Come, Let Us Celebrate What A Sh*tty Few Days Bari Weiss Has Had
Knocking it out of the park, along with her star anchor Tony who's just as bad at this as she is!
With everything going on, we don’t want people to forget what a bad weekend it was for Bari Weiss. And not just like “Waaaaah, Bari Weiss had 15 TABLES for this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, this night was supposed to be about HER HER HER! And Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Brendan Carr — you know, real celebrities! — were CBS’s and Paramount’s guests at the WHCD and they were sitting at their tables, and at David Ellison’s big Trump suck-n-fuck two nights before, Bari’s wife Nellie got to sit at Donald and Melania Trump’s table, and now everything is RUINED RUINED RUINED!”
(Her sister Suzy’s take on the WHCD debacle? “DUDES ROCK!” Wherein she explained that “It was a big night for men who use the word ‘vehicle,’ opine on the Roman Empire, and show up as heroes when we actually need them.” Soooooo there’s two of them.)
We also want to make sure people understand that when there was a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and 60 Minutes flew into action to do a knob-slobbing interview with Trump to find out how this tragedy would affect the dimensions and fixtures in his ballroom, journalist Norah O’Donnell humiliated Trump and Weiss when she read from the alleged shooter’s manifesto, which caused him to blow a gasket, because it referred to him as a rapist and a pedophile and a traitor, at which point O’Donnell, in an amazing moment of trolling, spoke the words, “Oh you think — do you think he was referring to you?”
Savor this transcript and imagine you’re Bari Weiss, trying to destroy the First Amendment and journalism in the name of protecting soft MAGA men’s feelings, and imagine your boss Donald Trump lashing out like this at the TV show on your.network, the one you’ve been carefully trying to revamp so Dear Leader always feels like it’s licking his ass.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re— you’re he— you’re horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m— I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Oh you think— do you think he was referring to you?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not a pedophile. Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person? I got associated with all— stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say, Epstein or other things. But I said to myself, “You know, I’ll do this interview and they’ll probably”— I read the manifesto. You know, he’s a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I’m not any of those things.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Mr. President these are the gunman’s words—
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I was never— excuse me. Excuse me. You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace. But go ahead. Let’s finish the interview.
“You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes,” he said.
Not after everything Trump has done to buy CBS and install his own personal buttlickers in power there!
But there is another way this was a shitty weekend for Bari Weiss, something we really don’t want Saturday night’s unsavory events to overshadow while we all move on to the next distraction/tragedy/moment of authoritarian capture.
Did y’all read that hilarious Vanity Fair article about empty wig-stand loser anchor Tony Dokoupil, Weiss’s pretty boy at the top of the CBS Evening News, which features more than 20 current and former CBS News staffers talking absolute shit about how bad Dokoupil is, what a bad manager Weiss is, and what a shitshow this little experiment in giving a newsroom to somebody who has zero qualifications for the job besides all these personality flaws is turning out to be?
Let’s quote it liberally and wokely and not at all fair-and-balanced-ly!
Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.
Here’s how the sub-hed/teaser for the article reads:
With tumbling ratings and savage reviews, the hospital-drama-handsome anchor has hit a rough patch after a meteoric rise at CBS. Insiders are questioning whether he’s up for the job—and panicking at the show’s coziness with the Trump administration. Through it all, Dokoupil has come to represent the Weiss era.
That means he sucks and he’s just a vacant windsock, but a pretty one, and she just sucks.
The piece begins with a hilarious anecdote about Katy Tur’s arm candy’s first week at work, his first night in the big boy anchor chair, and the amateur way Bari Weiss made sure it went poorly for him. She was just trying to edit the script to make sure Donald Trump knew what a hero she thought he was for doing that Nicolás Maduro raid, a little love note. “Sir, sir! Your Maduro raid was the most beautiful Maduro raid I’ve ever seen!” Signed Bari Weiss, big strong man with tears in her eyes, right out of central casting.
“Of course she writes it in the wrong place,” said a producer, about the idiot thing Bari Weiss did to the script, a thing network chiefs don’t usually do. (They also don’t typically cut entire 60 Minutes segments after they’ve already been sent to Canadian TV.)
“What a disaster,” says one former CBS News anchor. “Honestly, I would’ve fucking killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”
She’s so good at this.
Bari had been working to remake Tony! Toni! Toné! in her own image, starting with puppeteering that humiliating intro speech he did where he promised viewers he wouldn’t try to tell them points of view held by “academics or elites.” No experts allowed at the new CBS News! We need to ask ignorant hicks how stories make them feel instead!
Turns out all the professionals in the building hated that too, and hate Tony.
“He’s deeply lacking in self-awareness,” offers one current CBS correspondent.
And they hated it when Bari’s 3D-printed stock photo of a news anchor started promising that he’d be “more transparent than Cronkite,” as if he has earned the right to utter that name in a sentence about himself.
