Bari Weiss Screws Up Big Time

In case you’re wondering, Bari Weiss has failed. She is the new czarina of CBS News and she seems to have a gift for the wrong first move. It started last month with “Sixty Minutes,” the venerable voice of legacy journalism and the most trusted program across the old broadcast networks.

The issue was an expose of the prison in El Salvador that has become, for many, a successor to Guantanamo. The prisoners go in, but they don’t come out and, deep in its bowels, they suffer the tortures of the damned.

The difference is that we can see much of this for ourselves. Where Guantanamo was and remains a black box prison, CECOT is a perverse public relations tool, a projection of savagery by the Salvadoran regime. It functions as a kind of macabre disincentive: if you cross the government, you will spend the rest of your life crammed into a cell with hundreds of fellow criminals, silent as corpses and rigid with fear.

This is the prison chose by Donald Trump to receive Venezuelan deportees, his imagined cohort of murderers and rapists who needed to be removed from the MAGA Republic. They were, of course, mostly innocent, a handful of shoplifters among terrified refugees. But that has never stopped the likes of Stephen Miller or Tom Homan.

This is the reality “Sixty Minutes” sought to describe, and it poured itself into the horror of the story. The problem is that Bari Weiss didn’t like it, claiming that the Administration was never given a voice in the segment. So, with minutes to go, she spiked the story. As the producer of the segment, Sharyn Alfonsi, pointed out, that was patently wrong and politically intrusive. The segment was thoroughly vetted for both fairness and legality. But The Administration was rightly terrified of the broadcast and refused the invitation to comment or respond. Meanwhile Weiss claimed the piece was unripe.

How to account for Weiss’ decision? Her politics may be all over the place, but at the end of the day she seems to be a Jewish conservative. She is especially taken with Trump’s stance on Gaza, his assault against universities and pro-Palestinian activists. The fact that the segment was finally broadcast last night was less a moment of journalistic enlightenment than an admission of powerlessness and the potency of her opposition. Faced with the revolt of her news staff in New York, Bari Weiss acknowledged her weakness and folded like a lawn chair.

But the real failure here is her political naivete. The idea that Trump has a care for Jewish students and wants to see them protected by their universities makes as much sense as his marriage to Melania. Both are nakedly transactional arrangements. Trump gets to claim that his assault on the American academy is not really about fascism or the suppression of protected speech, but sheltering the victims of campus anti-Semitism. Jewish students are merely a tool. If they did not exist, he would find another pretext.

I disagree with Bari Weiss, but she’s supposed to be way smarter than I am. And her job is not to please the government, but to interrogate its methods, its tactics, and its savagery.