David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance and the son of billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison, made an announcement today that many of us in news have been dreading: “Anti-woke” hack Bari Weiss is the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, the formerly revered home of Walter Cronkite and 60 Minutes. Ellison wrote in a memo to staff that Weiss has a passion for “rigorous, fact-based reporting and a relentless commitment to amplifying voices from all corners of the spectrum,” which could not be further from truth. Weiss’ Free Press runs constant propaganda that smears trans people, denies climate science, bootlicks for billionaires and whitewashes Israel’s genocide under the guise of “independent thinking,” and under her leadership, CBS News should be regarded as Fox News Lite.
The move comes as Ellison purges CBS of beloved shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert over jokes that offend the right and installs a “bias monitor,” aka a news babysitter, to ensure that nothing happening on CBS could be construed as critical of Donald Trump. The outlet’s dizzying lurch to the right began in August after Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a ridiculous lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and the company desperately needed the approval of FCC Chair Brendan Carr for an $8.4 billion merger between Ellison’s Skydance Media. Carr made it clear that the company’s hard news arm, CBS, needed to show appropriate fealty to the regime in order secure his rubber stamp on the merger, and they bent the knee.
For those who are unfamiliar with Bari Weiss, she’s a former junior editor at the New York Times who wrote occasional, disingenous, “devil’s advocate”-style critiques of the #MeToo movement and progressivism that earned her the adoration of mega-wealthy conservatives. She’s a self-described political moderate and “Zionist fanatic” who’s never done a spot of real reporting in her life, but did leverage her clout among rich dudes to open a fake anti-woke “university” in Austin after NYT had become so embarrassed of her that they exiled her to Australia. (She wrote pieces like this in Australia that compared the entire country to “the hottest girl in your freshman class” who “looks fantastic in her crop top but suffers from crippling self-doubt”—hard-hitting stuff.)
Weiss then founded The Free Press, whose shoddily-sourced hit pieces about trans health care have inspired bomb threats to children’s hospitals and whose reporters claim that children in Gaza aren’t really starving to death because some of them had pre-existing conditions. This is the kind of misleading and morally depraved coverage we can expect over at CBS News, which now joins the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Disney, and basically all major social media companies in full capitulation to Trumpism.
The irony of Weiss’ outlet being called The Free Press amid the outright destruction of the actual free press just epitomizes this bleak moment in American history. But it’s time to spread the word that CBS News can no longer be considered a trusted source of information.
The article she wrote about Australia, which I was not aware of before, is as cringe inducing as described 😖
So disheartening how fast our 4th Estate has been chopped up and sold. Not surprising, but a real gut punch.