Boosting Bari Weiss
The Media Research Center heavily hyped Bari Weiss' bid to be head of CBS News -- and was ridiculously giddy when she actually got the job.
The Media Research Center has long been a fan of Bari Weiss ever since she loudly quit the New York Times, giving her a platform to complain she was being silenced (even as she was appearing on CNN to make that claim). Weiss went on to cheer her right-wing leanings by the promotion of the so-called Twitter Files on her Free Press website, where she was eventually joined by Uri Berliner, the guy who blew up his career at NPR in order to be a right-wing martyr.
Weiss has continued to be a right-wing cause celebre for the MRC. Clay Waters spent an August 2024 post whining that the new York Times did a profile of her:
New York Times reporter Matt Flegenheimer unloaded an almost 5,000-word attempt at a hit piece on journalist Bari Weiss, who founded The Free Press after resigning from the Times in 2020. The snarky tone paired with the story’s vaguely threatening cover art and the endless series of feeble jabs that don’t land suggest a failed attempt at a hit piece — with perhaps a scoop of professional jealousy in the mix?
The online headline deck carried the same vibe: “Bari Weiss Knows Exactly What She’s Doing — The founder of The Free Press has built a new media empire by persuading audiences that she is a teller of dangerous truths.” The whispered subtext: “But we know better, don’t we?”
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Flegenheimer dealt with the end of Weiss’s Times career, after she wrote an open letter to the paper’s publisher, citing “bullying by colleagues” and an “illiberal environment” in the wake of the fallout from an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) calling for the National Guard to be deployed to quell violent protests during the George Floyd riots.
In his words, Weiss tweeted “about a ‘civil war’ at the paper between ‘the (mostly young) wokes’ and ‘the (mostly 40+) liberals.’” The reporter sniffed: “Many colleagues called this a maddening oversimplification.”
Really? Weiss isn’t the first former Times journalist to be forced out by the paper’s resident wokesters — former opinion editor James Bennet wrote of the paper’s “culture of intolerance and conformity” for The Economist.
Waters didn’t actually prove anything in the Times profile to be wrong — he was just mad that someone dared to criticize a fellow right-winger.
Because of all of this, the MRC was quite gleeful about rumors that Weiss might be made the head of CBS News in the wake of new ownership (which the company paid off Donald Trump to ensure approval for the merger). Curtis Houck chortled in a Sept. 4 post:
Puck’s Dylan Byers dropped the bombshell Wednesday night that the rumored deal was “on the 1-yard-line” for CBS News’s parent company SkyDance to acquire former New York Times writer Bari Weiss’s indefatigable site The Free Press and grant Weiss a senior role inside CBS News.
Predictably, this has and will continue to send liberal journalists both inside the network and outside it into hissy fits that will dwarf one-time CNN boss Chris Licht’s failed desires (and orders from his superiors at Warner Bros. Discovery) to return the network to a serious news outlet and not a Trump hate factory.
Byers wrote that, for nearly a year, SkyDance boss David Ellison “has been courting” “an acquisition of The Free Press, the defiantly heterodox news and opinion media entity founded by Bari Weiss.”
In fact, Licht mismanaged his way out of his CNN job in trying to make the network more right-wing. Houck then had a fit of Oliver Darcy Derangement Syndrome:
Former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy was apoplectic at his newsletter site Status, whining this move by Ellison would be “revealing and hypocritical” given his early comments about wanting to depoliticize the network.
He further screeched about Weiss for the crime of being a “stridently pro-Israel, proudly anti-‘woke’ culture warrior” and “built her brand on polarizing political commentary—supposedly the type of material Ellison signaled to reporters that he wishes to run away from.”
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He found CBS News staffers to say they were “[n]ot happy AT ALL” and predict what Darcy dubbed “a firestorm inside the newsroom, especially over coverage of Israel and Gaza” and “some employees would be ‘apoplectic’ at the idea of taking editorial direction from her.”
