Bari Weiss Versus the Blob
Her enemies don’t want her editing
Bari Weiss is successful enough that she doesn’t need a defense from me. Yet so nasty, intense, and unwarranted are the attacks on her for merely exercising some mild control as editor in chief of CBS News that it’s become a newsworthy situation. The attacks say more about Weiss’s enemies than they do about her. The severity of the reaction shows how deeply invested so many are in the status quo, that is, a mainstream media with a left-wing bias. In that environment, demanding that all sides of the story be told is somehow an unpardonable sin.
Think I’m exaggerating?
“The Warning With Steve Schmidt,” a Substack-based publication that bills itself as “a place of respectful and civil debate,” ran a piece headlined “Bari Weiss killed CBS News in 76 Days.” It likened Weiss to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and described her, inaccurately, as “a cynical, corrupt and deeply unserious character who is partisan, frivolous and incompetent.” The article described her as “an abysmal leader and a worse journalist, with the judgement of Donald Trump Jr. on an all-you-can-sniff night at the Cartagena Trump Hotel and Casino,” “a sinister force in America, who serves two sinister families. One is named Ellison, and the other is named Trump.” Writing about a prison in El Salvador that is the topic of the “60 Minutes” piece that Weiss wanted held for more reporting and balance, Schmidt says of Weiss, “she believes that the brown people sent there deserve it, just like the Nazis said of the Jews. What does that make her exactly?” Schmidt writes, “a 40-year-old woman named Bari with an Ivy League pedigree, who maintains a constant spotlight on her identity as a Jewish lesbian snuffed out a story about a concentration camp on CBS News 80 years after Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast from Buchenwald.” That same piece basically calling Bari Weiss a Nazi was also published on Substack by J. Bradford Delong, a professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley.
Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor of the New York Times who is now the Executive Director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, declared, “A broadcast-news neophyte, Weiss has no business in that exalted role.” No one was bothered when Walter Isaacson went from Time to running CNN or when Mark Whitaker went from Newsweek to NBC News, but when Bari Weiss, who had a booming events and podcast business at The Free Press, takes over CBS News, it’s suddenly unacceptable? Maybe what some people are objecting to isn’t the experience but the ideology, or, to be more precise, the lack of the doctrinaire left-wing ideology that is so common in the rest of the media. In a column for the Guardian, Sullivan described Weiss’s decision to hold the piece as “a clear case of censorship-by-editor to protect the interests of powerful, rich and influential people.” Sullivan urged Weiss, “try to start acting like an editor – not like a cog in the machine of authoritarian politics and oligarchy.” In other words, the critics don’t want a news organization or an editor, they want a cog in the cheerleading machine for the anti-Trump resistance.
In the Nation, Elizabeth Spiers declared “CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss is simply another in a long line of feckless water carriers for the 1 percent.” Spiers goes on to accuse Weiss of spreading “Islamophobic urban legends” and of “producing a line of propaganda masquerading as news coverage that serves the interest of her patrons—in this case, David Ellison, whose interests are served by protecting Donald Trump.” Spiers writes, “Good journalists punch up; Weiss punches down. There is no vulnerable population she does not blame for their immiseration, and when she talks about ‘open inquiry,’ her list of verboten viewpoints includes the affirmation of the humanity of Palestinians and the denunciation of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, any opposition to a free market (though she doesn’t seem to have a material problem with tariffs and other anti-market policies if they’re coming from the Trump administration), together with any suggestion that women and minorities face systemic discrimination, or that religion is not an unalloyed good.” (Quite a feat to accuse Weiss simultaneously of spreading Islamophobia and the idea that religion is an unalloyed good, but for someone going on about “the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” clearly factual accuracy and logic are no obstacles.) The Nation doesn’t mind the one-percenters when they are Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is an heir to the Stein MCA fortune and who is the editor and publisher of the Nation. What they mind is one-percenters without reflexively left-wing politics.
As Weiss herself has pointed out and as we noted in a December 4 post here (“White House Launches ‘Media Bias Offender Tipline’”), surveys show public trust in the press has plummeted. Episodes like this help to explain why. It’s not as if David Ellison and Bari Weiss have turned CBS into anything close to Breitbart or Newsmax or Fox News or the Right Side Broadcasting Network or the Jewish News Syndicate, or that they even appear to have ambitions to. Her highest profile hires or promotions so far include Matt Gutman of ABC News and Tony Dokoupil, who was already at CBS News. Also reportedly playing a role at CBS is Ken Weinstein of the Hudson Institute, a former chairman of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, who was decorated as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des arts et des lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and who has a Ph.D. in government from Harvard. Plenty of negative news about Trump remains at CBS, not all of it warranted; before this whole episode it might not have been crazy to write a piece headlined “CBS News Is Still Terribly Afflicted With Left-Wing Bias, Even With Bari Weiss Running It.”
The media ethics mob won’t be completely satisfied until CBS is stripped from private commercial ownership and put safely in the hands of some left-wing nonprofit they can control. Until then, it’s worth remembering that no one is being forced to watch any of this stuff. As important as the First Amendment restriction on Congress is the choice and competition that characterize the media landscape at the moment. That applies not only to consumers but to producers. If the “60 Minutes” staff don’t like the new management, let them do what Weiss did herself when she found herself unhappy at the New York Times—quit and start a Substack.
At The Free Press, Weiss managed to generate something of value, in part because what she did was different from the predictable partisanship widely available elsewhere, in part because she has standards of quality and excellence that sometimes involve sending a piece back when it needs more work before publication. No wonder her enemies in the press and beyond see her as such a threat.
I do wonder about the timing of the small contingent of TPUSA-related Israel-hating far-right influencers (specifically Megyn Kelly who seems to be their MC these days) going after Bari Weiss and Ben Shapiro at the same time as this leftwing assault on Bari is underway. I guess that Horseshoe is now twisted pretty much all the way in on itself.
Years ago I was at a conference on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and rode the train into Manhattan with some of the "60 Minutes" staffers who were there to do some interviews. The staffers were deeply biased, condescending and sarcastic, similar to the staffers at the NYT that squeezed Weiss out of that newspaper.
The difference is the Weiss is the boss at CBS. It is hard to imagine that the "60 Minutes" staffers I met could ever be brought around to how Weiss wants to practice journalism. People will leave, and it won't necessarily be Weiss.