Walter vs. Tony

Bari Weiss has destroyed the integrity of CBS News.

Her dishonesty, incompetence, and terrible judgement have incinerated all traces of journalistic ethics, and brought disgrace to an institution that was made famous by the greatest collection of broadcast journalists in history. The roster of legends includes names like Murrow, Cronkite, Wallace and Bradley.

Bari Weiss is a MAGA propagandist.

She has made the network a carnival attraction, a highway car crash, where the shrinking viewers absorb the lies and gaslighting out of curiosity before walking away, tuning it out, and turning it off.

Americans once turned on CBS News to understand the world.

Those days are gone.

Under Weiss, CBS News has become a depraved version of Pravda, only less credible. Here is the latest hideous lie coming from the once venerable network:

Jonathan Ross is a murderer, but more importantly, he was not injured in the slightest when he shot an unarmed woman in the head and called her a “f*cking bitch.”

Two sources?

Who?

Miller and Noem?

Weiss’s hand-picked anchorman is a MAGA mouthpiece, who is the most preposterous network anchor since Will Ferrell played Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman” in 2004.

Watch this interview between Trump and the former hair model:

Madness.

Bari Weiss took command of CBS News in a meeting where she rallied some of America’s best journalists with this battle cry: “Let’s just do the f*cking news.”

Indeed.

Next, MAGA Bari spiked a “60 Minutes” story about the El Salvadoran gulag to which Trump sold human beings, where they have been abused and tortured.

After spiking the news Bari announced that CBS needed to “be the news” — whatever that means.

At some deformed level, that may be her only real achievement given that her lack of integrity has absolutely made CBS “the news.”

Her plan worked perfectly — except for one thing.

Destroying the credibility of CBS by embracing MAGA propaganda did make CBS the news, but it immolated the audience, which actually wanted information, not dishonest sophistry and Erika Kirk’s crocodile tears and thermonuclear grift machine thrown in their faces.

The corruption is epic.

Yet, it is also farcical which makes it kind of fun.

Because Tony Dokoupil is lighter than helium it is impossible to observe all of this from the ground.

Watching Tony means floating away to a land of make-believe, where he fights the elitists in the name of ordinary people, and where Bari and he are Katniss and Peeta, tribunes of the people, apostles of the unloved Ellison boy and his daddy, who just want to tell us all the truth, like Walter Cronkite used to do.

Within this land of make-believe anything is possible.

Did you know that Tony is going to be even “more accountable and more transparent” than Walter Cronkite?

Watching Tony and Trump reminded me of a few things, but none of them involve Cronkite.

Tony Dokoupil’s Trump interview was what the kids call “cringe” — and then some. It was an embarrassment wrapped in disgrace and peppered with lunacy.

Cronkite would not have approved.

He would have understood what Trump was.

He would have recognized the danger in an instant.

He was serious man, not a frivolous one.

During the war against fascism, the US government recognized the profound moral hypocrisy of America’s segregated society in the south and its segregated military.

Americans of every race, religion, background and nationality fought valorously, and played an enormous role in igniting the civil rights movement after the war.

During the war the “Double V” campaign was popularized. It stood for “Victory Abroad and Victory at Home.”

The heroism of military units like the 442nd RCT of Japanese Americans or the world-famous Tuskegee Airmen guaranteed the desegregation of the military by 1947 — the same year that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

A great momentum towards justice was unleashed after victory against an evil that is now routinely embraced by an American MAGA extremism that has wrapped itself in the swastika.

DHS is recruiting white supremacists with Nazi songs, slogans and images.

Trump has declared war on America, and none of it is covered on CBS News.

There, the truth is verboten and highly sanitized.

A great explosion of civil rights progress in America occurred approximately 100 years after the end of the Civil War in the mid-1960s, just a few short years before my birth.

This is the era that ended American apartheid and fulfilled the words of the Declaration of Independence as a legal construct, and validated Dr. King’s observation that “the arc of history is long but that it bends towards justice.”

Like you, I was born into a specific time and place that shaped my perspective on everything.

I lived in an overwhelmingly white working-class New Jersey borough that bordered an overwhelmingly black city.

