Corporate media apocalypse

It was only 18 days ago when CBS News goofball Tony Dokoupil declared that he was going to be “more accountable and transparent than Cronkite:”

---

---

Last Friday, Bari Weiss’ puppet validated the legitimacy of Trump’s madness concerning Greenland during an interview with Pennsylvania Senators John Fetterman and Dave McCormick:

With his questions, he wasn’t reporting a story, he was molding clay, shaping a narrative to sate the ego and flatter the delusions of the American Nero, whom he could not, would not, and will never provoke.

Bari Weiss is a 41-year-old digital native cocooned in elite feedback loops that reinforce the conceits and egos of America’s master class, which Weiss has joined by watering a garden of fragile flowers.

One of the world’s most cloying, entitled, brittle and annoying billionaires is a pristine example of the type of man that dreams of Bari Weiss.

His name is Bill Ackman, and though it seems impossible a cartoon could come to life and be so predictable, vapid and banal it has come to pass. He is a self-announced expert in all things, in all times, and a really great tennis player…oops!

Weiss knows something that is deeply true: the most delicate flower in the whole world is the male ego. She rubs up on America’s billionaire men, sprinkling their delicate petals with stories of their righteous genius and virtue like Lauren Boebert at a “Beetlejuice” production. She is a validator with a talent for masturbatory ego stroking, which, while lucrative, does not leave a person prepared to function in society writ large.

Her mark is the powerful men who need nothing except to be called geniuses, and told they are right.

Weiss molds their fantasies of what is real, what is dangerous and what really matters into a product she delivers back to them shaped by their delusions, prejudice, and grievances that she calls “doing the f*cking news!”

In this fantasy world woke children in an Ivy League dorm are America’s gravest danger, while Trump attacking NATO is completely understandable because the deal on the table is easy to understand.

Staying rich means staying in line in the Trump era.

It is very important to appreciate why The Free Press was purchased by David Ellison. According to a The New Yorker profile of Weiss by Clare Malone, a media executive said this:

Don’t think about it as David Ellison paying a hundred and fifty million dollars for The Free Press. Think about it as a hundred and fifty million dollars on top of the price they paid for Paramount. It was basically the cost to get it to go through.

It was money in a paper bag, but more elegantly presented.

The billionaire class doesn’t push $50,000 large across the table in a Cava bag because, after all, a man with a private island has more refined sensibilities than a low-rent thug like Tom Homan.

It was no different than greedy MAGA Shari Redstone paying off Trump by settling his absurdist lawsuit.

This is how business is done between gangsters.

This is how it works in Russia.

You want to play, you have to pay.

Bari Weiss got paid and that’s why she’s kissing a pedophile protector on the cheek instead of making sure the American people are informed about the catastrophe at hand.

She spins yarns.

This quote from Max Strasser, an opinion editor at The New York Times, is all anyone ever needs to know about how Weiss operates:

I am in the same meeting that Bari appears to be livetweeting. It’s not a civil war, it’s an editorial conversation; and it’s not breaking down along generational lines.

She’s a MAGA sculptor.

Trump’s Iceschlauss is a moral travesty, and it is illegal.

The act would be illegal. It would breach the UN Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights, the Atlantic Charter, the NATO Charter, US law, international law, and dozens of treaties, conventions and agreements. It would be the most treacherous betrayal by one people against another in human history.

Yet, at CBS there is no time for war, peace, justice, reality — or much of anything else — because Bari Weiss is in the house, and where she goes a soap opera follows.

If Bari Weiss had a hip-hop nickname it would no doubt be “PrePOSTERous.”

Preposterous.

She has turned the “Tiffany network” into Dunder Mifflin.

Sometimes, when I write about media corruption or the appeasement wing of the Democratic Party, it triggers comments where people say, “But what about the Republicans?”

My answer is, “What about them?”

If they serve in Congress, they are bad.

Period.

Nobody should have any expectations of the blowhards Thom Tillis and Don Bacon. They are Trump’s fellow travellers.

They always get in line.

There is no mystery about who they are. They are fascists and fellow travelers in the MAGA conspiracy to destroy the Republic.

MAGA cannot be compromised with.

It must be repudiated by the American people and its apostles of misery and treachery, driven from public life, and held accountable.

The greatest lie in America today is that MAGA cannot be opposed — that somehow it is unstoppable and inevitable, and Trump must be met in the middle.

The middle of what exactly?

No.

It must be opposed, not appeased.

Yet, because the Democratic Senate is led by Chuck Schumer and filled with feckless men and women, ICE has been handed a license to hunt and kill at whim, stamped with the approval of Chuck Schumer, Corey Booker and Patty Murray.

The lack of judgement is staggering.

The treachery is tragic.

The corporate media is even worse.

