When Bari Weiss became the editor-in-chief of CBS News in October, reactions among the media class were sharply divided. Many centrists and liberals and conservatives who shared Weiss’s criticisms of the illiberal “woke” Left saw her ascension as a welcome victory for the woman who had left the New York Times in 2020 citing bullying by progressive colleagues. Commentary on the left, however, slammed her as a “polarizing provocateur” peddling right-wing narratives and lacking the journalistic experience needed to run a network’s news division.
Now, Weiss is facing her first big controversy on CBS: the last-minute decision to postpone a segment of the network’s flagship show, 60 Minutes, titled “Inside CECOT”—a disturbing look at the Trump administration’s notorious deportation of 252 mostly Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador last March for indefinite incarceration in that country’s maximum-security prison, CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, the Terrorism Confinement Center). Once again, the reactions are sharply divided: from “Bari Weiss is exercising censorship on behalf of the authoritarian Trump regime and ruining a gold-standard TV newsmagazine” to “Bari Weiss is simply doing normal editorial oversight and leftists are freaking out because she is challenging their monopoly on television narratives.”
Some critiques of Weiss have been unfair. Atlantic columnist Adam Serwer, for instance, charges that her commitment to free speech has always been hypocritical, wrongly implying that she has never favoured speech rights for her critics or objected to the Trump administration’s abuses. Others have stooped to outright caricature which has little in common with Weiss’s actual record.
Even so, the defences of Weiss on the 60 Minutes story miss the mark. A close look at the timeline and substance of her decision suggests that the segment was spiked without a valid journalistic reason—and, very likely, to avoid angering Donald Trump.
