#bariweiss

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Yes, billionaires have accelerated the rightward shift of corporate media, but it would never have been possible without ordinary people like Bari who are willing to drain their souls to fill their own bank accounts. This isn’t unique to the media business, but when newsmakers are your victims, it tends to attract more headlines. Us journalists have watched countless corporate smash-and-grabs completed in broad daylight, bankrupting our friends and colleagues, killing their dreams, and denying the world exposure to their talents. With people like Bari in charge, mediocrity isn’t a dealbreaker; only dissent is.

A tale of two media women

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The CECOT story is not about any deportations of violent criminals. It is about the Trump administration disregarding proper evidentiary standards and the rule of law just to maximize deportations, leading to an awful lot of innocent people — including U.S. citizens — to suffer horrible deprivations. The administration’s abandonment of the presumption of innocence is the story, a fact Weiss embarrassingly fails to comprehend.

The Amateurism of Bari Weiss

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Brian McFadden

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At first glance, Bari Weiss and Jeffrey Epstein might not seem to have much in common. But the careers of both have been overshadowed by similar questions. For Epstein, the question was how did an unsuccessful high school math teacher rise through the financial world until he had billions of dollars of his own and unsupervised access to Victoria’s Secret founder Les Wexner’s fortune? And for Weiss, the question is how did a writer with no evident skill, original ideas, or journalism experience rise to become a media industry millionaire who currently oversees all of CBS News? A pair of articles this week make it clear that the two followed largely the same playbook: flatter the rich, make yourself useful to them, leverage one connection to make more connections, and reap the benefits.

The Weiss-Epstein Program For Success

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On Sunday, 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi sent an internal memo to colleagues warning that CBS was repeating that history. The network had just killed her story about Venezuelan migrants who were deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, where they were allegedly tortured, beaten, and subjected to sexual violence. The segment had been promoted on social media for days. It had been screened five times. It had been cleared by CBS’s lawyers and its Standards and Practices division. It was, by all accounts, ready to air. Then Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, pulled it.

The Kill Switch

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Stop asking whether Weiss is good at journalism. She is good at the job she’s actually doing: performing submission to power and recruiting others to the ritual. In today’s media oligopoly, that job pays.

The "1984" Theory of Bari Weiss

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Maybe there are some sound journalistic reasons to have held the CECOT story, though so far that seems unlikely. Even if there were, CBS, with its cowardly settlement and its appointment of Weiss to run the news division, has put itself in a difficult position. Trust in media generally is eroding. Trump is accelerating that by constantly attacking journalists and trying to undermine their credibility. It's dangerous, because it's another threat to a free and fair press, to the media's mission to hold the powerful to account. Pulling a story critical of the Trump administration at a time when thorough, honest journalism is needed more than ever only makes things worse. A lot worse. And unless the CECOT story and others like it continue to air, it won't get better.

Bari Weiss is killing '60 Minutes' one story at a time