Woeful Journalism

backinatracksuit · January 7, 2026, 5:26pm

Jesus you’re a sad man

Barname · January 7, 2026, 5:36pm

thats all you can say - figures.

Ralphie · January 7, 2026, 8:20pm

Scutter, as expected to be fair

Iggy · January 7, 2026, 11:38pm

Deirdre Reynolds: Sex-starved Irish women are choosing ‘male gays’ over the ‘male gaze’

More and more women are choosing to remain single – perhaps that choice carries through to viewing preferences too

‘Wuthering Heights’ is showing in cinemas next month

Shows like ‘Heated Rivalry’ move away from restrictive, heteronormative dynamics. Photo: Sky

‘Wuthering Heights’ is showing in cinemas next month

Deirdre Reynolds

Today at 15:00

Two muscly male ice hockey players tangled in a sweaty, secret love affair? That’ll be a hard ‘yes’ from me when Heated Rivalry premieres on Irish television this weekend.

Based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, the Canadian bonkbuster comes to Sky and Now on Saturday, but no need to tell your wife or girlfriend – they’ve already got it set to record.

The six-part drama centres on professional-rivals-turned-clandestine-lovers Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.

Such is the advance buzz around the show, which smashed records when it debuted online on Crave in late November, don’t be surprised if RTÉ commissions a Steamy Sliotars spin-off with two burly Kilkenny and Tipperary hurlers.

Eamonn Sweeney: Enzo Maresca’s 10-man Chelsea come of age and already look like champions in the making

This season’s Premier League title is still Arsenal’s to lose but resilient Blues proved club is much more than a vanity project

Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca salutes the Stamford Bridge crowd after the 1-1 draw with Arsenal. Photo: PA

Trevoh Chalobah of Chelsea opens the scoring against Arsenal at Stamford Bridge. Photo: Vince Mignott/MB Media/Getty Images

Arsenal’s Viktor Gyokeres fouls Chelsea’s Robert Sanchez before he is shown a yellow card. Photo: Reuters

Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca salutes the Stamford Bridge crowd after the 1-1 draw with Arsenal. Photo: PA

Trevoh Chalobah of Chelsea opens the scoring against Arsenal at Stamford Bridge. Photo: Vince Mignott/MB Media/Getty Images

Eamonn Sweeney

Mon 1 Dec 2025 at 05:30

Chelsea have entered the title conversation. They’re young, gifted and back.

The Blues’ performance at Stamford Bridge yesterday showed that Enzo Maresca’s players have the right stuff to become Premier League champions. It might not be this season but their hour is rapidly approaching.

No other team in the Premier League, and perhaps no other team in Europe, could have contained this rampant Arsenal side while a man short for an hour.

The Gunners have been an irresistible juggernaut, winning 12 of their last 13 games while scoring 30 goals and conceding just five.

Favourites to slap down Chelsea’s young pretenders even before Moises Caicedo got his marching orders for a ludicrous 35th-minute challenge on Mikel Merino, the leaders looked dead certs after the dismissal.

Trevoh Chalobah of Chelsea opens the scoring against Arsenal at Stamford Bridge. Photo: Vince Mignott/MB Media/Getty Images

Sorry, the video cannot be played. Try reloading the page or try again later.

Mikel Arteta heaps praise on Arsenal after an ‘immensely difficult’ week

Yet Chelsea, who’d been the better team before Moises crossed the red-card threshold, didn’t just hang in there but took the lead. Even when pegged back, they were never besieged.

It was the day Maresca’s men came of age. The idea of this Chelsea side as an extravagantly assembled vanity project that’s long on style but short of substance was comprehensively rebutted once and for all.

This game was the real thing. There was an intensity and a rigour to the exchanges which surpassed anything seen in this season’s league.

The match mattered. It involved, after all, two teams fresh from midweek demolitions of the best teams in the two other strongest European leagues.

The underdogs’ performance displayed both the advantages and drawbacks of youth. Chelsea were energetic, enthusiastic and fearless but a certain rawness was also evident.

Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca salutes the Stamford Bridge crowd after the 1-1 draw with Arsenal. Photo: PA

It was there in Caicedo’s terrible tackle and in the struggles of Estevao. Exhilarating against Barcelona, the teenage Brazilian’s performance before being withdrawn at the break confirmed the wisdom of Maresca’s patient approach to bringing him through.

