All of this is background for Weiss’ last-minute decision this past weekend to postpone a 60 Minutes segment on the Trump administration’s practice of deporting accused Venezuelan gang members to an El Salvadoran gulag without due process. Pulling the segment hours before airtime was either an act of great courage or great cowardice on her part, as Weiss surely understood how her intervention would look to outside—and inside—observers. Namely, that she was doing her benefactor, David Ellison, a favor by finding a pretext to delay a story that was destined to make Donald Trump angry.
If Weiss honestly thought that the segment was unfit to run as-is, hitting the brakes despite the heat she would inevitably take for doing so was a show of integrity. If instead this was what it appeared to be, a case of someone hired for her right-wing credentials running interference for the White House on one of the filthiest things it’s done, it stinks on ice.
The problem for Bari Weiss, I think, is that everyone from her boss to the president to partisans on both sides assumed she’d be a flunky for the post-truth right in her new role, a sort of ombudsman tasked with ensuring that the network isn’t too hostile to the MAGA agenda no matter which dark direction it might take. When you accept an editorial position on those terms, even the conscientious, good-faith decisions you make that end up redounding to the right’s benefit are destined to reek of flunky-dom.
The timeline.
The reported timeline of how the segment was postponed does not favor the “Bari acted with integrity” theory.
According to the New York Times, the 60 Minutes segment was screened internally for CBS News journalists five separate times, beginning on December 12, before it was ready for air. Weiss didn’t attend any of those screenings. She did finally watch it on Thursday evening “and offered suggestions, which producers integrated into the script.” The next day, the network began promoting the piece on social media.
That same evening, Trump spoke at a rally in North Carolina. “I love the new owners of CBS,” he said. “Something happens to them, though. 60 Minutes has treated me worse under the new ownership. … They just keep treating me—they just keep hitting me. It’s crazy.”
Hours later, reportedly around midnight, “Ms. Weiss weighed in again, this time with more substantial requests,” per the Times. “She asked producers to add a last-minute interview with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff.”
If she thought the segment was so unbalanced that it shouldn’t air because it lacked an on-camera interview with an administration official, it’s curious that she didn’t say so after her review on Thursday evening. And given how much lead time would be needed to secure such an interview, it’s likewise curious that she didn’t make a point of attending one of the early internal screenings to ensure well in advance of the air date that her request would be met.
In other words, even if you assume that Weiss’ intentions were good—perhaps she was uneasy about the segment on Thursday, slept on it, and fully formulated her concerns on Friday—she handled the process incompetently by waiting so long to pull it, creating an appearance of improper political motives. It was so last-second, in fact, that the piece actually did air in Canada before it could be pulled there, and is now widely available for viewing online.
I’d be curious to know how many other times Weiss has belatedly pulled the plug on a piece after it was already set for broadcast. Is this a pattern with her, or is it just a remarkable coincidence that the first time she torpedoed a 60 Minutes segment as substandard happened to involve an investigation that made the Trump administration look awful?
Per CNN, it doesn’t sound like a coincidence. “Earlier this month, after President Donald Trump blasted 60 Minutes for interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene, correspondents noticed a change behind the scenes,” Brian Stelter reported this week. “‘Bari Weiss got personally involved,’ specifically with stories about politics, a source at the program told CNN.” Assuming that’s true, she sure does seem to perk up whenever the president grumbles about her network’s flagship news program.
The email.
Weiss sent an email to CBS News staff on Monday explaining her reasons for postponing the segment (which, she insisted, will air eventually). The story doesn’t add much to what’s already known about the El Salvador renditions, she wrote, and would profit from an interview with Miller or border czar Tom Homan explaining the administration’s position. And with respect to the Alien Enemies Act, the statute Trump invoked to justify deporting detainees without due process, the segment should include “a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority.”
All of which is reasonable enough on its face.
But Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes reporter responsible for the segment, claimed in her own memo to staff that she did ask the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security for interviews and was refused by all three. (Axios reports that the agencies provided “comments” that weren’t included in the version of the segment screened for Weiss, but whether those comments were meaningful or the usual hot air about “fake news” is unclear.) Grilling sweaty public officials on camera with uncomfortable questions is admittedly the lifeblood of 60 Minutes but producers can’t be expected to delay a report indefinitely because of an official’s refusal to grant them face time.