“I just don’t even understand how you could say something like that,” says one former CBS executive who worked closely with Dokoupil. “He completely lost the room.”
But don’t worry. It’s not like Bari Weiss scoured the earth for the perfect anchor, shot her shot, and now it’s all going wrong. (Though it’s thought that he caught her eye in 2024 when he really shit the bed going rogue and being a complete dick in an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates.) She didn’t really want him anyway. It’s just that the rest of the human population screens its calls for telemarketers, people offering to buy their houses sight unseen, and Bari Weiss.
“She called everyone on planet Earth,” says a prominent agent. “And that was her problem. In doing so, she demonstrated she didn’t really know how the process worked.”
“He very much was not Bari’s first choice,” [a] correspondent says. “He must have been her seventh or eighth choice, because nobody would take the fucking job. I mean, she wanted Bret Baier. She wanted Anderson Cooper. She wanted a name, and she does not see Tony Dokoupil as a name. A useful idiot for sure, but not a name.”
Guess literally everybody else in the world was washing their hair that day, because everybody hates Bari Weiss and nobody wants to throw their career away to work for Bari Weiss.
Also he knows he’s not qualified for his job, we guess he’s kind of like Big Boss Bari in that way:
Tony has the biggest case of imposter syndrome out of any anchor or correspondent I’ve ever worked with,” the producer adds. “And they’re filled with it, because they’re all full of vanity. But Tony knows he wasn’t ready for the chair.”
Oh well! He’s there now, and it looks like there’s no hope of them finding anybody better, now or ever!
And he’s doing great, just like Big Boss Bari is doing great. Like when he tongued Marco Rubio’s balls voluntarily and without being coerced. “Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida Man.” Staffers in the building were super-impressed too:
“The Marco Rubio thing was outrageous,” says one CBS News journalist. “It just alienates the audience. I don’t think even a MAGA Republican wants to see that in their news.” For the CBS correspondent, the moment reflected Dokoupil’s “lack of sophistication” as a journalist. “This is what happens when you get somebody who’s only ever worked on a morning show, where he just thinks, Oh yeah, why don’t we dedicate two minutes of this 19-minute broadcast to glazing Marco fucking Rubio?”
Um, well, maybe Tony Dokoupil likes Marco Rubio’s balls. And Pete Hegseth’s balls. And Donald Trump’s balls.
So all of this is awesome. If you want to read the full thing, which includes background on this guy who would definitely be the next Murrow R. Cronkite if you’d all stop making fun of him, and also if he was better at his job, you may. For a bonus, it links back to his earlier writings about getting adult circumcised to make sure God was sufficiently pleased with his already circumcised penis. So that’s a neat story!
It also has more on how good at staffing Bari Weiss is, like when she brought Jerry Seinfeld’s daughter Sascha over from The Free Press to write for the Evening News. Surprise, it went poorly. “Being Jerry Seinfeld’s daughter does not make one a skilled TV news writer,” says a CBS News correspondent.
Which seems really unfair if you’re an obvious starfucker like Bari Weiss.
(Speaking of starfucking, there’s an anecdote in there about Dokoupil’s interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, where he seemed to try to starfuck Netanyahu by … bragging about how close he was to his boss Bari Weiss? “Bibi didn’t give a shit about Bari Weiss,” the article quotes a source as saying. “He was just like, ‘Okay, whatever.’” Apparently Tony also really likes Bibi’s balls.)
As VF notes, the ratings for CBS Evening News are embarrassingly low, “lows not seen this century,” even though Dokoupil is so pretty and does basically no journalism that could ever threaten anyone in power. This means they’re hemorrhaging money. They’re also hemorrhaging staffers, because people don’t want to be there, and they’re firing the real talent, sort of like the way Donald Trump is running his regime. (Trump just fired the entire National Science Board. It is hard to put into words just how thoroughly fucked this country is, at least for the rest of all our natural lives.)
We’ll give the last word to this CBS News correspondent:
“We’re all in this weird situation where we’re looking at this woman and all of us agree that she’s not remotely qualified for this job,” the correspondent says. “All of us agree that she’s an ideologue with an ideology that she invented herself, and we’re sort of left here trying to psychoanalyze her and make sense of her and try to find motivation and understanding. And it’s fucking crazy!”
Unless the intent is to fully destroy one of the Big Three networks and render it utterly impotent in the face of burgeoning MAGA fascism, whether or not the network technically continues to exist.
If that’s the goal, she’s nailing it.
[CBS News transcript / Vanity Fair]
Want to read more Evan than just what’s at Wonkette? Visit The Moral High Ground and subscribe to it!
Follow me on Instagram!
And on BlueSky!
And on Facebook!
Bari Weiss has single handedly turned "CBS" into "SEE B.S."!
"Come, Let Us Celebrate What A Sh*tty Few Days Bari Weiss Has Had"
But not NEARLY enough.