The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait raked newly-installed CBS boss Bari Weiss over the coals for her controversial move to block the release of a “60 Minutes” report on horrific conditions at the foreign megaprison where President Donald Trump is shipping hundreds of migrants with no due process — and warned that her justifications for it are not credible in the slightest, given the context in which she was installed into the network in the first place.
“The year is 2029,” wrote Chait. “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 installed 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,” he continued. This, he argued, is exactly what happened here: the Trump administration fast-tracked a merger for CBS’s parent company to put it in the hands of right-wing executives who are now interfering in their journalists’ coverage.
And yet, he noted, even many Trump skeptics are giving Weiss the benefit of the doubt she does not deserve. For example, conservative commentator Noah Rothman defended the editorial decision in a lengthy write-up, without mentioning anywhere “the abuses of power — Trump’s insistence on 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 is following a long-standing instinct to turn every Trump abuse into a debate, a generosity she does not afford targets on the left,” wrote Chait. “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.”
“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,” wrote Chait. “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.”
At the end of the day, Chait concluded, conservatives “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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