The Insider II: The Bari Weiss Effect (#111)
In this edition: Bari Weiss has made quick work of CBS News’ reputation while, perhaps inadvertently, creating a kill switch for the Trump regime to use to prevent negative stories. Plus, there are links to other stories I am following involving false accusations, large language models, the Trump regime’s illegal drug boat murders, and creepy forced birth advocates. The closing quote involves the capitalist critique embedded in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.
“It might be helpful for you to know that you are not alone. And that in the long, twilight struggle which lies ahead of us, there is the possibility of hope.” “The Long Twilight Struggle.” Babylon 5, created and written by J. Michael Straczynski, Season 2, Episode 20, 1995.
Bari Weiss’ 60 Minutes of Fame
Many predicted that the Bari Weiss experiment as the Editor-in-Chief of CBS News would not end well. But, wow. But I thought it would take more than three months for her to destroy the news division’s reputation.
I also didn’t think she’d rip off the plot of one of the lowest points in CBS News history in the process by spiking a story about migrants who were tortured after they were illegally deported to a notorious El Salvadorian prison. As Parker Malloy explains:
In 1995, 60 Minutes made a decision that nearly destroyed the program. Producers killed an interview with Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco industry whistleblower who had evidence that cigarette companies knew their products were addictive and carcinogenic. CBS’s lawyers were worried about a potential lawsuit, so the interview got shelved. The story eventually came out anyway, the lawyers’ fears proved overblown, and 60 Minutes spent years trying to rebuild its credibility. The whole debacle became the basis for The Insider, a 1999 film starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino that portrayed CBS executives as cowards who caved to corporate pressure at the expense of the public interest.
Now, call me old-fashioned, but if I were put in charge of a network news division, I would try really hard not to draw any comparisons to that dark piece of journalistic history. Has she not watched the movie to see what happened to Al Pacino, Christopher Plummer, and Russell Crowe?
But Weiss answers to higher authorities than the ghosts of Murrow and Cronkite. She answers to David Ellison and his father Larry Ellison—and indirectly, at best, to President Trump’s regime.
A skillful and knowledgeable operator would have dealt with the segment in a subtle fashion. We might not even know it happened. But as Malloy explains, Weiss waited to act until the last minute. By that point, only harsh measures—ones almost guaranteed to be leaked by those impacted—remained on the menu.
On Friday morning, CBS sent out a press release promoting the upcoming segment. “Inside CECOT,” it was called. The network described it as a look at “one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons,” featuring interviews with recently released deportees who would describe “the brutal and torturous conditions they endured.” CBS ran promotional clips on the air and on social media. The 60 Minutes website had a page up for the segment.
On Friday night, Donald Trump held a rally in North Carolina. He complained about 60 Minutes, saying the program had “treated me worse under the new ownership” and that if the Ellisons, who now control CBS’s parent company, “are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”
On Saturday morning, Weiss weighed in with concerns about the segment. According to CNN’s reporting, she took issue with the lack of an on-camera response from the Trump administration. She suggested the segment needed an interview with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and provided his contact information to 60 Minutes staff.
By Sunday afternoon, the story was dead. CBS posted on social media that the segment would “air in a future broadcast.” The promotional page was taken down. The clips were removed from YouTube. A CBS spokesperson told reporters the segment “needed additional reporting.”
So why did Weiss wait until so late to raise major objections to the segment? After all, the sequence of events that led to her hiring started with a 60 Minutes controversy. Trump was upset with an edit of a pre-election interview the program aired with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump filed a ridiculous lawsuit, as he regularly does. Legal experts said Trump had little chance of winning because of that pesky First Amendment.
But Paramount, the company that owns CBS News, couldn’t wait for a lawsuit verdict because it was on a tight deadline to get the government approvals required to finalize its sale to Ellison’s Skydance Media. Since it became obvious that the FCC would not grant the approvals until Paramount settled the lawsuit, Paramount wrote Trump a check.
As the final approvals came through, we learned that David Ellison was talking to Weiss about buying her publication, the ironically named Free Press, and installing her as CBS News Editor-in-Chief.
