The Collapsing Broadcast System

What's happening at CBS News is heartbreaking

Eleven years ago, when I started my job at KNX in Los Angeles, it was a CBS station. There was a huge CBS News logo when you got off the elevators. I was proud to walk by it every day, because that was the network of a man I built a religious temple to in my head: Edward R. Murrow.

He was long gone by then, of course. Not just him, but his like — the whole tradition of hard-edged, power-speaking-to-truth broadcast journalism that he embodied had been slowly dissolved by the economics of cable and then finished off by social media. I was sad about that. But at least the legacy was still there. The name still meant something.

But even sadder still is that now, the legacy itself is being erased — deliberately, systematically, for reasons that have nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with politics and billionaire vanity.

CBS Evening News, now anchored by Tony Dokoupil under the direction of David Ellison and editorial architect and anti-woke warrior Bari Weiss, drew fewer than 3.83 million viewers last week. ABC’s World News Tonight pulled in nearly 8.48 million over the same period. NBC Nightly News drew 6.51 million. Nearly half the audience that ABC draws is a collapse. And it is a direct result of a billionaire buying a news organization and remaking it in his own political image.

Here’s how it happened, and how fast: Ellison controls CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance. He brought in Weiss — the self-styled anti-establishment media critic who has made a career out of positioning herself as a corrective to liberal bias — to reshape the network’s editorial direction. Weiss installed Dokoupil as anchor. Dokoupil wasted no time signaling where things were headed. On his second day on the job, he offered what sources described as a salute to Marco Rubio. He gave soft coverage to the fifth anniversary of January 6th. That coverage reportedly drove out Scott MacFarlane, one of CBS’s top Justice Department correspondents — exactly the kind of reporter a serious news organization would fight to keep. Anderson Cooper left, too. Sources say he was put off by the network’s rightward lurch. Staff buyouts are now underway ahead of expected layoffs.

Dokoupil, to his credit, was at least candid about the mission when he took the job. Legacy media, he said, had failed average Americans by listening too much to academics and elites. Two weeks later, he was touring Dallas in Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ private helicopter. Make of that what you will.

What we’re watching now is the CBS playbook in action: keep it soft, keep it safe, don’t ask the hard questions. The network ran it on January 6th. It’s running it again on Iran. And viewers — whatever the new leadership may believe about the appetite for this kind of coverage — are noticing. They are changing the channel or turning it off entirely. The ratings don’t lie, even when the broadcasts do.

Edward R. Murrow once said that television can teach, illuminate, and inspire. But only, he warned, if human beings are determined to use it that way. Otherwise, he said, it’s merely wires and lights in a box.

What do you think? Can CBS News be turned around? Is this just another link in the chain in the collapse of broadcast news? Let me know in the comments below. Also, check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast with my friend Jack Messenger.