Bari Weiss Jumps Into a Drained Pool
That she drained herself.
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It was the early 1950s, and America was in the throes of the Second Red Scare, a massive, fear-mongering campaign led by Senator Joe McCarthy, who claimed to be saving the country from communism but was actually exploiting anti-communist sentiment as a vehicle to target innocent people and suppress free speech in order to bolster his national profile.
The propaganda avalanche would come to be called “McCarthyism,” and for several years, it seemed no one was safe. Politicians, journalists, military officers, artists, and ordinary Americans walked around with swords dangling over their heads, always in danger of being persecuted.
On March 9, 1954, CBS News journalist Edward R. Murrow, venerable host of the program “See It Now,” aired an iconic live report in which he deftly took McCarthy to task for his dishonorable tactics.
It is now credited with accelerating what was by then a growing backlash against McCarthyism and breaking the stranglehold of his propaganda on the American public.
Here’s an excerpt of Morrow’s segment:
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’
Mr. Murrow extended an invitation to McCarthy to appear on the program and offer a response to the segment—promised to be free of commentary from Mr. Murrow during the broadcast—knowing that the Senator would likely accuse him of being a communist and clumsily use the same, stale tactics levied against critics of McCarthyism.
Sure enough, after delaying his response for several weeks, McCarthy delivered it on April 6th, accusing Mr. Murrow of being a communist sympathizer, and Mr. Murrow, keeping to his word, offered no commentary on that week’s broadcast.
The following week, Mr. Murrow responded on-air while north of 20 percent of American households with televisions watched (unusually high for that program), thoroughly dismantling McCarthy’s charges against him. By the broadcast’s end, the junior senator from Wisconsin looked craven, manipulative, and disreputable.
Of Mr. Murrow’s response, Joe Gould wrote in The New York Times:
In the last analysis the Senator was perched on the television high dive and all prepared to make a resounding splash. He jumped beautifully but neglected to check first where he was going to land. It must have been something of a shock to discover that Mr. Murrow had drained the water out of the pool.
It’s a sad irony that Bari Weiss was installed as the editor-in-chief of CBS News this past October following the merger of Skydance Media with Paramount Global, which owned the news network.
Skydance is owned by billionaire David Ellison, and his father, Larry Ellison, is a friend of Trump. The younger Ellison sat with Trump ringside at UFC events earlier this year. They lobbied Trump to approve that merger, which, at the time, was pending regulatory approval.
(You’ll recall this because it resulted in Stephen Colbert’s show being cancelled after he publicly criticized the merger.)
After the merger was approved, the Ellisons bought The Free Press—the outlet owned by Bari Weiss—for $150M and brought her into the fold to run CBS News.
Weiss has been widely criticized in the time since for various shenanigans at the network under her leadership, all of it chalking up to accusations that she’s attempting to make the network a propaganda arm of the Trump administration.
Last night, news program “60 Minutes” was set to air a segment on the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, where more than 200 people were deported by the Trump administration earlier this year under incredibly dubious allegations of criminal activity.
According to reporting by Michael N. Grynbaum at The New York Times, the segment had been privately screened five times and cleared by the CBS legal team and Standards & Practices team for broadcast, but just three hours before it was set to air, Bari Weiss suddenly pulled it, claiming it wasn’t ready.
Sharyn Alfonsi, the “60 Minutes” correspondent who led the CECOT segment, immediately slammed the move: “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
In case you’re wondering, everything up to this point has been highly unusual. In follow-up reporting, Mr. Grynbaum detailed widespread frustration at CBS News during a staff call this morning:
“I held that story because it was not ready,” Ms. Weiss, who joined CBS News in October, told colleagues at the top of a 9 a.m. editorial call with the newsroom, according to a recording of her remarks. She said that while the testimony of the imprisoned men was “very powerful,” other news organizations had already reported their basic story.
“The public knows that Venezuelans have been subjected to horrific treatment in this prison,” Ms. Weiss said, adding that if “60 Minutes” wanted to feature the story, “we simply need to do more.”
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.
I spoke with several veteran journalists today, all of whom affirmed for me the same thing privately that numerous journalists have said publicly since this all went down last night: that Bari Weiss acted inappropriately and unethically in pulling the segment from broadcast, that it made CBS News look deeply untrustworthy.
For her part, Ms. Alfonsi wrote this excellent memo to the staff of CBS News, which I encourage you to read in full:
News Team,
Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now—after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.
If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a "kill switch" for any reporting they find inconvenient.
If the standard for airing a story becomes "the government must agree to be interviewed," then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.
These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that "low point." By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.
We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of "Gold Standard" reputation for a single week of political quiet.
I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.
Sharyn
Okay, so, this is all pretty bad, and it’s abundantly clear that CBS News, under the leadership of Bari Weiss, is being forced to run interference for the Trump administration on a story that detailed the horrific abuses against those detained at CECOT.
If you’re like me and have been following this saga since last night, you were probably wondering when an employee at CBS News would have the integrity to leak the segment in full to the public, consequences be damned.
Would it take days? Weeks? Would we ever see it?
Well, you’ll hardly believe what happened next.
It turns out that Bari Weiss either didn’t know (or forgot to check) that the segment she spiked for American viewers went out in a broadcast package to a streaming app called Global TV, which distributed the originally intended “60 Minutes” show, including the killed segment, to viewers worldwide earlier today.
You may feel the need to read that a few times because it probably seems somewhat ridiculous on its face. She forgot to check? She didn’t know?
Yes. One of two things happened. You read that correctly.
Earlier this evening, Canadian bootlegs of the segment began spreading like wildfire across social media. My friend Allison Gill received one of these bootlegs early and posted it on her blog The Breakdown. You can watch it here.
I warn in advance: it’s worse than you thought, and Ms. Alfonsi did an exceptional job of reporting on the abuses at CECOT prison.
Paramount removed the “60 Minutes” episode from the Global TV app and have been working feverishly to remove bootlegs of the segment that are sprouting up across YouTube, and I would assume video posts throughout the social media landscape will be getting a similar treatment shortly.
But it’s now out there permanently. Myself and Ms. Gill and thousands of others have the file of the full segment saved. This is not going away. It will be shared and viewed millions of times in the coming days, regardless of how hard Paramount works to remove it from online spaces.
It's 2025, and we're sharing bootlegs of a “60 Minutes” segment broadcast in other countries because our own nation is being run by fascists and their billionaire-owned state media helpers.
So, what Bari Weiss has essentially done here is generate enormous interest in a segment she attempted to censor, only for that segment to be shared worldwide within 24 hours of her censorship attempt because of her incompetence.
She took a high dive into a pool that she drained herself.
Were he alive today, Mr. Murrow would not believe what his network has become.
I'm a retired academic and over my teaching years I encountered a few students who cheated on classroom assignments. One thing I learned is that when students cheat, almost all of them cheat stupidly. It appears that this is also true for Trump lackeys. Great essay and I loved the reference to Edward R Murrow.
Brilliant. Thank you Charlotte. I appreciate the reminder that the McCarthy era ended (as this one surely will) and that the whole story has yet to be told.