Winners & Losers: Narratives & Nihilism

Bari Weiss' destruction of one of America's greatest newsrooms accelerated last week. But our winner isn't playing by the right-wing's media rules.

Welcome to your weekly pot of Losers underneath the rainbow. This is our chance to review not only the stories that shaped the week, but the people behind them. I say this all the time in a million different ways, but all of the chaos that’s happening right now is a choice. Our world did not light itself on fire. People chose this course.

Picking through Winners and Losers isn’t necessarily an exercise in assigning blame. Holding the firelighters to account is important, but that’s only one piece of the broader project of building a more equitable, just, and livable world. In fact, if we get mired in laying blame, that becomes the project itself. Who did this to us is an important question, but it’s not the solution to our problems.

We are the solution. The right, and especially the white Christian nationalist right, has framed the current battle as a fight for who gets to write the rules for everyone else. But that’s not the endgame for the left, exactly. Do you want to be able to tell your neighbors how to worship, or who they can marry, or how they are allowed to care for their own bodies? If you’re reading this, probably not.

But that is the right’s goal. And they would love for us to frame the battle in those terms: this is a battle over who gets to control you.

Not so. We are not fighting over who gets to control anyone. Winning that fight on their terms would look a lot like losing.

We are fighting for freedom for everyone.

The framing of this is everything, and the right knows this. This is why they have put so much effort into controlling the media. They are baiting us into a battle on their terms.

This week’s Loser is a central figure in the effort to shape the narrative to their advantage. And our Winner is someone whose messaging — at least over the past week — has cut through.

Bari Weiss, Loser

Last week, CBS News announced a second round of layoffs under the leadership of Bari Weiss. Around 6% of the workforce — somewhere between 60 and 70 people — are being cut. Additionally, CBS’s radio division is being shuttered entirely. CBS New Radio has been around since 1927, and was the home of Edward R. Murrow. Around 700 affiliated radio stations will lose their CBS News Feed.

If these are solutions, then it’s important to understand the problems they are meant to solve.