A great many people have followed the story of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mistress Olivia Nuzzi, who smeared Ryan Lizza (check out his series that lays everything out at Telos News), betrayed confidential sources, abused the courts, and conspired to destroy anybody who posed a threat to the ambition of the deranged Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It is the biggest media scandal of the 21st century, and yet Nuzzi’s psychotic behavior was glamorized, serialized, packaged and sold.

Here is the obscenity that appeared in The New York Times:

This was Vanity Fair:

This is a CNN headline about measles in America:

Robert Kennedy is sick.

He’s a liar, an abuser, a predator and a manipulator who has wrecked the CDC, the Public Health Service, and demolished scientific research across the nation. Countless Americans will die unnecessarily from this insanity, but that matters not because the cancer in our media saw a leggy blonde costumed and performing, and decided it was romance, not depravity.

As Lizza lays out in his “Bamboo” series, several media outlets knew every detail about what Olivia Nuzzi had done, and more importantly, what Robert Kennedy had done. They refused to report it.

Any of it.

This is the ethos of Bari Weiss.

The New York Magazine investigation of Nuzzi’s reporting has been exposed as an utter sham. Vox Media has an urgent obligation to hire an outside counsel who can conduct an independent investigation around who knew what and when about RFK at NY Magazine.

The magazine covered up vital information to their reader, desecrated journalistic ethics, ran a sham investigation, and then exonerated themselves with a deceptive statement that is a grave insult to their integrity and legitimacy.

Here is what the magazine said at the time:

Clearly, the investigation was a whitewash.

We the people are besieged by lies and propaganda.

We are drowning in lies of commission and lies of omission.

It is crushing America’s future and poisoning our national soul.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s epic speech at Davos is jarring to the American ear, which has been anesthetized by constant and ceaseless stupidity broadcast to them. It was a moment where reality showed defiance against make- believe.

Reality always wins in the end, which brings us back to Bari Weiss.

The following was reported today by Oliver Darcy at Status about calls that Weiss was making to reporters in advance of the airing of the “60 Minutes” CECOT story, which she finally greenlit for airing this past Sunday:

By Sunday, however, Weiss had finally green-lit the piece—and she wanted to personally explain to reporters how it made its way to air and offer her perspective on the whole fiasco. Indeed, Status has learned that Weiss personally spoke to several reporters covering the controversy, chatting with them on the phone one by one to offer her preferred version of events. The conversations, which Status did not take part in and learned about independently, were conducted on background [my emphasis added], allowing reporters to use the information without directly attributing it to the embattled editor in chief.

Here is CBS’s sourcing policy:

Single sourcing:

There are occasions when we report based on a single source, but only after careful consideration and discussion with senior leadership. If we publish a single-sourced report, we aim to deliver as clear a representation of the source’s credentials as possible.

Anonymous sourcing and confidentiality:

When someone who has important information fears personal harm or reprisal if their identity is revealed, confidentiality may be warranted.

Sometimes, agreeing to protect a source’s identity means we will not identify them in a news report. Sometimes it means we will keep their identity confidential even beyond the report. Before agreeing to this protection, reporters, correspondents and producers will disclose the identity of the source and the circumstances of any offer of confidentiality to one or more members of newsroom leadership.

If we agree to this protection, we will work with the source to agree on how they will be acknowledged in our reporting, if at all (for example, “a source close to the investigation”). We will also characterize the reason we are not identifying them so that the viewer or listener can evaluate how much weight to give the information.

Stay with me here…

After Weiss’ decision to spike the vetted story about CECOT, she told the “60 Minutes” staff that she stood “100 percent behind Sharyn and her story,” referred to the segment as “thoroughly reported,” and that she wanted a newsroom “where we are able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters and do so with respect.”

And yet, according to Status, Weiss personally called up CBS News reporters, not as their boss, but rather as a source who spoke on background, which means that the information she gave them could be used to shape the story and even quoted directly, but not be sourced to Weiss.

Like a middle schooler, she picked up the phone and began anonymously disparaging one of the finest journalists at CBS News, Sharyn Alfonsi, who dared to say this when the story was spiked and immediately aired in Canada.

The CBS News editor-in-chief attempted to undermine her own newsroom by pressuring reporters to carry management’s spin as anonymized fact in order to manipulate the viewer and reader to not believe the reporting over Trump’s assertions, which are lies.

The story was held originally because Ellison was singed by Trump as he was in the middle of trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.

Trump said this on Truth Social:

For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before. If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!

The story was spiked.

Now, Weiss is anonymously shaping her image as a source to the reporters she leads in order to discredit their own colleagues to please Trump, which pleases David Ellison. This is exactly what he paid $150 million for The Free Press to do.

It isn’t the “warmth of collectivism,” but it isn’t exactly capitalism either.

The word is fascism.

What Bari Weiss is producing at CBS is propaganda.

Her leadership is a disaster. It’s unethical, self-important and lacking and sense of responsibility.

She is one of the most ludicrous fighters of this era, which is saying something.

---

---

---