As regular readers know, Bari Weiss, described by Gordon K as ‘our favorite left-of-center Jewish lesbian woman’ has officially taken over as Editor-in-Chief at CBS News and there is much gnashing of teeth and lamenting in leftist journosphere. But Iowahawk found a particularly special example:
And yes, it’s real (both the headline and unconditional love):
It’s real and spectacular… -ly stupid. Yep, we are going to take a moment to fisk this sucker, starting with the headline:
From Dan Rather to — Bari Weiss? How far CBS News has fallen
So, to be clear, she decided that when she wanted to cite an example of the height of CBS News, she cited a man best known for having to resign after peddling documents that turned out to be fake. After all, there were dozens of much more respected journalists that worked for CBS and she put Dan frakking Rather in the headline. Somewhere beyond the grave, Walter Cronkite is like
Now, you might think that this Sophia Tesfaye might be forgetting about the whole Rathergate thing. But she isn’t. She’s doing something a lot more insidious: She's trying to rewrite history. This is her opening paragraph:
Twenty years ago, when Dan Rather was pushed out from CBS News following a controversial 2004 report on former President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, it was a massive scandal. While many remember it for being predicated upon shaky documents, it was also incredibly prophetic about the future media landscape: One that’s rapidly consumed by corporate interests, political pressure and the erosion of editorial independence.
First off, they were not ‘shaky documents.’ They were fake. The famous gif created by the formerly sane Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (whatever happened to him?) puts that to bed almost instantly:
As you will recall, this was a comparison between a memo supposedly written in 1973 and a document written in Microsoft Word on default settings. It almost perfectly matches as you can see. Not only is it extremely difficult to recreate this document with the technology that existed in 1973, it is astronomically unlikely that it would also conform to the idiosynchronicities of how Word formatted its documents in 2004. Not even a contemporary WordPerfect Document would look the same. And, of course, a person just trying to write a simple CYA memo in 1973 would have actually no motivation to make the document look so good. The Occam's razor answer is that the documents were typed up in Word and then run through a copier a few times to falsely make them look ‘older.’
And let’s not walk past this bit: ‘corporate interests, political pressure and the erosion of editorial independence’ line.
First, CBS is a corporation, it was one in Rather's time, and has always been a corporation since before they were a television network (they started as a radio network). Complaining about corporate interests infecting a corporation is just silly. And as far as editorial independence, they are arguing that employees should not be accountable to their bosses.
And as for politics, Dan Rather was peddling those fake documents in a plain attempt to sway the election in 2004. And it strains credibility to say Rather didn’t know they were fake when the show first aired. This might be hard to understand for someone who perhaps is younger and has never seen how a typical typewriter worked or had little exposure to documents written on a typewriter. This author has a disability that makes it hard to write by hand—but, crucially, not our ability to type—and we just celebrated the twenty-third anniversary of our thirtieth birthday last month, so we had more experience than most people with typewriters before we switched to laptops in 1995. And the difference between a typewritten document versus a Word-Processed document circa 2004 was night and day.
The difference is so stark that it is hard to believe that Rather—who dealt with typewriters before this author was born—wouldn’t have noticed the difference. But to be fair to Rather, this author didn’t realize it was typewritten when we first saw the segment. But the moment we saw the infamous ‘Buckhead’ comment saying it was Word-Processed, we immediately realized he was right and honestly chastised ourselves for missing it. We literally said, ‘Oh, duh!’ when we saw the comment and looked at the documents again. So even if you can excuse Rather and everyone else at CBS News for missing that this was a fake when the documents first aired, Rather should have had the same ‘oh, duh!’ moment the moment the question was raised.
But rather than confront the scandal honestly, Rather went for weeks denying that there was any cause to doubt the story until he was forced out. Even when Rather did a mea culpa, he still didn’t admit they were fakes—even though they obviously were:
That is when he crossed the line into clear journalistic malpractice—and all in an obvious attempt to hurt Bush Jr.’s reelection campaign.
Later in the same piece they discuss the acquisition of Bari Weiss’ The Free Press as follows:
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that Paramount’s acquisition of the conservative outlet would value Weiss’ operation at around $150 million.
Good lord, yes, she thinks that the Free Press is a conservative outlet. No, it is an outlet that believes in accurate reporting and free speech, and if that makes them ‘conservative’ that says a great deal about the modern left.
Alas, she goes on:
At the same time Rather’s controversial reporting was challenging a sitting president, Weiss led a campus campaign designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with anti-Semitism.
First, again, she is trying to pretend that Rather was challenging a sitting president, ignoring again that the story was fake news. We thought the left had decided that fake news was a threat to our democracy or something, especially in election season.
And in our experience, most sustained criticisms of Israel is at least biased against them. We are not saying that it is impossible to criticize Israel without being antisemitic, but we have yet to see someone vociferously criticize Israel without revealing some kind of bias against the country and/or jews in general. So claiming that she accused critics of Israel of being antisemitic doesn't instantly scandalize us. It frankly tracks.
