Our friends at the Washington Free Beacon did us a great service late Monday by collating an exhaustive list of the most ridiculous meltdowns over CBS News announcing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and that parent company Paramount SkyDance purchased her site, The Free Press.
By Wednesday, the Associated Press got off the sidelines to offer a cartoonishly whiny piece that, if published earlier, would have made the roundup in sneering a “polarizing” person taking over a “fact-based” network that has supposedly never had “an agenda.”
The headline was foreboding: “In CBS role, Bari Weiss goes from critic of mainstream news to one of its gatekeepers.”
Matt Sedensky sneered from the onset that this “polarizing voice” had “made a name for herself as an unflinching critic of mainstream news outlets,” but must now “run one.”
“To some, it is a triumph of an anti-woke crusader who could bring an even hand to at least one corner of a media they see as awash in liberal groupthink. To others, it amounts to the elevation of a person who is anything but evenhanded, a conservative posing as a centrist who will shovel half-truths and worse,” he huffed.
Sedensky dismissed the idea she “bills herself as a centrist” and, despite criticizing Donald Trump, he argued “her right-leaning views...have gotten the most attention, including criticizing corporate diversity efforts, colleges’ lack of political diversity and pro-Palestinian protesters.”
This, he said, “rankled liberals” and generated “animosity.”
He also poo-pooed her biography, dripping with disgust (click “expand”):
By Weiss’ telling, she was exposed to animated political debate from the very start. She grew up in Pittsburgh, the oldest of four sisters born to a conservative father and liberal mother. At the elite private school Weiss attended, she was student council president, taking a gap year in Israel before starting at Columbia University. Being Jewish, she has said, “is the most important part of my identity,” and at Columbia, she led a student group accusing professors of anti-Israel views.
After stints at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Jewish publication The Forward, Weiss landed at The Wall Street Journal as an op-ed and book review editor. But she grew disenchanted after Trump’s election, moving to the Times as a self-described “diversity hire” for views that didn’t always fit liberal orthodoxy. At the time, she described the transition as going from “being the most progressive person” at the Journal to “the most right-winged person” at the Times.
Her Times columns drew buzz for views that often appeared contrarian on its left-leaning opinion pages. Pushing back against the idea of “cultural appropriation,” she celebrated the concept as an ingredient to American success. Taking aim at the #MeToo tenet to believe women’s allegations of sexual assault, she called it condescending that such claims couldn’t stand up to skepticism. Her words so galled many on the left, each column became a source of knee-jerk opposition online.
She eventually grew disillusioned at the Times, too, resigning in 2020 in a lengthy missive in which she suggested stories were chosen to fit a pre-ordained liberal agenda. “Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” she wrote.
(....)
[The Free Press] has gained a following with an eclectic mix of coverage, from takedowns of traditional news outlets written by insiders to podcasts featuring the likes of Kim Kardashian to lighter fare, like an essay by humorist David Sedaris. It boasted a subscriber base of 1.5 million people.
He even tried to insinuate her working-class persona was fraudulent because she “has hobnobbed with billionaires, guest hosted ‘The View,’ and even become a punchline on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ with [n]ewspaper and magazine profiles hav[ing] dissected everything from her college relationship with former ‘Saturday Night Live’ star Kate McKinnon to her unflapping charm.”
If a liberal gay icon were taking over a legacy media outlet, it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to say she’d receive a spread in, say, Vogue.
Sedesnky whined Weiss had “spent nearly all of her career airing opinions, not writing objective news, and she has not worked in TV news, a galling reality to some as she ascends to the top of the network hierarchy.” This led to an equally whiny take from....Jay Rosen on BlueSky.
He even found a Syracuse journalism professor to fear “questions about credibility” of CBS News and what Sedensky described as someone coming in from “outside of traditional, fact-based news.”
The funniest part from professor Aileen Gallagher came when she declared “CBS has not had an agenda,” but they’ve now placed “someone in charge who does,” so viewers have “ no other option than to think that the news they’re getting from CBS is politicized now.”
“For someone who has been so outspoken in her opinions on so many topics, onlookers will no doubt be keeping a close eye on any impact she might have on CBS’ coverage. The issue she has been most outspoken on is Israel, no stranger to negative headlines in its two-year-old war. Weiss is an unwavering supporter,” Sedensky concluded.
Um, Dan Rather anyone?