What was Weiss’ deadline for Stephen Miller to say “yes” before running with the segment as-is? How many days/weeks/months had Alfonsi already given him to comment? Did Weiss even ask before deciding that that time period was insufficient?
As for the idea of a point-counterpoint on Trump’s legal authority, that’s the kind of journalistic nod towards “balance” that’s responsible and enlightening when the two parties to a dispute are acting in good faith but can be absurd and confusing when one isn’t. You can, I’m sure, find experts who believe so intently in unlimited executive power that they’ll defend the president’s use of wartime authority to deport detainees without due process—even when, as in this case, the pretext for invoking that authority is based on a lie. But you need to go waaaay far out toward the fringe, beyond what figures like John Yoo are willing to tolerate, to identify such people.
What duty, if any, does 60 Minutes have not to promote outré legal theories lest it create a false impression that those theories are more mainstream than they are? Should the network behave the way cable news outlets do when assembling their pundit panels, granting airtime to shamelessly slavish Trump apologists because they’re desperate for a simulacrum of ideological “balance”?
Or is it Weiss’ opinion that any cockamamie authoritarian belief that the president holds, no matter how dangerous, deserves a respectful hearing simply because he’s the president? I admit, I’d probably tune in to watch a point-counterpoint on whether Rob Reiner deserved to be murdered. But I sure don’t think CBS News is under any ethical obligation to air one.
First-world and third-world.
Weiss has an impossible dilemma. She’s in charge of a first-world news organization that aims to hold government accountable (especially when it’s run by Republicans) but was appointed to the position to satisfy a third-world regime led by a demagogic boor who believes “news” should look like … this.
Her concerns about the 60 Minutes piece feel like a desperate attempt to try to appease both constituencies. She’s attempting to achieve “fairness” and “balance” through traditional journalistic means, by including more right-wing viewpoints. But Trump doesn’t want more right-wing viewpoints in the media. He wants far fewer—i.e., zero—left-wing ones. It’s not the “imbalance” of the segment on El Salvador that will irritate him when it airs, it’s the fact that an outlet owned by his friend and crony, David Ellison, dared to give him unflattering press at all.
“The Failing New York Times, and their lies and purposeful misrepresentations, is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation,” the president declared this morning. “Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped. THEY ARE A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” He didn’t specify the supposed “national security” threat that prompted that, but earlier this month he accused the Times of “seditious, perhaps even treasonous” behavior for reporting on his obviously declining health.
That’s the kind of media Trump wants. Not one where Stephen Miller does more interviews but one where you go to prison if you acknowledge the plainly observable fact that the president sounds addled.
All the “balance” in the world won’t spare Weiss his or MAGA’s wrath for continuing to report on matters that reflect badly on him. What it will do is make distrust for CBS News thoroughly bipartisan, with the left convinced that Weiss is slowly transforming the network into state media and the right disappointed that she’s not being nearly quick enough about it.
That might explain her odd decision to host a televised town hall event with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, earlier this month. You’d expect one of the network’s seasoned pros to have handled that, not an executive who spent her career before joining CBS News in opinion journalism. But maybe that was Weiss’ small way of trying to make the right happy in lieu of giving it what it truly craves, which is seeing broadcast news reduced to the same sort of abject turd-polishing Trump sycophancy that Republicans prefer in their choices of infotainment.
The current staff at her network wouldn’t agree to work for an operation like that and Weiss herself, as an anti-anti-Trumper, might blanch at the thought of repopulating a respected news bureau with dimwitted MAGA propagandists. So, perhaps, she’s going to try to scratch the president’s and his base’s itch for state media with minor concessions whenever possible, like airing something with Erika Kirk that wouldn’t seem out of place on Fox Nation.
Liberalism or postliberalism, adversarial media or state media: No one can serve two masters, but it looks like Bari Weiss is going to try. Everyone will hate her for it in the end.