And there it was. CBS News journalists are happy that a Jewish woman would be in a senior news position.
Yes, Houck is that desperate to portray Darcy and every employee at CBS News as anti-Semite because Weiss apparently wants to skew Israel-related coverage. He also didn’t dispute the accuracy of anything Darcy wrote.
Jorge Bonilla hyped the rumor a day before, adding, “Bari Weiss can’t get to CBS quickly enough.” The next day, Houck promoted new rules at CBS about interviews, concluding: “Between this, the long-rumored purchase of The Free Press, and granting Free Press founder Bari Weiss a senior CBS News role, the liberal media could be on the verge of losing one of the ‘Big Three’ to reality.”
Right-wing bias does not equal “reality” — something Houck is apparently too blinded by his own partisan bias to see.
It’s official
When that actually came to pass, the MRC was even more excited. chief among them was Houck, who cheered in an Oct. 3 post:
In word first leaked out Wednesday afternoon to the New York Post, Puck’s Dylan Byers, and others, Paramount Skydance will reportedly announce as soon as Monday it will not only acquire the great team running The Free Press, but make its founder Bari Weiss the editor-in-chief of CBS News, triggering a hopeful avalanche of changes to the ratings-challenged legacy liberal network at a time of record-low trust in the press.
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Over at the New York Post, media reporter Alexandra Steigrad said Weiss would be given “unusual clout to revamp the struggling network” and she would “report directly to Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison,” not CBS News boss Tom Cibrowski or Paramount Skydance TV media chair George Cheeks.
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Weiss’s ascendance will undoubtedly cause turmoil in the far-left network, whether it’s wokesters with views that, say, include a hatred for Israel (and we can think of a few who’d fit here), aging journalists with a disgust for Trump voters (of which there are plenty), or staffers writ large with blinders to the world outside their deep blue, New York City bubble.
Weiss will have a mountain to climb, both in making changes to the stories CBS covers to the tone and tenor that has come to dominate liberal TV networks.
Houck didn’t mention that Weiss is a right-leaning writer with little relevant experience running an organization like CBS News and who would likely impose right-wing bias on the network. He went on to indulge his own biases, raging at “deranged liberal media defender and former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy” and declaring that “Weiss would do well to (and we have no doubt she will) cultivate a newsroom with new and old voices that echo NewsNation’s slogan: News for all Americans.” But NewsNation is also a right-leaning channel (which the MRC won’t admit), and Houck has a serious case of Oliver Darcy Derangement Syndrome.
When Weiss’ new job became official, Houck gushed some more in an Oct. 6 post:
After months of waiting, Paramount Skydance made it official Monday in not only purchasing Bari Weiss’s intrepid and thought-provoking site The Free Press, but installing Weiss as CBS News’s editor in chief in hopes of investing in and restoring credibility to an American news brand mired in porous ratings and decades of self-inflicted wounds from ethical scandals and political bias.
“This morning, The Free Press is joining Paramount. This move is a testament to many things: The Free Press team; the vision of Paramount’s new leaders; the luck of starting an independent media company at the right moment; and the courage of my colleagues to leave behind old worlds to build a new one,” Weiss said in an email to Free Press subscribers and a subsequent video on The Free Press’s social media channels.
While also keeping her titles as The Free Press CEO and editor-in-chief, Weiss said her role as EIC at CBS News would be “working with new colleagues on the programs that have impacted American culture for generations…and shaping how millions of Americans read, listen, watch, and, most importantly, understand the news[.]”
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Weiss has a mountain to climb. Along with the rigid, liberal biases entrenched inside their New York City headquarters and major bureaus, Weiss’s chief resistance will sadly be her Jewish heritage and support for Israel’s right to exist.
As we wrote last week, Weiss would do well to cultivate a newsroom with new and old voices that echo NewsNation’s slogan: News for all Americans. Her seventh point echoes that.
To conservatives, CBS will still do stories we don’t like and Weiss is never to be confused with being a conservative or MAGA supporter. NewsBusters will chronicle it all.
