The Only Way Forward for Bari Weiss at CBS: Total Purge

A leader forced to defend every step cannot lead. If Weiss is made to answer for every action under constant public attack, the institution will swallow her whole.

There’s no way around it: Weiss has to clean house. CBS News is not merely biased or misguided—it is structurally corrupt and intellectually irredeemable.

What Weiss walked into at CBS is reminiscent of Condoleezza Rice entering the State Department’s Arabist stronghold alone, without her own people, only to be slowly neutralized and absorbed by an entrenched bureaucracy hostile to her mission. Institutions like this do not reform themselves. They resist, sabotage, and wait out interlopers.

A leader forced to defend every step cannot lead. If Weiss is made to answer for every action under constant public attack, the institution will swallow her whole.

Weiss succeed surrounded by adversaries.  She needs loyal, clear-eyed allies at her side and an unflinching willingness to excise the rot. Incrementalism will fail. Process will fail. Appeasement will fail.

If CBS News has any chance of being salvaged, the purge must be total. The leftist culture that defines it is not a flaw to be managed; it is a cancer to be cut out. Without decisive action, Weiss will not change CBS. CBS will consume her.

Bari Weiss pulled a 60 Minutes story of the El Salvador CECOT prison at the last minute, saying that it needed more reporting before being ready to air. All the usual suspects are claiming that she did so at the behest of the Trump administration, which on its face is absurd.

CBS News pulled a segment on Trump administration deportations of Venezuelan immigrants to an El Salvador prison from “60 Minutes,” causing staffers and media onlookers to question whether the decision was politically motivated. …

Driving the news: “60 Minutes” announced on social media around 4:30pm ET Sunday that it was dropping the segment, called “Inside CECOT,” from that evening’s broadcast lineup, but said that it would air at a later date. Sharyn Alfonsi, the segment’s correspondent, alleged in an email to colleagues that she learned Saturday that new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss had “spiked our story” after Trump officials refused to be interviewed, per multiple reports. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote, per a copy of the email that journalist Liam Scott shared on X. I’ve watched 60 Minutes and CBS News’ practical application of “standards and practices” for decades. This is not the flex that Alfonsi thinks it is. Twenty-one years ago, CBS News and 60 Minutes II ran a prime-time hit piece on George W. Bush based on fabricated documents in an attempt to influence a presidential election. “Rathergate” only cost CBS some embarrassment and retractions, and perhaps a momentary blip in sponsor support. Almost exactly twenty years later, they botched a re-edit of their softball interview with Kamala Harris so badly that the manipulation was once again easily exposed by critics and commentators. That escapade cost Paramount $16 million to settle in a lawsuit Trump filed, who most definitely preferred direct action more than Bush did at the time. (Hot Air)

(Axios)