The Conservative Crusade Against CBS
The steady decline of American media continued this week with word that David Ellison, the new owner of Paramount, plans to purchase The Free Press and give its founder Bari Weiss a top position at CBS News.
Now, I should acknowledge at the outset that I am not the son of an insane billionaire as David Ellison is, so I'm incapable of understanding the obvious Business Genius of this move. I'm merely the son of an accountant, wondering why anyone would pay a rumored $200 million for a Substack that – even with massive financial backing from some of the dullest and dimmest tech bros in the world – still has fewer than 150,000 paid subscribers, and why they would then put that person in the driver's seat of a network news division with millions of viewers.
The driving motivation behind this bizarre transaction, of course, is politics.
Even though it just gave Donald Trump a $16 million bribe – sorry, "settlement" – for his laughable lawsuit against "60 Minutes," Paramount wants to assure the president and his party that they are absolutely on their side. Investing in an "anti-woke" startup like the Free Press and placing Weiss in a prominent position at CBS News is a ham-fisted way to accomplish that.
While this all speaks poorly of the present and augurs ill for the future, as a historian my province is the past. And it's worth noting that for conservatives in postwar America, CBS News has long been a target to be crushed or co-opted.
As you're likely aware, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Jack Daniels) had a famous feud with the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, whose "See It Now" program provided important pushback to McCarthy's reckless anticommunist crusade and helped bring about the senator's downfall. (If you've never watched the culmination of Murrow's takedowns, please do yourself the favor.)
But the McCarthy-Murrow fight was just an opening round in a long-running fight between conservative Republicans and CBS News.
In 1964, for instance, GOP presidential nominee Senator Barry Goldwater got into a "verbal duel" with CBS News over a proposed trip to Germany. Angry that a news report from the Munich bureau had drawn comparisons between Goldwater's brand of conservatism in America and "right wing elements in Germany," the senator canceled his trip and launched into a war of words with the news network.
More seriously, President Richard Nixon engaged in much more than a war of words with CBS News.
Nationally-known CBS figures like Daniel Schorr and Marvin Kalb made Nixon's infamous "enemies list," but his White House went even further. It tried to meddle with the editorial decisions of local CBS affiliates as well.
CBS's White House correspondent Dan Rather, mentioned in that piece above, naturally became a special target of Nixon's hatred.
In his memoirs, FBI Director L. Patrick Gray recalled a conversation with Nixon shortly after Hoover's funeral in 1972. When Gray mentioned a routine inquiry from Rather, Nixon went through the roof. "Rather's a son of a bitch!" Nixon said. "Don't ever see him. Don't ever, ever, ever see him, I can assure you, because he will cut you up. I would not say anything at all. Cut him off completely." He reminded the new FBI director that J. Edgar Hoover had hated Rather "with an utter passion" and for good reason. "Rather is a smart rat," the president insisted, "but not as smart as someone who's more of a pundit."
As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Rather kept up the attack and Nixon responded in kind. The two men soon held each other in open contempt, as seen in this remarkable exchange at a March 1974 press conference.
During the Reagan administration, the Republican War with CBS News ramped up with regular complaints about their coverage being unfair to the administration.
In April 1982, for instance, the White House accused a CBS News documentary of distorting its policies on poverty. In August that same year, the President Reagan personally called Dan Rather – right in the middle of a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News – to complain that he had mischaracterized a point about arm sales to Taiwan. And on it went. In a 1983 interview, Rather said the administration had engaged in "unrelenting" criticism of CBS in general and him in particular.
But it wasn't just the Reagan White House.
In January 1985, Republican Senator Jesse Helms (R-Hands) launched an ambitious campaign calling on conservatives to buy up stock in CBS and thereby "become Dan Rather's boss."
Working with the group Fairness in Media – which put out the "Rather Biased" bumper sticker in the banner image – Senator Helms asserted that CBS was "the most anti-Reagan network" in the nation, Helms asserted in a five-page letter mailed out to a million conservatives. But if each of the recipients of his letter “shifts enough of his or her savings or investments to buy just 20 shares of CBS stock," he promised, "we would have enough votes to end CBS’ bias forever.”
While the plan tapped into the wide resentment of grassroots conservatives, it failed for simple reasons of math. As the Morning Call noted in an editorial, the scheme would require the purchase of 15 million shares for more than a billion dollars in all.
But that's where the billionaires like the Ellisons come in. Rather than get a million ordinary people to band together and purchase a network, it's much easier for one extraordinary billionaire to throw a piddling $16 million at the president and then toss control of the entire enterprise over to an "anti-woke" grifter.
It's been nearly 75 years in the making, but at long last, conservatives have managed to tear down their hated enemies at CBS News.
