Has feminism failed women? CBS wants to know | Arwa Mahdawi
Things that matter (to billionaires)
Has feminism failed women? I know this may seem like a silly question to ask when women’s rights are in decline all over the world due to right-wing authoritarian politics, but trust me, okay? The problems with feminism are the ones we really need to focus on right now.
Or rather, don’t trust me. Trust millennial media mogul Bari Weiss (and Bank of America). Starting in 2026, CBS News and Weiss’ media startup Free Press are launching a debate series called Things That Matter, tackling questions such as “Has feminism failed women?” “, “Does America need God? and “Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?” Everything is sponsored by Bank of America.
Weiss positions Things That Matter as a way to bring polarized America together and get people talking about important issues. However, zoom out and this new series looks more like a way to amplify the things that matter to Donald Trump and Bari Weiss’s billionaire friends.
As you may have noticed, Trump’s right-wing allies are quickly taking over America’s media ecosystem and reshaping it to reflect Maga’s worldview. Earlier this year, for example, CBS owner Paramount struck a $16 million deal with Trump for an interview on 60 Minutes and axed Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Many commentators saw the moves as a way to embolden Trump ahead of a potential $8 billion sale of Paramount to Hollywood studio Skydance Media, owned by David Ellison. Lo and behold, the mega-merger happened and centi-billionaire Larry Ellison and his son David became two of the most influential people in media. Papa Ellison is also one of the most powerful people in Washington; the Trump donor was described by Wired as a “shadow president.”
The Ellisons have been busy. In October, Paramount purchased Weiss’s the Free Press for $150 million and named Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. It wasn’t his editorial experience that seems to have won him the role; rather, it was his pro-Israel views and his obsession with criticizing “wokeness” and progressive causes: the Financial Times reported in October that David Ellison had courted Weiss for months “as part of an effort to reset CBS’s editorial focus” and that “Weiss’s openly pro-Israel stance was among the factors that appealed to Ellison.”
Weiss doesn’t just stay behind the scenes at CBS News. Last Saturday, she appeared on camera at a high-profile town hall with Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow. This was very strange content for a supposedly objective news channel: Kirk talked a lot about the importance of the “word of God,” in what the New Republic described as a “sermon on Christian Zionism.” Many media commentators were concerned that the softball interview relied on a religious framework, leading some to question whether it was advocacy or journalism.
Regardless, the town hall was a ratings fiasco, attracting 1.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen data. This represents an 11% drop from the annual average for the 8:00 p.m. EST time slot and a 41% drop for the key 25-54 demographic. Big advertisers also stayed away and airtime was bought by companies like the dietary supplement SuperBeets.
The great thing about data, however, is that you can often find a way to make it tell the story you want. In a press release, CBS said the town hall show outperformed the network’s season-to-date performance in the time slot by 32% in total viewership and 19% in the key demo. CBS clearly thinks the snooze-fest was successful enough to be replicated, anyway, because the conversation with Erika Kirk was positioned in the first part of the series Things That Matter. According to promotional materials for the new series, we’ll now be treated to exciting guests like JD Vance (whom Erika Kirk endorsed Thursday night for president in 2028) and Ross Douthat (the conservative columnist who recently asked whether liberal feminism has ruined the workplace.)
I can’t imagine one of these town halls becoming a ratings bonanza, but that doesn’t really matter. If the Ellisons aren’t happy with the way CBS is moving, they have plenty of other ways to reach Americans. “The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the same way the Vanderbilts did for railroads and the Rockefellers did for oil,” Wired noted in a September article. This market now includes TikTok; The social media app signed a deal on Friday to cede control of part of its U.S. operations to a group including software giant Oracle, founded by Larry Ellison. The Guardian reports that Oracle “will license a copy of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm as part of the deal, part of a partnership that will expand Oracle’s current handling of the trove of data TikTok collects on its US users.”
I’m sure I don’t need to explain why Ellison is so keen on acquiring TikTok. “Think of TikTok as video data — unstructured data that fits into another slice of this Oracle matrix,” a former Oracle executive told the New York Times earlier this year. “He who has the data has the power. »
Now, if Weiss held a town hall about this, instead of talking about all the issues surrounding feminism, I would tune in! I’m pretty sure the ultra-rich around the world using media ownership for political purposes counts as a thing.
Funding cuts in the United States have led to the closure of 1,394 family planning clinics. Millions of people find themselves without access to contraceptives or care as part of a “radical shift toward conservative ideologies that deliberately block human rights,” according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation. But be sure to tune in to CBS to find out if feminism is bad for women!
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Ultraconservative José Antonio Kast elected next president of Chile
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Brigitte Macron prosecuted after being filmed uttering sexist insults
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Newborn baby freezes to death in Gaza
On Friday, Doctors Without Borders reported the death of a four-week-old baby. This brings to five the number of children who died of cold in less than 10 days. Israel continues to refuse the arrival of vital aid to Gaza. Journalists are also still not allowed to report freely from Gaza.
The week in Pawtriarchy
As this is the last Pawtriarchy of 2025, I think we all deserve an extra dose of kindness. So stop by here for Christmas sausage dogs in London, and here for an update on everyone’s favorite drunken raccoon. Meanwhile, in Germany, a little pygmy hippo named Panya is making the internet swoon. Hippo holidays everyone!
