The mega-rich have always been willing to hire, promote, and fund people willing to unquestioningly run interference for their interests while making them feel like their near-pathological selfishness, hoarding of money and power, and total disregard for the public interest is somehow morally justifiable. CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss is simply another in a long line of feckless water carriers for the 1 percent.

Which 1-percenters, you ask? Well, it’s hard to tell; there are so many of them. A recent New York magazine article outlining Weiss’s popularity with entertainment moguls and celebrities who are very, very angry about wokeness (but don’t want to be considered bigots, you understand) is so rife with the names of A-list billionaires and centi-millionaires that I think I went up a tax bracket just by reading it. Friends, supporters, and investors include Lloyd Blankenfein, Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos, Brian Grazer, Herb Allen III, and an assortment of other people who think pronouns in e-mail signatures are embarrassing but “Chief Happiness Officer” is not. They believe in empathy and compassion as rhetorical wrappers for corporate activity but in the real world have none for vulnerable people unless it comes with a tax write-off.

Weiss’s newest patron is David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, who has purchased of The Free Press, her center-right commentary Substack that is committed to “liberal principles of free speech and open inquiry” as long asthe open inquiries fit neatly into a thin slice of the center-to-center-right continuum. As part of the deal, Weiss, a commentator with no experience running a broadcast newsroom, was made the editor in chief of CBS News.

David Ellison and his father, Larry, are allies of and financial supporters of Donald Trump’s. In any ordinary newsroom, this would constitute a conflict of interest that would necessitate the construction of ethical firewalls designed to prevent coverage of the presidency from being unduly influenced by these relationships. Ellison the younger has done the opposite: Weiss is reporting directly to him rather than any of the news executives at CBS. Far from operating within a firewall, Weiss is a conduit.

This became especially clear on Sunday, when she pulled a 60 Minutes report about Venezuelan men whom the Trump White House has deported to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) mega prison. Weiss justified her decision on the grounds that the segment didn’t feature a comment from the White House (it did note that the White House had elected not to give a comment when the reporters on the piece requested one, which is all the due diligence required). 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi said in an e-mail to colleagues, “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.”

Weiss claims this isn’t true, of course. “Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason—that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices—happens every day in every newsroom.”

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I have written for many different newsrooms and run newsrooms myself. “Screened five times and cleared by attorneys and Standards and Practices” is a level of review that exceeds any I’ve experienced, including at major newsrooms like The New York Times and The Washington Post. The idea that all of the parties involved—many of whom are heavily liability oriented—missed something that Bari Weiss did not strains credulity, especially given Weiss’s historically lax reporting standards for herself.

The funniest and mercifully lowest-stakes example of Weiss’s own anemic standards of editorial review comes from Weiss’s Free Press investigation—and I use the word “investigation” very loosely—of the resignation of a librarian named Jodi Shaw from Smith College. Shaw had alleged that she experienced “reverse racism” after the university would not allow her, a white woman, to make a presentation at a department meeting in a rap format. Weiss’s primary beat at the time was producing an endless series of articles claiming that concerned citizens and private school students continually called her to complain about leftist overreach on their well-appointed campuses. Weiss wrote that on a daily basis, “I get phone calls from anxious Americans complaining about an ideology that wants to pull all of us into the past. I get calls from parents telling me about the damaging things being taught in schools: so-called antiracist programs that urge children to obsess on the color of their skin. I get calls from people working in corporate America forced to go to trainings in which they learn that they carry collective, race-based guilt—or benefit from collective, race-based virtue.”

When I came across this overwrought testimonial, I initially assumed that it was rooted in a basic misunderstanding. Perhaps Weiss had latched herself onto Shaw’s plight under the misapprehension that a rapped presentation that promised to be exceedingly awkward—and meant not for comparatively powerless students or corporate underlings, but for Shaw’s administrative peers—was somehow a constitutionally protected mode of self-expression. And maybe Shaw, who claimed to Weiss that she was a lifelong liberal, which Weiss took at face value and did not question, simply did not understand that rapping in a work meeting was . . . unorthodox? Unprofessional? As I wrote at the time, “No, [Ms. Shaw], you cannot rap your presentation, and neither can you set it to Sondheim, or Twitch it while playing Call of Duty, or deliver it as an abstract performance titled The Student Support Coordinator Is Present.”

But here I did something Weiss did not seem to have any inclination to do: I picked up the phone. And unlike Weiss’s phone, which she claims is always ringing with aggrieved rich people horrified by wokeness, my phone makes outbound calls. So I called, among other places, Smith College. Which refuted her entire story. I picked up some sources along the way who told me Shaw had been kicked out of an alumni group for reasons that definitely contradict her claims to have been a lifelong liberal, and a trail of digital posts by Shaw herself railing against social justice.

