I know this may come as a shock to some self-styled Very Serious People, but someone wildly unqualified for their job is struggling mightily to do it, and ever since Bari Weiss took over as CBS News Tzar in early October, not only has the outlet done its best Fox News minus the good ratings impression, but from a pure organizational perspective, Weiss is running the opposite of a tight ship. We practically have a live look at all times into a storied news organization that she and one of America’s preeminent billionaire failsons in David Ellison are destroying in the name of King Trump.
Bari Weiss rose to fame telling soft, coddled rich men that all of their biases are brilliant, their stupid kids are wrong, and that actually, the brave and cloistered American elite are wise and desperately needed contrarians in a world gone terribly woke, culminating in her blog The Free Press getting bought by David Ellison’s Paramount for $150 million. That millions of dollars are available at preposterous revenue multiples no serious media investor would sign off on for writing that comforts the rich, while very little money exists for outlets that investigate the powerful, is very instructive as to how soft this generation of American power is. Rupert Murdoch is a unique force for evil whose global damage will take generations to undo, but he at least understood the need to keep up appearances among the adults in the world, and he never interfered in his Wall Street Journal destroying a significant portion of his net worth through their Herbalife investigation. That the WSJ has led the pack through Trump 2 as by far the best of the major news organizations, driving new Epstein revelations and inviting lawsuits while not mincing words about the economic shitshow Trump’s trade war unleashed, says a lot about how cowed The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC had become prior to this new right-wing takeover of media. Trump 2 suing Rupert Murdoch before A.G. Suzlberger is a very depressing commentary on the present state of America’s media titans, and the Oracle failson clumsily elbowing his way into this club with Bari Weiss in tow certainly won’t help matters.
This generation of American power has built a reactionary, fragile and fundamentally broken world that looks just like them, and a lot like Bari Weiss. Tommy Craggs deftly skewered her in a must-read piece for Defector this week where he rightly decried Weiss as a symptom of the larger problem within mainstream media. She is unfortunately but one of many Bari Weiss’s populating an industry financed by America’s weak gilded elite, and they are a big reason why mainstream media finds itself in its current sad and distrusted state of affairs.
But Bari Weiss is unique in one respect, and it’s her very powerful job and the fact that she has proven to be hilariously unqualified for it. CBS News is one of the largest, most storied and well-resourced news organizations ever created. There are not that many people in journalism with the expertise to run such a complex news outlet. I certainly am not one of them, and neither is Bari. We’re both just fucking bloggers. Imagine me running CBS News, what a joke! But perhaps a boy can dream, because our resumes are not that dissimilar. She’s two years older than me and has worked two more years in the blog mines than I have, and we both have held the exact same number of real reporting jobs (zero). The difference is that I blog about how powerful people fuck us over, so I am relegated to the smashed remnants of the greater Gawker universe now in Paste’s orbit, while she got six years to tell the rich dullards still reading the New York Times and Wall Street Journal op-ed sections that trickle-down economics is definitely going to work this time–also that Israel is super great and all the kids totally love it, and none of them use the word genocide, except for hysteric antisemitic woke scolds like former IDF soldier and Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov.
That grift works well enough when you can leverage it into a Substack designed to scrape the bottom of the barrel of ideas that wouldn’t make the cut at WSJ or NYT‘s lukewarm center-left to center-right blogs, like publicly gooning over AI virgins, but this fundamentally unserious person has a very serious job now. There is a level of professionalism the head of a major news organization must bring to their work that a fucking blogger is not qualified to do, and putting herself on TV to interview Erika Kirk as soon as she got the gig was a harbinger of the shambolic clusterfuck to come. Any editor worth half their salt knows that their job is rooted behind the scenes, and that was a big red flashing signal that Bari Weiss does not know what her job is, and that like many classic American idiots, she just wants the endorphin rush that comes with seeing her face on TV.
