JONATHAN ALTER:
Hi, I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
And I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.
Welcome back, everyone, to Then and Now. Jon, I’m sure you and I have both been following the stories about Bari Weiss this year, who is now an executive at CBS and has been making all kinds of changes to the news division that have been front and center as part of the conversation about the pressure networks are facing under the Trump administration.
I was thinking back to another time we both remember, in 1996, when Fox News started and Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to run the station. Ailes, of course, was a well-known political operative. He worked for Richard Nixon on his campaigns and helped him become more media savvy. He worked with many other candidates as well, including Mitch McConnell during the 1980s.
Ultimately, Fox epitomized, in that era, this intertwined relationship between news and politics. I’m curious how you think about that and what Ailes did at the station compared to what, at least as far as we know, is happening with CBS in various ways.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Well, first of all, the administration does want CBS News to become a kind of less obviously right-wing Fox. They want it to be Fox. That’s their goal.
But they don’t have quite the same ally in Bari Weiss that they had in Roger Ailes, who was an ideological right-winger ,and threatened to sue me at one point for something I wrote about him.
Bari Weiss sounds sometimes a little bit like a neocon, but she’s not nearly as doctrinaire as Roger Ailes. She also has no experience, whereas Roger Ailes was a very experienced television producer, going back to when he worked on The Mike Douglas Show. He was a television programming genius.
Bari Weiss is a woman who doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and she’s in a medium that she doesn’t understand. So I’m going to be very interested to see how Nick turns out. He’s new at the head of 60 Minutes. He wrote a wonderful book called American Kingpin, so he’s got a lot of talent. It could be that he works out and develops something really interesting.
But why not just have him develop a new show? 60 Minutes was doing really well. I think its ratings were up 9 percent or something. It brings in a ton of advertising money. It’s kind of like taking your Cadillac out and wrecking it.
A lot of her decisions, and that’s not the only one, I think are a reflection of her inexperience. I don’t think she’s taking orders from the White House, but she might be doing a version of obeying in advance. Not quite obeying, but pulling your punches a little bit in advance.
That’s a very different thing from Roger Ailes simply being an extension of any Republican presidency.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
As always, a very interesting look back and comparison. Thanks for doing it, Jon. We will talk again next week.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Thanks, Julian. Bye-bye.
