I enjoy The Free Press.
Bari Weiss is walking into CBS studios with bodyguards. I’m not the reader that concentrates on the details, I skim and make my verdict based on my hunch.
I saw that CBS had hired a new boss. I casually looked through the resume and she hit all the right marks. Early 40’s, East Coast, Ivy Leaguer, and a Democrat that didn’t leap towards the far left. Her background was in political science and journalism with her graduate studies being done partly in Israel. CBS had just hired a genuinely democratic Jewish millennial journalist. What wasn’t to love?
Again, I haven’t looked deep. Maybe I’ll feel differently in a year, but for now I’m okay. While we nitpick at our centrist representatives, each polar opposite side will continue to create talking heads that will fill the airwaves. Instead of having her present a new thesis on how she can ensure to uphold the legacy of Walter Cronkite, could we just be happy that she’s working?
My cheat sheet for decades was the back pages of Time Magazine. I would read the summary of the articles and then Joel Stein’s opinion piece. That was enough for me to have an inkling of all the jokes on Real Time by the time it aired on Friday. That’s all I needed, enough to understand it running in the background. Every last one of those outlets were using NYT as a cheat sheet, but that stopped because they put up paywalls.
What I have done recently is skim The Free Press. I didn’t even know that was Weiss’ podcast and substack. Here’s her latest article on sports betting. I don’t care about sports betting, I knew it was a bad habit because the blonde on Law & Order:SVU almost got fired for it. She goes into detail about the corruption internally that caused this huge sports issue. The country spends billions of dollars to watch really fit teens run back and forth better than most people. That’s the crux of it and money is just thrown at it with endorsements for players and organizations that could feed the developing world. Why are we shocked that funny money is exchanging hands? But it’s not my pastime.
I was really sad when I found out the art world laundered money through over hyping artists. That shocked me. Someone created an item from scratch that immortalizes a point of time that meant something to them and it was used by others to wash money? That’s just rude. I’m guessing that’s how all the people that read the NBA article in its entirety feel.
Weiss doesn’t pull her punches and I like that she leans into all of the drama they are throwing at her. Never trust the media though. They gave us Weiss for a reason, so you have to look for what the other networks will return with. Let’s pretend all of our usual cheat sheets didn’t have paywalls, are we just getting more centrists in the game leading up to 2028?
To even it out, CNN should get Kamau Bell on a weekly show and CBS has to find a way to work in a weekly spot for Galloway’s Raging Moderates. Will it be CNN’s new streaming service or Netflix that will decide to create the sound bites that will go all over social media flooding it with the clips elder millennials are looking for. We are finding a few like Weiss on Substack, but if a media company can do the legwork and put it in front of us so we can get it automatically like we do all of the ads, it would be appreciated.
A political conversation came up at work. I immediately had an opinion. My resources? Reviews of said issues on a few substacks, hearing about it on Real Time and hearing my little brother bringing it up once. There is a need for main stream media to create these news bites and find us on the apps. We are listening, but you have to put it in front of us like you’re Zuck testing something new out on Meta.