught on camera hobnobbing with the swells at a red-carpet pre-Super Bowl event just hours after cold-bloodedly annihilating his entire sports department.

When he axed them, Lewis didn’t have the guts to face his employees. That job he designated to his executive editor. As the time of the Zoom meeting approached, Lewis ghosted his entire staff in a spectacular burst of shame and/or fear. He shambled away to a different office. He didn’t even answer the phone.

Who could have predicted such a graceless fall from grace? Surely no one would expect that of the man who was Rupert Murdoch’s toady, credibly accused of having directed the coverup of the phone hacking scandal that brought down The News of The World, in London.

But Jeff Bezos gave this guy $3 million a year, plus whatever sweet separation clause he might have. If you add the the $75 million Bezos flushed away to finance the “Melania” movie in order to suck Donald Trump’s ample posterior — why, you wouldn’t have had to fire anyone and destroy the newspaper, at all!…

(Click through, if only to see the header cartoon in full.)

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Open Thread: Jeff Bezos, Maker of Bad Choices

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— Michael de Adder (@deadder.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 11:40 AM

"Think carefully before you buy," @petridishes.bsky.social advises Jeff Bezos circa 2013. "Do you really want to own a newspaper? Do you really have what it takes? Or do you just want to own another yacht?"

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— The Atlantic (@theatlantic.com) February 5, 2026 at 5:43 PM

At the Atlantic, national treasure Alexandra Petri — who fled the Washington Post — has some advice for Mr. Bezos [gift link]:

CONFIDENTIAL: To a billionaire trying to determine what to do with $250 million in 2013,

That kind of pocket change can buy you a newspaper. And not just any newspaper, but a world-class paper with a wall full of Pulitzers (I remember emerging from the elevator and marveling at it as a summer intern) and decades of experience holding power to account.

Alternatively, $250 million can buy half a superyacht. A yacht is a very big boat…

A yacht will never turn a profit, and it would be confusing to expect it to. But you know that your net worth is such that if the yacht never supports itself, you will still be proud to call yourself the yacht’s owner and will not suddenly say, “Well, perhaps if we just pivoted part of the yacht sharply to the right and knocked dozens of people off, the yacht would suddenly become self-sustaining.”

A newspaper can certainly turn a profit. One way for a newspaper to make a profit is if you keep its subscribers from canceling their subscriptions en masse…

A newspaper is a public service. If it does its job, people will have better information and better lives—difficult to quantify in monetary terms, but for a long time, we used to think that making people’s lives better was important and valuable. Andrew Carnegie did not demand to see exponential growth from his libraries.

You can give your yacht whatever name you want! Sunk-Cost Fallacy, Ship O’ Theseus, Redacted, Democracy Dies in Darkness.

A newspaper can take down a president—and has, in fact. (Of course, that requires guts from its owner. But you have guts, don’t you?)…

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See BS After Dark Open Thread: Bari Weis {Hearts} Jeffrey Epstein

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1. The new batch of Epstein documents helps illuminate one contemporary controversy: What is Bari Weiss up to at CBS? I think the answer is she is trying to rehabilate the Epstein network as a bulwark of reactionary centrism. Let me explain.

— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 3:33 PM

As a Comic Book Guy, Mr. Heer understands the value of a big crossover issue…

2. Let's lay out the connections. Weiss' partner and ideological collaborator Nelli Bowles was on very familiar terms with Epstein.

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— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 3:36 PM

3. Announcing her plans for CBS, Weiss said she wants to marginalize the radical right and left while elevating charismatic centrist voices such as Alan Dershowitz, Epstein's former lawyer and crony.

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— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 3:37 PM

4. And of course another voice being elevated by Weiss is Peter Attia.

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— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 3:38 PM

5. And of course Weiss has brought on Steven Pinker to CBS as part of her new town hall format. And she had used Larry Summers for Free Press (but of course now Summers is too toxic to rehabilitate)

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— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 3:38 PM

6. Weiss presents her mission at CBS as restoring trust by elevating centrist voices, which is accurate enough if we understand "centrist voices" to mean "the type of men likely to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein."

— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 3:39 PM

7. I completely forgot to mention Weiss did a lengthy, friendly interview with one of Epstein's closest friends, Woody Allen.

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— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 4:29 PM

8. Weiss's project is creating an Operation Paperclip for Epstein's cronies. Taking a group of discredited men and rehabilitating them as necessary pillars of system. Dershowitz and Peter Attia are the Wernher von Brauns of reactionary centrism.

— Jeet Heer (@jeetheer.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 4:30 PM

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Late Night Open Thread: Bari’s ‘See BS’ News Channel

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New: CBS News seems to be preparing a new segment called "Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil," per sources.
Some staff were only first made aware of it as they encountered CBS testing out set designs of a faux-stocked bar in the newsroom, featuring a large sponsor banner for Jack Daniels.

— Prem Thakker ? (@premthakker.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 4:20 PM

not for nothing, but “i think i am gonna get into being a whiskey guy” feels like a distinctly 00s or 10s thing, which is very funny given how badly weiss wants to be cutting edge

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— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) January 13, 2026 at 6:30 PM

i see why he needs a drink

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— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) January 13, 2026 at 6:50 PM

===

This Bari Weiss edict is the most idiotic manifesto for a legitimate news organization that I have ever seen, and I cannot begin to tell you how many idiots I've come across in my career.
Free link: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/b…

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— Bill Grueskin (@bgrueskin.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 10:20 AM

Another finger curls on the monkey’s paw... “‘We Need to Be the News’: Inside Bari Weiss’s Bumpy Revamp at CBS” [Gift link]:

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