Given this history—and Trump’s sensitivities—I figured Weiss would make overseeing 60 Minutes her priority. That wouldn’t be good for the sanctity of the news program, but that’s not why the Ellisons hired her. They want Trump handled, especially now that they are trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery (and thus control CNN).
Instead, as the New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum reported, Weiss was late to the game.
That viewpoint found little sympathy within “60 Minutes.” The show’s staff and correspondents convened for a somber Monday afternoon meeting, where the correspondent Scott Pelley expressed frustration at Ms. Weiss’s handling of the situation and raised questions about her management style. He asked why she had weighed in at the last minute after not attending five screenings of the segment as it was being completed.
“It’s not a part-time job,” Mr. Pelley said, according to four people familiar with the discussion who requested anonymity to describe a private exchange.
Yikes.
Was Weiss distracted putting together her boring series of political debates that began with her lowly rated interview of Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated Talking Points USA leader Charlie Kirk? Did CBS News execs not have her work calendar up and running yet? Or, as Wonkette’s Gary Legum wonders, was it another set of factors?
There will be people who think Weiss killed this story to protect her powerful paymasters’ influence. Which is probably true! It was only recently that CBS paid Donald Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit he filed over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview last year, a case he very likely would have lost. That cleared the way for billionaire Larry Ellison and his failson David to buy CBS parent company Paramount.
What is also true is that Bari is an inexperienced neophyte who has never worked in hard news (she has been an opinion journalist and editor), never worked in a real newsroom, and lacks the experience, knowledge, and credibility to run such a large and storied organization as CBS News. The employees there already were upset at being led by a right-wing hack propagandist. This incident probably validates some of their worst fears about her.
It certainly validates some of my worst fears about her.
Meanwhile, CBS News had already distributed a copy of the 60 Minutes program with the CECOT segment to at least one licensee in another country—Canada’s Global TV.
Oops. These are the kinds of oversights that can happen when one waits until the last minute and doesn’t understand how network news works.
Viewers helpfully recorded it and uploaded it to various social media sites. And, despite CBS News’ efforts to file copyright claims, millions of people have watched the program online. Is it not a great sign for our democracy that United States viewers have to search for bootlegged copies of a news report like Eastern Bloc residents trying to find the frequency for Radio Free Europe. Anyway, you can watch the report here, under fair use and commentary, thanks to Wonkette’s Doktor Zoom.
Doktor Zoom
Because of the uproar created by the Weiss’s belated actions, more people have now seen the program than would have if it had aired as scheduled. The Streisand Effect is undefeated! As Mike Drucker explained on Bluesky:
Bari Weiss’ two accomplishments so far are hosting an interview that she desperately wanted people to watch (but they didn’t) and trying to spike a news story that she desperately wanted nobody to watch (but they did)
— Mike Drucker (@mikedrucker.bsky.social) 2025-12-24T21:52:55.674Z
That’s not great for her. Sad.
But I am concerned that Weiss, perhaps by accident, has created a sinister dynamic—the kill switch. Malloy explains what this could mean for CBS News and legacy media in our nation under the Trump regime:
None of this requires memos or meetings or explicit orders. It just requires a few high-profile examples of what happens when you pursue the wrong story. The Alfonsi situation is that example. Every journalist at CBS News now knows that if you spend months working on a segment that makes the Trump administration look bad, it might get killed at the last second by someone who’s never worked in television news and who reports directly to a billionaire with business before the administration.
What do you think happens to the next story about immigration enforcement abuses? Or the next investigation into deportation policy? Or any story that might embarrass the White House at an inconvenient time?
Some of those stories will still get pitched. Some will still get made. CBS will still do critical coverage of the administration sometimes, if only to maintain the pretense of independence. But the calculus has changed. The risk-reward math is different now. And at the margins, that means stories that should get told won’t get told. Not because anyone explicitly killed them, but because they never got started in the first place.
That’s the kill switch working as intended. It doesn’t just stop one segment. It changes the entire editorial culture. It makes self-censorship so routine that nobody even notices it’s happening.
And that’s why, no matter what happens, we can no longer trust CBS News. We can no longer trust that it is value to the public, rather than value to the Ellisons and Trump, that is driving their editorial decisions.