Chelsea found heroes elsewhere. Ironies accompanied the performances of their two leading men. In a game containing three of the six most expensive midfielders of all-time, the outstanding player in this area cost nothing.

Better again, Reece James is less a specialist midfielder than a moonlighting defender. He still outshone Declan Rice and Enzo Fernandez, as well as the prematurely departed Caicedo, with a powerful, athletic performance which epitomised Chelsea’s spirit on the day.

So did the display of Trevoh Chalobah, a colossus at the heart of the home rearguard. Even a flailing Piero Hincapie arm which raised a considerable welt under the centre-back’s right eye couldn’t halt the big man’s gallop.

Trevoh Chalobah of Chelsea opens the scoring against Arsenal at Stamford Bridge. Photo: Vince Mignott/MB Media/Getty Images

Sorry, the video cannot be played. Try reloading the page or try again later.

We were better with 11 players, says Maresca after 10-man Chelsea draw against Arsenal

Arsenal and Chelsea have cast their net wide in search of talent. Players from 11 nations saw action in this derby. But the two best performers were James, reared five miles from Stamford Bridge, and Chalobah, who grew up seven miles away.

They combined to give the 10 men a shock lead in the 48th minute, Chalobah’s perfect near-post header from James’s inswinging corner beating David Raya.

That lead lasted just 11 minutes, Merino nodding in Bukayo Saka’s superb cross to equalise. It was one of the few times Saka got the better of Marc Cucurella, another player whose performance typified Chelsea’s attitude.

An 11th-minute yellow card for a foul on Saka didn’t inhibit the Spaniard at all. He stayed tight to his man, kept making tackles and generally defended as though that yellow had been a figment of our imagination.

Cucurella didn’t so much walk a tightrope as flamenco merrily across it. His teammates seemed similarly uninhibited with only Caicedo straying the wrong side of the line separating bravery from carelessness.

A moment in the 87th minute summed up their afternoon. When goalkeeper Robert Sanchez collected the ball, the percentage play would have been to hang on to it, use up a bit of time and settle things down.

Instead, he immediately threw the ball to Pedro Neto who scampered over half the length of the pitch before curling a shot wide of the far post. Corner flag? What corner flag?

The idea of victory never left Chelsea’s minds. Arsenal may have dominated possession but it was their undermanned opposition who had more shots, 11 to the Gunners’ eight.

Arsenal’s Viktor Gyokeres fouls Chelsea’s Robert Sanchez before he is shown a yellow card. Photo: Reuters

Mikel Arteta’s team will remain title favourites. They’re further along than Chelsea and should reach the summit first. Their rivals have come a long way in a short time but the title remains Arsenal’s to lose.

The visitors had to cope with the unprecedented double absence of twin centre-back towers Gabriel and William Saliba yesterday.

It left them unusually vulnerable at set-pieces with the Chelsea goal being immediately preceded by a fine Raya save after Joao Pedro had escaped the cover at a free-kick.

Such opportunities will not be available to the opposition when the big two reunite in the new year. Arsenal welcomed back Martin Odegaard yesterday. The Norwegian was involved in the move leading up to the equaliser and provided sundry reminders of what an asset he’ll be during the run-in.

Injuries haven’t been kind to Chelsea either. Cole Palmer’s sparkling World Club Championship displays whetted the appetite for his Premier League campaign. Instead, he’s hardly played thanks to groin and toe problems.

His presence on the bench yesterday suggests an imminent return which will further strengthen Maresca’s hand. If Arsenal are the Premier League’s best team, Chelsea are its most intriguing. Yesterday showed potential rapidly turning into achievement.

They’re still a work in progress. But the project has moved beyond the days of radical reconstruction. All that’s needed now is a little fine-tuning.

Maresca, barely willing to whisper the odds let alone shout them, seems the right man for the job. The Diffident One’s time may be at hand.

blackjack · January 18, 2026, 9:58am

Premium

Conor McKeon: Manchester is a pale, concrete shade of grey but there is a light that never goes out for the Reds

A flying visit to sample the derby delights with United fans… ‘City are such a tiny f**king club’

8

Conor McKeon

January 17 2026 07:50 PM

“Shhhh,” implores Dom, a teacher from Rochdale. “Shhh. Shut the f**k up, will ya?” A maelstrom of anxious, edgy energy all morning, suddenly a hush falls over the Old Nag’s Head. Sky’s coverage of the Manchester derby has started.

