John Oliver used his principal segment on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight to take a detailed take a look at Bari Weiss, the newly appointed editor-in-chief of CBS news.
Earlier this month, Paramount announced that it had officially acquired The Free Press, the digital publication founded by Weiss, and would bring Weiss into the fold of CBS News, which, as The Hollywood Reporter recently reported, had been expected but additionally was greeted with dread contained in the news division. Weiss works outside of the present org chart by reporting on to Paramount CEO David Ellison, while The Free Press will remain a stand-alone business outside of CBS News.
Oliver began his segment on Weiss by noting: “Let’s start with the undeniable fact that she’s been given editorial control of a large news organization, though she’s never run a TV network, has no experience directing television coverage and, as one 60 Minutes producer identified, isn’t even a reporter. That’s true. She didn’t come up through the news site of a newspaper, but through the opinion pages, that are a really different thing.”
As Oliver noted, Weiss “made a giant name for herself” after being hired by The Recent York Times as a columnist.
The Last Week Tonight showed a clip of Weiss explaining: “My job explicitly was to herald voices that wouldn’t otherwise naturally appear in The Recent York Times, either because other editors wouldn’t think to commission them, or the writers themselves would think, you understand, The Recent York Times would never accept me.”
His response: “Yeah, she was apparently tasked with finding voices that The Times’ op-ed page would never accept, which is already a giant claim provided that before she got hired there, it published op-eds from, and that is true, Muammar Gaddafi and Vladimir Putin. If The Times had been around within the fifteenth century, I’m guessing they might have given an opinion piece to Vlad the Impaler. ‘Drinking the blood of my enemies isn’t disgusting; it’s beautiful and courageous.’”
Oliver noted that a few of the columns Weiss wrote at The Times included “one wherein she argued that the left had gone too far in policing cultural appropriation,” one other that was “a largely sympathetic profile of the mental dark web, a term that she popularized for people like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro” and one other one “suggesting progressives were so focused on labeling fellow Americans fascists, they missed opportunities to call out real fascism, which is just a few weapons-grade whataboutism.”
That latter column, Oliver noted, got attention attributable to the undeniable fact that it contained links to posts from the official Antifa Twitter account, which that was actually a “well-known hoax site, which is pretty embarrassing. You don’t expect a Times author 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 don’t give my permission to make use of any of my personal data or photos.’”
But her time at The Times got here to an end after it ran an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, who argued that federal troops must be used put a stop to protests against police brutality. After the op-ed was published, many staffers argued that The Times shouldn’t have published it.
“And Bari Weiss wrote a series of tweets a few supposedly heated staff meeting characterizing it as a civil war between the mostly young wokes and the mostly 40 and up liberals,” Oliver explained. “That claim was strongly disputed by others on the paper, with one editor saying, ‘I’m in the identical meeting that Barry appears to be live tweeting. That is inaccurate in each characterizations. It’s not a civil war, it’s an editorial conversation, and it’s not breaking down along generational lines.’ So to be fair, it seems Barry Weiss does have some reporting experience, specifically attempting to report what was happening within the meeting, only to have our own co-workers say, ‘Hey, what the fuck are you talking about?’”
She resigned soon afterward and founded The Free Press.
“Its first motto was ‘Honest news for sane people,’ which feels scientifically engineered to trigger a watch roll,” Oliver quipped, adding: “Within the five years since, it’s grown to roughly 1.5 million readers, although only around 1 in 10 actually pay to subscribe, meaning it generates subscription revenues of about $15 million a 12 months, which isn’t nothing, but I might argue also not quite enough to justify someone spending $150 million to amass it, as that may be a revenues to valuation ratio that will make Mr. Wonderful [Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary] start vomiting blood.”
Oliver noted that Weiss has repeatedly insisted she’s only excited about the reality, but then played a clip of her talking about The Free Press‘ process for locating out the reality: “The identity of our brand is truth-seeking, and our premise is you can not get to truth in an echo chamber. The one way that you just get to truth is by sitting next to someone — that is what makes it so different from any newsroom I’ve ever worked in — witting next to someone who disagrees with you, who you continue to respect, admire them and collaborate with them.”