But, in the end, I am glad Weiss is so bad at her job. We can see what is happening. It would not have been difficult for a competent leader to have kept all of this in the shadows.
Tabs I Closed
- The Kill Switch (Parker Malloy, The Present Age, Link to Article)
- The 60 Minutes report on CECOT that Bari Weiss censored is now internet contraband (Elizabeth Lopatto, The Verge, Link to Article)
- Bari Weiss F*cking Up CBS News Even Faster Than Predicted! (Gary Legum, Wonkette, Link to Article)
Other Stories I’m Following
- Google Apologizes for AI Falsely Identifying Ashley MacIsaac as Sex Offender (Alex Hudson, Exclaim!, Link to Article)
Juno Award-winning fiddler Ashley MacIsaac learned of the GoogleAILarge Language Model (LLM) misinformation after the Sipekne’katik First Nation canceled a concert. The GoogleAILLM apparently mistook MacIsaac for another man with the same last name. I hope MacIsaac can find an attorney willing to sue Alphabet, Google’s parent company, for defamation. Google has released an LLM tool without proper safeguards. MacIsaac shouldn’t have to hire an attorney to get damages. Alphabet should write him a large check and stop featuring an LLM service that generates information and harms people. - Poems Can Trick AI Into Helping You Make a Nuclear Weapon (Matthew Bault, Wired, Link to Article)
These Large Language Models (LLMs) have been released to the public without the safeguards required to protect the public. We see several stories a week about the harm they can do. Thankfully, the researchers behind this study were wise enough not to share their prompts. - Why Scaring The Dickens Out Of Your Wayward Friend Is The Ultimate Christmas Gift (Stephen Robinson, The Play Typer Guy, Link to Article)
Robinson is correct: often giving someone a second chance is the greatest gift one can give, as Jacob Marley demonstrates. - 104 murders in 107 days (Radley Balko, The Watch, Link to Article)
Balko explains why the Trump regime’s attacks on drug boats are violations of U.S. and international law. Those responsible are murderers. We must hold accountable those members of the Trump regime behind these decisions. - Republicans Are Fighting Over 'Catch Kits' (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, Link to Article)
Forced birth advocates are trying to get abortion medication banned because of a mythical impact on our drinking water quality. It’s clearly an effort to use Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s history of clean water advocacy as an entry point to ban a safe and effective health care measure. As part of these efforts, some forced birth advocates are proposing legislation requiring women who receive abortion medication to also get a catch kit to return the remains. It’s creepy. But hasn’t stopped forced birth advocates so far.
Post-Game Comments
Here’s a special holiday season closing thought from Denny Carter at The Bad Faith Times:
“There’s a specter haunting National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation” – the specter of communism, or socialism, or maybe just a general leftist hostility toward capitalism.
Some of our most vaunted Christmas movies assail the very underpinnings of the consumerist machine churning furiously at the heart of this season of gluttony and consumption for consumption’s sake. "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is little more than a skewering of Christmas consumerism with a thin religious veil. "A Christmas Carol," in all its cinematic iterations, is downright hostile to the supremacy of capital, positing that a more equitable society is only achievable through threat of life and limb against the monied class. "It's a Wonderful Life" is the story of an ice-cold capitalist predator threatening the well being of working families, featuring George Bailey, the people’s hero.
But no holiday film confronts the vicious class struggle created and inflamed by the logic of capital better than National Lampoon's "Christmas Vacation," wherein the capitalist dream – the American dream – is skewered, mocked, and vilified amid cartoonish hijinks and Chevy Chase's goofball one liners. Watch "Christmas Vacation" through a critical lens and you'll see that it's not just a source of holiday laughs, but a Marxist critique of capitalism and class struggle in the United States.”
It is a better argument than I expected. Read the rest here as you enjoy the holidays.
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On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump instigated a violent insurrection against the United States government. Here’s a video from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol that one can review if their memory fades.
People were hurt and police officers died protecting the Capitol. Vice President Pence and other elected officials just barely escaped danger. Our national streak of peaceful transfers of power ended.
It was not, as Trump claims, a “day of love.” And we must resist his efforts to rewrite the history of that dark day.
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