Winners & Losers: Narratives & Nihilism
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.
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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.
Let’s talk about Bari.
In October, 2025, Paramount Skydance CEO and Trumpy billionaire David Ellison installed Weiss at CBS News as editor-in-chief. Her first gig in broadcast television was running the newsroom at one of the most hallowed broadcast newsrooms on Earth. Her experience in mainstream media was as an opinion writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. But in 2020, she resigned from NYT because she found the environment too illiberal. On here own, she founded The Free Press right here on substack.
https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/winners-and-losers-narratives-and