William Safire was my professional idol. A New York City–born college dropout, he worked in public relations and staged Richard Nixon’s famous 1959 “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, then wrote speeches for Nixon’s failed 1960 presidential campaign and later for Nixon in the White House.
After Safire left the administration, he was recruited by then–New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger for a coveted slot on the publication’s once-influential op-ed page. The newsroom staff threw conniptions. Sulzberger had hired a conservative. Worse, a Nixon speechwriter.
But in those days, publishers had a different view of leadership than their counterparts today. Journalists worked for them, not the other way around.
Sulzberger’s defiant judgment paid off. Safire became the Times’ most influential columnist, won a Pulitzer Prize for his takedown of Bert Lance, President Carter’s budget director, and earned respect well beyond his ideological lane. Safire prevailed not by force of personality, but by the strength of his ideas and his superior ability to communicate them. Readers who couldn’t get past Safire’s service in the Nixon administration were forced to take him seriously, even if they didn’t admit to reading his columns.
For a time, I believed Bari Weiss might evolve into a modern-day William Safire. I’m embarrassed by my mistaken judgment.
Early Supporter
I was praising Weiss long before she became BARI WEISS. She came to my attention in July 2020 when she resigned from the New York Times and published a blistering letter accusing colleagues of bullying, ideological conformity, and intellectual cowardice, particularly over her refusal to embrace political correctness and her unapologetically pro-Israel views. I regarded the letter as a worthy critique of all that ailed the Times and other mainstream publications and repeatedly referenced it in these columns, along with a shout-out for her book about combating antisemitism.
After leaving the Times, Weiss founded The Free Press, which became the most successful publication on Substack. She attracted talented and experienced writers frustrated with legacy media and quickly became a media celebrity in her own right. I mistakenly assumed her motivation was to combat media bias and antisemitism, not to chase celebrity or cash out.
When given the choice between continuing to build The Free Press or selling it, Weiss took the money. Paramount reportedly paid about $150 million for a publication with only 170,000 paid subscribers, a mind-numbing premium for an upstart digital publication. While Weiss had well-heeled Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors, she likely still walked away with several million dollars.
As I’ve acknowledged before, I probably would have done the same.
Media Disruptor
Paramount CEO David Ellison believed Weiss was the right figure to shake up CBS News, whose morning and evening broadcasts trail competitors and whose crown jewel, 60 Minutes, has seen its prestige eroded by scandal over the years. Weiss was cast as a disruptor who would restore credibility and seriousness.
The corporate media, threatened by Weiss’s success calling out pervasive journalistic dishonesty and attracting a sophisticated and educated audience that understood and embraced her criticisms, launched a concerted attempt to destroy her credibility. Multiple publications derided Weiss as an “opinion journalist” and The Free Press as an “opinion publication.” That criticism, which I maintain was partially driven by antisemitism and Weiss’s unabashed support for Israel, was false and dishonest on multiple fronts.
The Free Press published original reporting, including this story by Weiss’s sister Suzy about the cancellation of Dr. David Sabatini, a medical researcher widely believed to have been on a path toward a cancer breakthrough before his career was derailed by sexual harassment allegations. Suzy Weiss presented compelling evidence that could lead a reasonable person to conclude the charges were bogus. I wrote a column hailing the reporting and her courage in pursuing it.
Former New York Times editorial page editor Max Frankel was never derided as an “opinion journalist” when he was later promoted to executive editor and broadened the Times’ coverage with a wider mix of news and feature articles.
The accompanying CNN interview with the Times’ White House correspondent and Trump nemesis Maggie Haberman is rife with opinion and deceptive flourishes, including her portrayal of New York Attorney General Letitia James as one of Trump’s “perceived” enemies. James ran on a “get Trump” campaign agenda and pursued him with charges that even some of Trump’s critics considered dubious.
Critics also railed that Weiss had no previous television experience, yet there were no protests or voiced concerns when Rebecca Blumenstein, who previously held senior management positions at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, was named president of NBC News. Blumenstein also had no prior television experience.
Critics also highlighted that Weiss had no previous management experience. On that front, those criticisms proved to be spot on.
Justify Your Existence
Weiss’s undoing began when she asked employees to write a personal report describing “how you spend your working hours—and ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you are most proud of.” CBS’s editorial union urged employees not to comply, warning, quite rightly, the information could be used as “a basis for discipline, discharge, or layoff.”
