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Things That Matter (to billionaires)
Has feminism failed women? I know that may seem like a silly question to ask when women’s rights are declining around the world thanks to rightwing authoritarian politics, but trust me, OK? The problems with feminism are what we really need to be focusing on right now.
Or rather, don’t trust me. Trust the millennial media mogul Bari Weiss (and Bank of America). Starting in 2026, CBS News and Weiss’s media startup, the Free Press, are kicking off a debate series called Things That Matter, looking at questions like ‘Has feminism failed women?’, ‘Does America need God?’ and ‘Should gen Z believe in the American Dream?’ All of which is sponsored by the Bank of America.
Weiss is positioning Things That Matter as a way to bring together polarized America and get people talking about important issues. Zoom out, however, and this new series looks rather more like a vehicle to amplify the Things That Matter to Donald Trump’s Billionaire Friends, and Bari Weiss.
As you may have noticed, rightwing Trump allies are rapidly taking over the US media ecosystem and reshaping it to reflect the Maga worldview. Earlier this year, for example, CBS’s owner, Paramount reached a $16m settlement with Trump over an interview on 60 Minutes and axed Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Many commentators saw these moves as a way to butter up Trump before a potential $8bn Paramount sale to Hollywood studio Skydance Media, owned by David Ellison. Lo and behold, the mega-merger went ahead and the centi-billionaire Larry Ellison, and his son David, became two of the most influential people in media. Daddy Ellison is also one of the most powerful people in Washington; the Trump donor has been described by Wired as a “shadow president”.
The Ellisons have been busy. In October, Paramount bought Weiss’s the Free Press for $150m and installed Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief. It’s not her editorial experience that seems to have landed her the role; rather, it’s her pro-Israel views and obsession with criticizing “wokeness” and progressive causes: the Financial Times reported in October that David Ellison courted Weiss for months “as part of an effort to reset CBS’s editorial direction” and “Weiss’s vocally pro-Israel stance was among the factors that appealed to Ellison.”
Weiss isn’t content with just staying behind the scenes at CBS News. Last Saturday, she appeared on camera for a massively hyped town hall with Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. It was a very weird piece of content for a supposedly objective news channel: Kirk talked about the importance of “God’s word” a lot, in what the New Republic described as a “sermon on Christian Zionism”. Numerous media commentators were concerned about how heavily the softball interview leaned into a religious framework, leading some to question whether this was advocacy or journalism.
Whatever it was meant to be, the town hall was a ratings flop, drawing 1.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen data. That’s an 11% decline for the year-to-date average for the 8pm EST time slot and a 41% decline in 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 get it to tell the story you want. In a press release, CBS said that the town hall broadcast outpaced 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 replicate, anyway, because the conversation with Erika Kirk was positioned in the first part of the Things That Matter series. According to promotional material for the new series, we’re now going to be treated to exciting guests like JD Vance (whom Erika Kirk endorsed for president in 2028 on Thursday night) and Ross Douthat (the conservative columnist who recently asked if liberal feminism ruined the workplace.)
I can’t imagine any of these town halls becoming ratings bonanzas but it doesn’t really matter. If the Ellisons aren’t happy with the way CBS is going, they have plenty of other ways of reaching Americans. “The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the same way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil,” Wired noted in a September piece. That market now includes TikTok; on Friday the social media app signed a deal to hand control of a portion of its US business to a group including the 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, in a partnership that will expand on Oracle’s existing management of TikTok’s trove of data collected about its US users.”
I’m sure I don’t need to spell out why Ellison has been so keen on acquiring TikTok. “Think of TikTok as video data – unstructured data that fits into another slice of that Oracle matrix,” a former Oracle executive told the New York Times earlier this year. “Whoever has the data has the power.”
Now if Weiss conducted a town hall about that, instead of all the problems with feminism, I’d tune in! I’m fairly sure that the ultra-rich around the world using media ownership for political ends counts as a Thing That Matters.
US funding cuts have caused 1,394 family planning clinics to shut down. Millions of people have been left without access to contraceptives or care as part of a “radical shift towards conservative ideologies that deliberately block human rights”, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation. But make sure you tune into CBS to hear if feminism is bad for women!
Texas is collecting a list of transgender people who request gender marker changes
The state has created a list of more than 100 trans people without explaining why it’s collecting this data. And that’s not all Texas is doing: the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, is encouraging the public to help enforce the state’s “bathroom bill” via a tip line for suspected violations of the new law, which restricts which toilets transgender people can use.
Elon Musk tweeted about Sydney Sweeney’s breasts
The tech billionaire continues to be one of the creepiest people on Earth.
Ultra-conservative José Antonio Kast elected Chile’s next president
He’s the son of a Nazi party member, opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, and wants to deport undocumented migrants.
Brigitte Macron faces lawsuit after being filmed using sexist slur
The French first lady was documented calling feminist protesters at a theatre show in Paris “sales connes” – which roughly translates to “stupid bitches”. More than 300 women are now filing a legal complaint for public insult.
Yet another newborn freezes to death in Gaza
On Friday, Doctors Without Borders reported the death of a four-week-old baby. That brings the number of children who have frozen to death to five in less than 10 days. Israel continues not to allow life-saving aid into 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 helping of cuteness. So step this way for Christmassy sausage dogs in London, and this way for an update on everyone’s favourite drunk raccoon. Meanwhile in Germany, a tiny pygmy hippo named Panya is making the internet swoon. Hippo holidays everyone!
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
