Bari Weiss: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Bari Weiss: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

We’re going to dive straight in with our main story tonight, which concerns CBS News, one of the most trusted names in American journalism. It gave us Edward Armor Maro’s Harvest of Shame, Walter Kankite delivering the news of JFK’s assassination, and of course, this. In recent months, a kind of underground fashion has spread among marijuana smokers. It involves the fancy paper used to roll the joints, as they’re sometimes called. Cigarette papers manufactured in this country, France, Mexico, and Spain now amount to big business, mainly because of the boom in grass, pot, tea, Mary Jane, reapers, giggle grass, or marijuana. Wow, someone really did their research into weed synonyms back then. I just wish he’d kept going. Giggler Grass, Boneweed, Power Flour, Magic Cabbage, Lucifer’s Lettuce, Smokeoky Doie, Whizzle Bizzle, and of course, checking in at the Blitz Carlton. Specifically, we’re going to talk about CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and its recent merger with Sky Dance Media, a deal largely powered by the money of Larry Ellison, one of the richest men on Earth, and notable Trump supporter, with the company now run by his son, David, a man with resting, just checked into the White Lotus face. There are already some worrying signs regarding what this takeover might mean for CBS News in particular. Starting with the fact that this guy is thrilled about it. I think ABC is very bad. I think NBC is very bad and CBS has a new owner. So, we have hope for CBS. CBS has a great new owner. My opinion. Yeah. It is never a great sign when Donald Trump, seen here fresh from a trip to Sephora to color match his hair to his skin, loves a management decision that you’ve made. But he does have a lot to be happy about. In order of Sky Dance to get its merger approved by Brendan Car’s FCC, it committed to adopt measures that can root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media. One of those measures was installing this former conservative think tank CEO as CBS News’s new onbudsman. But this Monday, Anderson took a much bigger step. A major shift in the landscape of TV news. Paramount Sky Dance announcing that they’ve made Barry Weiss, editor-inchief of CBS News, and acquired her online news and commentary organization, The Free Press. She’s a registered independent who at one point called herself politically homeless, unrepresented by the two main US parties. Okay, first politically homeless sounds like how you describe Rudy Giuliani’s current fashion sense, but but it is true. Paramount has bought the free press for $150 million and Barry Weiss, his co-founder, will now be setting the editorial strategy, vision, and focus for CBS Morning, CBS Evening News, Face the Nation, and even 60 Minutes. Also, instead of reporting to the president of CBS News, Weiss will apparently report directly to David Ellison. And look, if you are not familiar with Barry Weiss, you should know she’s a proud contrarian who in public appearances will inevitably deliver some version of this pitch. I confound people because I’m Jewish. I’ve always thought I was liberal. I’m gay. I’m married to a woman. Like that’s my life. You would think that I’m liberal and I would just go along with the flow. It’s like I look like them. I think like them. I eat at the same restaurants. But I don’t think all the same things. And I’m not scared to say when I disagree. And I think that’s really pissed people off throughout my career. Okay. First and least importantly, the reboot of Between Two Thorns looks terrible. But that is her basic self. She’s a liberal who’s brave enough to disagree with other liberals. And along the way, she’s accumulated admirers from Jeff Bezos to Megan McCain and from Amy Coney Barrett to Joe Rogan. And if you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s not a very ideologically broad from and two,” you’re starting to catch on because there are times where she’s a little more explicit about what she believes, like when she gave a speech to the Conservative Federalist Society featuring this fun joke. I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice. I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal and that’s okay because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes. Good one. And you can almost hear that room unclench after she basically says, “I know you think I deserve fewer rights, but don’t worry, besties. We’ll still chill.” And while that is obviously framed as a joke, it’s also a setup to her saying, “In all seriousness, I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, who my allies really are.” And she goes on to say, “Among other things, the wave of so-called progressive prosecutors has proven to be an immensely bad thing for law and order.” And I’ve got to say, for someone whose claims they are politically homeless, she sure seems awfully at home in that room. And look, this isn’t the first time an outsider billionaire has tried thumbming the scale of a news organization. We’ve seen Jeff Bezos increasingly meddle with the Washington Post and Patrick Sunun Shong do the