I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: this was the lowest possible effort I could make to check out this story, and it was still too high a bar for Bari Weiss. (This did not stop her from doing this again. If you’re feeling masochistic, you can read about a very angry dad at Manhattan’s exclusive Brearly prep school here.)

In other words, I find it hard to believe that Weiss has suddenly turned into a crackerjack reporter and editor, and is capable of running a storied newsroom that often does complex investigative reporting. The rapping librarian story happened just four years ago, after all.

And I find it utterly implausible that the 60 Minutes segment was pulled because there was something that an entire team of experienced reporters and producers, many lawyers, and many standards-and-practices people who are employed specifically to hold stories at the slightest indication that they might be incomplete or inaccurate, missed. More likely, she is just doing what she always does: producing a line of propaganda masquerading as news coverage that serves the interest of her patrons—in this case, David Ellison, whose interests are served by protecting Donald Trump. (In anticipation of Ellison’s buyout, CBS executives thought it advisable to signal their MAGA fealty by settling a meritless lawsuit Trump had brought against 60 Minutes protesting their edits of an election-season interview with Kamala Harris; that act of brazen capitulation now looks like the operatic overture to Weiss’s quisling tour at the helm of the newsmagazine show.)

The appeal of journalism—for good journalists—is serving the public interest by, among other things, holding people in power accountable. It’s also true that very rich and influential people own many news organizations, which instills an inherent tension at their foundations—which is why the firewalls that Weiss seems determined to steamroll have long been in place. The job of an editor in chief is, among other things, to bolster those firewalls. Bari Weiss was not hired in spite of her unwillingness to do that, but because of it.

Good journalists punch up; Weiss punches down. There is no vulnerable population she does not blame for their immiseration, and when she talks about “open inquiry” her list of verboten viewpoints includes the affirmation of the humanity of Palestinians and the denunciation of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, anyone who opposes a free market (though she doesn’t seem to have a material problem with tariffs and other anti-market policies if they’re coming from the Trump administration), together with any suggestion that women and minorities face systemic discrimination, or that religion is not an unalloyed good. She says she is a liberal in the classical sense of promoting free markets and upbraiding government interference in the lives of individuals. She largely disowns the modern social-democratic brand of liberal politics, though she will opportunistically invoke it in passing by reminding people she was a Hillary Clinton supporter and that she’s gay, actually. In other words, Weiss, like many of her fire-breathing anti-woke allies, tends to wield the term “liberal” in the same that intellectually dishonest way favored among the antidemocratic and authoritarian-minded people who insist “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic” do.

In a speech to the Federalist Society in 2023, she said, “In recognizing allies, I’ll be an example. I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice. I know there are some in this room who do not believe my marriage should have been legal. And that’s okay, because we are all Americans who want lower taxes.” By itself, this statement is worthy of a spit take, but its broader context speaks volumes about the sort of political-cum-journalistic agenda Weiss endorses. She went on to offer a high-imperialist account of the righteous response to the October 7 attacks that placed the room full of right wing ideologues in her audience at the vanguard of what she referred to as a civilizational war:

The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, by a different kind of catastrophe. A moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified.

People poured into the streets of our capital cities to celebrate the slaughter.

In Sydney, crowds gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering “gas the Jews.” People rejoiced on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York.

Then came BLM Chicago using the paraglider—a symbol of mass death—as a symbol of freedom. Then came posters across our campuses calling for Israel to burn. Then came our own offices in New York City being vandalized with “Fuck Jews” and “Fuck Israel.” Then came Harvard’s task force to create safe spaces for pro-Hamas students.

As they say on the Internet, of all the things that did not happen, this did not happen the most. The fabulism on display here is as bad or worse than Donald Trump claiming that he saw Muslims celebrating 9/11 from a rooftop in New Jersey. These kind of statements were not an aberration for Weiss, either; they’re claims she has repeated incessantly in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.

In any normal newsroom, anyone presenting as fact Islamophobic urban legends like these would be disqualified from newsgathering, and possibly referred to a good therapist. But with Ellison and Weiss overseeing the news operations of the network, CBS may no longer be in the news business–especially if anything that the newsroom produces is always subject to a pocket veto from either of them in defiance of the canons of editorial review. And if the fate of the CECOT segment is any indication, the higher the stakes are, the likelier it will be that a story meets with suppression from on high.

In Weiss, Ellison and Trump have found a willing enabler and compensated her richly. The rich and powerful already sleep soundly compared to the rest of us. And to judge by Weiss’s track record so far, her tenure at CBS will be one long and soothing lullaby for hoarders of power and wealth. They will be beguiled by a steady stream of comforting lies that cast vulnerable Americans as villains and the billionaire class as brave and righteous defenders of open debate–meaning, of course, the kind of debate they want to see parroted by designated courtiers like Bari Weiss.