Kissing Trump's Ass Actually Not Going So Well For WaPo, LAT, CBS News!
If you couldn't tell already by the hundreds of thousands of subscribers they lost.
In the run-up to the 2024 election both Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong decided that neither of their newspapers would do an endorsement — with both asserting a desire to be seen bias-free. Not long after that, the opinion pages of both papers began a marked shift to the right.
How has it worked out so far? Have the owners managed to replace the hundreds of thousands of readers who canceled their subscriptions with legions of loyal Trumpists, eager to read editorials about, as Bezos put it, supporting “personal liberties and the free market”?
They have not! A recent report from the Alliance for Audited Media found that WaPo’s circulation decreased by 21 percent, while the LA Times’s is down by 19.8 percent. At the same time, Status’s Oliver Darcy reports that every news show over at CBS, recently purchased by David Ellison — the son of Trump’s billionaire buddy Larry Ellison — is also tanking in the ratings.
Via Media Matters:
Status’ Oliver Darcy got ahold of some CBS News ratings data from the first quarter of 2026, and it is brutal. CBS Evening News has lost 7% of viewers year-over-year, placing it “on track for its lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century in both total viewers and the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic,” while CBS Mornings plummeted 13% and “is pacing toward its lowest-rated quarter on record in both total audience and the key demo.” Meanwhile, the audiences of competitor shows at ABC News and NBC News grew over the same period.
Gosh, and we just would have assumed that putting Bari Weiss at the helm would have … oh, who are we kidding. Have you seen Tony Dokoupil? No one asked for that. No one asked for that at all.
Unlike other news outlets that have clearly just been out to win favor with the Trump administration, either through publishing MAGA-friendly editorials or by spending $75 million ($40 million to buy, $35 million on promoting) on a Melania Trump documentary, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss seems to truly believe in what she’s doing. This is not because she is especially pure so much as because she is especially narcissistic.
Ellison and Weiss have suggested that the core problem for American media is that the public does not trust news outlets, and that the reason for this is that the public perceives those outlets as too far left and too critical of the right. They propose to win over a larger audience by deliberately course-correcting in the opposite direction.
“We are not producing a product that enough people want,” Weiss said at a CBS News staff town hall in January. Weiss attributed this to two factors. “First: Not enough people trust us. Not you. Us. As in: the mainstream media,” she said. “Second: We are not doing enough to meet audiences where they are. So they are leaving us.”
The problem here is that the audience Weiss sees herself as meeting is a mirage. She sees herself as a real woman of the people, when in fact she is merely a useful idiot who will never actually be accepted by those she imagines she is representing. You know, because she is a Columbia-educated lesbian they do not find attractive and not a blonde tradwife.
Weiss took a bet a long time ago — a bet based largely on her own personal grievances and anger at the Left’s refusal to accept her viewpoint as gospel. She bet that if the Left was lying about her not being correct about literally everything, that we must also be lying about the character of Trump voters. Except, you know, we weren’t (on either account).
The idea that what those people “really” want is slightly right-leaning but mostly normal news is absurd. Almost more absurd than the idea that these people “lost trust” in the media due to inaccuracies or actual bias. Or that those people ever wanted “free speech” for all beyond just wanting it to be socially acceptable to use racial slurs or were upset about “cancel culture” for ethical and philosophical reasons beyond just wanting to be the ones who canceled people themselves. They are insincere but enough of them know how to present their bullshit as “reasonable” to fool someone like Bari Weiss — who still doesn’t seem to realize that they don’t want her to even be able to vote, nevermind run a network or remain married to her wife.
The fact is, MAGA doesn’t want a MAGA-lite Washington Post, they don’t want a MAGA-lite CBS. Hell, FOX is barely enough for them these days. Why would they bother with lite-anything when they have myriad full-fat options like One America News, Right Side Broadcasting Network, The Daily Wire, Breitbart, The Federalist, The Blaze, Newsmax and Real America’s Voice? Hell, when they have LindellTV? Or the approximately 87,000 streaming shows hosted by actual extremists?
These folks are practically oversaturated with the exact kind of “news” they crave, “news” that blows smoke up Trump’s and their own asses, “reports” on the insane conspiracies they thirst to believe in, and promises them that everything bad in the world is the fault of people they do not like. They only said they wanted “bias-free” news because they wanted news they viewed as left-leaning to go away. They want very biased news that not only tells them what to think, but also literally tells them how fabulously attractive and brilliant they are on a regular basis.
No remotely normal news outlet can ever give them the sheer lunacy they crave.
All of this being said, I do not think that the Ellisons, Jeff Bezos, or Patrick Soon-Shiong give a flying shit if their outlets are not doing well. Certainly, in Bezos’s case, he is more than happy to lose money on the Washington Post if it means getting in Trump’s good graces. For the Ellisons, it’s not what they’re adding, but what they’re subtracting. It’s why they wanted CNN so badly. Soon-Shiong’s motivations are fairly obvious, given that he is a biotech billionaire who served as an HHS advisor during the first Trump administration and whose company relies on approvals from the Food and Drug Administration. It turns out, surprisingly, that the FDA is still doing its job.
Unfortunately, their bids for power come at the expense of good journalism, which we all need for a functioning democracy — which, as the Washington Post still inexplicably and ironically maintains in its tagline, “dies in darkness.”
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
OT. Article says Karen could be facing a felony charge.
"Woman skips roofing bill by calling ICE when workers finish: report"
https://www.rawstory.com/ice-roofers/
There is no bottom to these people. There just isn't.
Rather depressing that I have to go to CBC, BBC, France 24, The UK Guardian, Independent and The Economist to actually get something called..."News"...