Jonathan Chait

It was a gigantic scandal, but it wasn't going into his pocket and he wasn't pardoning criminals.

I mean, it was like, you know, 1% as bad as this.

But that was on front pages for months and months.

Agreed.

I've been very critical.

I've written some critical stories about Barry Weiss's tenure at CBS.

And the context that you simply can't ignore is the obvious ones, and I'm sure your audience is well aware of it, right?

Is that there was a merger involving Paramount, and the payoff to this merger approval is essentially Barry Weiss being put in charge of CBS and changing its ideological character.

So...

All the people who are trying to defend her tenure there are just focusing on the discrete steps of like, hey, maybe this story she held up needed more approval, or maybe this person she pushed out wasn't that great, or maybe this person she wants to put into the job has some good ideas.

The individual decisions aren't the point.

The point is the corrupt circumstances under which she is there as part of a payoff to the president.

That is the story.

So I just imagined as a kind of

counterfactual that you have an AOC as a Democratic president, and she somehow leverages the ownership of Fox News and finds some business pressure point for Rupert Murdoch and says, if you want this business deal to go through, I want some changes at Fox News.

And the changes I came up with were to put you in charge of Fox News.

Correct.

Tim Miller.

I'm not drawing an equivalent between you and Barry Weiss.

I think Barry Weiss is talented, not as talented as you.