Legacy media elites think you’re a “village idiot” — and this week they went ahead and said it out loud. CBS’s new Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil posted a video promising to stop leaning on “advocates” and “academics or elites” and instead put the average American at the center of the broadcast, and the very people he was talking about instantly proved his point.
Legacy media elites were furious that anyone inside CBS would even suggest viewers might not trust them anymore, especially in the Bari Weiss CBS era where the old club suddenly has a boss who isn’t impressed by their credentials. Within hours of Dokoupil’s video, academics, pundits, and self‑described “experts” were flooding social media to defend legacy outlets and sneer at the idea that ordinary Americans should ever outweigh the sacred consensus of the green room.
Legacy Media Elites and Their ‘Village Idiots’
Legacy media elites and their favorite “village idiots” script each other’s roles so well that half the country can now recite it from memory. They play the sober guardians of democracy; you play the confused rube who must be corrected whenever you notice the Iraq WMDs, the lab leak, or a campus hoax they spent years insisting were settled facts.
What Dokoupil did in that short promo was admit, in careful corporate English, that the critics have a point: for years the big networks have “taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American,” and “put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
That is just a polite way of saying what viewers already know in their bones — that legacy media elites have been programming for the faculty lounge and the activist Slack channel, then acting stunned when the people they ignored stop trusting them and change the channel.
References:
- Tony Dokoupil Tells Viewers ‘Don’t Trust Me, Make Me Earn It’ Ahead of New CBS Role
- Tony Dokoupil Asserts ‘CBS Evening News’ Will Be Independent From Its Corporate Owner: “I Report For You”
- Tony Dokoupil: Don’t just trust me. Make me earn it.
Tony Dokoupil Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
Tony Dokoupil is smart enough to see the numbers on the wall: barely a quarter of the country still trusts the outlets that made him a star, and the trend line is still heading down. His little confession reel is less a moral awakening than a damage‑control memo read straight to camera — an admission that the old script is dying and the audience is not coming back on nostalgia alone.
When he says the press has “missed the story” by putting too much weight on advocates, academics, and elites, he is talking about years of coverage where anyone who questioned the party line on Russiagate, lockdowns, or Hunter Biden’s laptop was painted as crazy or corrupt. Now the same faces are begging viewers to “hold us accountable,” as if the problem was a lack of slogans instead of a lack of respect for the people who turned them off in the first place.
Larry Sabato and the Viewers He Loathes
Larry Sabato likes to present himself as the calm, data‑driven grown‑up in the room, the professor who can explain America to the rest of us from a safe distance in Charlottesville. But when he lets his guard down on social media, the mask slips and the voters he claims to “analyze” turn into the “village idiots” he blames for everything from measles outbreaks to believing the wrong things about elections.
This is the perfect specimen of the old ecosystem Tony Dokoupil is talking about in that promo clip: a class of credentialed talkers who live off television hits and university brands while dripping contempt for the very people they insist they understand.
When those people tune out of the evening news or show up in polls saying they don’t trust the press, Sabato and his peers never ask what they did to earn that distrust; they just crank up another thread about how dangerous it is when the “village idiots” stop listening to their betters.
When ‘Experts’ Become Activists With Titles
For years, the people filling those green rooms were introduced as neutral “experts,” even when their social feeds and side hustles made it obvious they were activists with titles. Viewers were told to treat every panel as objective analysis, then went online and saw the same faces fundraising for causes, dunking on half the country, and declaring dissenters too dangerous to platform.
That gap between the résumé and the behavior is a big reason trust in the media has fallen below 30 percent, with major polls now finding more Americans who have zero confidence in the press than those who have even a “fair amount.” People can smell the difference between a straight shooter and a hired gun, and no amount of new slogans from legacy media elites can erase the memory of all the times the “experts” turned out to be campaign surrogates in disguise.
References:
Bari Weiss CBS and the Panic Inside the Club
Bari Weiss walked into CBS with a mandate that terrifies the old guard: stop treating the news division as a private club and start treating viewers like adults who can tell when they’re being spun. Her push to tighten standards at CBS and even “60 Minutes” signaled that the era of automatic deference to legacy media elites might finally be ending.
That is why so many internal leaks read less like principled objections and more like a tantrum from people angry that someone is finally checking their work. Staffers mocking Tony Dokoupil as “mediocre” and sneering at his promotion are really sending a message to Weiss and to the audience: they would rather torch their own shop than accept a shake‑up that forces them to earn back the trust they casually burned.
References:
- Bari Weiss plans overhaul of CBS News and “60 Minutes” standards and procedures
- CBS News staff grouse over ‘mediocre’ Tony Dokoupil getting ‘Evening News’ gig: ‘It’s an insult’
Why Legacy Media Elites Keep Losing the Country
Legacy media elites keep blaming “disinformation,” “populism,” and “polarization” for the collapse in trust. But fewer than three in ten Americans now say they have even a fair amount of confidence that the press will tell them the truth.
When 70 percent of the country tells pollsters they have “not very much” or no trust in the media at all, that is not a messaging problem. It is a verdict on decades of sneering at the people who were right about the stories the networks “missed.”
Tony Dokoupil’s little speech only landed because it finally echoed what viewers have been shouting back at the screen since Iraq and Russiagate. The press chose advocates over the average American and academics and elites over the people paying the cable bill.
If Bari Weiss is serious about fixing any of this, she has a clean decision to make. CBS can still be run for legacy media elites and their favorite “experts,” or it can finally be run for the so‑called “village idiots” who turned out to be the only adults in the room.
Note: This post builds on an earlier piece about Bari Weiss’s first big move at CBS – Bari Weiss CBS: New Boss Pulls 60 Minutes Trump Hit Piece, Signals Real Change
References:
- Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.
- New CBS Evening News Anchor Tony Dokoupil Says News Has ‘Put Too Much Weight’ on Academics and Elites: ‘The Press Has Missed the Story’