Washington Post chief’s firing should terrify new regime at CBS News

Will Lewis is out at The Washington Post. Since he was a fancy “chief executive,” his departure is being reported with the genteel framing of him “stepping down,” even though it is very evident that Post owner Jeff Bezos sent Lewis packing. 

Ostensibly, Amazon billionaire Bezos felt that Lewis didn’t handle the complete decimation of the newspaper with enough gravitas and was instead partying in San Francisco at Super Bowl-related events. 

Indeed, Lewis wasn’t even there for the mass firings that roiled the paper’s staff on Feb. 5. But Lewis isn’t out because of optics: He’s out because the work he was hired to do—destroy a venerable media outlet to please President Donald Trump—is done. 

Readership doesn’t matter, and quality doesn’t matter. Flattering and protecting Trump matters, and being willing to openly and obviously run media outlets into the ground is the ultimate show of fealty.

And if Bari Weiss isn’t watching this all play out with trepidation about her own future, it’s only because she is not smart enough to realize her role at the helm of CBS News is exactly the same as Lewis’ was at the Post. 

Lewis came to the Post with actual experience running a newsroom, unlike Weiss—though he was always very morally flexible about his work. He served as a sort of unofficial, secret, very unethical political adviser to Boris Johnson when Johnson was the prime minister of the United Kingdom, and Lewis was vice-chair at the Associated Press. 

He was deeply enmeshed in a phone-hacking scandal in the U.K., including allegedly lying to police about it. 

In other words, Lewis was the perfect guy to turn the Post into a Trump propaganda machine and feel just fine about it. 

Sure, Lewis might have thought he was there to actually helm the paper, and he had a bunch of nitwit ideas to juice readership. He launched a terrible new opinion product, “Ripple,” which seems to be a Substack aggregator, and he floated opening an entirely new newsroom division to cover social media.

Related | Bezos guts the Washington Post—just like Trump wanted

But Lewis immediately clashed with Washington Post employees who were not aligned with whatever mishmash his vision purported to be, and the executive editor left after he took the helm. Lewis decided to address this in a town hall meeting by saying such encouraging things as, “People aren’t reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.” 

After that, the coward never addressed the newsroom in person again. 

Tone deaf until the end, Lewis wrote an incredibly graceless two-paragraph missive thanking no one but Bezos and mumbling about “difficult decisions.”  

Ultimately, Lewis seems to have fundamentally misunderstood that he wasn’t there to revitalize the Post or lead it into a new era or whatever. He was there because he was a pliable amoral vessel who wouldn’t object to the complete wreckage of the publication—from deciding not to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024 so as not to make Trump sad, to the shifting of the opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” and ultimately to the gutting of the newsroom. 

None of those things increased readership. None of those things were necessary for the survival of The Washington Post, given that Bezos is so staggeringly rich that he could afford to cover WaPo’s losses for five full years with what he takes home in a single week. They were, however, necessary to show fealty to the regime in power, and prove that the once-fierce Washington Post is defanged and Trump need not worry it will hold him accountable any longer. 

For Weiss, Lewis is the Ghost of Christmas Future. She also seems to genuinely believe she is at CBS News to improve ratings and that she has a real job. Like Lewis, her message to her employees is that they suck: “We are not producing a product enough people want,” was her inspiring welcome message. 

Implicit in that statement is that Weiss has the key to getting more eyeballs, but her efforts at that have flopped. Witness her terrible town hall with new Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, which had catastrophically bad ratings.

It was 11% lower in total viewership than all other standard programming in that timeslot year to date, and a comically abysmal 41% lower among the key advertising demographic of viewers age 25 to 54. 

Related | Bari Weiss wastes no time wrecking CBS News

Meanwhile, Weiss, like Lewis, keeps pushing coverage to the right. Her tenure at CBS News now includes the appallingly goofy sucking up to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the purging of the standards division, and the censorship of a story about CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran prison that Trump sent hundreds of migrants to.

All of this is keeping her real boss, Donald Trump, happy, even as ratings plummet. 

Much like Will Lewis, once Weiss rids CBS News of actual newspeople, she’s not really of much use. Eventually, much like Bezos got tired of running an actual news outlet, Larry and David Ellison will tire of CBS News, particularly given that Larry now has TikTok to play with. Once that happens, there’s no need for Weiss to pretend to run anything.

Sure, she’ll land on her feet and return to some lower-rung right-wing grift, but she’ll no longer be able to pretend to run a network newsroom, because she will have run it into the ground. 

rss@dailykos.com (Lisa Needham)مصدر