Bari Weiss is Destroying CBS News

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Even before the first 60 Minutes episode of the season aired, the media was already running articles blasting Weiss for ‘destroying the journalistic legacy of CBS News’. The New York Times ran its preview by repeating the false claim that Weiss was “trying to insert political bias into the show”, which she did by asking for a comment from the White House about a 60 Minutes story.

The media considers asking the target of a hit piece for comment to be a case of “trying to insert political bias into the show”. As opposed to the political bias being the whole point of the show.

It would be awful indeed if Bari Weiss were to tamper with the journalistic legacy of CBS greats like Walter Cronkite, Les Moonves (accused of forcing a woman into oral sex), former 60 Minutes Executive Producer Jeff Fager (accused of sexually harassing women), former 60 Minutes correspondent Charlie Rose (accused of sexually harassing women), former 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt (accused of sexually harassing women) making “accused of sexually harassing women” into an official requirement for CBS News legends.

At least there was Dan Rather, who broke the network’s curse of sexually harassing women by merely trying to pass off a Microsoft Word document as if it had come from the Vietnam War.

Obviously, Bari Weiss doesn’t belong at CBS News. She hasn’t even raped anyone yet.

(When Scott Pelley stomped off in a huff over Bari Weiss, the AP contacted Jeff Fager for a comment without mentioning he had been forced out over allegations of groping women. To the media, groping women is less of a sin than asking it to meet ethical standards.)

60 Minutes founder Don Hewitt had such an incredible legacy that one of his victims settled with CBS News in the 90s for $450,000 to keep quiet and then another $75,000 every year for the rest of her life so she would stay silent. This dirty deal, which paid $5 million to a woman to keep her quiet about what was going on at 60 Minutes, was only discovered in 2018. None of the intrepid 60 Minutes journalists busy targeting political opponents ever got around to it.

If only Don Hewitt had been a Republican or Israeli or something appropriately newsworthy.

But you can’t fault Don Hewitt’s high journalistic standards. Consider the time he tried to add (and potentially sexually assault) Murphy Brown to 60 Minutes. Hewitt, a winner of more journalistic awards than the entire cast of Cats, decided that Candice Bergen, who played a fictional journalist on Murphy Brown, would make a great real journalist. Bergen, who had more integrity than the great newsman, decided she was actually an actress, not a journalist.

The same, however, is also true of most of the on-camera talking head talent at CBS News.

CBS News has a long proud legacy of things to be ashamed of. Especially 60 Minutes whose star Mike Wallace conducted interviews while zonked out on drugs and then tried to commit suicide because the news network had been sued by General Westmoreland after it lied about his actions during the Vietnam War. The media turned this into a teachable moment about coping with depression, rather than correctly portraying Wallace as the same kind of unstable egomaniac con artist that he had made a career out of claiming to expose.

Had Mike Wallace been the face of any other profession and tried to commit suicide after his lies were exposed, the takeaway would not have been “he was so brave for coping with depression”. But the media is always kind to the media whether it’s guilty of lying or raping.

Wallace had already made it clear which side he was on when he was asked what he would do if he were embedded with a North Korean unit that was about to ambush American soldiers. ABC News’ Peter Jennings had said, “I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans”. Wallace mocked him, “I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you’re an American, you would not have covered that story.”

But the good news is that the sorts of stuff that internal CBS News reviews flunked 60 Minutes for back in the good old days of 1982, (selective editing, a key witness doubling as a paid consultant, ignoring contradictory evidence) are so routine that anyone objecting to them would probably be accused of “trying to insert political bias into the show” by asking for basic ethics.

By the time the Dan Rather era arrived, it was one lie and lawsuit after another. There was the time that Dan Rather interviewed a fake Vietnam War combat veteran who told him John Kerry-style stories of killing lots of innocent Vietnamese civilians. ‘CBS Reports: The Wall Within’, produced by Rather and Hewitt, was hailed by the media as compelling journalism that finally told the real story of how evil America had been during the Vietnam War. The minor problem was that the Navy SEAL who claimed to be “one of the highest trained, underpaid, eighteen-cent-an-hour assassins ever put together by a team of people who knew exactly what they were looking for” had actually been an equipment repairman far from combat.

Whoops. CBS News denied everything.

Before that, 60 Minutes had been sued by a doctor in Los Angeles after he was accused of signing a medical form that he hadn’t actually signed. CBS News hadn’t bothered to verify it.

The grand finale of Rather’s career came with another Vietnam War story, this one a pre-election hit job on George W. Bush which relied on the Killian memos that were supposed to have been typed up in 1973, but were as perfectly proportioned as a modern Word document. Dan Rather denied everything, but eventually had to leave to pursue a lucrative career in not being Connie Chung, Rather’s former anchor-partner, who had to leave after baiting Newt Gingrich’s elderly mother into calling Hillary Clinton a #. Damn that Bari Weiss.

CBS News personnel involved in the Killian memo scam doubled down on claiming that a laptop had somehow traveled back in time to 1973 and was used by a local secretary to type up the memos. A CBS News producer wrote a book titled ‘The Truth’, which blamed the whole thing on the “right wing” and which was later turned into a movie starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford as courageous journalists determined to expose the truth about time traveling laptops.

The Truth (2015), which was a lie, only made back $5.6 million of its $9.6 million budget.

These days, the media tunes in on Dan Rather’s frequency every now and then to lecture about how Bari Weiss is letting down the proud CBS News tradition of making up lies about Republicans to help elect Democrats. And Weiss insists on actually fact checking the lies.

She hasn’t raped anyone or pushed any lies. If this keeps up, she’ll destroy CBS News.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

And click here to support my work with a donation.