CBS News has been rendered worthless by a MAGA handmaiden

I intend here to discuss MAGA handmaiden Bari Weiss, the CBS News assassin, and to suggest ways we can combat corporate media corruption. But first I need to share a story from my rookie stint in journalism. You’ll see why.

In 1975, while covering the cops in New London, Connecticut, I got a tip the boys in blue had screwed up. The first paragraph of my subsequent piece gives you the gist: “Bank Street was left unguarded by city police early Monday when a break-in occurred at Roberts Electronic. Thieves escaped with an estimated $1600 in stereo equipment.” Turned out, the Bank Street patrolman was back at HQ, eating, when the 2:32 a.m. break-in occurred, and the late-responding patrol car had to come from an I-95 shopping mall that was miles away – and was further delayed because it had to pick up the eating patrolman.

I wrote: “Police would not comment today on this report.” But my editor OK’d the story because the police department’s decision not to comment was irrelevant. I had all the key info I needed from eyewitnesses, the store owner, and public police records.

But if Bari Weiss had been my editor, she would’ve spiked the story simply because the cops stayed silent about the lax patrol car and its detour to pick up the eating cop.

My point is a kid covering cops and a small-city editor had better news judgment than Bari Weiss – in part because the grandly dubbed “editor in chief” of CBS News has never spent a day in the field covering cops or anything else. And it’s precisely her dearth of actual experience that makes her the perfect MAGA instrument for sabotaging the work of real journalists – as evidenced by last week’s debacle at “60 Minutes.”

The solid coverage of Trump’s torture hellhole in El Salvador – a story that had been pre-screened five times, cleared by CBS’ lawyers, and vetted by the folks at Standards and Practices – was spiked by Weiss on the eve of its American broadcast just because the White House, Homeland Security, and the State Department had declined to comment.

As Sharyn Alfonsi, the story’s reporter, rightly pointed out in an internal email, “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill a story…If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the ‘60 Minutes’ broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.”

Stenographer for the state… That’s precisely why Weiss got her gig. Even the dumbest alum of Trump University should be able to connect these dots: On July 2, Paramount (CBS’ parent firm) gave Trump $16 million to settle a bogus Trump lawsuit, thus greasing his FCC’s approval, on July 7, of Paramount’s $8-billion merger with Skydance Media. Skydance, which is run by the Trump-friendly Ellison family, proceeded to steer CBS News rightward.

Decision number one was to install pliable Weiss as editor in chief, after buying her digital platform (hilariously titled The Free Press) for $150 million. To quote Walter Cronkite’s nightly sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.”

Uncle Walter – who once said, “Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy” – must be spinning in his grave about the fate of the “Tiffany Network,” so nicknamed for its quality and prestige. But this is what happens when 77 million inattentive voters elect a vengeful autocrat who openly declared, long in advance, that he would wage war on the free press and crush the corporate media giants beneath his jackboot. He’s just mimicking what Hungarian “strongman” Viktor Orban has already done in Hungary. Virtually all the big Hungarian media outlets are now controlled by Orban’s pet moguls.

On these shores, CBS News is now Exhibit A.

What can we do about this?

We can start by ignoring most of corporate media, which is terrified that ticking off Trump will harm its bottom line. There’s no point in pining for the good old days of “60 Minutes,” because they’re gone.

Instead, support independent news sites that defy MAGA, that still believe in holding the powerful accountable – sites that are buttressing, practicing, and promoting good journalism from the ground up. Ex-ABC News reporter Terry Moran concedes the new media environment is sometimes “chaotic,” but “it cannot be denied that (it) is more democratic, more diverse, and less captured by corporate interests…The future is here.”

But the future is not free. Donate during the holidays. Spread some money to the sites (most of them non-profit) that are writing and fighting to keep us free – Pro Publica, States Newsroom (which has put reporters in all 50 capitals), the American Journalism Project, The Atlantic, The Associated Press, Vox (great explanatory journalism), Philadelphia’s Lensfest Institute, The Guardian, The Bulwark (founded by sane Republicans), plus a subscription or two on Substack…or perhaps National Public Radio (which has been stripped of federal funding), or Lawfare Media (which each week features legal experts on YouTube critiquing Trump’s anti-democratic abuses).

If your dollars are depleted, sign up for social media’s BlueSky, where users shared the Canadian broadcast of the “60 Minutes” story. That alone made me smile. The upside of our turbulent new info-climate is that virtually everything salient finds its way to the sunlight.

And maybe if the tide turns, we should launch a GoFundMe for Bari Weiss. A starting salary as a local cop reporter would be most appropriate, given her level of experience.

–

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]