Everyone turns to face the screens. It’s 11.31am. Up goes the volume. Roy Keane is on. Fire blazing in his eyes, Roy doesn’t waste a second. Like Marc Overmars in 2001, he wires into his old club early doors.

“An old pal’s act,” he says of Johnny Evans’ appointment as coach. “Wink, wink. Who’s making the decisions upstairs?”

Take that.

An annoyed, guttural roar goes up in the pub. The place is edgy now. The mood has turned. They may agree with Keane on the specific issue of Evans, or they may not. But for the first time today, they see the same anger in Keane they have ferried here today, an unease curdling in their stomach all week. Now they feel seen.

The effect of Keane’s diatribe is that of changing the colour scheme on the pub. Until Roy flashed up, people were distracted and happy, busy with greetings and banter and bonhomie.

A dedication to the great Keano.

A couple near us were drinking baby Guinness. Others were endeavouring to ‘split the G’, a pursuit that warrants no further investigation.

Now, there is a singular target of attention. Who else? In the densely populated jungle of ex-Manchester United media pundits, Keane is still the apex predator.

“I’d have given him the interim job,” says Dom. “But it’ll never happen while Fergie’s still around.”

Keane hasn’t been relevant to United’s wellbeing in any direct way for two decades. Last week, he dominated the local news cycle here; firstly, by comparing Alex Ferguson and ex-CEO David Gill to a “bad smell” and then suggesting Michael Carrick’s wife might give his inaugural team talk, due to some long-forgotten gripe.

This is Manchester United. A big club but in some ways a small club. For these people, despite the intergalactic scale in question, a local club.

With so many glory-era players working in the media now, the thing — maybe the only thing — they have come to specialise in is the public airing of airing dirty laundry. It fuels the general angst, a rumbling, bubbling rancour, around the city — inside this pub.

These people. They know that the rest of football is rubbernecking in their direction. Smirking. Sniggering at every new act of hara-kiri. Every freshly unfurled shambles.

Daniel Taylor, writing in The Athletic on the morning of this game, a fixture that has come to symbolise everything that Manchester United are no longer about, explained it like this: “Anything they say is played on a loop and turned into headlines, to be plastered across various websites.

"The stronger it gets, the more prominence it receives. That, in turn, sets the news agenda and when United’s results are poor, as they often are, it cranks up the pressure on everyone.”

Manchester United scarfs and a banner in protest against owners Jim Ratcliffe and the Glazer family outside the stadium.

Zoom in and it’s just a bigger version of the parish priest calling out the manager of the intermediate hurling team in his Sunday homily for picking the wrong team.

The United line-up flashes on the screen. Sky’s graphic has it as a 4-5-1. Kobbie Mainoo is in midfield; his first Premier League start of the season. Michael Carrick, in his crested club blazer, has reached out. He has plucked the low-hanging fruit of public favour.

“Not a bad team,” says the barman with a knowing glance. Everyone agrees. It’s the hope, etc.

Dom notes optimistically that at least Carrick isn’t wearing white runners, the universal signifier for spoofery.

We’ve been in Manchester for four hours and have yet to see one City jersey. This seems odd. Manchester is a city of two elite teams. Each looks on the other as a lower caste.

“They’re a tiny club, mate,” says Dom, shaking his head pitifully. “Such a tiny club.”

It began with a 6.10am flight from Terminal 1. The brief was straight forward. Go to Manchester for the derby. Sample the local mood. Plunge a thermometer into the crisis engulfing the world’s biggest football club. Ideally taste their salty tears.

There are several United fans on the plane. Dublin airport early on a Saturday morning is full of Premier League day trippers.

For the 6.10 to Manchester, never has that phrase about travelling in hope more than expectation felt more apt. By our green and yellow ‘Glazers Out’ scarfs shall ye’ know us.

The co-pilot’s name is Ruben. Some mirth. “He moved on quickly …”

The Busby Babes who were decimated after the Munich air disaster in 1958.

Manchester, a trendy but tough town, is still asleep when we arrive. Neither light nor dark, it’s a pale, concrete shade of grey. Sums up the mood.

