The year is 2029. President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, having spent years raging against Fox News as a propaganda organ whose very operation is illegal, has found a pressure point to control it. She enables its sale to owners who are friends of hers, and whose business depends on regulatory favors she has made a practice of doling out to allies. As the new editor in chief of Fox News, the owners install Tim Miller, a skeptic of conservatism who has never previously worked in television news.
But then AOC complains that her friends at Fox News aren’t moving fast enough, and the network is still running critical coverage of her. Days later, Miller kills a long-scheduled report showing how AOC may have flouted the Constitution in order to have people tortured.
It is safe to say, I think, that conservatives would be upset.
What’s more, they would probably not care whether Miller’s stated reasons for pulling the report had any journalistic merit. Their concern would be the authoritarian nature of the government wielding its power to hand control of major media properties to its allies. And they would be right.
[Adam Serwer: Cancel culture’s boomerang effect]
This analogy, as you’ve no doubt guessed, describes what has happened at CBS News. In October, Donald Trump openly boasted that Larry and David Ellison—the father-son duo that now owns Paramount, CBS’s parent company—are “big supporters of mine, and they’ll do the right thing.” He implied that he expected more positive coverage from CBS News and its newly appointed editor, Bari Weiss. He was right to expect as much, given that Larry Ellison reportedly assured him that he and his son would make Paramount more conservative, according to reporting from The New York Times.
Then, just last week, Trump expressed frustration on Truth Social that despite his relationship with the Ellisons, “60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” adding: “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!” Days later, Weiss pulled down a scheduled report on 60 Minutes about the Trump administration’s deportation of migrants to a notoriously harsh prison in El Salvador.
But conservatives are not critical of the maneuvers that placed the network in the hands of businessmen who rely on Trump’s favor, and who are seeking the president’s support in a hostile bid to edge out Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Nor are conservatives concerned about Weiss’s suspicious timing in abruptly shelving a report about the president’s aggressive deportations. Instead they are defending her judgment.
Noah Rothman, an anti–anti-Trump conservative—a member of the tribe more devoted to calling out Trump’s opponents than the president’s abuses—defends Weiss in a column in National Review. The most amazing thing about Rothman’s column, which echoes arguments other conservatives have made on X, is that it does not mention anywhere the abuses of power—Trump’s insistence of favorable coverage from media-owning friends—that led to Weiss running the network. It focuses instead on the merits of her critique of the CECOT story. “Weiss said the report glossed over the administration’s fuller legal rationale for its deportations, which amounts to a journalistic sin of omission,” he notes. “Weiss questioned the report’s credulous restatement of the claim that almost no detainees had criminal records, and she sought clarification about the charges against them that might have been dismissed.”
Weiss only wants to make the story stronger, conservatives say. What’s the problem?
Well, there are three problems. First, Weiss’s specific complaints run the gamut from plausible to badly misguided. As Ryan Goodman and Tom Joscelyn explain in a carefully reasoned article in Just Security, Weiss’s memo misconstrued the legal arguments involved in these deportations. Although the segment in question was about how the administration sent Venezuelan immigrants to a Salvadoran prison without due process, she insisted that “there’s a genuine debate” about the legality of the deportations. Yet the administration has consistently argued that these men are not due “judicial review,” and on Monday a federal judge in Washington, D.C., further undermined Weiss’s hopeful deference by ruling that the government itself has not contested that these detainees “received inadequate process prior to their removal.”
Weiss is following a long-standing instinct to turn every Trump abuse into a debate, a generosity she does not afford targets on the left. She herself has sometimes been a fierce and effective critic of Trump. Still, The Free Press, which she continues to edit while running CBS News, publishes obsessively and unremittingly negative coverage of New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, but holds symposia on Donald Trump. In defending the administration’s actions as debatable, she has misrepresented just how heedless it has been with the Constitution.
Second, the process by which she imposed her will on this story seems odd. It makes the most sense to ask basic questions about the structure and tone of a news story while it is coming together. Instead, Weiss reportedly missed many of the screenings, and intervened only after the story had been vetted, slated to air, and promoted on social media.
Third, even if Weiss’s objections were completely merited and followed procedure, it is impossible to take them at face value given the context in which she is operating.
[Read: Bari Weiss’s audience of one]
Scott Alexander once wrote a classic essay titled “Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor.” Alexander was describing a common trick among partisan intellectuals: Insist that your ideological opponents meet the highest standards of proof, demand that every piece of evidence they cite be as rigorous as possible, and permit far more laxity from your allies. This method is so effective because it looks like you’re upholding high standards while actually acting in bad faith.
Weiss claims that the CECOT story fails to “advance the ball” because many of its central facts have already been reported. This mania for insisting that every new story introduce breaking news was nowhere to be found when she was airing a town hall with Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, whose talking points have not exactly suffered from underexposure.
Liberal democracy is the proposition that democracy requires more than mere voting. It needs a set of neutral rules governing the state and civil society to prevent ruling parties from becoming entrenched in power. Trump’s maneuvers to influence CBS blatantly violate even the most minimal guardrails of liberal democracy. Those blunt abuses of power matter a million times more than the specific content of a particular 60 Minutes segment.
Conservatives would never accept a left-wing government using regulatory favoritism to pressure conservative media into softening their coverage of a Democratic administration. They may delight in the new editorial direction of CBS News, but they cannot defend the process that led to it. So they pretend it didn’t happen; offer narrow, pointillistic defenses of Weiss’s editorial pretext; and deftly dodge the authoritarianism that enabled it.
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