Ever since she got the gig, Bari Weiss has proven herself to be yet another conservative media bigwig who has been violating Biggie’s Fourth Crack Commandment. She really got high enough on her own supply of selling safe spaces to rich people that she thought she could just tell the journalists working for her that Americans don’t trust them and the almighty Bari is here to save them from their own incompetence, but somehow, they wouldn’t run to their friends at every media outlet the moment her bad ideas left her lips. This deluge of leaks isn’t really even about her lack of journalistic principles, just a demonstration of a basic awareness one must have to work in an industry where gossip at the bar after work is a real currency, and how she clearly hasn’t reached that baseline level of competence where she understands the world she lives in.
A Titanic Deluge of Leaks
“What the fuck?” said one source inside the CBS newsroom to Zeteo on October 5th, the day before the Bari and David amateur hour began. This report detailed the revulsion that many journalists felt over the news that they would soon work for a blogger, and the leaks only accelerated from there. “Let’s do the fucking news,” said an enthusiastic Bari Weiss to CBS News staffers on a deeply embarrassing October 7th call that immediately leaked from “multiple sources” to The Independent. The call reportedly induced many “eyerolls,” which suggests further Fourth Crack Commandment violations by Weiss. Three days later, a condescending memo from Weiss about what was “broken” at CBS leaked to Business Insider. By the end of the following week, Zeteo had another report from inside Fox News Jr., documenting an extensive list of the first ten days of fuck-ups under someone who clearly has no idea how to do the fucking news.
Not even two full weeks after taking over, it leaked to the New York Times that Bari Weiss was sick of the leaks and is waging a campaign against them, and a CBS News senior staffer subsequently told The Independent that this was “insanely ironic” considering that a year earlier, Weiss was boasting about how The Free Press obtained leaked audio from CBS News meetings where they decried Tony Dokoupil’s inaccurate, jingoistic and embarrassing attack on Ta-Nehisi Coates over his report from Gaza and Israel. Let’s keep following this timeline to see how Weiss’s leak hunt went!
After a relatively quiet November, The Independent reported on more discontent inside CBS on December 9th, as “mediocre straight white man” Tony Dokoupil is widely believed to have only got the coveted CBS News anchor gig because he shares Weiss’s bad politics. It seems very likely that braindead Bari looked at Dokupil’s embarrassing Coates segment as a positive. “It’s an insult to the storied news giants who came before [Dokupil],” one CBS news reporter told The Independent. Two weeks later, Weiss would make the fuckup that has come to define her joke of a tenure to date.
She spiked a 60 Minutes story on the El Salvadorian concentration camp that Trump is sending abducted people to, CECOT, that had already cleared all of CBS’s internal checks. In a leaked memo, Weiss claimed that running it without the Trump regime’s retort was unsatisfactory to her journalistic standards, but this silly belief misses a simple fact that any elementary school journalist reporting on next week’s school lunches understands. If you refuse to publish a story because the subject of it will not give you a quote, you are handing them veto power over your story. This naive assertion was always preposterous anyway, because if Weiss’s complaints were valid, the story wouldn’t have passed the muster of CBS’s legal team being paid to worry about the most litigious man alive. Is Bari Weiss really dumb enough to think that 60 Minutes didn’t try to get a comment from the Trump administration? She definitely wants you to think so.
The reporter on the CECOT story, Sharyn Alfonsi, torched Weiss in an e-mail to her 60 Minutes colleagues afterwards, saying this was “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” This e-mail leaked to practically every news outlet you can think of, then Bari Weiss’s e-mail defending her decision in response also leaked out the whole world. Despite her best efforts, the 60 Minutes segment still leaked too, creating the ultimate example to date of how Bari Weiss doesn’t understand the basic mechanical functions of her job.
She proved that she does not even know how her own product gets distributed. CBS had already sent the 60 Minutes segment to a Canadian broadcaster, and so for all of Bari Weiss’s attempts to do baby’s first regime propaganda here, she failed at pretty much every respect of it. Watching her and David Ellison ineptly flail around like this in front of the whole world has given me a newfound cynical respect for the competent evil of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.
