Bari Weiss has barely been editor-in-chief of CBS News for two months, and already her promise to bring an even hand to the notoriously biased network is dividing media royalty.
In a podcast last week, onetime CBS News anchor Connie Chung clashed with her husband and shock show host Maury Povich over the impact so far on CBS.
Even before the network has shown any noticeable changes, Chung charged on the Pablo Torre Finds Out video podcast that the network under the new team of Weiss, Shari Redstone and David Ellison “has caused the venerable CBS to actually disassemble, to crash into crumbles.”
Povich countered briefly with, “Yeah, but she’s, you know, we’ll see,” to which his wife glared and said, “It’s not a big ‘we’ll see…’” And she wasn’t having it when he added that an interview with President Donald Trump, as Weiss looked on, “was a decent interview. It was OK.”
While no chairs were thrown, the clash certainly was our pick for the Liberal Media Scream of the week.
From the Pablo Torre Finds Out video podcast, hosted by the former ESPN contributor who now appears regularly on MS NOW’s Morning Joe, posted Thursday on YouTube:
PABLO TORRE: By the way, what’s it like to watch CBS right now?
CONNIE CHUNG: We don’t. I mean, I can’t. The paradigm has completely changed in news, and we have so much opinion that the truth doesn’t hold value anymore, and what we end up doing is trying to — we as consumers — trying to find the truth. We can’t find good old-fashioned facts, and it distresses me so terribly.
CBS is a whole different realization that I had worked for. CBS has now been taken over, thanks to greedy owners: Shari Redstone, partnering with David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. And their greed has caused the venerable CBS to actually disassemble, to crash into crumbles, and then they’ve hired this — I don’t know what to call Bari Weiss.
MAURY POVICH: I don’t either.
CHUNG: She is, you know, I, I just don’t know.
POVICH: Yeah, but she’s — you know, we’ll see.
CHUNG: It’s not a big “we’ll see” as if she could possibly restore —
POVICH: Well, she was there the other day when Trump goes on 60 Minutes. I thought it was a decent interview. It was OK.
….
CHUNG: When I worked at CBS, it was owned by William Paley, and he actually — who made it a point of allowing the news division to be autonomous and not have to worry about the bottom line. He had a president by the name of Frank Stanton, who went before Congress time and time again to defend the Fourth Estate. Now we have a complete dismantling of that kind of social responsibility. That we are watchdogs. We, reporters, are watchdogs of government. It’s our job to report information that is not fed to us.
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Brent Baker, the Steven P.J. Wood senior fellow and vice president for research and publications at the Media Research Center, explained our pick: “How arrogant. Ellison and Weiss are trying to save CBS News from the mess left by Chung and her successors where virtually no one trusts or believes the elitist press corps. And they’ve hardly done anything yet to the programming: It’s all the same people running and anchoring the same shows, so what’s she so upset about? She needs to realize and accept that the left can no longer control all of the news media.”
Rating: FOUR out of FIVE screams.