The early kick-off is problematic. Pubs only open at 11. Just an hour of lubrication? Fail to prepare …

The queue outside the Old Nag’s Head, the quintessential United boozer in town, at 10.20 that suggests it will be more or less uninhabitable by kick-off. We skip on to Mulligan’s around the corner. It’s worse.

We meet Jay from Carlow though. Jay and two of his friends have access to two season tickets between them. On big days — City, Liverpool, Arsenal etc — they have an arrangement. All three fly over, and then they draw lots to see which pair take their seats in the stadium and who stays in the pub.

Today they used those long, brown stirrers flight attendants provide with tea and coffee.

Jay has lost three of the last four. Jay is 42. He has a wife and two kids at home. He is beginning to wonder why he still bothers but knows it’s beyond logic now. There is no justifying this.

Manchester United and Manchester City scarfs for sale.

For those of us who grew up in the ’90s, Jay and his type feel like part of a seismic correction for United colonising the souls of so many impressionable young Irish people.

Nobody here mentions City. For a derby, this seems weird. There is no outward hostility from United fans. As though their own problems are far, far bigger now than some local rivalry.

Paul, from Oldham, reckons the schism between United and City fans isn’t as pronounced as it was anyway. They co-exist peacefully in the same greying city now.

He mentions the deaths last year of Ricky Hatton and Mani, bass player with the Stone Roses and Primal Scream. Manchester loves its icons. Hatton was a City supporter. Mani was devout to United. Nobody made any distinction. Their grief was the city’s grief.

He makes this observation as a buxom man in a ‘F**k The Glazers’ t-shirt leans provocatively across him to liberate his tinctures from the bar. Paul seems a thoughtful, easy-going sort of fella.

Carrick is manager number 10 (including interim bosses) since Ferguson and Paul thinks Amorim was the worst. Not on results, or even aesthetics, but in the altogether more precise metric of feels.

“They were just … nothing. You felt nothing watching them. They weren’t too good. They weren’t too bad. There was nothing exciting about them. No thrill. Nothing you could even get behind, you know, a bit of aggression, or passion. It was like being on f**king Prozac, mate.”

He says this while the outro to ‘Champagne Supernova’ sounds drowsily in the background.

Everyone else is concerned with the minutiae of the United malaise. His mate, Tony from Burnage, suggests Cunha should be starting as a false nine. Another of their group thinks United just aren’t suited to playing with three centre-halves. Somebody else is rattling on about Diego Dalot’s passing range.

A signed George Best jersey takes pride of place.

Paul smiles. Paul is different. Paul can see clear shapes through the dense fog. He knows these are only cosmetic issues. Trifling problems. Like telling someone with the Ebola virus they have a runny nose.

The issue, he says sagely, is culture. Poor governance. An ownership who are now twice removed from the public, their customers, bleeding the club dry from the other side of the Atlantic. He seems wistful.

Sensing a connection, we ask Paul whether it ever feels like he is supporting a club that no longer exists. Paul looks as though we have suggested giving his pint a quick stir with our index finger. “Nah, mate.”

Later, realising we have no basic grasp on the geographic or socio-economic delineations between United and City fans, we ask Paul what the defining features of the respective fan bases are. “They’re c**ts and we’re not.”

At this point, Paul has reorientated his barstool in a way that makes it clear that all future enquiries should be made to the back of his head.

It’s 11.56. Kick-off is approaching. The atmosphere in the pub shifts. It’s an angsty kind of excitement. Plenty of the early brigade seem to be having the sort of crisis of confidence a cow gets outside an abattoir.

Manchester United photos in Mulligan’s and the Old Nag’s Head in Manchester.

“C’mon United,” they cheer.

“You know,” says Dom, calmly. “This is the sort of game they could actually win ….”

… It’s 2.23pm now. We’re on Jackson Row in the heart of Manchester City. A man in a red fedora is leading a chant. Men, mostly men, are standing in the cobbled road with their arms stretched wide bellowing into the dark grey early afternoon sky.

‘My old man said be a City fan,

‘And I said, “bollocks, you’re a ct, you’re a ct.

‘I’d rather shag a bucket with a big hole in it

‘Than be a City fan for just one minute.”

‘Ya-nigh-ted!, Ya-nigh- ted!”

People are drinking on the street. They are smoking cigarettes and hugging. There is a palpable police presence but there is nothing remotely threatening or uneasy about the atmosphere here.

