Get Ready for the Bari-fication of CNN
Even as her controversial makeover of CBS continues, reports suggest she has her sights on the biggest name in cable news.
THE DUST HAS BARELY SETTLED from the latest clashes between CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and network staff—or, more accurately, from Weiss’s recent purges at 60 Minutes—when it’s starting to look like CNN is next in line for Bari-fication. The Justice Department has greenlit the long-discussed Paramount Skydance/Warner Bros. Discovery merger, apparently blindsiding DOJ career lawyers who leaned toward recommending an antitrust suit. Unless Democratic state attorneys general manage to stop it, the merger will likely go ahead. That means Larry and David Ellison’s Paramount will acquire CNN. And Axios reported last week that, while the plan is to bring someone else to handle business operations, David Ellison may well leave the editorial reins at both networks in Weiss’s hands. Weiss was also one of the two CBS representatives who, as media reporter Oliver Darcy revealed his newsletter, met with CNN executives several weeks ago to discuss the upcoming “marriage.”
While Weiss has long been a lightning rod, the real concern is that we could be in for a “lite” version of the authoritarian media takeover that unfolded in the 2000s in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and in the 2010s in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary: major media organizations brought to heel by regime-friendly owners and managers. Does Weiss bring a Donald Trump-friendly agenda to CBS, and now most likely to CNN? Weiss’s supporters scoff at such concerns as “Bari Derangement Syndrome.” Pro-MAGA USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques harrumphs that 60 Minutes veteran Scott Pelley’s criticisms of Weiss after being fired prove the case for left-wing media bias. Even the Atlantic’s thoughtful and non-Trumpy Conor Friedersdorf sees a “blindness” in Pelley’s comment that a never-before-seen “subtle political bias” had crept into CBS News under Weiss’s stewardship. Those, says Friedersdorf, are the words of a man who lives inside a left-wing bubble and doesn’t notice left-wing biases.
Fair enough: CBS News pre-Weiss was not free of political bias, even if it didn’t work anything like the right imagines—as a conscious effort to push Democratic National Committee talking points. Under other circumstances, a more centrist or even moderately right-of-center editor-in-chief of the kind Weiss positions herself to be could have offered a welcome corrective. But under current circumstances, the “thumb on the scale” that Weiss seems to be bringing to CBS, and perhaps soon to CNN, is vastly more alarming since it suggests conscious interference to placate the government.
AS IT HAPPENS, a book titled Bias and written by a CBS insider—former longtime network correspondent Bernard Goldberg—was published twenty-five years ago. Goldberg, whose own political views are a mix of liberal and conservative, argued that news coverage tends to tilt leftward simply because most journalists’ views and sympathies tend to tilt that way, and they often assume those views to be objective. (Hence, for instance, a tendency to treat factual claims by abortion-rights activists as more credible than claims by anti-abortion activists.) Some of Goldberg’s claims have been questioned; the left-wing watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting pointed out that a 1996 CBS News segment skewering then-Republican candidate Steve Forbes’s flat-tax proposal, which Goldberg cited as an example of one-sided coverage, featured mainly Republican detractors of Forbes’s idea. Yet the Nieman Reports, hardly a bastion of the right, conceded the validity of much of Goldberg’s case.
After his book’s publication, Goldberg became a hero to conservatives for a while, and spent a decade as a Fox News contributor. But today the 81-year-old often finds himself, as he noted on a recent podcast, being trashed as a “liberal hack” for criticizing the right. When I asked him in a telephone interview about the Weiss drama at CBS, Goldberg was careful to say that he hadn’t seen enough to judge; but he also acknowledged that the circumstances under which Weiss came to CBS didn’t help:
Certainly, when CBS/Paramount pays Donald Trump $16 million which was clearly a bribe to settle a ridiculous lawsuit that would have gone nowhere if he had pursued it, and then they bring somebody in from the company that bought CBS News whose family, the Ellisons, are friends with Donald Trump—man, that looks bad. And it might be bad. It might be that she was brought in not just to straighten the liberal bias, but to make Donald Trump happy. If that’s the case, I’m totally with the critics who are against Bari Weiss. But I don’t know if that’s the case. I know it looks bad, but it might not be bad.
In fact, it looks even worse if one recalls the role of Weiss’s website, the Free Press—acquired by Paramount at the same time Weiss was hired—in laundering Trump’s “ridiculous lawsuit.” Shortly after Trump accused CBS of deceptively editing Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview in October 2024 to make Harris look better and improperly influence the election, the Free Press published an editorial boosting the claim of possible unethical edits. A few days before Trump’s lawsuit was filed, the site followed up to badger CBS for “stonewall[ing]” on the full transcript. When the transcript and the raw footage were released in February 2025, the Free Press’s only response was a brief item that made no acknowledgment of the plain fact that there was nothing inappropriate about the edits. Nor did it mention Trump’s lawsuit, or the Federal Communications Commission complaint over the same supposed violation—which was further used to strong-arm Paramount by delaying approval of the Skydance merger.
