Bari Weiss — the young, dynamic new head honcho at CBS News — is not at all interested in being accepted by the lefty communist collective clique that has had a stranglehold on American mainstream media seemingly forever. That’s what makes her story so interesting, fun to watch, and important.
It wouldn’t be odd if she was, mind you. Ms. Weiss is decidedly left-leaning in her politics. She is something that we don’t see much of anymore, an iconoclast who broke away from the leftist hive mind and survived all subsequent cancel attempts from the bedwetters. When Weiss very publicly left The New York Times in 2020, she called out the editors for being wusses and caving to woke Twitter mobs. Taylor Lorenz was the Times’ in-house straitjacket model then, and accused Weiss of misrepresenting the situation. A good litmus test for veracity is whether Taylor Lorenz is on your side or not. If she says you’re not telling the truth, it’s a lock that you actually are being honest.
Rather than losing her resolve and apologizing to the cancel Nazis — the usual path for lefties who go astray — Weiss leveraged her outsider status and thrived by creating “The Free Press” on Substack. Last year, new Paramount Skydance chairman David Ellison decided to shake up the moribund and dishonest CBS News division by putting Weiss in charge. As soon as that announcement was made, the Democrats’ rush for the fainting couches was on.
I frequently refer to the Democrats’ Coastal Media Bubble™ in my writing. Those familiar with my work know that Illinois and Minnesota are honorary members, but the Dems’ power base is very much coastal and most definitely a bubble. Weiss’s arrival at CBS burst that bubble in a way that the delicate Democrats who rely on MSM propaganda peddling felt was nothing short of violent.
The most common leftist complaint about Weiss is that she had no prior experience in broadcast journalism. Given how riddled American broadcast “journalism” is with corruption, dishonesty, and laziness, that’s hardly a negative to anyone who’s outside the bubble. The Democrat-leaning bias in old school American media is long overdue for a massive course correction. That can only happen with radical (the good kind) change.
The frothing lefty social media hordes — the idiots who think putting a Ukraine flag in their profiles is “activism” — have been in hair-pulling tizzy mode about everything Weiss does at CBS. While I find their anguish entertaining, it becomes less so when it’s manifested in the media sources that are uncomfortable with Weiss. The old guard keeps coming at her in semi-subtle and not so subtle ways.
Here’s an example from her former employer, The New York Times:
The bumps of Ms. Weiss’s early tenure have been heavily chronicled, including her contentious decision to postpone a “60 Minutes” segment and rocky moments on a revamped “Evening News.”
This is from an article published on Tuesday that covered Weiss’s remarks to “hundreds of CBS staff members gathered in bureaus across the globe.” It’s also one of the “semi-subtle” digs I referred to above. The authors do a fair job of covering what Weiss said but — because editorial hackery is their lifeblood — the article is peppered with things like the complaint about the postponed “60 Minutes” segment.
The site links to another Times article about the postponement, which also largely ignores what really happened. For balance, Weiss wanted a comment from the White House. The producers had written statements from the White House that they chose not to use. They were also reluctant to admit that they had them.
What strikes fear into the hearts of every mainstream media hack in America is that Bari Weiss operates under the principle that real journalism should be objective and not wrapped in a cheerleader’s skirt. Despite the way her detractors are behaving, she’s not asking CBS News employees to put on MAGA hats and get American flag tattoos; she merely wants them to somewhat behave like real journalists.
Late last year, shortly after Weiss took over at CBS, our friend and colleague Ed Morrissey joined me and Stephen Green on our VIP Gold live show, “Five O’Clock Somewhere” for a discussion about the new world order in the news division at the Tiffany Network. Ed had written something about those of us on the conservative side of the aisle looking for only a little bit of objectivity to return to any MSM entity. The gist of the conversation was that the MSM has been so awfully biased for the Democrats for so very long that we would be happy to see any movement away from that.
Bottom line: we’re not asking for much. Neither is Bari Weiss. Sadly, a little bit of honesty seems to be far too much for Dem media simps to handle.
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