John Oliver Sounds Alarm Bells Over Bari Weiss Running CBS News
CBS News, home to Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow and 60 Minutes, is one of the most trusted names in journalism, says John Oliver. But on the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight, Oliver says that reputation is in danger, thanks to its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.
Weiss paints herself as a liberal brave enough to disagree with other liberals, explained Oliver, earning admirers ranging “from Jeff Bezos to Megan McCain and from Amy Coney Barrett to Joe Rogan. And if you’re thinking, ‘Wow, that’s not a very ideologically broad from and to,’ you're starting to catch on.”
Oliver played a clip of Weiss speaking to the Federalist Society, joking that even though many conservatives in the room didn’t approve of her marriage to a lesbian, it’s okay because “we all want lower taxes.” For someone who paints herself as politically homeless, Oliver pointed out, Weiss seemed awfully comfortable in that room.
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New media owners like Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have meddled with the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, Oliver said, but “this feels like the most sweeping change yet and at one of the few remaining prestige names in news.”
He’s especially concerned about Weiss, someone who has “never run a TV network, has no experience directing television coverage, and as one 60 Minutes producer pointed out, is not even a reporter.”
So what qualifies Weiss for the job? Proponents point to her experience at the New York Times, where she wrote opinion pieces from a decidedly conservative perspective. While many on the right agreed with those rants, Weiss didn’t get points for journalistic integrity, once quoting a hoax site pretending to be the official Antifa Twitter account as if it actually existed.
“You don’t expect a Times writer to fall for online hoaxes like they’re your 75-year-old aunt on Facebook who keeps posting that message saying, ‘I hereby state that I do not give my permission to use any of my personal data or photos,’” Oliver joked. “That is fake, Linda. Also, why would anybody steal your photos? You exclusively post pictures of your elderly cat, you’re going to be fine.”
Weiss, after feeling bullied by her colleagues at the New York Times, quit and retreated to the safety of Substack, where she built her blog into what became the Free Press. Impressive, but ‘head of CBS News impressive’? Oliver doesn’t think so, citing specific examples of Free Press journalism in which facts weren’t checked. An article about transgender teens was refuted by the families it featured, for instance. Another reported that crime was rising under a progressive district attorney, when the opposite was true. And so on and so on.
Oliver knows all about opinion outlets — Last Week Tonight, for example. But “while our staff works incredibly hard to research stories before we write something and vigorously check our facts afterwards,” he noted, “we’re also not the news.”
No one from a pure opinion outlet, “not even one that I happen to agree with,” should run CBS News, Oliver said. “It is especially alarming to have someone doing it who has spent years putting out work that, in my opinion, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading.”
So Oliver is asking us to keep an eye on CBS News for subtle changes in its reporting. “If you start seeing people resigning or getting fired, or you start seeing stories that seem off in some way, especially if it involves the left going too far on a topic Bari Weiss cares about,” he cautioned, “it’s worth asking yourself why that might be.”
