While Fox News has long been an almost singular focus of the so-called media reporting class, conservative stalker and Status founder Oliver Darcy seems to have decided in recent months to shift his weight to throwing daily Mean Girls hissy fits over CBS News and the existence of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and Tony Dokoupil as CBS Evening News anchor. That was yet again on display Thursday night as he pilloried them over Dokoupil having to cover the U.S.-China summit in Beijing from Tapei, Taiwan after failing to received a visa.
Darcy called Dokoupil’s week “an embarrassing series of events for the Bari Weiss-led network,” which feels like the umpteenth time he’s written something emblematic of what Stephen L. Miller told us Thursday on the NewsBusters Podcast about Darcy and his crowd embodying the grade school-esque “cool kids table” mentality.
As usual, Darcy never offered anything in terms of substance — think rhetoric or story election — to criticize Dokoupil and boss Weiss. Rather, it’s entirely personality-based and vague claims they’re somehow hard right.
Darcy relitigated the visa situation before gloating this “logistical blunder has become an embarrassment for the Bari Weiss-led network, leaving CBS as the only major broadcast news network without an anchor on the ground in the Chinese capital.” Never mind that CBS still has a full-time correspondent in China with Hong Kong-based Anna Coren.
He then shared his latest death-by-a-thousand-cuts leak about what CBS’s hotel thought of Wednesday’s show:
[E]agle-eyed viewers may have noticed that when Dokoupil anchored Thursday’s broadcast, he was in a very different location than the night before. While he anchored his program from a Taipei hotel balcony on Wednesday, Dokoupil was stationed in Liberty Square on Thursday.
The change in location was no small matter and the result of a behind-the-scenes drama. According to people familiar with the matter, the hotel from which Dokoupil had initially been broadcasting was far from pleased with the network using its grounds to anchor the newscast. In the words of one source, after seeing the aggressive way in which Dokoupil presented the geopolitical situation between China and Taiwan on his show, hotel management “was appalled,” not wanting to be member to regional politics. I’m told that displeasure was made clear to CBS News.
First of all, who cares?! Second, doesn’t that say more about the hotel than it does Dokoupil that, presuming it’s a global hotel chain of some sort, didn’t have the stones to allow freedom of speech about a country looking to level the ground they stand on?!
“As a result, CBS News on Thursday was forced to scramble to secure a new location for Dokoupil to broadcast from, ultimately deciding on Liberty Square. Put another way, not only was Dokoupil unable to broadcast from Beijing during Trump’s trip, but he was also booted from his backup location—a logistical fiasco compounded by another mortifying logistical fiasco,” Darcy added, painting some grim scenario as though Dokoupil’s life was in danger even though Liberty Square was arguably a better backdrop for the point he was trying to make.
Darcy even made a point Miller also called out on our show Thursday:
It’s yet another reminder to Weiss, who took over the network with virtually no television experience, that producing television news is not as simple as it might seem. And while Weiss might blame her deputies for the mistakes, she is ultimately responsible for what happens at her network.
Gee, considering the network’s liberal bent and third-place ratings for a lifetime, one would not normally look to tacitly endorse the multiple CBS regimes prior to Weiss and Paramount Skydance boss David Ellison.
Darcy shoe-horned this into a more traditional ratings piece, declaring the “embarrassing episode” be seen through the lens of “a brutal first five months for Dokoupil, who has struggled immensely in the ‘CBS Evening News’ chair” and new Nielsen data that the newscast has been under four million total viewers for “five consecutive weeks...with the week beginning May 4 averaging just 3.7 million viewers.”
He closed by repeating himself about Weiss supposedly Captain Queeg-levels of competence:
But the “Evening News” disaster is an indictment of Weiss’ short tenure atop CBS News. Under her leadership, Dokoupil’s ratings continue to slide, likely because viewers have been alienated by management’s sudden rightward editorial lurch. And even on the logistics front, basic unforced errors continue to pile up, creating real embarrassment for both the show and the network.
Yes, the “rightward editorial lurch” is more like two ticks to the center covering a wider variety of stories, such as hospice fraud in California or, like this past week, telling the truth about China’s current picture.
For a dictatorial tattletale like Darcy, only viciously partisan and inflammatory hot takes about conservatives existing in polite society are the only way the news media should operate.
