Every authoritarian regime has a characteristic style of propaganda. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf (better known as “Baghdad Bob”), the Soviet Union had Glavlit, and Donald Trump has Bari Weiss. “Bob” became famous for his blustering denials of reality as Hussein’s regime rapidly collapsed in the face of American attack. Glavlit was a big committee that stamped out proletarian agitprop. And Bari Weiss is an incompetent toady (and unlike her, I know what that word means) who is busily obliterating one of the crown jewels of American journalism, 60 Minutes, in service to Trump.
Back in October, David Ellison, son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, bought Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and installed Weiss as head of CBS News. Her short term there has now culminated in her ham-fistedly attempting to suppress a report about the people Trump has deported to the El Salvador torture prison CECOT—and failing.
The segment did not run on CBS in the U.S., but it did run on a Canadian station that had a contract to run the show. Many sharp-eyed Canadians quickly realized what was happening and recorded the segment, or took video of it with their cellphones, much like how forbidden samizdat publications were passed around under the Soviet dictatorship. The full segment is now all over the internet; see here to watch. It’s impossible to quantify, but the attempt at suppression is likely to drive orders of magnitude more attention to the story than simply running it would have.
The segment doesn’t break any huge news—it was already reported in multiple articles and reports that CECOT was a torture dungeon, that many of those Trump deported there had no criminal record, and in some cases had been in the U.S. legally. But it does confirm many important details and report many new stories.
One asylum applicant, for instance, waited in Mexico until he got a hearing in California, at which he was imprisoned, falsely accused of being a danger to society, and later sent to CECOT. Another described gruesome torture and sexual assault. The report confirms that only a minority of the deportees had any criminal record, and of that small group only about a tenth had been convicted of violent crimes. A point system to determine whether a detainee was a gang member put heavy weight on whether they had tattoos. An expert testifies that the men’s testimonies are highly plausible. And a team of researchers confirmed key details about CECOT, often by using influencer videos to map the facility and verify its features. Overall, it was a superb piece of journalism.
Weiss has insisted that she spiked the segment because it wasn’t ready. This is completely impossible to believe. The New York Times recently published a detailed timeline of how the decision went down, and they find that Weiss only started paying attention to the typically elaborate 60 Minutes production process at the very end. Correspondent Scott Pelley “asked why she had weighed in at the last minute after not attending five screenings of the segment as it was being completed.” She did watch on Friday, and made some suggestions, which were taken into account. The segment was greenlit and advertising for it begun. Then, less than 48 hours before the scheduled run time, Weiss mysteriously came up with more demands—namely, to get administration sources to comment, and in particular for Stephen Miller to do an on-camera interview.
The idea that Weiss spiked this story out of journalistic scruples beggars belief. Even she is probably bright enough to know that such an interview would take weeks or months to arrange, if Miller even agreed to it. Moreover, making the interview a requirement allows the administration to censor any report they don’t like by refusing to participate.
Meanwhile, the Ellisons, who also have some manner of control over TikTok, are trying to roll up another huge media property, Warner Bros., into their burgeoning media empire. This effort has hit the skids of late. Jared Kushner was going to help finance the effort, but he has pulled out, and Trump has been complaining bitterly about CBS News in general and 60 Minutes in particular. Netflix, salivating at the chance to lock up the vast Warner Bros. IP vault behind a paywall, has put in a competing bid.
The time is right for some good old appeasement—just like when the Ellisons took control of CBS News, and they immediately demonstrated their loyalty to the regime by canceling Stephen Colbert’s show and installing a right-wing ombudsman. This was more Trump appeasement, loudly declaring that stories unflattering to the regime will not see the light of day under the Ellisons’ watch. Weiss is just too green to appease Trump in a way that isn’t grossly embarrassing—heck, she couldn’t even prevent the segment from getting out.
None of this is too surprising. On the merits, the very idea of putting someone like Weiss at the head of CBS News is preposterous. Her prior journalistic experience would not have qualified her to run your average college newspaper. Her personal writing was almost exclusively op-eds, and those were, shall we say, not up to a high standard of factuality—in one glorious instance at The New York Times, she uncritically cited a joke Twitter account called “Official Antifa” as a source.
She did found a publication, The Free Press, but her record there is even worse. The Times had to issue a correction for the antifa face-plant, but at her own shop Weiss regularly printed outrageous falsehoods and then refused to retract or correct them. As I have previously written, she ran a transphobic screed about a Missouri gender clinic that turned out to be totally false yet did not admit error.
But by far the biggest swing The Free Press has taken was a piece that attempted to prove that George Floyd died of a drug overdose rather than being killed by police. When Radley Balko, an actual criminal justice reporter, proved beyond any question that the piece was wildly inaccurate—in fact, that it was stuffed to bursting with comically obvious errors—Weiss refused to retract or correct that one either. Instead, a month later, she invited Balko on her podcast to a “debate.”
Weiss does have one true talent, however: ingratiating herself with right-wing billionaire men. And to tech oligarchs like the Ellison family, who plainly couldn’t care less about the state of American journalism, a dimwitted hack who will tell you whatever you want to hear sounds like just the ticket. Practically every elite institution selects for people like this now. Unfortunately for Trump, such people do not tend to be very capable.