Reliably liberal CBS News’ experimental town hall featuring a conservative, Erika Kirk, is now the object of mockery — not regarding Ms. Kirk, who comported herself with her customary dignity — but for the bizarre format, black hole of a time slot and embarrassing, low rent advertising rarely seen on a premium broadcast network like CBS, including an ad for a Chia Pet.

Before CBS News aired its town hall with Ms. Kirk, the widow of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the event was already receiving scrutiny from left-wing commentators and media observers who questioned the format of the program.

Erika Kirk had already made a lengthy appearance on Fox News earlier that week discussing the same topics she would on the CBS town hall – including the harmful conspiracy theories about her husband’s murder. Normally, according to broadcast news conventions, an outlet like CBS News would never “follow” an interview that had already appeared on cable (and on daytime cable, no less). Yet CBS News persisted.

The high-profile event – moderated by CBS News’ new editor in chief, Bari Weiss – aired during the 8 p.m. time slot on Saturday,  one of the least-watched hours in broadcast television, which CBS usually fills with reruns of its more popular entertainment programs like “NCIS” or “Fire Country.” And the Kirk town hall appears to have failed to draw major advertisers that are usually seen on broadcast television networks, such as Amazon.

Instead, the commercials during the advertising time slots were filled with so-called direct-response advertisements– common on conservative channels such as Fox News, which are shunned by liberal Madison Avenue – which typically cost less, from advertisers such as the dietary supplement SuperBeets, a home repair service, HomeServe.com, and CarFax. 

Those watching the town hall on CBS’s flagship New York City station, WCBS, also saw an ad for Chia Pets.

The Kirk event was sponsored by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, the Catholic mobile prayer app Hallow, and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a group whose founders are Jewish but which is largely supported by evangelical Christians. The advertisements for the town hall led to some mockery on social media from left-wing users who argued it was a sign of failure by CBS’s new management, which has been attempting to clean up the network’s longstanding left-wing bias and help boost its ratings. 

(These efforts have had little success. President Trump has twice said publicly that CBS News’ new management is as bad as the old one when it comes to bias. “60 Minutes,” for instance, has persisted with regular, anti-Trump segments.)

A left-wing commentator, Mark Strauss, wrote on X, “Bari Weiss brings in the big advertisers…such as Chia Pets.”

“Cronkite and Murrow are rolling over their graves,” another user wrote about the slate of advertisers.

Another viewer wrote, “This ‘special report’ segment was so bad that apparently major advertisers refused to participate in it and at one point they had Viagra and Chia pet commercials in between breaks. The Ellisons are going to bankrupt CBS news and I am going to laugh my ass off watching.” 

Variety notes that a “flurry of the ads appearing in one program usually offers a signal that the network could not line up more mainstream support for the content it chose to air.”

However, the idea that the Ellison family — which owns CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global — and Ms. Weiss are driving the network into the ground financially may be overblown. After the town hall, CBS aired a rerun of “48 Hours,” the venerable CBS News true crime news magazine, which had commercials from bigger advertisers such as Amazon, the Ferrero Group, and Procter & Gamble.

Major advertisers also tend to stay away from programming that focuses on culture war issues, opinion programming, or programs touching on hot-button issues, unless they are being presented by a prestigious brand, such as “60 Minutes.” Given the political sensitivity surrounding the killing of Charlie Kirk, it makes sense that the special was lacking major advertisers. 

Besides the lack of major advertising, some left-wing commentators had criticized the network for letting Ms. Weiss, who founded the pro-Israel, anti-woke outlet, the Free Press, moderate the event. Ms. Weiss, an experienced podcaster, is a newcomer to broadcast television, which broadcasts to an enormous audience that’s very different from the listeners and viewers of the brainy fora to which she is accustomed.

CBS News, critics pointed out, is chock full of A-list broadcasters, some with 50-60 years of experience in front of the cameras.

CBS News did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.