San Francisco’s shoplifting epidemic is shocking to behold. But we shouldn’t imagine that the same couldn’t happen here. In fact, we’re well on our way. According to the British Retail Consortium, theft from stores across 10 UK cities is up by 26%. More, “incidents of violence and abuse against retail employees have almost doubled on pre-pandemic levels.”

On Tuesday, Asda Chairman Stuart Rose told LBC that “theft is a big issue. It has become decriminalised. It has become minimised. It’s actually just not seen as a crime anymore.”

In the absence of an adequate response from the authorities, retailers are beginning to take defensive measures. For instance, home furnishings company Dunelm is now locking up duvets and pillow cases in cabinets; Waitrose is offering free coffees to police officers to increase their visibility; and Tesco plans to equip staff with body cameras. 

The “progressive” response to this phenomenon isn’t quite as deranged as it is in in the US. Nevertheless, British liberals have responded as expected. A piece in the Observer is typical. You’ll never guess, but apparently it’s all the Tories’ fault: “Starving your population and then ‘cracking down’ on it for nicking baby formula or a can of soup can start to make a government look rather unreasonable.”

But as the writer ought to know, the issue here isn’t the desperate young mum hiding a few groceries in the pram. Nor is it the schoolboy pilfering the occasional bag of sweets. Rather, the real problem is blatant, organised and sometimes violent theft of higher value items. Criminals who never previously thought they could get away with it increasingly now do — thus presenting a material threat to retail as we know it. 

But instead of addressing the issue head-on, the writer blames the victim: “Once goods were kept behind counters, but since the birth of large supermarkets they have been laid out near the door, ready for the taking.” How terribly irresponsible of them! On the other hand, perhaps the open display of goods isn’t just a convenience for customers, but instead the hallmark of a high trust society. 

In fact, modern shops are a minor miracle of civilisation: public spaces, stacked high with products from all over the world, that passing strangers may freely inspect and handle, but which aren’t looted by anyone who feels like it.

Surely, that’s something worth defending. But if you’d prefer to abandon retailers to their fate, then don’t moan when they do what it takes to survive. Some will close, of course, and others will move their operations online. Those who stay open will guard themselves and their stock behind plexiglass and electronic tags. And then there’s the hi-tech solution: the fully automated and completely cashless store, in which customers have to be authenticated to even get in. 

Remember that retail facilities like this already exist. One day, when they become the norm, we’ll remember what shops used to be like. Then, we’ll ask why no one stood up for them.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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With the media’s attention fixed on CBS, Tony Dokoupil marked his second week in the Evening News chair with a presidential interview from Detroit. Are Dokoupil and CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss merely puppets of the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which merged Skydance with Paramount and promptly signalled a push for change? Tuesday’s Trump interview yielded little: the ratings were weak, the questions serviceable. But moderation will satisfy no one, and that is the problem.

Dokoupil’s discussion with Trump was fair enough. The President played media critic throughout the segment, jabbing the anchor repeatedly over certain questions and even invoking Dokoupil’s salary. Trump also called Skydance-Paramount CEO David Ellison an “amazing guy”. When pushed with some obvious points on Iran, the economy, and Renee Good (who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week), Trump didn’t give up much more than usual, and Dokoupil largely stuck to the script.

Variety reported shortly before the interview aired that CBS Evening News in Dokoupil’s first week was down 23% in viewership compared with the same period a year ago. NBC and ABC were down as well, but only by 9%. This shows that CBS has work to do.

Weiss’s tenure started in October with leaks, continued with leaks through the holidays, and entered the new year with even more leaks. The morning of Dokoupil’s big interview, a New York Times feature took readers inside CBS News, painting an unflattering picture of Weiss. Two days earlier, at the Golden Globes, comedian Nikki Glaser used the network’s airwaves to joke about the news division’s shaky credibility.

Hypothetically, if one were to take an ageing network with declining trust and transform it for the better, people responsible for driving that network into the ground would respond with anger. They would leak internal discussions to their peers at other outlets. They would accuse their new bosses of demanding coverage be biased in the other direction. Every mistake would be scrutinised with unusual vigour. It’s no surprise that this is exactly what’s transpired since October.

The task of reforming CBS News both in style and substance would be monumental for anyone, let alone a young and high-profile pundit already disliked by many journalists. Weiss, for her part, is celebrating two million subscribers at The Free Press and describing the job as an effort to make CBS “the most trusted news organisation in the world”.

Weiss’s big moves have included layoffs, eliminating the “race and culture” unit, plucking Dokoupil from his morning job, making hires from Substack and the Wall Street Journal, changing the outlet’s style guide on transgender language, and hosting Erika Kirk for a town hall.

The Kirk town hall is an instructive example of how all this is going. Because Weiss, who conducted the interview herself, brought up the man who was questioning Kirk’s late husband when he was assassinated, conservatives were infuriated by the broadcast. Progressives found it cringeworthy. Nobody was happy — and the ratings reflected that.

If Ellison’s aim in hiring Weiss and acquiring The Free Press was to move CBS from a monocultural media model to a microcultural one — where opinionated news prevails, and audiences value transparency over neutrality — the network’s early strategy would not look so resolutely backwards. Yet that interpretation makes more sense than CBS attempting to resurrect an ideal of neutrality and monoculture in an age when most news is consumed through highly personalised social media feeds.

Weiss, according to the Times, described the “goal” of Dokoupil’s recent broadcasts on the road as “not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*”. By that standard, Tuesday’s Trump interview failed. It looked and sounded a lot like what CBS would have done before the Weiss era.

That’s the problem: monoculture is dead, so the audience for contrived centrism on nightly TV doesn’t exist in American living rooms, and doesn’t ultimately reflect much change in newsrooms after wokeness is rightfully purged. If Weiss transformed CBS into an elevated version of The Free Press for a post-woke era, with coverage offered more often by self-aware journalists with transparent biases and a clearer digital-first strategy, the takeover could succeed. If Weiss is looking to make those changes, it’s not yet obvious.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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