Ben Smith

I think Barry West will be there for a long time.

Yes, if next time you see her, you should make her buy dinner.

Well, I would say there's a couple of different things here.

One is I don't know if you are a regular viewer of the CBS Evening News.

If you are, you are very unusual for our age group.

But, like, you know, CBS is a broadcast television network that for complicated reasons kind of missed out on cable and then kind of also missed out on digital.

So this is the Titanic like well after it has hit the iceberg in a place that has been in a kind of state of real crisis and decline for many, many years.

So it's not like – I mean so I don't really – the idea that like these guys were just doing fine and these maniacs are coming and changing everything.

What are they doing?

It's ridiculous.

I mean, I think CBS is sort of a poster child for a company that really failed to figure out the digital transition, lost most of its value, and is getting swallowed by some billionaire's kid, which is at a discount as a result.

And that's true of CBS News, which is a tiny, tiny portion of a bigger company that is now called Paramount.

that includes all sorts of other things that used to have a lot of value and and sherry redstone who owned it managed it gradually downward over a period of years um and and so in the new ownership um

David Ellison, whose dad is one of the richest guys in the world, Larry Ellison, I think both seem authentically to share Barry's politics, which are – I don't know if you'd call them center, right?

They're eclectic.

They're very pro-Israel, very, very upset about the direction the media took in the last few years.

And, you know, and –

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.