same at the LA Times. But this feels like the most sweeping change yet and at one of the few remaining prestige names in news. And if one person has suddenly been handed this much power over a whole news organization, it is worth knowing who that one person is. So tonight, let’s take a look at Barry Weiss. So let’s start with the fact that she’s been given editorial control of a massive news organization. even though she’s never run a TV network, has no experience directing television coverage, and as one 60 Minutes producer pointed out, is not even a reporter. That is true. She didn’t come up through the news side of a newspaper, but through the opinion pages, which are a very different thing. She really made a name for herself after she was hired by the op-ed page for the New York Times in 2017. And to hear her tell it, it was for a pretty simple reason. To put it bluntly, I was brought in along with Brett Stevens from the Wall Street Journal as a kind of intellectual diversity hire. My job explicitly was to bring in voices that wouldn’t otherwise naturally appear in the New York Times either because other editors wouldn’t think to commission them or the writers themselves would think, you know, the New York Times would never accept me. Yeah. She was apparently tasked with finding voices that the Times oped page would never accept, which is already a big claim given that before she got hired there, it published opeds from, and this is true, Mar Gaddafi and Vladimir Putin. If the Times have been around in the 15th century, I’m guessing it would have given an opinion piece to Vlad the Impaler. Drinking the blood of my enemies isn’t disgusting, it’s beautiful and courageous. In any case, why started getting attention at the times for writing provocative pieces like this one in which he argued that the left had gone too far in policing cultural appropriation. This one, a largely sympathetic profile of the intellectual dark web, a term that she popularized for people like Jordan and Peterson and Ben Shapiro. And this one suggesting progressives were so focused on labeling fellow Americans fascists, they missed opportunities to call out real fascism, which is just some weaponsgrade whataboutism. That piece, by the way, also got attention for the fact that Weiss linked to posts from the official Antifa Twitter account. There was actually a well-known hoax site, which is pretty embarrassing. You don’t expect a Times writer to fall for online hoaxes like they’re your 75-year-old aunt on Facebook who keeps posting that message saying, “I hereby state that I do not give my permission to use any of my personal data or photos.” That is fake, Linda. Also, why would anybody steal your photos? you exclusively post pictures of your elderly cat, you’re going to be fine. But things came to a head in 2020 after the Times ran this infamous Tom Cotton oped in which he argued that the US should send federal troops into cities to tamp down protests against police violence. A lot of staffers at the times argued that it shouldn’t have published that editorial and Barry Weiss wrote a series of tweets about a supposedly heated staff meeting characterizing it as a civil war between the mostly young wokes and the mostly 40 and up liberals. That claim was strongly disputed by others at the paper with one editor saying, “I’m in the same meeting that Barry appears to be live tweeting. This is inaccurate in both characterizations. It’s not a civil war. It’s an editorial conversation and it’s not breaking down along generational lines.” So, to be fair, it seems Barry Weiss does have some reporting experience, specifically trying to report what was happening in a meeting, only to have her own coworker say, “Hey, what the are you talking about?” Now, shortly after that, she resigned, posting a lengthy resignation letter to her website, claiming that her foray into wrong think had made her the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. And she now tells the story of that letter in some pretty self- mythologizing terms. I thought to myself, I have I have a choice to make. I can stay. And in where I lived on the upper west side of Manhattan, Seinfeld territory, um telling people you worked at the New York Times really meant something. got you a good table at a good restaurant among other things. Um, and it meant a lot to me because I felt like, wow, like I made it or I could leave and I could give up the prestige, give up the platform, have no plan for what I’m doing next, but leave with my integrity. So, I left with a resignation letter sort of heard around the world. Uh, it was my Jerry Magcguire moment. Okay, self arandizing aside, let’s not reduce the Upper West Side to just Seinfeld territory, it’s the site of many other cultural touchdowns like You’ve Got Mail, Will and Grace, and that time the night before the Macy’s parade when balloon Spider-Man made an absolute meal out of Uncle Sam’s ass. My point is, the Upper West Side is more than just one thing. Anyway, she quickly launched her own publication, first as a substack called Common Sense, and later as a full-blown media company, The Free Press. Its first motto was honest news for sane people, which feels scientifically