No One's Nice To Bari Weiss

What the Outrage Over 60 Minutes Gets Wrong

The facts: On Saturday, December 20, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss told the executive producer of 60 Minutes she was holding a segment scheduled to air the next day. The piece concerned CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration had sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants. Weiss cited the need for further interviews and additional reporting.

Sharyn Alfonsi and Bari Weiss

Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, in an email to colleagues including Anderson Cooper and Lesley Stahl, called the decision political: “Pulling (the story) now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

She continued: “When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship (italics mine). We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.”

By Sunday evening, the story had media-tastasized into a national controversy about censorship, oligarchy and authoritarianism. Former Representative Adam Kinzinger declared, “Bari Weiss—now the head of CBS News—clearly a right winger, clearly in line with Donald Trump, has made it clear that 60 Minutes will do the administration’s bidding now.” The Daily Beast ran the headline “CBS Boss Censored 60 Minutes for Not Interviewing Stephen Miller,” which is an inaccurate account of what Weiss had done.

Weiss, as made clear in her leaked editorial memo about the story, steered the segment to engage in the strongest version of the administration's legal argument, not just the lame soundbite Karoline Leavitt offered. That's good journalism: steelmanning your opposition makes your case stronger if you can still dismantle it. Also, the administration may not always make its own best argument. Officials speak to different audiences, have varying communication skills, and deploy different legal strategies in different forums. While it’s not 60 Minutes’ job to help the government communicate, it is their job to best inform their own audience about what is actually at issue. Asking for additional comment to achieve that is not censorship. It's a normal, albeit late-in-the-day, editorial decision.

How does Alfonsi’s theory of the case work?

Putting aside her grandiose regard for 60 Minutes’ standing as the “gold standard”—not 24-karat, as it turns out, the core claim is that there’s political advantage in delaying the story for a week or two while it’s tweaked to the editor’s satisfaction.

Really? Did Alfonsi know that the Lions vs. Steelers game would end up with an insane pass interference play and set a ratings record? If so, Sharyn Alfonsi needs to open a FanDuel account. Otherwise, “a single week of political quiet” makes no sense. Put aside the fact that the story wound up airing on Canadian TV by mistake, and it certainly did make the administration look bad. What was gained by the delay except the opportunity to add the reporting Weiss requested?

The Terms-of-Debate Shift

What I wish to do here is rebut the claim that holding the 60 Minutes piece was “censorship” or, in Alfonsi’s description, certainly “political.” It may have been bad editorial guidance (I think it was generally sound). It definitely came too late in the process (on this, I agree with critics). But “frustrating” and “late” do not equal “right-wing censorship” or “fascist editorial capture” or “Bari Weiss spiking stories to appease Trump.”

Could politics have influenced the decision? Of course. CBS owners Larry and David Ellison want to buy Warner Bros. Trump keeps talking about the deal. But Weiss's memo also raised legitimate editorial concerns that are hard to dismiss as a convenient pretext. Critics of Weiss's worldview, who see no need for even the slightest editorial reset at CBS News, reject all her suggestions as illegitimate. But conduct a thought experiment. Ask, "What might a center or right-of-center editorial sensibility demand of this segment?" You'd get something very close to the memo Weiss composed.

The censorship theory requires believing that holding the story for two weeks to add tougher reporting somehow helps Trump or the Ellisons. But how? Get Miller and Homan on camera for harder questioning—that helps Trump? Demand analysis of whether he exceeded his authority—that advances a business deal? Hold the piece for a couple of weeks, when the Warner vote won’t happen until spring—that changes anything?

The Specter of Authoritarianism

When it comes to all things Bari Weiss, the most extreme explanations for her choices are so often the ones loudly cited by her critics. Take former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes. He and Weiss sharply disagree about Israel. So when Rhodes assesses the CECOT decision, he doesn't frame it as an editorial choice he disputes. He jumps right to authoritarianism.

I take the threat of authoritarianism seriously. So when Ben Rhodes treats an editor requesting more precise language about criminal records—"let's not say 'almost half' don't have records, let's say most do"—as evidence of tyranny, I wonder how much we can trust his authoritarianism detector. That's not fascism. That's editing.