But if Weiss is not a “conservative or MAGA supporter,” there would be no reason for Houck to defend her so vociferously. The fact that he is — and that it gave her a platform to complain after she left the New York Times in 2020 — suggests that he’s lying about her political leanings.
A post the same day by Brad Wilmouth complained that “MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Alex Wagner freaked out over news that independent journalist Bari Weiss will be named as editor in chief of CBS News and worried that it would become like state TV under her leadership.” Wilmouth made no effort to dispute that claim.
Tim Graham spent his Oct. 8 column denying that Weiss is an ideologue:
The aerobic freakout has begun inside the liberal media over the new owners of CBS News appointing “anti-woke” Bari Weiss to the new post of “Editor In Chief.” None of the CBS veterans want a new boss with a new ideology. They like pretending they don’t have an ideology. They call themselves courageously “independent.”
Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison wants to put CBS News firmly in the middle: “We want CBS to speak to that 70 percent of the audience that would really define themselves as center-left to center-right.”
In her initial memo to employees, Weiss stated several principles that are absolute anathema inside CBS: “Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny,” and “Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.”
The anonymous leakers are already on fire. Jeremy Barr of The Guardian spread the early spurts: “CBS News veterans I’ve talked to are encouraging Bari Weiss to not mess with the Golden Goose(s) of 60 Minutes and CBS News Sunday Morning.”
What makes them “golden”? They’re the opposite of the Weiss principles. They rely on a narrow spectrum of ideas and persistently favor one political party over another.
Graham concluded by repeating his employer’s right-wing caricature of CBS: “It must be a terrifying prospect for the badly named “mainstream media.” Because merely adding Democrat scandals and policy failures to the definition of “newsworthiness” is a nightmare, a concept they refuse to accept.” He didn’t explain why CBS (or anyone) must accept someone like Weiss to lead them when he wouldn’t accept such bias if it was “liberal.”
MRC expectations
Expectations are low for Bari Weiss as head of CBS News — Wonkette, for example, believes she’ll run the organization into the ground by insisting that the channel have a right-wing bias. But the MRC has unending faith in Weiss, and Houck in particular is a true believer. So when Weiss faced a bit of criticism from a familiar target, Houck rushed to her defense in an Oct. 9 post:
Doing their part to undermine and destroy Bari Weiss’s time at CBS News before she can even settle in, Oliver Darcy’s website Status posted Wednesday night a story filled with anonymous sources offering Mean Girls-esque smears of Weiss, painting her as “abrasive,” “chaos,” “erratic,” and someone who “struggl[ed] to effectively lead.”
The result of these leaks, of course, are a giddy prediction success at CBS News “may prove difficult.”
Natalie Korach made her debut writing on behalf of the far-left, hateful, press-defending site, down to the snarky headline and subhead: “A Bari Trying Time; While Bari Weiss faces skepticism inside CBS News, former colleagues describe her management style to Status as chaotic and abrasive—raising questions about how she’ll lead one of America’s most storied newsrooms.”
She got right to work taking pot shots at Weiss in the middle of the second paragraph: “Thus far, Weiss is being viewed skeptically inside CBS News, to put it mildly. Senior leaders inside the company are holding their breath as they cautiously get to know her[.]”
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For her part, Korach scoffed at Weiss because “it is a matter of public record that Weiss has no real experience leading a workforce the size of CBS News, let alone a television outlet” and the most she’s done in terms of leading was “only a few dozen” at The Free Press and a rocky “junior editor” stop at The New York Times.
The same could have been said about Korach’s boss Oliver Darcy running his own site after having been at CNN, Business Insider, and, before his change into a man filled with hate for conservatives, editor positions at Campus Reform and The Blaze.
That’s right — Houck can’t stop spewing hatred at Darcy after all these years. He also doesn’t bother to disprove anything that was reported on Weiss, baselessly insisting that the anonymous nature of the claims is sufficient. Instead, he declared that this criticism means “Liberal journalists hellbent on being stuck in their ways, unwilling to admit fault in widespread loss of trust in the press or, specific to CBS News, decades at third-place in the ratings.”