Responded Oliver: “I mean, perhaps, perhaps that’s the way you do it as an opinion author, but that isn’t the way you get to truth as a reporter, is it? You try this by leaving the newsroom and reporting. … And I’ll be honest, there’s not a ton of hard journalism on The Free Press site. There’s really not much of anything there. There’s normally only a handful of recent posts a day which may even include weird shit like editorial cartoons from David Mamet, the playwright. And in the event you’re pondering, ‘I didn’t realize David Mamet could draw’ — fun fact, he can’t.”
Oliver then went through an inventory of headlines on Free Press stories, including: “I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back,” “I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired,” “I Took Religion Out of Christmas. I Regret It,” “I Want People to Have More Kids. Does That Make Me Far-Right?,” “I Was Called an ‘Inbred Swine’ at Princeton Last Night,” “I’m 17. And I’m Immunized From Woke Politics,” “My Family Was Hunted by Nazis. But I Was Fired For ‘Defending Hitler,” “My Husband Desires to Be Cremated. I’d Ignore His Dying Wish” and “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty.”
Joked Oliver: “It looks like we’re just two weeks away from an article titled ‘I Dressed My Dead Wife up as Hitler for Her Funeral, and Now Her Woke Family Is Mad at Me.’”
He said that a take a look at The Free Press‘ homepage won’t give the impression that the outlet is conservative. “But once you begin reading its articles, the pronounced theme that starts to emerge is the left has gone too far,” Oliver said. “Principally, whatever issue you are feeling like that’s true for — Israel, campus politics, DEI or police reform — you’ll find articles there to strengthen that opinion. And look, I’m not saying the left never goes too far or that it’s immune from criticism in any respect, but it may well sometimes feel like The Free Press’ conclusions can get out ahead of its evidence, which brings us to the undeniable fact that a few of its pieces may be pretty poorly fact checked and in ways in which feel necessary.”
Oliver then brought up examples of stories reported by The Free Press that other outlets had contradicted with their very own reporting, including accusations that the Transgender Center on the St. Louis Children’s Hospital was prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy without appropriately conducting mental health assessments; one other on crime in Austin; and a 3rd on starvation in Gaza.
As for that latter story, it was shared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his social media account with the caption “Facts matter.”
This “is terrible for multiple reasons, including if Netanyahu ever shared one in all our stories, I believe I’d burn this place to the fucking ground,” Oliver quipped.
He added of his decision to focus his principal segment on Weiss: “The reality is, we wouldn’t even have done this story were it not for the actual fact Bari Weiss has just been named editor-in-chief of CBS News, and that feels different because there are a lot of opinion-heavy outlets on the market from left to right and with low to high editorial standards. This show [Last Week Tonight] is, amongst other things, an opinion outlet, and while our staff works incredibly hard to research stories before we write something and vigorously check our facts afterwards, we’re also not the news. And I wouldn’t want anyone who led a pure opinion outlet, not even one which I occur to agree with, to suddenly be running CBS News. However it is very alarming to have someone doing it who has spent years putting out work that, for my part, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading.”
Oliver then criticized Ellison for “think[ing] that she and her editorial sensibility make her a great fit for the job.” He also noted that Ellison is reportedly planning to make a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of HBO, home to Last Week Tonight. That “isn’t ideal, although I’ve gotta say, if what he likes about Bari is that she forces him to have hard conversations to get a bit uncomfortable, perhaps he’ll like this,” he added.
The host went on to notice that the longer term of CBS News is unclear under its latest editor-in-chief. “Possibly Bari Weis will completely reshape CBS News,” he said. “Possibly she’ll flame out.”
But he cautioned his viewers to listen to any differences on the news organization going forward: “It’s price keeping a watch out for subtle changes there because, while I’m sure lots of CBS’ good journalists will proceed to do great work, in the event you start seeing people resigning or getting fired, otherwise you start seeing stories that appear off in a roundabout way, especially if it involves the left going too far on a subject Bari Sensible cares about, it’s price asking yourself why that is likely to be, because unfortunately the much greater answer is likely to be that a billionaire has chosen to inject contrarian right-leaning opinion journalism into an American icon.”