Next up on Bari’s speedrun of anti-journalism was her attempt to help make ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s public execution of Renee Good in Minneapolis look defensible. Ross filmed it on his own phone camera for the whole world to see, calling her a “fucking bitch” after shooting her three times, and there’s no debating among law enforcement officers or broader civil society about how inappropriate his actions were. Ellison and Weiss’s CBS decided this was the moment to declare itself beyond the bounds of civil society, branding themselves as regime propaganda for good. They published full blown stenography in the wake of this execution by the state, saying that Jonathan Ross “suffered internal bleeding to the torso” after the incident, according to “two US officials briefed on his medical condition.” CBS is the only outlet to report this. No actual journalists have touched this claim by the proven lying liars who lie in Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation, because if you stub your toe and get a bruise on it–guess what–you have suffered internal bleeding too. Are you going to shoot your wall three times in response? You might if you have the stunted intellectual and emotional capacity of the American gestapo, or their allies in media.
The Guardian reported that one of the nearly infinite news outlets that didn’t touch this story are the remaining journalistic remnants of CBS News, where this regime stenography was met with “huge internal concern,” per one CBS News staffer. One medical producer at CBS suggested to colleagues that “it would be helpful to ask what type of treatment [Ross] received,” and CBS News senior vice-president David Reiter wrote in an e-mail that “I’m no doctor, but internal bleeding is a very broad term and can range in severity.”
Every time the Ellison-Weiss CBS News royally screws up something extremely basic and can’t even meet Fox News’ low bar of trying to put a patina of justification on the second word in their name, the leaks come fast and furious from all angles. I have never seen anything like it in ten years of covering the media and politics. This is so titanically embarrassing for everyone involved.
What the Fuck?
NEW from me:
Towards the end of Trump’s interview with 60 Minutes in November, Bari Weiss rushed into the room to introduce herself and the pair exchanged kisses on the cheek, leaving 60 Minutes staff stunned at the “overly chummy” embrace.
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a…
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) January 16, 2026 at 7:53 AM
After the CECOT debacle, a much lower stakes leak saga unfolded, but one that was still very instructive as to how Bari and David’s amateur hour sees itself. The big debut of CBS News featured a teleprompter mistake because Weiss was editing the script too late, leaving Dokupil exasperated, aimless and apologetic to the audience on live TV. Then to start 2026, CBS News did a bizarre segment about Marco Rubio AI memes where Dokupil ended it saying “Marco Rubio, we salute you, you are the ultimate Florida man”–a phrase all good journalists know is very good journalism and not at all an anchor lobotomizing himself on live TV. The Titanic metaphor continued afterwards, as further leaks blew through the hull when a CBS News staffer told the Washington Post that the Rubio segment was “embarrassing and unnecessary,” and that “there’s broad agreement that at the very least it was cringe and at most it was deeply inappropriate.”
“Cringe and deeply inappropriate” is one of the most accurate taglines for The Free Press that I have ever heard. Weiss’s CBS tenure has been such an amateurish clusterfuck that it’s difficult to know what leaks to take seriously and what to disregard as rumor now, but a recent report about a potential new segment straight from Bari’s lizard brain took the internet by storm this week.
Update — Here is what the new apparent CBS News segment “Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil” may look like:
— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 4:01 PM
Jack Daniels told Dave Infante the next day that they had not agreed to any sponsorship deal with CBS, and today, a CBS News spokesperson told People that “This is not a segment for broadcast. This is not a real title. This is not a real sponsor. And this is not a real story.” It was supposedly just a mockup of ideas being tossed around.
If CBS News had commented before Jack Daniels said anything, perhaps this would be a believable statement, but given that Bari Weiss has torched CBS’ credibility in just four months–plus the linear timeframe these three reports create–this has very strong “you can’t quit, I’m firing you” vibes from CBS. I totally believe that she pursued this harebrained Whiskey Fridays idea for CBS News, because it’s the exact kind of vacuous, virtue signaling, “how do you do fellow kids” anti-journalism that she excels in, and has attracted other like-minded dullards with. Real journalism is where she has always struggled, as her last four months atop CBS News have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Weiss has led a very successful career of telling powerful and coddled men that their gilded biases are 100% correct, and now that she has a real job, she is proving how trite and amateurish that worldview is when it is finally forced to integrate itself into reality.
