Eye on Weiss

Plus Trump's Triumph

Before I get to Bari Weiss and CBS, allow me to bore you a bit more about last week’s column called Give it to Him, wherein I presumptuously, unequivocally and meaninglessly nominated President Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Prize for Peace. I even did it in Norwegian, the mother tongue of the Nobel Prize Committee.

Well, we now know how that bloviation turned out. This past week, the prize was awarded to Maria Corina Machado, a courageous and outspoken opposition leader in Venezuela, and not to Trump. In fact, when asked, the president of the committee dissed the Donald, saying the award is given only to people with courage and integrity.

As I pointed out last week, that’s not always the case.

But here’s the much more important point. The Israeli hostages who have been in Hamas hell for two years are finally being released by their savage captors, and in large part it’s due to Donald Trump. And for now, at least, the Gaza war has ended and there is a vision for a peaceful future for the Middle East. Again, thanks to Donald Trump.

It really doesn’t matter if the Nobel committee believes he deserved the prize. What matters are the lives of the people, Israeli and Palestinian, that he has saved.

Trump has every right to take a bow and to bask, at least for now, in what he has accomplished.

Bari Weiss is basking in all the publicity she’s been getting this past week.

Bari Weiss, the one who told the New York Times to take her job as an opinion page writer and shove it, the one who created The Free Press digital news outlet, the one who sorta became the spokesperson for the Jewish community amidst ballooning American antisemitism, that 41-year old Bari Weiss, became the editor-in-chief of that dinosaur of a news organization, CBS News.

To lure her to the erstwhile “Tiffany Network”, Weiss was reportedly paid $150 million in cash and stock by David Ellison, the new boss at Paramount, which now owns CBS.

Many people asked me this past week what I thought about the Weiss deal, and I proclaimed, if someone handed me $150 million on the condition I’d have to jump into a pit filled with cobras, you know what I would say? Point me to the pit.

So let’s dispense with, oh, Bari Weiss became the CBS editor-in-chief as an act of journalistic altruism, to try to save the once-proud home of Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite from disintegrating even further into a woke puddle of news pudding.

I have no doubt Ms. Weiss sees the sad state of CBS News and its shrinking audience as a resurrectional challenge, but let’s not kid ourselves. While she was loving the world of digital news at The Free Press, lording over a linear laggard like CBS was not on her to-do list. Until she was wooed by David Ellison and his $150 million.

I say, kudos to her! Weiss had Ellison begging her to come aboard and she did what any good capitalist would do. She got all she could out of a guy with loads of dough, at that very special moment in time that comes, if it comes, only once in a lifetime.

For Bari Weiss, getting to CBS News was a big bucks no-brainer. Ah, but now, now that she’s is in the pit with the cobras, let’s see how good she is at playing the pungi, that flute-like instrument that allows snake-charmers to defang those deadly serpents and to milk their venom.

I was at CBS, albeit at the local news level for 14 years, and I was snake bit by those CBS News folks several times. Really, it was my bad. I forgot they were actually curing cancer down on the first floor. Shame on me.

CBS, especially in recent years with a guy by the name of George Cheeks in charge, turned into a woke news paradise. He encouraged advocacy journalism, that perversion of truth-telling that has infected my profession. He created the “Race and Culture” unit at CBS News, that put news stories through, well, a race and culture colander. He kowtowed to outside special interest groups that sought to impose their biased agendas on news managers, or to punish them with cancellation.

Cheeks survived the Ellison takeover and is now President of the CBS Network. But, and it’s a big but, Bari Weiss doesn’t report to Cheeks. She reports directly to David Ellison. The existing President of CBS News, Tom Cibrowski, still reports into Cheeks. That is odd and unwieldy and probably will implode at some point. Cibrowski has the title with no editorial authority. In other words, he’ll do the dirty work of layoffs, suspensions and discipline while Bari Weiss hovers at 30-thousand feet above the news division.

But that lofty perch won’t last forever. Right now, by some published accounts, in her first week on the job, Weiss has been doing a lot of listening and some suggesting. That’s a good thing. That’s the easy thing.

But here’s an example of where the rubber could meet the road for Weiss and CBS News.

Let’s say Scott Pelley, the head correspondent on 60 Minutes, does an interview with let’s say, Bibi Netanyahu. And let’s say, during the screening of the piece, Bari Weiss objects to a question Pelley asked, or the way he asked it, or the way he edited Netanyahu’s answer.

And she turns to Pelley and says, “Scott, we have to change that.” Or, “we have to cut that.” And Pelley says, “over my dead body.”

What will Weiss do? Will she confront Pelley to make the point she’s the boss and he’d better not mess with her? Will she tell Pelley, if he doesn’t like her call he could walk out onto West 57th Street and keep on walking? Or, will she let the piece air as is and deal with Pelley’s pique at another time, in another way?

Pelley and the other veteran journalists at CBS have lots of allies in the CBS Broadcast Center. Right now, Bari Weiss has none and in that snake pit, she’ll need more than one.

My advice to Weiss is to hire a couple of highly-seasoned journalists with lots of TV news experience, who aren’t worried about building their resumes, who are smart and tough and who are totally aligned with her news philosophy, and do it with all deliberate speed.

Those CBS News cobras have seen lots of news execs come and go through those revolving doors at the BC. They need to believe, she needs to make them believe, that her $150 million isn’t burning a hole in her pocket and that she’s there for the long haul, however much pain and punishment they will inflict on her.

And one last thing, she should keep on practicing playing her pungi.