engineered to trigger an eye roll. Here she is, not long after starting it, making her pitch. I want to create the media company where people can go for the best podcasts, the best reporting, the best analysis. basically combining the blue chip high quality of the old media landscape with the punk energy of the new political realignment. Okay, first, it is pretty hard to claim you’ve got punk energy when you essentially spout conservative talking points while dressed like the front desk manager at a Courtyard Marriott. I I for one do not trust the punk bonafise of anyone wearing an Anne Taylor Collus silk blouse. But but it turns out like most punk rock things, the free press was quickly bankrolled by a string of reactionary billionaires like venture capitalist Mark Andre and David Sax. And in the 5 years since it’s grown to roughly 1.5 million readers, although only around 1 in 10 actually pay to subscribe, meaning it generates subscription revenues of about $15 million a year, which isn’t nothing, but I would argue also not quite enough to justify someone spending $150 million to acquire it, as that is a revenues to valuation ratio that would make Mr. Wonderful start vomiting blood. Anyway, Weiss has since stocked the Free Press with staffers who in some cases are quick to brag that like her, they are proud refugees from the mainstream media. Hey, I’m Lucy. I’m the social media editor here at the Free Press. And today I’m going to ask my co-workers the moment they realized they were free pressers. Olivia, when did you realize that you were a free presser? Um, when I was reporting for on President Trump and they inserted the word racist into the headline. Okay, so just to be clear, she was apparently reporting for NPR, even though that bleep makes it seem like she used to write for an outlet called the Hole Times or something. And and the word racist was a top a story of hers about public response to Trump saying these four members of Congress, all American citizens, three of whom were born in the US, should go back to the countries they came from. And I guess if you’re not ready to call that racist, the free press might be the place for you. One of Barry Weiss’s goto lines is that she’s only interested in the truth. In announcing her decision to go to CBS this week, she said, “America cannot thrive without common facts, common truths, and a common reality.” Which sounds great. But watch her articulate the free press’s approach to arriving at the truth and see if you can spot a small problem with it. The identity of our brand is truth seeeking and our premise is you cannot get to truth in an echo chamber. The only way that you get to truth is by sitting next to some. This is what makes it so different from any newsroom I’ve ever worked in. Right. Sitting next to someone who disagrees with you, who you still respect, admire them, and and collaborate with them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I mean maybe maybe that is how you do it as an opinion writer, but that is not how you get to truth as a reporter, is it? You do that by leaving the newsroom and reporting. That’s not saying the only way to hold Henry Kissinger’s skull in your hand is by sitting next to someone who disagrees with you. No, that’s not it. You do that by leaving your desk, breaking into Dick Cheny’s house, going into his master bathroom, and taking it out of its jar. And I’ll be honest, there’s not a ton of hard journalism on the free press sites. There’s really not much of anything there. There’s usually just a handful of new posts today, which can even include weird like editorial cartoons from David Mamemoth, the playright. And if you’re thinking, “I didn’t realize David Mamemoth could draw.” Fun fact, he can’t. But don’t worry, cuz that hasn’t stopped him from producing cartoons like this one that says, “What’s the best way to deal with detractors?” with the answer being a manual for tractors. Or this one supposedly about environmentalism that just says, “Shoving eggs up the tushies of chickens.” Or this one of an autobiography by Kermit the Frog with a blur that says ribbiting, which I’m worried might be too funny. There are also a ton of first person clickbait essays with titles like I can explain why the Nazi salute is back. I crit criticized BLM then I was fired. I took religion out of Christmas. I regret it. I want people to have more kids. Does that make me far right? I was called an inbredad swine at Princeton last night. I’m 17 and I’m immunized from woke politics. My family was hunted by Nazis, but I was fired for defending Hitler. My husband wants to be cremated. I’d ignore his dying wish. And I used to hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA lefty. At this point, it feels like we’re just two weeks away from them posting an article titled, “I dressed my dead wife up as Hitler for her funeral, and now her woke family is mad at me.” And look, if you go to the homepage of the Free Press, it might not immediately read as a particularly conservative outlet, but once you start reading its articles, the pronounced theme that starts to emerge is the left has gone too far. Basically, whatever issue you feel like that is true for Israel, campus