CBS bet big on Bari Weiss and Erika Kirk and got a face plant instead. The much hyped CBS News town hall was one of the most heavily promoted specials of the season, with weeks of teasers, primetime promos, and social clips, yet it still hemorrhaged top advertisers and only pulled about 1.9 million viewers, which Variety called one of the least watched hours in broadcast television this season. That is a disaster night for a legacy network that still expects its news brand to look serious.
On the same week, CBS Evening News drew closer to 4.5 million viewers, while even a rerun of FBI cleared over 3 million, which makes the Weiss special look like a late night infomercial in comparison. When a supposedly marquee news event that the network blasted everywhere cannot even hang with scripted filler, it tells you viewers are not buying what this new culture war flavor is selling. For advertisers, wall to wall marketing plus low ratings plus backlash is the worst of both worlds.
It is also a brutal look for a network that once carried Walter Cronkite, Edward R Murrow, Dan Rather, Connie Chung, and Katie Couric as symbols of fact first journalism. Putting Bari Weiss at the center of CBS News makes that tradition feel like a costume the network no longer fits. Every flop like this, especially one they promoted this hard, chips away at the last bits of credibility that brand still has with people who remember when CBS News meant something.
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