Bari Weiss Is Doing Exactly What She Was Installed at CBS to Do

Bari Weiss speaks onstage during Book Club Event With Peggy Noonan on November 19, 2024 in New York City. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Free Press

The media world is disgusted and indignant at CBS News’s new editor-in-chef Bari Weiss’s decision not to air a 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. (In a now-deleted promo clip for the segment, the reporter said the migrants endured “four months of hell,” with one man saying, when asked if he thought he was going to die, “We thought we were already the living dead.”) According to a statement from CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, the report had been internally reviewed and cleared by broadcaster’s legal and standards departments. It had also been heavily promoted on 60 Minutes’ social media. But three hours before it was set to air, Weiss pulled the segment, citing the need for “additional reporting” and on-camera interviews with White House officials –– who had reportedly refused to comment for weeks.

This was, of course, an excuse that didn’t pass the most basic smell test. By all accounts, the piece had been thoroughly reported, and the idea that reporters need to secure on-camera interviews with government officials before reporting on government misdeeds effectively gives the administration veto power over CBS’s news reporting, as Alfonsi pointed out.

The outrage in the U.S. media has been swift and more than justified. But in the back and forth, some key context is being overlooked — context that might help clarify that as bleak as Weiss’s move is for the future of journalism, it is a perfect example of why Paramount’s new owner, David Ellison, hired her in the first place. Her job is to suck up to Trump, yes, but largely as a means –– not an end in and of itself. If Trump favors CBS and Paramount, it could undermine the pending Netflix-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, help David Ellison take over Warner Bros. Discovery himself, and cement the Ellison family’s media concentration to further advance their business interests and their right-wing ideology. This is not just a matter of routine MAGA brain rot; there are material interests at work.

Unlike in traditional corporate media arrangements, Weiss reports directly to David Ellison. Her role, from the onset, has been to police the CBS newsroom, an open acknowledgement that CBS News must reflect the ideological preferences of the Ellison family—namely, their fidelity to Israel and surveillance capitalism. Despite efforts to paint Weiss as a “reporter” and her publication the Free Press as a “news outlet,” neither characterization is true. Weiss rose through the ranks as an opinion writer, going from Tablet to the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to her own Silicon Valley-seeded and funded media property, the Free Press. Along the way, she never did anything, at least not with any degree of consistency, that could be seen as reporting.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing opinion writing and analysis (indeed, it’s what I do), but it in no way qualifies someone to run an ostensibly straight news organization, especially one the size of CBS News. Installing a leader like Weiss is what a company does when it’s attempting an ideological overhaul and gutting of a newsroom, not when they’re attempting to appeal to middle America or modestly counter an alleged liberal bias, as some claimed at the time.

Weiss built her brand going after the targets popular with her wealthy backers: supposedly “woke” college kids, trans people, and pro-Palestine voices, positioning her outlet as “Honest. Independent. Fearless” while carrying water for reactionary elites. Through that lens, David Ellison’s decision to buy the Free Press earlier this year can best be seen not as a straight-forward business decision, but a commitment to a political project that would dovetail with the family’s broader ideological and business interests in surveillance and military technology.

A cursory look at the Free Press’s YouTube channel (Weiss’s closest analogue to running a TV news network) at the time of the purchase reveals a product of middling popularity. The site’s videos rarely rack up more than 200,000 views, and the channel does not crack the top 1,000 on YouTube. It’s true that the outlet’s Substack supposedly had 155,000 paid subscribers, but by no objective metric did this justify its eventual $150 million purchase price. The payment was for something much less direct, and much less unseemly: Weiss integrating her political project with CBS News to slowly turn the once-storied brand into a tabloid news channel for cheerleading Israel, U.S. military interests, and right-wing social causes. By associating a valued name in journalism with Ellison and Weiss’s agenda, their politics take on a sheen of credibility — a bargain that far exceeds any purchase price.

Central to this agenda is steadfast support for Israel. Ellison and Weiss’s shared commitment to Israel is hard to overstate: Bari Weiss began her career at Columbia attempting to get Palestinian academics fired, and throughout her career has prioritized the topic with consistency, vitriol, and vindictiveness. When Ellison’s bid to buy Paramount was announced in the summer of 2024, his company Skydance published a press release in The Jerusalem Post stating David Ellison “loves Israel,” has “Zionist values,” and “quietly donates quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF.” Larry Ellison, David’s father and the co-founder of Oracle, made what was the largest-single private donation to the nonprofit Friends of the IDF in 2017.

One thing gumming up the works is that Paramount, by David Ellison’s own admission, is simply the appetizer for their grand designs of concentrated media ownership, and the Ellisons will need the Trump Department of Justice to help expand their reach any further. While the straightforward narrative of “pro-Trump media defends Trump” is, strictly speaking, true, it misses the bigger picture. Indeed, to say that Weiss and Ellison are ideologically MAGA wouldn’t be entirely correct –– or at least be very incomplete. Weiss and the Free Press’s journalistic output has frequently been critical of Trump. Despite his father being a long-time Republican mega-donor, David Ellison has donated large sums to Democrats.

In the relatively tight window of Trump’s second term –– which has been marked by outright venality, old-school personality politics, and a total abandonment of anti-trust law –– the Ellisons have an opportunity to consolidate unprecedented control of media into the hands of one company. First, they snatched up CBS News’s parent company, Paramount, earlier this year for the relatively bargain basement price of $8 billion, and now they’re setting their sights on the big prize of Warner Bros. Discovery. That company has made a deal with Netflix, currently valued at nearly $83 billion, but it could still very much fall apart if Trump decides it should during the anti-trust review process, and Larry Ellison isn’t letting go without a fight.

Trump has made his demand that 60 Minutes be nice to him abundantly clear by criticizing the Ellisons, CBS News, and 60 Minutes just days before Weiss pulled the Venezuelan migrant segment. It’s important to situate the latest capitulation to the ever-petulant Trump as part of a much broader media consolidation effort. Ellison senior just took control over TikTok, and Ellison the younger controlling CBS News and potentially CNN, HBO, and other influential Warner Bros. Discovery media properties gives them power to not just profit off of media concentration, but to use this unprecedented megaphone to shape the news in a way that benefits Oracle’s interests, Israel, and beyond. Their goal isn’t just to promote Trumpism –– this is a temporary necessity with a lot of obvious ideological overlap –– it’s to promote the Ellisons’ own agenda. To do this, and do this swiftly, David Ellison’s foot soldiers within these organizations, with Weiss leading the way, are going to have to move fast, break journalism norms, and potentially wreck the old models and brands of trust and credibility –– ideally before Trump leaves office or other media competitors manage to win his favor first. Weiss and Ellison’s interference into 60 Minutes creates a de facto state media, but their burgeoning empire is about consolidating top-down oligarchical control over legacy media brands that will endure long after Trump fades into irrelevance.