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Last fall, David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, purchased Bari Weiss’s pro-Trump website, the Free Press, for $150 million. As part of the deal he put Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she quickly went to work making the division’s products more friendly to Donald Trump. We don’t need to recapitulate the entire history here; it is enough to note that, as a business matter, Weiss’s tenure has been an abject failure. Ratings are down across CBS News properties. But as a corporate matter, Weiss has been a success. First, as a way of greasing the skids of Ellison’s purchase of Paramount, he publicly signaled that he would give Weiss a prominent role at CBS News long before he bought her. Then, once she was put in charge and started breaking things, she made Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery all the more politically appealing to Trump. Trump publicly praised Weiss, and when Ellison and Netflix got into a bidding war for Warner-Discovery, the president stepped in to thumb the scales and make sure everyone knew that he would approve a sale to Ellison but not to Netflix. So under Weiss, CBS News has been a failure, both in terms of product and business. The journalism at CBS News is getting worse and the audience is leaving. But the particular manner in which CBS News has failed—by broadcasting its obeisance to Trump—has enabled tremendous success by the division’s corporate parent. This is what happens in a command economy when the head of the government picks winners and losers. CBS News no longer exists as a unit whose purpose is to create journalism that attracts an audience and drives revenue. Its purpose is to keep the president happy so that Ellison’s other businesses prosper. It’s not quite right to say that CBS News under Weiss is a charity. It’s more like an ongoing bribe.

On the Great American Plains, the summer nights are not silent. The fields sing the summer songs of insects—not individual sounds, but a high-pitched drone of locusts, crickets, cicadas, small chirping things for which I have no names. You drive along the superhighway and that sound blends with the sound of wind rushing through your opened windows, hiding the thrum of the automobile, conveying the impression of incredible velocity. Wheels vibrate, tires beat against the pavement, the steering wheel shudders, alive in your hands, droning insects alive in your ears. Reflecting posts at the roadside leap from the darkness with metronomic regularity, glowing amber in the headlights, only to vanish abruptly into the ready night when you pass. You lose track of time, how long you have been on the road, where you are going. The fields scream in your ears like a thousand lost, mechanical souls, and you press your foot to the accelerator, hurrying away.