Another debacle was her town hall with Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika, which, to the delight of Weiss’s critics, was a ratings disaster. That Weiss sought to conduct on-air interviews while supposedly running CBS News is indicative of her apparent need to pursue a public persona.
But Weiss’s biggest misstep of all was her decision to pull a 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT megaprison, where Trump deported more than 200 Venezuelan illegal immigrants, just hours before it was scheduled to air.
Published reports say Weiss had approved the segment with some requested changes days earlier; her claim at the eleventh hour that the segment needed an on-air response from the Trump administration reinforced the perception that she was protecting the corporate needs of Paramount, whose CEO, David Ellison, needs Trump’s support to acquire Warner Bros. and can’t afford to alienate the president.
Worse, Weiss reached for a familiar corporate-media tactic when justifying her decision.
What was unforgivable was Weiss questioning the quality of 60 Minutes’ reporting — a reprehensible and all-too-common practice when media bosses want to kill stories that could potentially be harmful to their corporate owners. NBC News, before Rebecca Blumenstein’s arrival, killed Ronan Farrow’s damning Harvey Weinstein investigation on the grounds that it was journalistically deficient. Farrow took his reporting to The New Yorker, which published the work and won multiple awards for it.
In 2019, ABC anchor Amy Robach was caught on a hot mic alleging that the network had killed her earlier reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, including his ties to Prince Andrew and former President Bill Clinton. Robach said ABC executives cited an inability to secure sufficient corroboration and concerns surrounding Prince Andrew, even though the reporting later proved accurate when published elsewhere.
Weiss’s reported comments to staffers about the corporate media’s outrage over her decision demonstrated just how out of her depth she is in managing a newsroom, particularly one where her presence isn’t welcome.
“The only newsroom that I’m interested in running is one where we are able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters, and do so with respect and, crucially, where we assume the best intent of our colleagues,” Weiss reportedly said on an editorial call that was leaked to The Wall Street Journal.
If Weiss is looking to work in an industry where colleagues demonstrate mutual respect and presumed good intent, she needs to find another line of work. Most mainstream journalists aren’t that charitable.
Recycled ProPublica Reporting
Let’s be honest. CBS News’ interest in El Salvador’s notorious prison isn’t driven by concern about that country’s treatment of convicted criminals. It’s an opportunity to embarrass Trump and call him out on yet another dishonest claim.
While Trump claimed the Venezuelan deportees were hardened criminals, ProPublica reported more than six months ago that more than half of the 238 Venezuelan deportees were not convicted of any crimes in the U.S.
CBS News reportedly has footage of deportees describing the abuse they suffered, which likely makes for compelling television but should not come as a surprise. El Salvador’s horrific prison conditions are well known and have been extensively reported. Moreover, a CBS News poll six months ago found that 54 percent of Americans supported Trump’s deportation program.
Telling Indictment
The most telling indictment of Bari Weiss’s ineffective leadership was reports that among the changes she requested was that 60 Minutes refrain from referring to illegal immigrants, instead using “migrants,” a sanitized term intended to distract from the fact that they entered the U.S. without legal authorization.
Having been on the job for more than a month, one could reasonably have expected Weiss to have already made clear at CBS News that the days of using Democratic and media euphemisms were over.
Weiss’s management missteps have given her enemies ample ammunition, as she has quickly become a liability for Ellison. Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for The Guardian, summed up the prevailing media narrative by declaring that Weiss’s decision to pull the 60 Minutes segment was “a clear case of censorship-by-editor to protect the interests of powerful, rich and influential people.”
For the record, The Guardian’s U.S. editor is Betsy Reed, who, when she was an editor at The Intercept, was instrumental in killing a column by co-founder Glenn Greenwald before the 2020 election questioning whether the media was too quick to dismiss the New York Post’s “laptop from hell” story about Hunter Biden.
The Post’s story has since been validated by multiple publications. The Intercept was originally financed by eBay billionaire founder Pierre Omidyar, a member of the oligarchy.
I also note that for all the cries about Trump’s supposed media censorship, there was little outrage when CBS News fired Catherine Herridge, who was doggedly pursuing critical stories about the Biden family.
The media may be gleeful about possibly taking down Weiss, but in the end it’s just another nail in the coffin of mainstream U.S. journalism. The public already has a low regard for the media, particularly broadcast journalists, and I doubt most Americans know or care what all the fuss is about.
Anyone who believed CBS News was an honest and credible news source before Weiss arrived wasn’t particularly well informed to begin with.