In the background, sounding out from the sound system in one of the pubs, The Smiths. ‘There is a light that never goes out.’

“Goes to show,” says Dom, a big shit-eating grin draped wide across his face. “City, they really are such a tiny f**king club.”

Why you can Trust the Irish Independent: Learn about Editorial Guidelines and AI Use

The Five Farcical Principles of the ‘CBS Evening News’

Tony Dokoupil and Bari Weiss’s new broadcast has been one debacle after another. Let’s try to make sense of it all, with or without whiskey.

Getty Images/Ringer illustration

It’s hard to blame Tony Dokoupil. If you have the ability to throw a football through a tire 70 yards away, you have to try to become a quarterback, and if your entire being screams “news anchor” to the extent that Dokoupil’s does—the accentless news anchor baritone, the sturdy news anchor jawline, the impeccable glazed swoop of anchorly hair—you probably have to take your turn in Walter Cronkite’s seat.

Dokoupil, as you probably know, is the new anchor of CBS Evening News. He was appointed in December by Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of the network’s news division. Weiss was herself recently hired by CBS’s new owner, David Ellison, the son of the MAGA-friendly billionaire Larry Ellison. If that seems like a lot of names to take in at once, all you have to remember is this: The scion of a superbillionaire family bought CBS in August, and he hired a conservative former New York Times opinion writer with no TV experience to remake the news division, and she gave Dokoupil, a cohost of CBS Mornings best known for accosting Ta-Nehisi Coates over Israel, the anchor’s job. This is his third week in the role. Against all odds, it’s going even worse than you’d expect.

It’s going horrendously. I don’t mean there have been a few minor speed bumps; I mean the bus is pancaked, Wile E. Coyote–style, against the side of the mountain. Ratings have nosedived. The broadcasts have been beset by basic technical errors. Dokoupil has been pilloried on both the left and the right, to the point that he seems to have broken several of his critics’ brains in fascinating new ways: Megyn Kelly, whose brain wasn’t exactly running smoothly to begin with, blamed Weiss’s sexual orientation for convincing her to hire the “soft” Dokoupil. (“This is a lesbian’s idea,” she sneered, “of what women want.”) A new exposé about the chaos inside CBS News seems to drop every day, stuffed with juicy quotes from staffers furious about Weiss’s leadership. (They’re also stuffed with bizarre details: According to a scorched-earth New York Times piece last week, one of the lieutenants Weiss brought with her to CBS is Sascha Seinfeld, whose main qualification seems to be that she’s Jerry Seinfeld’s daughter.) At one point, Dokoupil cried on the air.

“Let’s do the fucking news!” Weiss shouted at her staff during her first editorial meeting, on October 7. Well, here’s some of the fucking news CBS has done on her watch, as reflected in the headlines it’s inspired. “CBS Anchor Tony Dokoupil Is Stuck in an Endless Loop of Humiliation.” “This Tony Dokoupil Thing Isn’t Working.” “It’s Worse Than Even CBS Thought It Could Be.” “Tony Dokoupil’s ‘Embarrassing’ First Days at CBS Evening News Savaged by Staff.” ”‘Blood in the Water’: Bari Weiss’s Chaotic First Three Months in Charge of CBS News.” “The CBS Evening Debut of Tony Dokoupil Was Embarrassing in Ways I Didn’t Know Possible.”

And then—oh, friends, then there was Whiskey Fridays With Tony Dokoupil. Did you follow the Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil saga? Last week, as America melted down in 50 new ways, as Minneapolis resisted a brutal ICE occupation, as Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club hosted a party where dancers dressed as French aristocrats and wore dog masks to raise money for canines in law enforcement, images leaked of a new segment apparently being readied at CBS Evening News. Its name? You guessed it. Whiskey Fridays … with Tony Dokoupil.

Sorry, that’s the wrong image. I apologize. First day, big problems here. Let’s try that again:

What was Whiskey Fridays With Tony Dokoupil, we asked ourselves, back in those innocent days before the first Whiskey Friday rolled around? No one knew. We could draw certain inferences. It would involve whiskey. It would happen on Fridays. It would feature—you see where I’m heading with this—Tony Dokoupil. Beyond that, our horizon disappeared. Would Dokoupil read the news while slowly sipping corn liquor from a Mason jar, perhaps pausing to smack his lips and say, “That’s the good stuff!” before reporting on the latest measles spikes? Would he get more charming and relaxed as the segment progressed? Would he cry more? Could Whiskey Friday possibly start on Tuesday, the way it does at my house?