politics, DEI, or police reform, you’ll find articles there to reinforce that opinion. And look, I am not saying the left never goes too far or that it’s immune from criticism at all. But it can sometimes feel like the free press’s conclusions can get out ahead of its evidence, which brings us to the fact that some of its pieces can be pretty poorly fact checked and in ways that feel important. And let’s look at three key examples. First, take one of its biggest splashes. This article, I thought I was saving trans kids, now I’m blowing the whistle. It’s an account by Jamie Reid, who’d worked as a case worker at the Washington University Transgender Center. Her piece claimed that the clinic was harming patients by, among other things, routinely approving adolescence for medical transitions without proper mental health assessments, calling its work morally and medically appalling. Now, that story understandably got a ton of attention, including from public officials, which prompted Weiss to go on Megan Kelly’s podcast to take something of a victory lap. The day after the piece published, I’ve never seen such a sort of rapid reaction to a piece of journalism, Missouri’s attorney general announced an investigation into the gender clinic. The reason that this story was especially important and gratifying for us to have substantiated was because it’s exactly the kind of story that we exist to pursue. It’s exactly the kind of morally naughty story in which journalists avoid pursuing it because they know they will be punished or smeared for doing so. That is why the free press exists. Wow, that is an exceptional amount of self- congratulation. And the bar was already set at the Jerry Maguire moment heard around the world. But she is right. The state AG apparently found that article, to borrow a term, ribbiting, because they soon announced an investigation into the center, and it ultimately stopped treating minors with Reed’s claims even being used to help justify a statewide ban on gender affirming care for them. So, it did have real impact, which is what makes it so awkward that when Washington University conducted its own investigation, they found that allegations of substandard care causing adverse outcomes for patients at the center were unsubstantiated. And when other outlets reported the story out again and again, their findings did not match what the free press published. For instance, the St. Louis Post Dispatch found dozens of former patients and parents at the clinic who told them their experiences sharply contradicted the example supplied by Reed. NBC spent two months reaching out to nearly 40 people associated with the center and got the same result with patients and parents saying the care they received was thorough and slow. And the Missouri Independent found parents who told them any treatments their kids received were only undertaken after long consultations with doctors and mental health professionals. And often patients were told they needed to wait four years. In fact, at worst, follow-up reporting showed that as more patients sought care, the clinic became overwhelmed as its employees grappled with how best to help patients. And to be fair, the Times did find some former patients who had complaints, including one who’ since dransitioned and felt there’d been a major lack of care and consideration from the center. But even that article, which Weiss claimed vindicated their story, said it’s clear the clinic benefited many adolescence with patients and parents saying their experiences were overwhelmingly positive. And the thing is, some of Reed’s marquee examples just don’t hold up on further inspection. For instance, she cited the harrowing story of a patient she claimed suffered uh liver toxicity from medication she was prescribed at the center and whose mother was so distraught, she sent a message saying they were lucky her family was not the type to sue. That sounds pretty striking. But when the Times spoke with that family, they were stunned to read this characterization of their daughter’s case, saying she only experienced liver problems after getting COVID and taking another drug with possible liver side effects. As for threatening a lawsuit, they were adamant that never happened to the point they went on local news to refute the whole story. It’s not just not true, but it’s a lie. You can’t see their faces. We’re in shadow, but we’re not hiding. But you can hear their voices. There’s lies, and people have paid for that in the transgender community. Did you ever say that you were going to sue the clinic or ever allude to suing the clinic? No. Nope. The parents message goes on to say they don’t regret any decision and would never have denied their daughter these lifesaving treatments. We have still have no regrets. It’s blatant exploitation of my daughter’s medical situation. Yeah, that mother felt that the story was blatant exploitation of her daughter’s medical situation, or as I guess Barry would describe it, harnessing the punk energy of the new political realignment. And look, I get her frustration at seeing misinformation about her daughter go far and wide. In fact, when we reached out to that mother, she told us, “I’ve been