My heroes were Reggie Jackson, Willie Randolph, Bucky Dent and Thurmond Munson.

The games on channel 11 WPIX were called by Phil Rizuttto and Bill White, which I thought nothing of, being completely oblivious about the epic role Bill White played in desegregating baseball just a few short years before my birth. In fact, as a boy, I had no idea blacks and whites did not play baseball together when my parents were born.

Looking back from the perspective of middle age, I think about the passage of time more than I once did, and have a greater appreciation for the reality that history did not begin at the moment I entered the story.

What came before matters, and what comes next, is not contingent on what happened last.

There is a great debate raging in America about freedom, liberty, immigration and race.

I thought about that as I watched again an extraordinary interview between Walter Cronkite and President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1973 when I was a toddler with curly hair and bangs.

The LBJ interviewed was different than my conception of him from the famous tapes of his politicking, phone calls, bluster and cajoling.

His hair was longer and he was calm, contemplative and at peace in a strange and serene way.

I have never heard a white American politician talk about race like this in my lifetime, and I thought, “What a shame.”

I have never heard a journalist ask the questions Cronkite posed.

Because LBJ and Walter Cronkite lived before the social media apocalypse and the billion-dollar rage industrial complex and the Olivia Nuzzi ethics that define modern journalism they had a very deep conversation.

It was the type of conversation from which Tony Dokoupil would float away because, like I said, he is lighter than air.

Fortunately, Cronkite was not.

Fifty-three year later, the recording stands as a time capsule and a gift to the nation. Ten days later, LBJ would be dead. It was his last interview.

Let’s watch:

These are remarkable words from a vice president of the United States 100 years on from the battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s famous reconsecration of American liberty and purpose.

They are as searing and honest as are the words that acknowledge LBJ’s self-awareness as a southerner.

Again, his honesty, directness and goodwill are extraordinary to watch from the vantage point of our current idiocracy. It is astonishing to think that there are laws being passed that criminalize books and could lick up school librarians 50 years later.

LBJ became president, and used all of his power to advance civil rights and create — for the first time in American history — a society in which black rights were protected fully under the law — at least on paper.

LBJ’s life’s journey changed and altered his perspective.

Can you imagine a white American politician talking about their life experiences like LBJ?

Listen for the directness and honesty talking about race from the perspective of a white, Christian man who was born in Texas in 1908:

In the end, what all of this led towards were some of the greatest legislative accomplishments in American history.

LBJ was the greatest legislator who ever became president. His approach to his job was “all in, all the time.” Consider his achievements:

LBJ could not have predicted the rise of a sociopathic demagogue like Trump or his fascist enablers like Miller, Noem, Bondi, Hegseth and Pirro, but he was familiar with their arguments.

There is no question that great progress has been made towards racial justice in America since 1973.

It is also true that bigotry, prejudice, racism, antisemitism and homophobia are alive and well in 2026. In fact, they are flourishing. The furies have been loosed by Donald Trump. His evil words have validated his evil intentions, which have been proven by his evil deeds.

There is intolerance everywhere.

Listen to President Johnson talk about prejudice:

The World War II generation saved the world in the way the Civil War generation saved the republic.

Today, a new generation is called to save America.

The world will always need saving, and perhaps there will be many more generations of Americans who are called on to make stupendous sacrifices for the maintenance of our American way of life.

The greatest generation will be the one that finally creates what Winthrop imagined, and that Dr. King saw from the mountaintop. It is a just, harmonious, peaceful, beautiful “city upon a hill.”

A noble land, where there is no prejudice and hate.

MAGA is a movement defined by its hatreds.

Bari Weiss and Tony Dokoupil are its apologists and useful idiots.

Whatever else they may be, they should hesitate before talking about Walter Cronkite because no fish can ever imagine what it can be like to be an eagle.

This is America in 2026:

Photo credit: Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images

This is CBS News in 2026:

Yup. Just like Cronkite would have done it.

Jack Daniels issued a statement saying that it was not involved in the “CBS Evening News” “Whiskey Fridays” segment, after Zeteo’s Prem Thakker shared these leaked photos.

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