Alas, even before Friday’s broadcast aired, Whiskey Fridays proved to be a mere illusion. First Jack Daniel’s, perhaps responding to the large “Sponsored by Jack Daniel’s” sign CBS had placed on the Whiskey Fridays set, clarified that it was not in fact sponsoring Whiskey Fridays, and also had never heard of Whiskey Fridays. Then CBS announced that the set for Whiskey Fridays wasn’t actually a set for Whiskey Fridays. It was “an experimental mockup.” In sober truth, there was no Whiskey Fridays. CBS had simply been dreaming of an alternate universe, in much the same way that, in an earlier segment featuring Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Dokoupil had shown an AI-generated image of Rubio as the new shah of Iran.

For me, what emerged from the crucible of Whiskey Fridays is that Dokoupil’s Evening News has managed to invert the very concept of the news. We turn to a news show for accurate information and to help us make sense of a confounding world. But on CBS, what’s most confounding is the production of the news show itself.

Before Dokoupil’s first night in the anchor’s chair, CBS laid out “five simple principles”—pledges to the viewer that would shape this new version of the evening news. Let’s consider them one by one, to help us make sense of the 105-degree fever now dampening the pillow of one of America’s most storied media institutions. We can have whiskey afterward. I don’t care what day it is.

Principle No. 1: “We Work for You.”

Full text: “We work for you. That means you come first. Not our advertisers. Not politicians. Not corporate interests, including the corporate owners of CBS News.”

How does it sound? Great. Noble. Important. Kinda punk rock!

How accurate is it? In the legal, financial, moral, and literal senses? Wildly inaccurate. Dokoupil has his job for one reason only, which is that Ellison, CBS’s new owner—his media company, Skydance, acquired the network’s parent company, Paramount, in August—wants to make his news division more friendly to the Trump administration. This is why he hired Weiss, a 41-year-old writer known for anti-woke, anti–cancel culture, and pro-Zionist views. Weiss wrote for the opinion pages of the Times from 2017 to 2020; her only prior managerial experience came from editing a popular Substack newsletter, The Free Press, which Ellison bought for $150 million when he brought her to CBS.

To be plain, then: Dokoupil works for Weiss, Weiss works for Ellison, and Ellison works for his family’s business interests, which means seeking favor from the White House. To be plainer still: In the silent depths of interstellar space, there are clouds of ionized gas that are doing as much to “work for you” as any of these people.

The best way to understand Dokoupil’s CBS Evening News is as an extension of Weiss’s media persona, which has been built around a peculiar sort of performance. She brands herself as a heterodox thinker, a champion of free speech, even someone who leans to the left, and then adopts positions that flatter the reactionary oligarch class. She isn’t a conservative! She just independently thinks her way to conservative conclusions over and over again. If you’re a rich white man convinced that pronouns and trans athletes are the greatest threats facing America today, Weiss is there to assure you not just that you’re right, but also that your bile is proof of your intellectual fearlessness.

The staging of this performance is neither particularly subtle nor particularly complex. Weiss will typically define “elites” exclusively as left-leaning academics and journalists, then depict the billionaires who feel aggrieved by those academics and journalists as the leaders of a bold grassroots rebellion against the tyranny of liberal groupthink. (Here she is, for instance, calling Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance’s billionaire mentor and the chairman of the powerful surveillance technology company Palantir, the “vanguard” of an “antiestablishment counter-elite”; in this view, the establishment elite would be, like, a Middlebury professor.) Billionaires, not a flattery-averse demographic overall, love it when she writes lines like “He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own”—that’s Weiss on Thiel again—and reward her by funding her projects and giving her jobs.

In hiring Weiss, Ellison surely understood that he was bringing in someone who would both serve his agenda and clothe her service in the language of moral heroism. The Ellisons are currently working to expand their media empire—they’re among the controlling investors in the impending sale of TikTok—which exposes them to potential oversight from regulatory agencies. The acquisition of Paramount last year made it clear to them, if it wasn’t already, that the Trump administration will gum up the business dealings of media companies that don’t curry the president’s favor: Approval for the long-delayed deal came through only after CBS paid Trump $16 million to settle a very sketchy lawsuit, then canceled the late-night show of Trump critic Stephen Colbert, who had called the payment a “big, fat bribe.”

