THE MORNING RANT: We Should Cheer for Bari Weiss to Fail in Her Effort to Rehabilitate CBS’ Reputation

There is a civil war being fought at CBS News. The battle is being played out between Bari Weiss, its new left-of-center editor-in-chief, and the left-of-Trotsky journalists she inherited at the laughingstock news operation.

There are many conservatives cheering Ms. Weiss on in her battle against her hyper-partisan corps of journalists. I’m not one of them. In fact, I’m cheering for the insurgent “journalists” to prevail, and to maintain CBS News’ well-earned reputation for being unethical, dishonest, and openly hostile to impartial political coverage.

In fact, my worst fear is that Ms. Weiss might succeed in restoring CBS News to a level of respectability such that it might able to reassert its liberal influence on politics as it once did.

The recent imbroglio is due to Ms. Weiss yanking a typical 60 Minutes hit job just hours before it was to air. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly acquainted with the story. A 60 Minutes journalist, Sharyn Alfonsi, who has a history of dishonest hit jobs against Republicans*, produced a sob story about Venezuelan illegal immigrants being deported to “CECOT,” a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. (*In 2021, Ms. Alfonsi famously ran a hit piece against Ron DeSantis accusing him of prioritizing Publix as a provider of Covid shots in exchange for campaign contributions. The story was subsequently debunked and widely criticized by Florida politicians of both parties.)

Ms. Alfonsi’s story alleged that these Venezuelan deportees were being tortured at CECOT at the behest of the Trump administration, but she did not bother to provide any rebuttals from the Trump administration, which had been provided to CBS News, as acknowledged by left-wing outlet Axios:

• One of the main reasons Weiss cited for pulling the segment was that the "60 Minutes" team didn't include any of the three on-the-record statements from the White House, State Department and Department of Homeland Security that were provided to CBS News journalists.

• According to a source familiar with the "60 Minutes" team's correspondence with the administration, journalists reached out to press officials at the White House, State Department and DHS, all of which provided comment to CBS News ahead of the piece's anticipated run date.

• None of those comments, which varied in length and substance, were included in the piece.

We all know 60 Minutes as the show on which Dan Rather self-immolated his career by using forged military documents in an effort to harm George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign. It’s also the show that spliced together various ramblings of Kamala Harris in 2024 to try to make it sound like she was making coherent answers to questions. And 60 Minutes is also the show that falsely claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was not really his in the last weeks of the 2020 election, in an effort to push Joe Biden over the finish line.

CBS News has a well-earned reputation for being a place where journalistic malpractice is not considered a problem, it’s policy. I don’t want that to change. As Margot Cleveland joked about 60 Minutes ”At this point I wouldn't even trust CBS News division to tell me how many minutes were in an hour...”

How bad is the media’s disrepute?

“Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in US: Republicans' confidence in mass media to report news ‘fully, accurately and fairly’ now at 8%” [Gallup – 10/02/2025]

Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.

Meanwhile, seven in 10 U.S. adults now say they have “not very much” confidence (36%) or “none at all” (34%).

The legacy media is fully discredited, and that is a good thing. There is no “scandal” that network news divisions can promote at this point that will be taken as fact.

It’s important to remember that Bari Weiss does not dispute the general thesis of the 60 Minutes piece that was pulled, specifically that deportees are being subject to Trump-approved torture. She simply wants the story to come across as impartial journalism, not as another clumsy “we finally got him” hit job.

Therefore, I hope Ms. Weiss fails. The last thing we need is for the legacy media to have its reputation restored to a point that it can once again promote left-wing propaganda with a veneer of respectability. Instead, let CBS and the rest of the legacy news media proceed down the path to permanent irrelevance.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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