Last Wednesday, newly minted CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss dropped the big news. As she walked through the CBS newsroom, Weiss looked into the camera, mechanically moved her hands around, and gave it to us straight: "I just sat down for an hour with Erika Kirk, and we talked about everything."
Given that Weiss was speaking in the tone of voice usually reserved for correspondents reporting from a war zone, someone who was not familiar with Erika Kirk may have concluded that something really important had just happened. Those who are more familiar with Kirk, however, immediately knew what was up. Charlie Kirk's widow, who has been overexposed while awkwardly attempting to establish herself as a public figure in the wake of her husband's assassination, had found yet another friendly platform at Weiss's version of CBS News, which is starting to implement its newsroom chief's vacuousness on an institutional level.
Weiss and Kirk taped an hour-long town hall, which aired on CBS Saturday night after the network flogged it for days ahead of time. Clips from the town hall appeared on the CBS News Twitter account throughout Thursday and Friday, and Weiss herself made an appearance on the CBS morning show to promote the town hall. As the town hall aired Saturday night, the CBS News Twitter account posted 11 consecutive tweets featuring clips from Weiss and Kirk's conversation. One of the top stories on the CBS News homepage this morning is headlined "7 highlights from Erika Kirk's CBS News town hall." That is just one of 19 posts about the town hall that CBS News has published to its website. All that promo didn't seem to do the trick. Variety noted that CBS seemed to have trouble selling the town hall to advertisers; at one point during the broadcast, a Chia Pet ad was shown.
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.