So the Ellisons want to please Trump. Weiss wants to please the Ellisons. Put all these pieces together, and you end up with Dokoupil, the public face of the enterprise, bellowing “Marco Rubio, we salute you!” live on national television. It’s how you end up with Dokoupil’s long infomercial of a talk with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It’s how you end up with his shit-eating chat with the president himself, who bragged that the anchor had Trump to thank for his new role: “If she got in”—meaning if Kamala Harris had been elected president—“you probably wouldn’t have a job right now. … You wouldn’t have this job, certainly, whatever the hell they’re paying you.” A normal news network might have cut that bit of the interview out; CBS couldn’t, because Trump threatened to “sue your asses off” if they edited his interview, and through the 60 Minutes settlement, CBS had created a world in which it was normal to capitulate to White House pressure on free speech.

So no, none of this suggests that CBS Evening News works for us as opposed to “politicians” and the “corporate owners of CBS.” The exception here is the many CBS staffers who are reportedly seething behind the scenes at what’s happening in their building, and who have relentlessly leaked details to other media outlets revealing how corrupt and shambolic Weiss’s operation has been. The staffer who told The Independent that the network was now “state TV”? They were working for you.

Principle No. 2: “We Report on the World as It Is.”

Full text: “We report on the world as it is. We’ll be honest and direct with you. That means no weasel words or padded landings. We’ll tell you what we know, when we know it. We’ll update our reporting when we uncover new facts. And we’ll admit when we get it wrong.”

How does it sound? A little weird! This is literally just a description of how a news organization is supposed to work. Uniqlo doesn’t have to put a giant placard in the window reading, “We will sell you socks.” If it did, I’d feel suspicious.

How accurate is it? Not particularly! I don’t mean Dokoupil lies on camera, or even distorts narratives Fox News–style. It’s more that the tone of his reporting, which combines a professionally folksy everyman demeanor with low-calorie pseudo-gravitas, smooths away the sharp edges of events, favoring vibes of unity and healing over real understanding, particularly when the causes of a tragedy lie in right-wing ideology. Conservative media reacted to the killing of Renee Nicole Good by trying to convince you she had it coming; Dokoupil, by contrast, delivered a much-mocked soliloquy filled with high-toned rhetoric that, on close examination, didn’t seem to mean much at all. “There is so much to say about the last 24 hours,” he intoned, “but sometimes, what matters most is what is yet to be said at all, and what we all still need to hear.”

The effect of this speech was to turn an event with very clear and specific political causes into a lukewarm bath of emotions. The real tragedy, Dokoupil seemed to say, isn’t that ICE shot Good; the real tragedy is our national mood, and our national mood can be rescued by Dokoupil looking into the camera and taking it very, very seriously. All the words, in this case, were weasel words. None of them honestly, directly depicted “the world as it is”; instead, they softened the world into a gentle, sorrowful, vaguely mysterious blur. In this way, CBS seemed to acknowledge our feelings while suggesting that no one, least of all the people whose decisions led to Good’s death, could possibly be held to account.

Principle No. 3: “We Respect You.”

Full text: “We respect you. We believe that our fellow Americans are smart and discerning. It’s our job to present you with the fullest picture—and the strongest voices on all sides of an issue. We trust you to make up your own minds, and to make the decisions that are best for you, your families and your communities.”

How does it sound? Like an influencer about to drop four minutes of anti-vax propaganda?

How accurate is it? Hmm. I can’t say I felt hugely respected by CBS’s decision to push the transparently ludicrous claim from anonymous Trump officials that the ICE officer who killed Good “suffered internal bleeding” during the incident. (A bruise, technically, is a form of internal bleeding.) Nor did I feel trusted to make up my own mind when Weiss yanked a 60 Minutes segment that might have made the administration look bad. If you think I’m so smart and discerning, don’t you think I’ve noticed that this sort of deferential wise-centrist rhetoric—there are always two sides, and they must be presented with equal weight so that viewers can decide for themselves—is almost always a cover for incorporating right-wing misinformation into the news? Do you think presenting me with the fullest picture ought to mean acknowledging that?

