Bari Weiss Fulfills Her Destiny

Editor’s Note: Happy Holidays

Back in 2017, The New York Times hired Bari Weiss alongside conservative columnist Bret Stephens. The purpose, according to opinion editor James Bennet, was to challenge the paper’s mostly liberal readership by presenting them with opposing perspectives.

That basic idea has been the guiding premise of Bari’s career. Wherever there is a liberal audience, a journalist’s obligation is to confront it with conservative views. The idea does not flow in the other direction: the fact that Bari’s audience at The Free Press is profoundly pro-Israel does not necessitate pro-Palestinian coverage. It’s a one-way corrective. The media’s longstanding liberal bias has left its audience in a bubble, which must be pierced so that the audience can be chided and disciplined for their narrow-mindedness.

Bari Weiss is now CBS News’s new editor-in-chief, and in that capacity spiked a 60 Minutes segment about CECOT, the Salvadoran gulag that the Trump administration has been shipping migrants to without due process. The segment, which viscerally described the torture that our government knowingly subjected these men to, was reportedly fact-checked to the program’s usual standards. Nonetheless, Bari claimed the story “needed additional reporting” and would be put on hold. She apparently suggested an interview with Stephen Miller (the administration had declined comment) and complained that the reporting didn’t draw enough attention to the criminal histories of some of the men sent to CECOT. She also argued that the Trump administration’s legal claims should be presented more favorably (I’m not sure what she’s talking about here, seeing as even the conservative Supreme Court held that the first men sent to CECOT were sent without due process). 

As 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi pointed out in a statement to her colleagues, a policy of refusing to publish reporting because it does not include comment from administration officials grants the administration a functional veto power over any CBS News story. 

Bari’s objections to the segment are not substantive, exactly, at least not in the sense that they are about the quality of the reporting. Bari is not a reporter, nor has she ever been. If she knows anything about reporting she learned it by eavesdropping on actual reporters. Her objections are ideological. If 60 Minutes’ reporting would naturally lead the viewer toward a left-leaning conclusion, then the reporting must be tempered and balanced and mitigated until it doesn’t.

These are the sensibilities she brings to the CBS newsroom. To her, liberal ideas are trite and boring, even when they’re correct. She argued that the segment’s reporting had been covered by other outlets. Everyone knows that CECOT is a horrific prison where migrants are shipped off without process, so why report it? The rationale never works in the other direction; everyone knows what Stephen Miller thinks about the situation, too, but his input is apparently essential.

Last year, Bari gave a TED Talk on the topic of courage. Here’s a sampling:

Now, maybe I’m just a stickler for language, but I think it’s a little odd to use a Senator concurring with the official position of the entire United States government as an example of “courage.” 

But this is a useful window into Bari’s mind. To her, what’s courageous is standing up to the left, no matter the circumstance. To a dedicated reactionary, the left is an indefatigable social, cultural, and political force. It must be confronted at every turn, and every confrontation is a noble cause. The median Senator taking the median position becomes brave. Mediocrity transforms into heroism.

It’s fairly obvious that this is all why Bari Weiss was hired. Her installation at CBS News was made by David Ellison, the head of Paramount Skydance, CBS’s parent company. It was part strategic – an effort to placate Donald Trump, who has expressed frustration at CBS’s coverage and targeted them with frivolous lawsuits.

But it was also because Ellison and his cohort have bought the hype, both about the liberal press and about Bari herself. The right has spent decades fostering the story that the media is irredeemably biased, and Bari has cultivated the image of a renegade moderate prepared to deliver it from its ideological stasis. This, they think, is what fairness looks like: a liberal newsroom being put in check by a fearless overseer. 

The problem for CBS is that if you don’t believe in the mythos about the liberal media – that is, if your brain hasn’t succumbed to right-wing propaganda – then none of this makes any sense. To someone without the requisite brain poisoning, the situation is straightforward: a powerful conservative spiked a story because it wasn’t sufficiently deferential to the Trump administration. Bari’s moves might please her bosses and Trump officials, but everyone else will see her for who she is.

Bari’s foremost talent is getting stuffy media types to hand her money and power. She convinced them that she shares their concerns about liberal overreach in newsrooms (and on college campuses), and that she had the antidote. She’s been selling that pitch her entire career. She sold it to The New York Times, she sold it to her investors at The Free Press, and she sold it to the big wigs at Paramount Skydance. Now she’s sitting atop the media world, and she’s trying to sell it to you.