fighting for the truth about that damn free press article for a while.” And if you’re getting the sense that the free press isn’t about to let whatever factchecking they do get in the way of a story they want to tell you, that also extends to some of the original reporting they do. Take this piece piece that they published last year about Austin, claiming crime had soared there under a progressive DA named Jose GarcA. It prominently featured a billionaire named Daniel Leetsky, the founder of Kind Snacks, who’d moved to Austin a few years earlier and was supporting a primary campaign to elect a more moderate DA. The story claimed that Austin’s crime wave was leading many of its most buzzed about new residents and some of its wealthiest to worry it might become the next San Francisco. But as local news there pointed out, there was a pretty big hole in that piece’s argument. But this article from a website called the free press, one of the first lines, hopefully we can pop it up right here on the screen. One of the first lines of the article claims crimes in Austin has soared under a progressive district attorney. This morning, the numbers tell us that that is just not the case. We looked at crime reporting data from Austin police. So, in December of 2020, before Jose Garza took over, 20,500 crimes against people were committed throughout the entire year. A few years later, in 2023, with Garza as DA for a couple of years, the number was 2,000 fewer than in the same time frame. Yeah, it’s true. And it is kind of striking that even local news was like, “Girl, calm down.” Because the only thing they usually love more than overhyping crime is maybe maybe dogs running 5ks. This just in. Woof woof pant pant. Good boy goes fast. And finally, there’s this piece the free press recently posted about media coverage of young people starving in Gaza. It concerned photos that it said had helped convince a growing number of Americans that Israel has induced famine and is committing war crimes in Gaza. There is a lot wrong with this article. For one thing, it questions how starvation and famine have been measured by claiming the IPC, the international body that helps monitor food insecurity and malnutrition, has quietly changed its methodology in Gaza, essentially redefining the criteria for determining a famine. But that is false. Very basically, the IPC has multiple metrics for measuring malnutrition in children. One involves measuring height and weight. Another involves arm circumference. Now, because arm circumference only requires a tape measure, it’s far easier to obtain, especially in a place like a war zone. So, in Gaza, that is what they started using because of, you know, all of this happening. And those methods were not in fact quietly introduced as the free press suggested, but have been accepted since 2019 and previously used in famine classifications in South Sudan and Sudan. But it gets even grosser because the piece tries to provide extra context for some pictures of starving children. And here’s one of its writers, the the one who used to work for the Hole Times, summing her work up. So, you’ve probably seen these photos of skeletal kids in Gaza on front pages, all over social media, even in a UNICEF ad. They’ve become the symbols of famine. But we decided to look into these photos and the stories behind them. And what we found is that in case after case, these kids were sick, but not just with malnutrition. In every instance they were suffering with other conditions or illnesses like cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy and even traumatic head injuries. Now their article claims all those kids were already facing grave situations because of their health irrespective of any third party action. But a few things first the traumatic head injury she mentioned was as their article points out caused by an Israeli shell explosion which feels like a pretty significant third party action. Second, it’s not like the 12 photos they chose to look into are the only ones illustrating stories about famine in Gaza. And as for the notion that this is something that the mainstream media was ignoring, there is a key problem with that claim, too. And see if you can spot it as she walks through their in-depth journalistic process. We did something so simple, it’s shocking that no other journalist bothered to do it. So, this is how we figured this out. Let’s just take this example of Naja Hussein Haj who appeared in CNN simply as suffering from severe malnutrition in Gaza City. So all we did is we took her name, we went to Google Translate, we took the Arabic spelling of her name, put that into Google and pulled up a lot of local clips in which her parents were talking about what was really going on. And what we learned is that she has an esophagus condition, which is something that was even reported in English media, including the New York Times. That is a quite different and more nuanced story than the assumption that Israel wants her dead and they’re starving her. Okay, so if no other journalist bothered to do it, but it was even reported in the New York Times, that sure suggests the journalist very much did bother to do it. But also, if we’re talking about