Column By John Young
Before getting to what a brazen billionaire has in mind for CBS News and CNN, let’s talk about Stephen Colbert.
Colbert’s show goes off the air May 21, yanked by CBS in advance of a hostile takeover.
“Economic decision,” said network brass. That’s cheap lunch meat. Colbert has been the late-night leader most of his 10-year run.
No, it’s all about politics — about Colbert’s rip-roaring ripping of the so-easily bruised snowflake in the White House.
David Ellison — whose dad, tech titan Larry Ellison, is a mega Republican donor and pal of the most transactional (i.e., corrupt to the bone) president ever — now rules CBS and CNN with the purchase of Time-Warner Discovery.
A derisive David Letterman calls them the “Ellison Twins.”
Did we say Colbert’s cancellation was about politics? CBS announced it was pulling the plug days after he called a $16 million settlement of a frivolous suit against the network by our rabidly litigious president a “big, fat bribe.”
OK, so who will be the late-night replacement? Not someone who can hold a candle to the brilliant Colbert. Rather, it’s someone who can sign a check.
It’s Byron Allen, who parlayed a modest stand-up career into mega wealth. He didn’t earn the slot so much as purchase it. Yes, he’s hosting his own show, sort of like David Ellison having his own news network. Allen’s is “Comics Unleashed.”
From what I’ve seen of the show, featuring corny repartee by comedians known only to their mothers, all I can say is that late-night viewers are going to get an extra hour of sleep.
Not that Byron Allen is mentally lacking, but he in no way merits this spot. And “merit” in hiring is what MAGA says it is all about in assailing “DEI hires.” Oh, boy.
What’s to become of Colbert’s show and CBS News provides an opportunity for thinking people to employ a fighting acronym — FUI — I have introduced in these spaces for rubber-glue use when Republicans cite “diversity hires.”
DEI? Anyone revolted by the comical hires by this president — the Noems, the Bondis, the Hegseths, the Patels – knows “FUI” is his method.
It stands for “finding useful idiots.”
Say it with me: FUI. Say it often. In the long form: “phooey.”
Idiocracy at the highest federal levels isn’t enough for the right. We now see FUI in the calculated dumbification of CBS, the Tiffany Network — the one that brought us Cronkite and Rather, Letterman and Colbert. Apparently, FUI is coming to CNN as well to please the president.
Never has any leader of CBS, NBC, or ABC set out to deliver anything out of the respective news divisions but industry-leading news — credible, accurate, trustworthy.
For generations, credibility has been the coin of the realm for network news bureaus. Mistakes? They make ‘em. They also admit them — unlike Faux News and other Big Lie sock puppets on cable.
Our president has said Larry Ellison told him in private that he wants CBS News to be “a more conservative outlet.”
Reportedly, Ellison has said he plans to fire CNN’s on-air figures for not leaning the way he does.
Claims that CBS had a calculated political lean are simply bogus, a long-running Republican fever dream.
But now. Oh, now CBS will have a political lean — an Ellison lean.
We won’t call Bari Weiss an idiot. After all, she was on The New York Times opinion page staff when she bolted over editorial philosophy and started her own online publication, The Free Press.
There, she wrote “anti-woke” commentaries that caught the eyes of conservative thought leaders. Or, at least, the Ellison Twins.
Weiss might be brilliant, but she had no experience in TV news. Handing CBS News over to her is like handing an ocean super tanker to a surfer because she “knows the water.”
Weiss is in over her head, reportedly, and CBS’s ratings are sinking.
The president has said several times that he expects to receive more favorable treatment from the CBS News division now, thanks to Weiss and the Ellisons.
To a reporter or news director, those are — or should be — fighting words: any claim that there’s a “company line” in covering the news or handling a newsmaker.
Showing their stripes, the Ellisons hosted a salute to the president, attended by news employees, at which Weiss supped at the table with you-know-who.
If she were worth her stripes as a news executive, Weiss would have excused herself from the situation and the kiss-his-tush glad-handing with, “Mr. President, I’m not an FUI hire.”
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