Decades later, Weiss’ Free Press repeatedly criticized CBS News’ coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza.
That sentence contained two links. The first was to a Free Press article that said the following:
In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to ‘be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news’ from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.
Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: ‘Do not refer to it as being in Israel.’
Except Jerusalem is in fact in Israel. Memmott might not like that fact, but it is. And this is an example of what we call bias against Israel. Why is Israel the only country in the world where so many countries in the world refuses to acknowledge that their capital is their capital? America didn't even do so until Trump's first term.
The second link reported on how CBS News admonished one of its reporters for asking an anti-Israel author some perfectly reasonable questions on the topic. Seriously, read it for yourself:
So, Weiss is right on both counts in her criticisms.
Alas, it goes on:
The Free Press’ stridently pro-Israel coverage, focusing on U.S.-centered culture wars, like criticizing campus protests rather than the bombing campaign or famine in Gaza, made Weiss an ideal candidate for Ellison’s apparent vision to reshape the global narrative around Israel’s war ahead of the third anniversary of Oct. 7.
Now, let’s start with the worst part of all this. ‘Oct. 7’ surely refers to Hamass’ attack on October 7, 2023. This piece was published yesterday, and surely written before then. So apparently this woman who thinks she has the correct narrative on the current war in Gaza doesn’t even know that they were about to commemorate the second, not third, anniversary of that attack. Yikes.
Layers and layers of fact checkers and all that. eye roll
And, of course, those campus ‘protests’ have been used to terrify anyone who is believed to be Jewish, to the point that Jews were required to hide in the attic of a library for their safety, in an example that would be seen as too on the nose if this was fiction.
And honestly, at this point, we have to ask, ‘what famine in Gaza?’ Camera phones are apparently ubiquitous over there and yet we haven’t seen a verified photo of anyone actually starving there. Rather we have seen one picture after another of a child—almost always with a suspiciously well-fed parent—who turned out to have a medical condition other than malnutrition. The only photo of a genuinely malnourished Palestinian child we have seen was of one who had a condition that prevented the child from taking in nutrition which means that the child would have been malnourished however much food was consumed. If thousands of people are starving, why can’t anyone produce a single photograph of a person being starved by Israel? The old saying in journalism is ‘if your mother says she loves you, get a second source.’ But where is the skepticism of these claims about the war in Gaza, coming from Hamass itself—either directly or indirectly?
She goes on, whining that
CBS staff, according to reporting, worry that bringing in Weiss will reduce the willingness of the network to maintain a modicum of editorial independence to cover pro‑Palestinian views in a balanced manner.
Which, first off, how entitled is this that they expect to work for someone and not follow their orders? Second, considering that we just showed you two examples of bad journalistic behavior regarding Gaza reporting, we tend to think balance isn’t the thing she is seeking.
Earlier this year, several of the show’s top executives resigned after Paramount agreed to a $16 million settlement with Trump, who had sued the network over the program’s October 2024 interview with then‑Vice President Kamala Harris. Despite the fact that CBS followed standard journalistic practices, Trump alleged the interview was edited in a way that falsely portrayed her responses — and gave her an advantage over him.
Right, so according to her, standard journalistic practices that includes editing video so it appears that Harris gave a different (and slightly more coherent answer) to a question than she did. If that is standard journalistic practices, that is an indictment on those practices.
Dan Rather knew this was coming. He warned us that once news organizations are fully absorbed by corporate and political interests, they stop telling truth to power — and start laundering power’s version of the truth.
Dan Rather, probably best known for peddling those fake documents, is not exactly the kind of person you hold up as a person known for speaking ‘truth to power.’ And, of course, the legacy media spent the entire pandemic telling power to truth, trying their best to suppress anyone who questioned the government's claims regarding COVID.
On to reactions:
She is to the right of Genghis Khan. That is the entirety of the hysteria. And it represents an erosion of the stranglehold much of the far left has on broadcast news. There, you are caught up.
Right?!?!?!?
We’re honestly surprised that the author expressed any doubt to their authenticity at all. Last we heard, Dan Rather is still trying to prove they are real and it is going about as well as the late O.J. Simpson’s search for the 'real killers.'
CBS News and 60 Minutes in particular among the worst offenders in politicizing the news. We just went over Rathergate, and over their selective editing of the Harris interview. But there was one more incident. In the 2020 election cycle, 60 Minutes did an interview with Tara Reade, who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault… sorry, that would be 60 Minutes Australia. That’s right, the Australian version of 60 Minutes thought that what she had to say was news to Australians, but the American version couldn’t be bothered to interview her or just air the Australian segment. It’s hard to believe that this decision was not influenced by their desire to avoid helping Trump.
So that would be three times within twenty years that they blatantly shaped news coverage to help Democrats.
Truthfully, we don’t know much about him other than Rathergate, but that is enough.
When the bar is low, the left gets good at limbo.
We are genuinely tempted to watch it, but we are afraid the algorithm might mistakenly think we agree with it. (This author only watches streaming these days.)
Finally:
Fair point, sir.
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