There is a scene in The Sopranos every fan remembers. Davey Scatino, a degenerate gambler, gets into Tony Soprano’s card game and can’t pay.
So Tony takes his sporting goods store and starts a bust-out.
Not in a hostile takeover. Not in a leveraged buyout. He simply moves in, runs up the credit lines, orders pallets of merchandise on the store’s account, sells it out the back door, and when the inventory is gone, and the vendors are screaming, and the name over the door means nothing anymore. Scatino torched what was left of his life and walks away from the ashes.
A “bust-out,” they call it. You drain the asset, you collect the insurance, you leave the husk. There are prettier, more genteel terms of art for it in private equity, but they’re all part of the same spectrum.
.
I have been thinking about Davey Scatino’s sporting goods store all week. Because that is what is happening to CBS News, and Bari Weiss is the one holding the gas can.
This week they fired Scott Pelley after a career spanning thirty-seven years.
Pelley was the managing editor and was once CBS Evening News anchor, a seat held by giants like Cronkite and Rather. He was a correspondent who stood in war zones and famine-stricken nations, and witnessed catastrophes and triumphs closer to home, so that you, sitting in your living room, would know the world.
Bari Weiss and the little claque of toadies fired him for the crime of standing up in a staff meeting and saying the quiet part out loud: that the woman now running CBS News and, by extension, 60 Minutes was “murdering the show,” that she “does not love this place.”
Pelley was right. And being right is precisely why he had to go.
Let’s be honest about Bari Weiss, because she will not be honest about herself.
She built a brand on a single, lucrative pose: the brave iconoclast, the heterodox truth-teller, hounded out of the priggish New York Times by the woke libtard mob, off to found a plucky little independent shop where Real Journalism could breathe free.
It was a good act. It sold subscriptions. It got her a podcast, a tote-bag readership, and a permanent seat on the Aspen-Sun Valley-Davos carousel, where the people who own things go to admire one another and bask in their comforts.
Then David Ellison wrote a check. About $150 million for The Free Press, and a title new title: editor-in-chief of CBS News, for a 41-year-old woman who, as the trades noted with admirable bluntness, has no experience working in broadcast TV. Not all skills scale and transfer; being a columnist isn’t like being a leading a major network.
It helps to know that, but she doesn’t. Hubris? Greed? The temptation to play above your skill set? Sure. Ambition is a cruel mistress.
And she reports, conveniently, not through the org chart but directly to Ellison himself. His eyes. His ears. His hand on the throttle, all to please Daddy Donald.
Here is what Bari Weiss does not understand, and what every stalking horse before her has failed to understand right up until the moment they’re loaded on the trailer for the glue factory: you are not the star. You are the bait.
The independent-journalist costume was the entire point. It gave the demolition a vaguely principled, anti-woke face. It let the wrecking crew swing the ball while telling the world they were merely modernizing. She thinks she has been handed the keys to a great American institution. She has been handed the matches and told where to stand.
Bari Weiss’s transformation of CBS and its properties into Diet Fox misses the point. The Fox audience wants Fox. They want all the sugar, all the fat, all the caffeine, all the Brawndo-style electrolytes of sloppy populist rage.
When the building is sold, when 60 Minutes is a husk and the Murrow legacy is a logo on a streaming menu, and the accountability journalism that made the brand priceless has been safely strangled, she will discover what Davey Scatino discovered.
The people who run the bust-out do not keep the man who lit the fire. They keep the insurance money and the profits.
You buy a distressed asset … and CBS, post-merger, post-debt, was distressed.
You install management with no loyalty to the institution and total loyalty to you. You provoke the veterans into leaving or fire them for “cause.” Pelley. Tanya Simon, the executive producer. Sharyn Alfonsi. Cecilia Vega. Anderson Cooper out the door. You replace a legendary EP with a former tech columnist, Nick Bilton, another columnist and writer with no TV experience.
You kill the stories that cause trouble for the regime, like the CECOT segment on the migrants shipped to an El Salvador prison, which Weiss pulled hours before air. And you do it all while issuing press releases about “trust” and “fearless, independent journalism.”
This is not editing or a change of management direction.
