Details Leak from Meeting Where Weiss's 'Handpicked' Editor Threatened CBS Staff | Hacker News Reader

Details Leak from Meeting Where Weiss's 'Handpicked' Editor Threatened CBS Staff

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87 pointsslowin48 comments

>“This is not your publishing platform,” she warned. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place. And at the end of the day, you have to answer to that hierarchy. If you can’t answer to that hierarchy, and you don’t listen to what we say, that is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.”

that's a bad quote by a person who is bad at her job and who is a bad leader. the industry doesn't matter. the topic doesn't matter. the specific person doesn't matter. the company doesn't matter.

bad leadership.

Well, maybe, but the quote is from a middle manager, not "management". I don't disagree with any of the analysis in general, but the deeper truth here is that Shayndi Raice was cross pressured: the desires of upper management and the desires of the workforce could not, on this subject, be reconciled. You can't fix that with a better manager.

Now, you can get more specific and point out that in a situation where CBS corporate management wants CBS News journalists to report the "news" (which is a journalism product) in a way that the journalists don't, that management is almost certainly "wrong" as a matter of product management.

But the even more specific point is that CBS News isn't viewed as a journalism product by upper management anymore. They were a token to be traded to get the Paramount merger to go through, and Weiss and her staff were brought on to make CBS News more palatable to the regulators, not the consumers.

Media is hard to get right/proper, and tempering the profit motive with social strictures works when everyone is mostly in agreement (I mean inside the organization).

However when the divide is so contentious, essentially binary, appealing to only the profit motive is probably not going to get the desired results.

The whole Skydance/Paramount (Ellison) take over of Warner Bros, CBS, etc. and then installing people like Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief does _not_ help the “own the media” trope.

For context, because swingboy is being oblique, Ellison and Weiss are both Jewish and the word omitted before "own the media" is Jews.

Let's drop the labels and state the facts, there are a group of people who are using the media to push an agenda that is covering up atrocities.

Atrocities on both sides don't negate that atrocities are happening.

Editors hold a high integrity position, these ones are not apparently operating with integrity.

Indeed, but the commenter is correct that the facts they have laid out do not help nix the conspiracy theories. In fact, they align to the conspiracies perfectly.

I am not agreeing with the conspiracies, but the optics here are just bad.

It's pretty curious to call "conspiracy" a statement that is easily provable or disprovable. A large chunk if the media in the West is owned or directed by people of Jewish origins, there's nothing conspiratorial about that, it's a simple statement.

It’s a form of sealioning and rightly called out as trolling.

Should be some internet law that “just making an observation” and “I sincerely hold this belief and am providing this as evidence” are functionally equivalent, like a perverse inversion of Poe’s Law.

it's also accurate, so it doesnt really matter what memespeak name you want to give it. spiking stories that are rightly and accurately critical of israel doesn't help combat the perception of a zionist-controlled media. i don't believe that a couple of isolated data points rises to the level of evidence of widespread conspiracy, but again, the optics are NOT good.

what, in the name of feck, is 'sealioning'?!?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

The problem with this specific debate fallacy, as I see it is the following:

>while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter

It's hard to know if the civility and sincerity is true or just a pretense! Also true whether the person is "feigning ignorance"

Corporate entertainment masquerading as news has been without integrity since the printing press, though the obviousness and doublespeak of it all has increased over time

I'd say you're projecting. Reading the parent comment I understood it to simply mean "reactionaries", nothing more.

I don't care what their religion is. I care that they want to run cover for and/or promote policies that benefit a foreign nation that's interests not only do not align with mine but directly run counter to mine.

Compared to most Americans, it is safe to say that we have a Zionist mainstream media right now. The American people do not support the genocide in Gaza the media mostly does. The billionaires mostly do. We have concert tours being canceled for the temerity to say free Palestine.

its wild to me how much power aipac wields.... my house of rep in rural maryland was like "palestine has no right to exist"... like why tf does this guy give a hoot?

Could he even find Palestine on a map?

My Democratic rep voted to sanction the ICC for having the temerity to want to hold a trial.

I will be voting Libertarian this year. I don't give a flying fart if that means Republican control of the house; I won't support genocide. Unfortunately, until people take stands like this (i.e., cutting out the "Blue No Matter Who" BS), there will be no long term improvement in governance.

Because people he's campaigning to (like you) do. I would be quite surprised if he brought it up without any of his constituents making it obvious that they cared.

That's an excellent point. Overtly having an opinion on something well outside his jurisdiction is essentially proof of purchase.

It's also strongly demonstrative of the increasing gap between 'those with even a small amount of power' and 'normal people'. Said gap leads to misalignment of actions and values which, generally, only serve to further increase the size of the gap.

Topic derailment: what is the justification for anyone to say that any group of people has no right to exist?

It would be antisemitic to say that Israel has no right to exist. What anti- is it to say that Palestine has no right to exist, and why is saying one of those things media-scandal-worthy and the other send almost acceptable as a 'normal' position to hold?

Racism and bigotry either way, so far as my logic works. But then my logic has rarely helped me to understand human behavior.

> What anti- is it to say that Palestine has no right to exist…

Arabs are semites too so ironically I think the term is still anti-semitism

It appears to be yet another word that has had it's original, quite specific and understandably literal, definition bastardized to either maintain relevance in a changing world or to serve a specific purpose. At the same time un-defining what 'semitic' once meant, or at least strongly muddying the waters for the layperson.

Well, not really- the word antisemitism has been invented in 1860s to describe aversion to Jews (both negatively and positively, as a political program), so despite the fact that technically Arabs are semites too, the word never meant anything else than what it means now.

I agree with most of your point, but it's not antisemitic to say that Israel has no right to exist. It doesn't really matter what the state religion of Israel is, the fact is that it was created through ethnic cleansing, land theft, apartheid and now genocide. It doesn't have a right to exist and that would be true if it was a Christian, Muslim or atheist country.

Can you imagine the (justifiable) outrage if a lobbying front for any other nation wielded this much power?

Russia? China? Any mostly Muslim country? Mexico? Even Canada or any European country?

The UK is the only other nation I can imagine being allowed to sleep on our couch rent-free and raid our fridge to this extent, and there's an incredibly deep cultural and political lineage connection there. Even with all that, if the UK had its hooks in this deep there'd be more outrage. "Didn't we throw the British crown out 250 years ago?"

Though I do have to say: there should also be more outrage at the influence of Saudi Arabia. But that one has an easy financial explanation. The net flow of cash is from SA to the US in exchange for influence and military support. In that case they're living on our couch and raiding the fridge but are paying rent for the privilege.

Bari Weiss being out in charge of CBS and then immediately engaging in manipulation of the narrative isn’t helping me believe in one political factions screaming about censorship for me.

The Twitter files were just projection.

> A top CBS News editor appointed by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss reportedly threatened staffers with termination during a tense meeting Tuesday morning that erupted into a confrontation over the network’s coverage of Israel and Gaza.

But don't you dare say they control American media!

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