CBS News and the First Moves of its Nepo Baby Owner

Learning about the limits of billionaires

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces. This edition is being published a day early because of travel tomorrow.

Having a career that included stints as an executive at the Wall Street Journal and then jobs centered around philanthropy has given me the opportunity to know more billionaires than most people. Here is what I have learned: Some of them are very talented— smart, effective, even wise; others are or were just lucky.

In the media business, some billionaires, like the newspaper owners in Boston and Minnesota, have proven good stewards in complex situations. Others, like the newspaper owner in Los Angeles, seem clueless, or, like the newspaper owner in Washington DC, have done better when standing back from management of an unfamiliar business and less well when leaning in.

Some billionaires, of course, are that just by accident of birth—candidates to become, in the marvelous contemporary phrase, “nepo babies.” This is not, by any means, a bar to achievement. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. did almost as much good as his father, and much less harm. Second generation leaders at IBM and Goldman Sachs were effective. But while making billions always proves something (even if sometimes it’s just having been in the right place at the right time), inheriting billions proves nothing at all.

Which brings us to the subject of this week’s column, the new path of CBS News. CBS is part of Paramount, which, with the assist of a “big fat bribe” paid at the instance of its former owner to the President of the United States, was just sold to a company called Skydance. Paramount Skydance is led by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison of Oracle— briefly last week the richest man in the world. The younger Ellison, 42, has been a movie producer of films including later installments in the Top Gun, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek series. He has also acted a bit, and launched a men’s clothing line that seems to have gone out of business eight years ago. He has never worked a day in the news business.

David Ellison

CBS News was once one of the greatest news organizations in this country. Beyond its flagship Evening News, it pioneered iconic programs including the World News Roundup on radio and 60 Minutes on television, and once produced courageous documentaries. For much of the last century, it stood well above its broadcast competitors in the quality of its news report.

Ellison has only controlled CBS News for about six weeks, so it’s early days to reach a conclusive judgment, but the returns so far are not encouraging. The “big fat bribe,” while paid by his predecessor owner, was handed over with his apparent encouragement, and may have included a separate, semi-secret (unwritten?) commitment of $20 million in free advertising which Ellison has refused to confirm or deny.

Earlier this month, Ellison’s new subordinates implicitly endorsed the Trumpian notion that editing taped interviews with political figures necessarily introduces partisan bias, and said its Sunday morning Face the Nation would no longer do so. This simply makes no sense, effectively invites politicians to filibuster away the time on such shows, elevating the interests of guests above those of viewers, and is a huge vote of no confidence in the network’s producers.

Why Bari?

Even more astonishing are reports that Paramount is about to buy Bari Weiss’s Free Press, and to give Weiss some sort of senior role at CBS News. The problem here is not ideological, no matter what you’ve heard elsewhere. Weiss seems to have positioned herself as bitingly cynical about both Trump and the progressive left, which is certainly her prerogative. And if Ellison wants CBS to join the fray with Fox News and CNN to occupy a “centrist” positioning on the political spectrum, I guess he can insist on that. (He seems also to want to buy CNN’s parent company, an issue for another day.)

Bari Weiss

The problem with picking Weiss is that entering the cable news-style fray is itself the wrong choice. Weiss is and always has been an opinion journalist, and the Free Press is fundamentally an opinion site. CBS News has never been in the opinion business, putting aside those long ago commentaries by Eric Sevareid and a few others. Placing Weiss at or near the helm of a television news division makes no more sense than it would have, a generation ago, to have given such a role to William F. Buckley, Jr. of the National Review or Victor Navasky of the Nation. That Weiss might position herself ideologically between the two doesn’t make it any more sensible. Presenting a range of opinions, or one set of “centrist” opinions, is not a substitute for covering the news.

Last week, CBS News named as its new ombudsman (an Ellison-era innovation), a man with significant foreign policy and think tank experience, another frequent opinionator, but, again, someone who has never worked in news. Perhaps because of this, the new ombudsman doesn’t seem to have noticed— unlike with other such roles across the industry— that CBS’s process for his work gives him no outlet to the public, and makes him merely an additional lever for bringing internal pressure on the newsroom.

The through line in all of this is, I am afraid, that David Ellison seems to know no more about TV news than he did about men’s clothing, and may prove to be no more successful in it.

A lesson from Musk

Press coverage, and popular perception generally, of billionaires tends to endow all of them with qualities some simply do not have. Those whose skill and pluck made them successful in one field are often presumed to be capable of great deeds in anything. When this is how people are seen, they can come to believe it themselves, which is when it can become dangerous. Elon Musk in government this past Spring gave us all a master class in this fallacy. (I have seen an analogous effect on people to whom others must defer, in jobs as diverse as federal judges and foundation program officers. When everyone laughs at your jokes, you can start to think you’re funny.)

Six weeks in, it’s not too late for David Ellison to empower people who do know something about TV news. Nor is it too late to demonstrate the modesty and light touch that his inexperience would recommend. But on the present course, a tough season is ahead for CBS News, for the people who still work there and for the remaining viewers who depend on it.