Bari Weiss F*cking Up CBS News Even Faster Than Predicted!
Respect is earned, but has she ever had to earn anything in her life?
When vapid pudding brain Bari Weiss took over CBS News in October, our prediction was that by sometime this spring the network would hire someone with experience in and knowledge of network news to do the actual day-to-day work of running America’s most storied news division, while Weiss focused on her “strategic vision” or some other bullshit. It would be framed as the network hiring an equal partner to share the load, but really it would be a subtle demotion for Weiss, even if no one admitted to it.
We may have given her too much credit with that timeframe. This weekend she stepped in shit up well past her knees when she killed a 60 Minutes story, then spent Monday morning angrily defending herself to the newsroom she just ran over with a bus. How quickly did people in that newsroom start leaking her utterly self-serving defense of her actions? Pretty much before the first period was out of her mouth.
But let us back up. On Sunday, 60 Minutes was set to air an in-depth piece on the Trump administration’s sudden deportation last March of hundreds of people to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran mega-prison famed for its brutality.
Then about three hours before the segment was to air, CBS announced it had been pulled from that evening’s episode and would air at a later date because it needed “additional reporting.” More specifically, we quickly came to find out, Bari Weiss pulled the segment because she doesn’t understand how journalism fucking works.
The correspondent who reported the piece, Sharyn Alfonsi, quickly sent an email to some of her colleagues explaining what had happened, and hoo boy is it a doozy:
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Of course she didn’t, you might have told her something she didn’t want to hear.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
Somehow this story that needed more reporting had already undergone a very thorough review, as one would expect from professional journalists with a controversial piece. Unfortunately for them, Bari Weiss has never been a real, professional journalist.
Weiss’s complaint about the story was that Alfonsi and her team had not gotten any comments from government officials, despite repeated requests to various agencies. Because she’s never done actual journalism, Weiss doesn’t realize that officials refusing to answer questions about a story is an answer of sorts itself. Also because she’s never done actual journalism, Weiss seems to think if a government official refuses to comment on something, the story should be killed. Which would give the government quite an advantage over journalists.
How does Bari Weiss keep living down to everyone’s expectations? Truly, she has a grift gift.
And whom did Weiss think 60 Minutes should have gone to for comment? Oh, you’ll never believe it. From The New York Times write-up of this whole fustercluck:
One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official ... Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.
We have been racking our brain trying to come up with a less useful person to interview for this piece than Dollar Store Goebbels and we’re drawing a blank. Peter Navarro? The real Goebbels’s moldering corpse? A baby? The 60 Minutes office ficus?
The other funny part here is Bari Weiss offering a team of seasoned reporters Stephen Miller’s phone number, as if none of them had the chops to call the White House themselves and track him down. We imagine all these people sitting around the 60 Minutes conference room, drooling on the table as they complained about running into this intractable problem.
Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally.
Hanukkah is over, but there is still time before Christmas for someone to buy the head of CBS News a fucking dictionary.
After Alfonsi’s email leaked, Weiss put out a statement saying that stories get killed every day for lacking “sufficient context” and “critical voices.” Then on Monday morning, she reportedly went off in the news division’s regular 9 a.m. call.
That is some spectacular horseshit from a person who, the moment she rage-quit The New York Times, was spilling all sorts of internal company dialogue to which she had objected. Keep it in-house for thee, not for me!
There will be people who think Weiss killed this story to protect her powerful paymasters’ influence. Which is probably true! It was only recently that CBS paid Donald Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit he filed over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview last year, a case he very likely would have lost. That cleared the way for billionaire Larry Ellison and his failson David to buy CBS parent company Paramount.
What is also true is that Bari is an inexperienced neophyte who has never worked in hard news (she has been an opinion journalist and editor), never worked in a real newsroom, and lacks the experience, knowledge, and credibility to run such a large and storied organization as CBS News. The employees there already were upset at being led by a right-wing hack propagandist. This incident probably validates some of their worst fears about her.
Respect is earned, but Bari Weiss has never had to earn anything in her privileged life.
Contrary to some opinions, we don’t think David Ellison brought Bari Weiss in to purposely wreck CBS News, unless by “wreck” you mean turn the network into Fox News Lite. Which is how we would define the word, certainly, but we doubt Ellison does. He didn’t spend billions of dollars on a state-of-the-art jetliner only to hand the controls to someone who has had one flying lesson in a Piper Cub.
The problem is that Ellison’s and Weiss’s vision of how journalism works is grounded in the perpetual conservative grievance complex that claims mainstream news exists to do nothing but make them look bad. As is typical of these types, they just assume based on nothing whatsoever that they know better.
In other words, Bari Weiss getting hired to run CBS News is the real-world equivalent of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde answering her ex’s shock that she got into Harvard Law School with an airheaded, “What, like it’s hard?” The difference is that compared to Bari Weiss, Elle Woods is a candidate for Mensa.
As long as we’re waiting for either Bari Weiss to come to her senses (ha!) and release the piece or for someone inside CBS News to leak it, you might as well watch this Frontline story on the same subject. It’s just as brutal, and you won’t be giving CBS your undeserved attention.
[NYT]
Hey look, 1100 words explaining why you should support independent media. Specifically, you should support Wonkette!
Bari just wants to make sure BOTH SIDES are well represented when in comes to illegally sending US residents and immigrants to a murderous gulag in El Salvador.
She's a nasty woman.