context, when it comes to the child she mentioned there, they quote from an Arabic news outlet. Here is the whole section about her from that outlet. Here’s the translation, and here’s the quote the Free Press pulled, mentioning her ailments since birth, including vomiting while eating. But it’s worth noting the sentence before says, “Her condition worsens each day without access to protein and vitamin rich foods that are needed for her treatment.” And the line after reads, “During the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, her condition deteriorated and she developed malnutrition because the right food for her was simply unavailable.” And while I would love to keep splitting hairs on whether a country’s starving kids is better or worse if those kids are already sick, let’s just table that discussion for when I see you in hell. And and that is not the only bit of cherry-picking in that piece which features a lot of young people with, yes, pre-existing conditions or ailments, but which were made significantly worse when they couldn’t access food. And to be clear, as the president of Refugees International wrote, “People with underlying conditions always suffer first when hunger sets in, adding that vulnerability is not a rebuttal of famine. It is a feature of how famine kills and who it hits first. And and it is kind of weird that nobody at the free press thought to include that sort of important context given that they are famously proud of their ability to Google And and you should also know that piece circulated far and wide among those seeking to downplay the suffering in Gaza, including BB Netanyahu himself, who shared that video on his social media with a caption, “Facts matter.” which is terrible for multiple reasons, including if Netanyahu ever shared one of our stories, I think I’d burn this place to the ground. And by the way, any story, too. Even if it was the one where I ate the ass of a cake bear that looks like me, if he retweeted that with a comment, “Facts matter,” you would never hear from us ever again. And look, everything I’ve shown you so far should comfortably be enough to make you question the wisdom of putting Barry Weiss in charge of CBS News. But I still haven’t even gotten to her weirdest venture, which lays out her priorities and worldview pretty clearly, and that is the fact that Barry Weiss has started her own university. Specifically, she’s co-founded the University of Austin in Texas, and it is exactly what you’d expect. Here is one of the school’s promo videos. If you’re wondering why the museums you love and the publishing houses you love and the newspapers you used to trust, if you want to understand why they are hollowed out, you have to look at the nucleation point for this and that is the university. The premise is that America is not only not great but evil to the core and rotten and need to be torn down. The answer to that is simply no. Okay, there are so many things wrong with that. from the firm no to a straw man argument to the claim we all have publishing houses we love that have been hollowed out to the pretentiousness of the phrase nucleation point which sounds more like the title of a straight to streaming action flop starring Steven Sigal now UATX is currently unacredited and while Wise proudly posted this image of students on the school’s first day I should note that while that building does look impressive that is because it’s the Texas state capital the actual school is housed on a couple floors of a former department store in downtown Austin, which is pretty unusual. You don’t generally expect a college to suddenly pop up in an abandoned store like it’s a spirit Halloween. While the the school may not have a traditional campus, it does have a white marble bust of Barry Weiss prominently displayed in one of its common areas. It was apparently donated by Joe Londale, the billionaire co-founder of the defense contract of Palanteer. He he’s one of several billionaire donors to the school along with Daniel Leetsky, you know, the Nutbar billionaire from that Austin Crimewave story and Harlon Crowe, famously Clarence Thomas’s benefactor. So, the school’s already got a lot of red flags on it even before you get to what’s being taught in there. It Substack, because of course it has one, brags that it’s a place where students quote Joseph Conrad and Joe Rogan in the same breath. And one of its big selling points is that its students adhere to what’s called the Chattam House rule, which essentially requires all classroom conversations be conducted off the record. And I’ll let one of the school’s professors explain. If someone says something unacceptable to people or shocking or problematic, you can’t run out and say, “Bobby said something racist or Susie actually is a Zionist.” You cannot do this. And what that means is that students don’t have to conform. They can actually say what they think. Oh, that’s good. Well, in the spirit of saying what we think, I’ll go first. Um, your vibe is all the way off. You look like GMO del Toro if he only directed episodes of Yellowstone. And and you enunciate like you’re the third Crane Brother that Frraasier and Niles never talk about. And you can’t tell