Ben Smith

I think Allison obviously kind of shares those to some degree.

And CBS News, by the way, is a single-digit percentage of the business of CBS, which is mostly the movie business.

And Allison has spent his career in the movie business.

And then people say, you know, the news is like 4% of the revenue and 95% of the headaches of these businesses.

But sure, this is like kind of one of the first big splashy things he's doing is bringing in Barry as the editor-in-chief, not the president, a new title as editor-in-chief.

of CBS News to direct the editorial back to the center.

That probably is what the owners want in terms of their own political views, although that's not going to, like, rescue a dying broadcast operation.

It also comes at a time.

Donald Trump, you know, loves to rage against these networks, is very focused on CBS and others, and feels that they've, you know, treated him unfairly, already extracted a big settlement for them.

And I think...

This is a company that's looking for another wave of regulatory approval to buy WarnerMedia.

And doing things that Donald Trump likes seems like a pretty good way to get regulatory approval.

And honestly, I think if you told one of these companies they could pay $100 million to $150 million to make a big deal go through faster, they probably would.

Yeah, there are a lot of different things going on here.

And I think that's what you're seeing, which is CBS has one problem, which is its business is collapsing.

That's not because of where it stands on Israel.

They're CBS News.

And in fact, isn't going to be fixed by tweaking their political stance because it has to do with the fact that they're a broadcast television network with a massive cost structure.

There's also...

People, you know, and I think there is also a sense of like it will please Donald Trump to stick it to the old, the people at CBS, whoever they are.