This is asset-stripping. It is the leveraged-buyout playbook applied to the First Amendment. The remaining correspondents, Stahl, Whitaker, Wertheim sit waiting to find out whether they are inventory to be sold or merchandise to be burned. They already know the answer. They are just waiting for the receipt.
And do not forget how the asset got distressed in the first place. Trump sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview; the suit was widely understood to be entirely frivolous, but Paramount, which owned CBS, settled rather than fight. They paid the protection money. The Weiss installation is what comes after the protection money. First you make them pay. Then you make them yours.
The hatred of the press in this country runs on two floors, and you have to understand both, or you understand nothing.
The ground floor is for the rubes. The media are libtard socialist shills who hate America. It’s loud, it’s cheap, it fills arenas, it moves merch. It’s been a part of the GOP’s messaging since 1960. It is designed to make sure that when a real reporter lands a real story, half the country has already been inoculated against believing it. That floor is an endless circus of “J’accuse, liberals!” And the circus is the point … it keeps the crowd looking up at the high wire while the real work happens in the basement.
The basement is where the actual agenda lives, and it has nothing to do with bias and everything to do with accountability. 60 Minutes did not threaten anyone because it leaned left. It threatened people because it knocked on doors that powerful men wanted left shut. Because a producer with a camera and a sixteen-minute slot could end a CEO, expose a defense-contract fraud, surface a cover-up, make a senator sweat.
The goal of the strip-down is not to make the news more conservative. The goal is to make sure the door-knocking stops. To eliminate the accountability function entirely for business interests, for political interests, for the men who own the men who own the network.
A press that cannot hold power to account is not a press. It is a public relations department.
I know what 60 Minutes was, because I stood on the other side of it. Years in and out of government, prepping principals for The Interview, and I will tell you the truth we all knew: other than “Bob Woodward is on the line,” a 60 Minutes request was the Super Bowl. Hell, I’ve been interviewed by 60 Minutes, and even after years of doing media training, I still had a “Whoa” moment when I sat down.
It was the one knock you could not spin your way out of. That ticking stopwatch was the closest thing American power ever had to a conscience it could not buy. Until they did.
The men who built this country were not sentimental about the press. Half of them were savaged by it. Jefferson, who wrote that a government without newspapers was a fate worse than newspapers without a government, later groused that nothing in a paper could be believed. They knew the press was loud, unfair, and frequently wrong.
They were right.
The press was and still is a human institution, living, breathing, flawed.
And they protected it anyway. First.
Before the right to bear arms, before the protection against unreasonable search, before any of it, the First Amendment. They put the free press in the foundation, not the attic, because they understood a thing that Donald Trump and his employees Larry and David Ellison also understand perfectly and intend to exploit: a free press is the only private actor in the entire constitutional design whose specific job is to make powerful people uncomfortable.
Madison called the people’s right to know the popular information that arms them against tyranny. Strip that away, and you don’t get a quieter country. You get a darker one. You get a Potemkin republic where the powerful are never asked the question, where the stopwatch never ticks, where the door is never knocked.
That is the project. That is what the matches are for.
So watch what happens to Bari Weiss, because it is the most predictable thing in the world. She will finish the job. The veterans will be gone, the troublesome stories spiked, the brand sanded down into something safe and streamable and toothless.
And somewhere in a year or two, when the ratings crater and the prestige evaporates, and the asset has been fully drained, the men of Ellison’s world will need someone to blame.
It will not be them. It is never them.
It will be her. The brave independent truth-teller will get hung out to dry by the very corporate masters who handed her the gasoline, and she will be genuinely, wide-eyed astonished, because the one story Bari Weiss never managed to report was the one about herself.
Davey Scatino never saw it coming either. He thought he was a player. He was the merchandise.
Light it up, Bari. Just remember who profits in the end.
And it’s not you.
Excellent article, Rick. Hero of the Week--Scott Pelley. Shameful Losers: CBS's dystopian owners.
Weiss was on my radar for years. Her incessant disingenuous victimhood at the NYT then her involvement in the bullshit Twitter files reveal marked her as a destructive and self important player, albeit as you suggest an especially robust and ruinous pawn. I can't wait for her comeuppance.