anyone I said that Chattam House rule. And if you’re wondering what sort of topics might require a rule like that, apparently one of their first offerings were summer classes called the forbidden courses, which promised to inquire honestly into today’s most vexing questions, which they then illustrated with this photo of an instructor seeming to point out hot button statements for debate. And if you zoom in, you’ll see there it is. Non-black people cannot use the n-word. And suddenly that Chattam House rule makes a whole lot of sense, doesn’t it? Although any black college student will tell you you don’t need to set up a whole university to find out which college kids are comfortable using the n-word when all it takes is a couple of rum and cokes and Lil Wayne to come up on shuffle. Look, it is no mystery what sort of person starts a university like this. But in case there were any doubt at all, just listen to Barry Weiss not long after the campus protest started over Gaza spell out as clearly as possible what she wanted to see happen. Above all, starting today, we need to uproot root and branch the ideology that has supplanted truth at the core of American higher education. And that ideology goes by the name DEI. Some call it wokeness or anti-racism or progressivism or safety or critical social justice or identity Marxism. Whatever term you use, what is clear is that this worldview has gained power in the world in a conceptual instrument called DEI. Yeah. And that itself is a whole worldview right there. You know, this DEI thing that we’ve been trying where we acknowledge not everyone’s been getting equal access to opportunity. Let’s just roll back the clock on that, shall we? Also, let’s be anti-anti-racist and not think too much about what that might make us. DEI is actually one of her favorite targets. She’s also said it’s undermining America, is about arrogating power and that it demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual. And look, it is not new or indeed interesting that a commentator would say that. There are plenty of them out there, and there’ll always be an audience for those who want to make that case. And the truth is, we wouldn’t even have done this story were it not for the fact that Barry Weiss has just been named editor-inchief of CBS News. And that feels different because there are many opinionheavy outlets out there from left to right and with low to high editorial standards. This show is among other things an opinion outlet. And while our staff works incredibly hard to research stories before we write something and vigorously check our facts afterwards, we’re also not the news. And I wouldn’t want anyone who led a pure opinion outlet, not even one that I happen to agree with, to suddenly be running CBS News, but it is especially alarming to have someone doing it who has spent years putting out work that, in my opinion, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading. And look, it is not just about Barry Weiss being at CBS. It’s about the fact that CBS is now under the control of someone who thinks that she and her editorial sensibility make her a good fit for the job. and who incidentally is reportedly preparing a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, home of CNN and uh-oh, HBO, which isn’t ideal. Although, I’ve got to say, if what he likes about Barry is that she forces him to have hard conversations that get a bit uncomfortable, maybe he’ll like this. But the thing is, it’s not just about Ellison either. Again, he’s just the latest in a string of billionaires who’ve taken over our journalistic institutions from the Washington Post to the LA Times and started making worrying changes. And whatever complaints I might have had with their coverage before, and I have had plenty, my solution would never have been this. Because when these takeovers get announced, it’s easy to think, well, thank goodness there are other outlets that aren’t under some billionaire’s influence. That is true because there is always another one until there suddenly isn’t. And I admit I don’t know what is going to happen next. Maybe Barry Weiss will completely reshape CBS News. Maybe she’ll flame out and write another resignation letter heard around the world. But it is it is worth keeping an eye out for subtle changes there. Because while I’m sure many of CBS’s good journalists will continue to do great work, if you start seeing people resigning or getting fired or or you start seeing stories that seem off in some way, especially if it involves the left going too far on a topic Barry Weise cares about, it’s worth asking yourself why that might be. Because unfortunately, the much bigger answer might be that a billionaire has chosen to inject contrarian right-leaning opinion journalism into an American icon. Even if much like that Thanksgiving Day Spider-Man, it has absolutely no business being there.

John Oliver discusses the Paramount Skydance merger, how they’ve named Bari Weiss the new Editor-in-Chief of CBS News, and what her editorial history and perspective mean for the future of U.S. journalism. Plus, some notable moments in the history of the Upper West Side.

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