ENOUGH WITH THE LIES!

David Ellison can change America. David owns Skydance Media which bought Paramount which owns CBS. His hope is to return it to the Tiffany Network. It will take some heavy lifting.

I have said for a long time that the proximate cause of the collapse of freedom the United States is the press, the only industry that has specific protection under the Constitution of the United States. Freedom depends on a skeptical press, willing to expose all of the wrongs regardless of where they are found. Our entire media industry has failed us.

Ellison’s remake of CBS under Bari Weiss changed the leadership, but it didn’t change the result. Bari’s choice of Tony Dokoupil to resurrect the dismal ratings of the one-vaunted CBS Evening News has now reached the lowest ratings of the 21^st Century. The total audience is now below 4 million total viewers.

I have some advice for David. You cannot change the result by changing the people at the top. The rot is deep.

Twenty years ago, Bernie Goldberg, a former CBS News reporter, wrote Bias. It was a take-down of CBS News due to its insular look at the world. He said that everyone in the CBS News Division in New York believed in their heart of hearts that their political views were precisely in the mainstream because everyone they knew agreed with them. And, indeed, that is the problem.

I have concluded that the real force behind the power of television is not the person who reads the news. It is the person who writes what that person reads. If I were going to try to improve the ratings I would start with the producers.

For decades 60 Minutes was one of the most important programs on television. The animating force behind the program was the producer, Don Hewitt. He chose the subjects and how they would be covered. He oversaw the scripts. He was a “newsman!”

In Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner and Morely Safer he had serious people, news people, doing the interviews and running the stories.

In 2004 viewership had declined from 17 million viewers to about 14 million and Hewitt was moved out. Politics overtook 60 Minutes just as it overtook the newsroom. Over time, the selection of subjects became very one-sided.

They also replaced the serious on-air personalities with dilettantes. Anderson Cooper? Norah O’Donnell? Sharyn Alfonsi? Spare me. They now have just over 8 million viewers. Joe Rogan routinely does better than that.

The news we get from the corporate media today does not diverge from the approved narrative of the Left.

It is now estimated that pure, unadulterated corruption is responsible for the cost to taxpayers of between 500 billion and one trillion dollars - PER YEAR!

It took Nick Shirley, an unpaid 23-year-old with a YouTube channel, an X account, and a video camera to uncover the fraud. This fraud, both in Minnesota and California, was reported to the top governmental leadership years ago. Yes, even Joe Biden was informed about California’s hospice fraud 4 years ago. Nothing was done. NOTHING! It was the Vice President’s home state. So … what’s a few billion bucks among friends?

We are going to find the same fraud in virtually every state. And we’re going to have to wait for more young unpaid producers with video cameras to root it out. The corporate media has no interest in it. It goes against the narrative.

Americans are not getting turned off by news. They are getting turned off by lies. Hundreds of podcasts, hours-long, get millions of viewers and listeners. People want to know more. But they want authenticity. They are tired of the lies.

And the lies being told to us are not even believed by those telling them. No sentient human being believes that men can have babies or that gender is a choice. They do, however, insist that we believe it.

Hannah Arendt addressed this in Truth and Politics. In her view the lying was not aimed at making anyone believe a lie, but to ensure that no one believes anything anymore. A people that cannot distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, are being completely subjected to the rule of lies. And then they are helpless.

The corporate media industry has fallen victim to the narrative. They picked a team. And they lie for the team. To end the lies, to report the news, you must destroy the entire structure.

If I were David Ellison, I would hire another top person to work with Bari, the Editor-in-Chief. That person would be the Producer-in-wChief. I would find someone outside of the system who was curious and cynical. Someone like Matt Taibbi who questions everyone and everything, but who is a very talented reporter and knows news. (Substack: Racket News)

I would turn that producer loose to remove the rot throughout the system. There are now thousands of young men and women who have created their own “productions.” They are getting more viewers and listeners than the networks. All by themselves! Turn them loose.

If Ellison turned someone like Taibbi loose and allowed him to clean out the newsroom and fill it with young aggressive people they would change the atmosphere in that newsroom. Everyone would want to join in the fun. And we would watch the evening news again. But not until then.