As Goldberg says, it certainly looks bad.
When I asked Goldberg if Weiss’s mishandling a few months ago of the 60 Minutes report on the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT prison in El Salvador, often described as a “Salvadoran gulag,” qualified as a politically motivated “thumb on the scale,” he demurred, pointing out that the segment did eventually air. And so it did; but it’s hard to say to what extent it was saved by the sheer incompetence with which it was yanked from the lineup at the last minute after the airing of several promos. (This last-minute removal also resulted in the segment airing in Canada and with recordings of it being widely seen online in the United States.) Nor do we know whether Weiss’s sudden decision that the segment needed more work—after raising no objection to previews—was related to Trump’s petulant remarks at a rally about his mistreatment by CBS. What is clear from Weiss’s memo on the segment is that her objections and suggestions were mostly bogus. Among other things, she either misunderstood or misrepresented the administration’s position on judicial review for the deportees; wrongly asserted that the segment’s discussion of the deportees’ criminal histories did not include pending charges; and suggested that then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem should have been asked about the goals of her much-publicized trip to CECOT, even though Noem clearly stated at the time that her goal was to send a “LEAVE NOW, or this will happen to you” message to illegal migrants.
It looks bad, in other words. So does the fact that the reporter, Sharyn Alfonsi, was recently terminated for an unspecified reason by means of the non-renewal of her contract.
Pelley has also mentioned an attempt by Weiss to interfere with a politically sensitive segment on the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during protests against the administration’s mass-deportation policy—specifically, by emailing a producer to say that the protesters should be made to look more violent and Good more culpable. By Pelley’s acknowledgement, the segment (which he says already covered violence by the protesters) aired as it was—which one could take as reassuring. Except that the producer to whom that email was addressed, Tanya Simon, was among the casualties of Weiss’s firing spree at the end of May.
During the confrontation that got him fired, Pelley accused Weiss of trying to “murder” 60 Minutes, a newsmagazine its defenders tend to describe in rhapsodic terms: the network’s “crown jewel,” or a “gold-standard” program. The right scoffs at such praise, claiming that the show is as a hive of leftist bias. Some criticisms are likely fair; for example, the Poynter Institute, the respected—and certainly not right-wing—journalism-monitoring group, concluded that the 2021 60 Minutes report on the COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Florida aired some unsupported accusations against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. But if 60 Minutes is not an infallible bastion of fairness, it’s also not the left-wing attack machine of right-wing fantasies. Notable 60 Minutes interviewees in 2016–17 included then-President-elect Donald Trump, in his post-election interview; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and MAGA strategist Steve Bannon.
And you know who else could attest to the openness of 60 Minutes to right-of-center topics before Bari Weiss came along? Bari Weiss. In November 2024—months before her name was floated as a possible CBS hire—the show aired a sympathetic piece on her academic project, the University of Austin, praising its commitment to free speech. (Prematurely, as it turns out, as the school has since come under a lot of criticism for shutting down disfavored speech.) A glowing report about the story in the university’s Substack hailed 60 Minutes as “an American institution.” Now, it seems very much as if Weiss has taken a jackhammer to this institution.
TO DEBATE WHETHER Weiss’s past advocacy of free speech and other liberal values was always a hypocritical cover would be pointless; likewise, it’s pointless to debate whether her declaration in early 2025 that she had overcome her “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was a sincere change of heart or a strategic readjustment. What seems clear is that the current version of Bari Weiss is in the business of Trump appeasement at a time when Trump is escalating his assaults on American institutions.
No, Weiss hasn’t turned CBS into MAGA TV or even MAGA-lite TV, as even her critics concede. But it’s still early days, and the full impact of her “shakeup” at the network has yet to be felt. Goldberg, for one, is willing to give Weiss a chance. But putting her at the helm of yet another major network given her record so far seems like a singularly bad idea.
Bari Weiss is the worst. I hope she crashes and burns in a truly spectacular way. I don't see people like Anderson Cooper putting up with her, she'll probably end up with unqualified yahoos just like at CBS.
JVL wrote a piece proposing that, under a lawless authoritarian regime, any news source that doesn’t set itself in opposition to the regime ends up supporting it. There can be no “neutrality” under authoritarian rule. “Liberal bias” in this context is just another name for decency and respect for the rule of law and democratic norms. The Administration makes no secret of its admiration for Orban’s Hungary. Of course it is bringing what media it can to heel by all the means at its disposal, and of course Bari is one of its tools.