Not Made for TV

Among other things, Bari Weiss is horrible on television and so are most of the idiots she is trying to turn into CBS Fascist News.

CBS News turning itself over to the propagandizing widow of a right-wing provocateur is bad on its own terms, but also nothing we haven’t seen before. Ostensibly mainstream and objective news organizations do evil shit all the time. What stands out in this case is just how cheap and desperate and disconnected it all felt.

The biggest problem with Saturday’s broadcast is that Weiss and Kirk are total zeroes. Weiss is not cut out for this kind of hosting gig: Every time she spoke in the town hall, she sounded like she was rehearsing a book report in the mirror. She seems not to know what a follow-up question is, and some of her lines of questioning were frankly insane. At one point she just started listing conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s murder, and it wasn’t clear if she was doing it for laughs or because the audience was meant to believe that debunking these theories is a matter of grave importance. Erika Kirk, somehow, makes for even worse TV. She looks and speaks as if she’s stuck in an endless audition to play Margaret White in a Ryan Murphy reboot of Carrie, and her political positions are nonsensical.

Kirk seems to have painted herself into a corner in her quest to become a political figure. You may remember her broadcasting from her husband’s podcast studio following his assassination and warning, “You have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country. And this world. You have no idea.” But ever since then, her vengefulness has given way to constant concern about divisive rhetoric and political violence, with a dash of 1990s-style religious moralizing. This puts her in a position where, when pressed on something like her refusal to condemn Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric, she can’t do anything but trip over her own words for a few minutes and then blame society’s ills on parents going to too many Pilates classes and ignoring their kids. “Do you want your kid to be a thought leader, or an assassin?” was her big flourish to the end of that series of thoughts.

These ladies have no juice. Please get them off our TVs.

This is the thing–it takes skill to be good at media. This is why the killing of Charlie Kirk was so powerful–he was an amazing propagandist, someone with the kind of natural touch that few people have. Whatever you think of him as a human being, he was very, very good at what he did. You can’t just replace that. Bari Weiss certainly can’t and Kirk’s widow most certainly can’t. It’s just going to lead to no one watching. CBS might be OK with that, at least up to a point. But really, why would anyone at all watch Bari Weiss on TV? What is the market here? It doesn’t exist.