Stop Defending Bari Weiss

The year is 2029. President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, having spent years raging against Fox News as a propaganda organ whose very operation is illegal, has found a pressure point to control it. She enables its sale to owners who are friends of hers, and whose business depends on regulatory favors she has made a practice of doling out to allies. As the new editor in chief of Fox News, the owners install Tim Miller, a skeptic of conservatism who has never previously worked in television news. But then AOC complains that her friends at Fox News aren’t moving fast enough, and the network is still running critical coverage of her. Days later, Miller kills a long-scheduled report showing how AOC may have flouted the Constitution in order to have people tortured. It is safe to say, I think, that conservatives would be upset. What’s more, they would probably not care whether Miller’s stated reasons for pulling the report had any journalistic merit. Their concern would be the authoritarian nature of the government wielding its power to hand control of major media properties to its allies. And they would be right. Adam Serwer: Cancel culture’s boomerang effect This analogy, as you’ve no doubt guessed, describes what has happened at CBS News. In October, Donald Trump openly boasted that Larry and David Ellison—the father-son duo that now owns Paramount, CBS’s parent company—are “big supporters of mine, and they’ll do the right thing.” He implied that he expected more positive coverage from CBS News and its newly appointed editor, Bari Weiss. He was right to expect as much, given that Larry Ellison reportedly assured him that he and his son would make Paramount more conservative, according to reporting from The New York Times . Then, just last week, Trump expressed frustration on Truth Social that despite his relationship with the Ellisons, “ 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” adding: “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!” Days later, Weiss pulled down a scheduled report on 60 Minutes about the Trump administration’s deportation of migrants to a notoriously harsh prison in El Salvador. But conservatives are not critical of the maneuvers that placed the network in the hands of businessmen who rely on Trump’s favor, and who are seeking the president’s support in a hostile bid to edge out Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Nor are conservatives concerned about Weiss’s suspicious timing in abruptly shelving a report about the president’s aggressive deportations. Instead they are defending her judgment. Noah Rothman, an anti–anti-Trump conservative —a member of the tribe more devoted to calling out Trump’s opponents than the president’s abuses—defends Weiss in a column in National Review . The most amazing thing about Rothman’s column, which echoes arguments other conservatives have made on X, is that it does not mention anywhere the abuses of power—Trump’s insistence of favorable coverage from media-owning friends—that led to Weiss running the network. It focuses...

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