In September, Bari Weiss had a modest position in the media landscape as the proprietor of the Free Press. It’s a relatively minor news outlet combining center-right commentary on America’s culture wars with a fanatical devotion to defending the State of Israel. In October, David Ellison, the owner of media behemoth Paramount Skydance, bought the Free Press for an eye-popping $150 million and appointed Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News.
As the New York Times notes, it’s hard to escape the impression that this was done not just because of Ellison’s ideological affinity with Weiss, but as a tactic for currying favor with the Trump administration. Ellison has been “courting Mr. Trump’s support” for “a hostile bid to outmaneuver a rival company, Netflix, and acquire the media behemoth Warner Bros.” But Trump has used recent episodes of CBS’s 60 Minutes to “suggest he is displeased with Mr. Ellison’s stewardship of CBS.”
Bluntly, it looks very much like Weiss, who’d previously run a small magazine that devoted a lot of its time to accusing advocates for Palestinian rights of antisemitism, was brought in as a kind of political commissar to minimize the amount of programming on 60 Minutes that would displease Trump. And that suspicion was massively reinforced on Sunday, when Weiss blocked 60 Minutes from airing a long-planned segment on human rights abuses that the Trump administration and Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele conspired to commit at El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration extra-judicially deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants and asylum-seekers to El Salvador, where Bukele had cut a deal with Trump to keep the deportees in CECOT in exchange for direct payment from the United States. The legal rationale was that the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 allowed such deportations without judicial oversight in a time of war, and that the U.S….
Auteur: Ben Burgis
