Folks like Oliver hate Weiss because her path to success—building a real business that meets a customer demand, generates revenue and employs people—is one that can’t be gifted upon someone based on their checking boxes and playing office politics. The weasel word here is “qualified.”
How and why did a news business that makes $18 million in revenue get valued at $150 million? That sort of multiple is typically only seen by high growth tech firms .
I didn’t say his viewpoint was self-serving. It’s ideological. A system based on box checking and politics makes it easier to achieve liberal social and political goals.
Seems like a just-so story. You could have just said Oliver has it out for Weiss over politics and ideology, and I'd have agreed. But you came up with this weird specific story instead.
I’m suggesting that, as an ideological matter, Oliver values box checking and credentialism in hiring someone to run CBS News, and devalues business accomplishments.
The Free Press makes $15M in annual revenue and sold for $150M - that's a 10x revenue multiple. That's not a business outcome, that's an ideological bailout. Ellison didn't buy this as a media investment, he bought it to install Weiss at CBS. The early VCs (Andreessen, Sacks, etc.) weren't making business bets either - they were funding ideology and got rewarded for it when a fellow billionaire needed to acquire the vehicle to legitimize his hire (but still nowhere near the type of exit they would seek for their non-ideological bets).
Also, since when is "built a business" the qualification for editor-in-chief of CBS News? That's an _editorial_ position at a major news organization. The relevant qualifications are journalism credentials and editorial judgment - you know, the things Weiss notably lacks. She came up through opinion pages, not the news side, and as Oliver documented, her publication has repeatedly published poorly fact-checked stories that fell apart under scrutiny. But sure, she can raise money from right-wing billionaires, so let's put her in charge of 60 Minutes.
More specifically, it sounds like an acqui-hire. Legacy media is in the toilet in terms of brand and profitability. You don’t need to reach for some conspiracy theory about “funding ideology” to understand why the owners would want to install Weiss. The ideology argument also makes no sense, because legacy media loves Wall Street and billionaires, as long they pretend to be socially liberal. And Weiss is known for being center-right on cultural issues, not economic ones.
> Also, since when is "built a business" the qualification for editor-in-chief of CBS News?
Building a business is a great qualification for any management position.
"Building a business is a great qualification for any management position."
So the guy who owns a bunch of McDonald's franchises is qualified to manage a team of surgeons? Someone who built a successful plumbing business should run a law firm? This is such obvious nonsense it's hardly worth taking seriously.
Management positions require domain expertise. The editor-in-chief of CBS News needs to understand journalism - how to evaluate sources, verify facts, assess editorial judgment, manage reporters. Weiss has none of that. She's an opinion writer, and the Free Press is mostly opinion with a sprinkling of notably shoddy opinion-driven pseudo-journalism.
And her "business" - which again, sold for 10x revenue in what was clearly an ideological acquisition - has produced work like the Gaza starvation piece that has been thoroughly debunked, most recently by Drop Site [1]. The FP never contacted any of the families. When Drop Site actually did the reporting and spoke to the families, they found the opposite of what Weiss claimed - these children were starving due to the blockade, and their pre-existing conditions made them more vulnerable to malnutrition, not less.
That's not "ground truth" journalism. That's lazy Google searches used to push an ideological narrative while calling it reporting. And now she's running CBS News - including 60 Minutes, the #1 news program in the country.
When the talent heads for the exits and ratings tank, will you concede Weiss was actually destructive to the organization? Or will you celebrate because you're on board with her ideological project regardless of the journalistic outcome?