Houck returned the next day with another complaint:
Our friends at the Washington Free Beacon did us a great service late Monday by collating an exhaustive list of the most ridiculous meltdowns over CBS News announcing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and that parent company Paramount SkyDance purchased her site, The Free Press.
By Wednesday, the Associated Press got off the sidelines to offer a cartoonishly whiny piece that, if published earlier, would have made the roundup in sneering a “polarizing” person taking over a “fact-based” network that has supposedly never had “an agenda.”
Houck then personally attacked the AP reporter behind the profile:
Matt Sedensky sneered from the onset that this “polarizing voice” had “made a name for herself as an unflinching critic of mainstream news outlets,” but must now “run one.”
“To some, it is a triumph of an anti-woke crusader who could bring an even hand to at least one corner of a media they see as awash in liberal groupthink. To others, it amounts to the elevation of a person who is anything but evenhanded, a conservative posing as a centrist who will shovel half-truths and worse,” he huffed.
Sedensky dismissed the idea she “bills herself as a centrist” and, despite criticizing Donald Trump, he argued “her right-leaning views…have gotten the most attention, including criticizing corporate diversity efforts, colleges’ lack of political diversity and pro-Palestinian protesters.”
This, he said, “rankled liberals” and generated “animosity.”
He also poo-pooed her biography, dripping with disgust[.]
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He even tried to insinuate her working-class persona was fraudulent because she “has hobnobbed with billionaires, guest hosted ‘The View,’ and even become a punchline on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ with [n]ewspaper and magazine profiles hav[ing] dissected everything from her college relationship with former ‘Saturday Night Live’ star Kate McKinnon to her unflapping charm.”
If a liberal gay icon were taking over a legacy media outlet, it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to say she’d receive a spread in, say, Vogue.
As before, Houck made no effort to disprove Sedensky’s reporting, nor did he consider the possibility that the right-wing slant of the Free Beacon may be the actual culprit here.
Tim Graham spent his own Oct. 10 post taking his own shot at another Weiss critic:
Honk if you think disgraced Dan Rather has any moral authority to criticize someone else over how they sully the reputation of CBS News. People who deeply love a crusading leftist press even when it defrauds the public with phony documents and smears are the people who still love Dan Rather.
Rather took to his Substack page to pen a piece titled “MAGA Tested, Trump Approved News: A conservative opinion writer is now leading CBS News.” Because if your politics are two ticks to the right of Dan Rather, you must be “MAGA” news. “It is a dark day in the halls of CBS News,” he warns, like his fraudulent reporting never darkened the scene.
These jerks call themselves “independent” even when they sound like negative Democrat campaign commercials. Rather loves the I-word: “That deal and the hiring of Weiss signals to everyone, especially to the man in the Oval Office, that CBS is no longer independent, but under the tutelage of a conservative billionaire who is putting more than his thumb on the scale.”
Graham kept up his personal attacks;
These jerks also identify themselves as “sentinels of democracy” rather than lapdogs for the Democrats. “Rather than doing their jobs as sentinels of democracy, who independently cover the news and hold the powerful accountable, they now have to be concerned about how their pitches, their stories, and their scripts will be received by someone with a clear political agenda.”
Point and laugh at Dan Rather, claiming that never before have CBS News scripts carried “a clear political agenda.” CBS was so apolitical in “holding the powerful accountable” until the last week. In reality, they’ve gone from smearing Barry Goldwater as a Nazi to smearing Donald Trump as a Nazi.
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It’s times like these when you relish the idea that a large majority of the American people don’t trust this “mainstream” media that boasts that its partisan propaganda is precious independence.
Graham offered no proof that Trump is not a Nazi, which would seem to be the main standard of proof here — nor did he dispute the fact that Weiss will engage in partisan propaganda.