Blasting a Publication You Don’t Read

The critique that bothers me most appears in Adam Serwer's Atlantic article, which contends that Weiss and other "so-called free speech advocates" stay silent when the right restricts speech, exposing their commitment as purely partisan. I respect The Atlantic, where I've published. I respect The Free Press, where I've also published. But Serwer's assertion is demonstrably wrong.

The Free Press doesn’t just occasionally cover right-wing threats to speech; it does so extensively. Consider, for example, their package titled “Are Conservatives the New Snowflakes?” explicitly tracking “how the right, now that it’s back in power, has adopted some of the worst tactics of the intolerant left—from suppressing dissenting views to enforcing ideological purity tests.” Weiss’ Free Press has run dozens of articles falsifying Serwer’s attempts to lump her in with “yesterday’s free-speech champions” who transitioned “so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors”. He writes:

Taking the claims one by one:

1. Claim: Weiss and The Free Press support the deportation of pro-Palestinian advocates.

   Fact: The article “No Deportations Without Due Process” rebuts exactly that: “The protocol cannot be: This student is a national security threat—trust us. But that is the kind of sloppiness that is typifying the Trump administration’s deportations thus far.”

2. Claim: Weiss and The Free Press are silent on book bans.

   Fact: They published the full text of a speech Ryan Holiday was to give, challenging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s book ban—a speech the Department of Defense also banned.

3. Claim: Weiss and The Free Press believe “when the federal government says left-wing speech is violence worthy of firing or prosecution, it’s fine.”

   Fact: The article “His Wife Called Charlie Kirk a ‘Nazi.’ He Was Fired” is a 2,500-word direct denunciation of this exact practice, arguing: “For years, the right decried the left’s equation of speech with violence—now it is doing the same thing. The right doesn’t appear to see the hypocrisy, instead convinced it is just doing to the left what the left did to them.”

4. Claim: The Free Press doesn’t care about the right’s threat to speech on campus.

   Fact: They’ve addressed this often. Here’s the best version, from the always interesting Coleman Hughes:

   The Bipartisan Assault on Free Speech

5. Claim: Weiss and The Free Press do not object to the government defining what speech is acceptable, with a link to an article about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension.

   Fact: The piece “Jawboning and Jimmy Kimmel”, signed by “The Editors,” argues “the FCC’s coercion undermines our most fundamental values.”

Serwer either didn't bother checking The Free Press's actual coverage, or he checked and decided it didn't count. Either way, his central factual claim about Weiss and The Free Press is wrong—which is especially rich given that his overriding thesis is that Bari Weiss threatens journalistic accuracy while he, Serwer, is its accurate adjudicator.

What We Actually Know

Bari Weiss is an editor, not a censor. You don’t know her motives. You can guess they were in service of political or business goals, and I acknowledge the timing would be extremely frustrating to any journalist. But her requests also comport exactly with what an editor trying to move a newsroom toward what she defines as more honest, fairer footing would do.

Bad timing isn’t evidence of bad faith. And the substance of her concerns—get the principals on camera, explain the legal framework, sharpen the data presentation, advance beyond existing coverage—are legitimate editorial standards.

Fortunately, when the story eventually runs on 60 Minutes, all the critics will reconsider their excoriations of Weiss, exhale, and admit, “Well, that was dicey, but as they say, ‘the truth will out.’”

No, they won’t! They’ll claim vindication, arguing the only reason the story aired was public shaming, leaked memos, and whatever other factors allow them to say “We were right all along.”

Just like they’re right that The Free Press has no investigative journalists when it does. Just like they're right about all the inconvenient stories it won't touch, except it runs them.

And just to be clear: If The Free Press were as wildly inaccurate about The Atlantic as The Atlantic was about The Free Press, I’d write that story too. But I suspect there wouldn’t be a pile-on declaring The Atlantic a sign of authoritarianism, as there was with this incident from the guardians of media. There would be a raft of unfair critics from the right, in which case we’d say those who jumped to the most extreme conclusions showed themselves to be catastrophists at worst, partisans at best.

I think we can say exactly that about the analysis here.