Over the past couple of years, one of Weiss’s side projects has been the founding of an anti-woke, notionally pro–free speech liberal arts university in Texas called the University of Austin. Funded largely by conservative billionaires and supported by a bevy of prominent right-leaning academics, the tiny school is currently melting down over an ideological litmus test one of its free-speech-loving donors wants to impose on faculty and staff. Last week, Politico published a story about the conflict, and this story included a detail that made my head spin: There is a marble bust of Weiss in the university library. I repeat: There is a marble bust of Weiss in the university library.

I’m sorry, but a 41-year-old journalist who commissions, or even permits, a marble bust of herself in public respects neither journalism nor her audience. Deference to billionaires is not a form of respect.

Principle No. 4: “We Love America.”

Full text: “We love America. And we make no apologies for saying so. Our foundational values of liberty, equality and the rule of law make us the last best hope on Earth. We also believe in Franklin’s famous line about America as a republic—if we can keep it. We aim to do our part every night: One way to think about our show is as a daily conversation about exactly where we are as a country and where we are going.”

How does it sound? Empty.

How accurate is it? You’ll be surprised to learn that I don’t think it’s accurate at all, even to the extent that boilerplate jingoism can be accurate. Anyone who really believed that “our foundational values of liberty, equality and the rule of law” made us “the last best hope on Earth” would presumably want to defend those values. But CBS, under its new ownership, is engaged in a conscious project of enabling the forces working to subvert them. Anyone who believed, with Franklin, that we have a republic “if we can keep it” would presumably want to help us keep it. But CBS, under Weiss, is contributing to the larger right-wing project of undermining access to accurate information, thus making the republic more fragile by making the public easier for would-be authoritarians to manipulate.

Democracy depends on voters seeing the truth. Dokoupil, wittingly or not, is serving as the acceptable face of a collection of powerful people who want to make the truth harder to see. This is not a patriotic project in any way. The patriotic language here is a disguise, meant to keep you from noticing what’s really happening.

Principle No. 5: “We Respect Tradition, but We Also Believe in the Future.”

Full text: “We respect tradition, but we also believe in the future. We embrace the tools that allow us to reach you where you are. Some of you will watch this show on linear television. Others will increasingly watch it on social media. What we can guarantee is that the tools will continue to change—but some things never will. One of those things is honest journalism.”

How does it sound? Pretty good, I guess. Like CBS has heard of phones!

How accurate is it? In the sense that it’s saying “you can watch CBS News on your phone,” I’d say it’s stunningly accurate. You can watch CBS News on your phone! At last, CBS has found a way to report on the world as it is. The world contains phones, and those phones contain CBS News. This is honest journalism of a sort that even the legendary Cronkite, who anchored CBS News from 1962 to 1981, could never have practiced, largely because he retired more than two decades before the smartphone was invented. Responding to a viewer comment earlier this month, Dokoupil said, “I can promise you that we’ll be more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite.” Mission accomplished, I guess!

Brian Phillips
Brian Phillips is the New York Times bestselling author of ‘Impossible Owls’ and the host of the podcasts ‘Truthless’ and ‘22 Goals.’ A former staff writer for Grantland and senior writer for MTV News, he has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, among others.

Jake_Stevens · January 26, 2026, 9:21pm

Cheasty · January 26, 2026, 9:29pm

Julie Burchill would be a great life partner for @Tassotti. I’d say he’d horse it into her.

Cheasty · February 4, 2026, 11:48pm

The Washington Post effectively ceased to exist today. Castrated by a catch and kill billionaire who has kissed the ring of the dear leader. Sure who needs actual journalists in the era of endless fascist bullshit.

Woeful Journalism

Deirdre Reynolds: Sex-starved Irish women are choosing ‘male gays’ over the ‘male gaze’

Read more

Eamonn Sweeney: Enzo Maresca’s 10-man Chelsea come of age and already look like champions in the making

Conor McKeon: Manchester is a pale, concrete shade of grey but there is a light that never goes out for the Reds

Conor McKeon

Related topics

The Five Farcical Principles of the ‘CBS Evening News’

Principle No. 1: “We Work for You.”

Principle No. 2: “We Report on the World as It Is.”

Principle No. 3: “We Respect You.”

Principle No. 4: “We Love America.”

Principle No. 5: “We Respect Tradition, but We Also Believe in the Future.”