BY StevieRay
CBS’s New Censor,
The son of the world’s second-richest man, with close ties to U.S. and Israeli state authority, is buying one of America’s most powerful news sites, which should terrify anyone who values a free and independent press.
Even more surprising is the Ellisons’ proposal to buy The Free Press and give Bari Weiss power over CBS’ newsroom. Skydance committed to hire Weiss as an ombudsman to combat political bias and DEI practices as part of the contract.
Weiss is notorious in the media for her staunch pro-Israel beliefs and efforts to mainstream conservative, anti-woke ideas. It appears her Middle East views got her the job. The Financial Times reported, “Weiss has won over Ellison partly by taking a pro-Israel stance, according to people familiar with the matter.”
One insider told The New York Times that Weiss will be a “key voice” at CBS News and “an influential role in shaping the editorial sensibilities”.
Some fear a pro-Israel censor, mirroring TikTok’s previous occurrences. The social media company hired veteran IDF soldier and Israel advocate Erica Mindel to supervise its online hate speech policies, including antisemitism.
Mindel is hardly the first former Israeli official to join the firm in power. A MintPress News investigation found that TikTok engaged veteran Israeli intelligence commander Reut Medalion as its worldwide incident manager in November 2023. Given what Israel was doing in Gaza, one may question what “global incidents” the ex-spy was working on.
Weiss first became famous while she was in college. There, she started a group that tried to get Muslim and Arab teachers fired by accusing them of being racist against Jews. The most famous of these was the Jordanian scholar Joseph Massad, who Weiss said scared her and other pro-Israel students during class. It didn’t work, but it made Weiss well known. After she graduated from college, she got well-paying jobs in Israeli media, which led to jobs as a writer at The Wall Street Journal and then The New York Times.
Weiss brought reactionary professors to the attention of a larger, more liberal audience at The Times. She wrote an important piece called “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web” about a group of people, such as Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray, and Bret Weinstein. These people have all pushed conservative or even far-right ideas, and almost all of them have been strong supporters of Israel’s actions in Gaza and other places.
But in 2020, she quit her job at the New York Times in a big way, saying that the paper was an echo chamber for leftist ideas. She started a Substack blog the next year, which she later changed the name of to “The Free Press.”
Journalist Branko Marcetic has said that The Free Press has been one of the loudest backers of Israeli actions from the start, spreading what he calls “insidious propaganda” and “outright disinformation.”
Over 50 Palestinian civilians, including children, were killed in 2021. Weiss defended this by saying that it was “Zionism’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination” by a state that was “surrounded by enemies making hard decisions about how to protect its citizens.” She used to say that Muslim immigration was to blame for the rise in racism in Europe.
The Free Press lied in May 2024 when they said that the UN had “admitted” that the number of civilian deaths in Gaza was much lower than what had been said before. It said that widespread hunger is “pro-Hamas propaganda,” even though President Trump himself has admitted that it is happening. And it said that an Israeli killing of Palestinians looking for help did not happen.
It has also tried many times to keep Israel from being blamed for attacking health centers by saying that Hamas might have been the one who destroyed the al-Ahli Hospital. Still, Weiss seemed to defend attacks on other Gaza hospitals.
“Every Palestinian knows [the al-Shifa hospital] is full of [armed militants], but nobody can talk,” she wrote on Twitter, referring to a Free Press interview that said it was with a Gaza resident who did not want to be named.
Trying to hurt Palestinians, Wikipedia
It’s even possible that Weiss’s acts killed people. People in Gaza, including writer and teacher Refaat Alareer, told a joke in October 2023 in reaction to the crazy (and false) claim that Palestinian militants had burned an Israeli baby alive during the October 7 attacks.
“This is Refaat Alareer joking about whether an Israeli baby that was burned alive in an oven was cooked ‘with or without baking powder,’” Weiss wrote.
A lot of people were mean to Alareer, and he said that Weiss’s words had made him a target. He said, “If Israeli bombs kill me or hurt my family, I’ll blame Bari Weiss.” He also said, “Many crazy Israeli soldiers who are already bombing Gaza will believe these lies and smears and act on them.” A little over a month later, Alareer was killed by an Israeli missile.
Wikipedia is another thing that Weiss wants to attack. The Anti-Defamation League is a pro-Israel pressure group that was called an unreliable source by an online reference. Since then, The Free Press has been fighting against it. To get Wikipedia to become more pro-Israel, The Free Press and Trump’s Department of Justice are working together to take away its nonprofit identity. They call it a “propaganda site.”
Author Ryan Grim wrote, “Bari could not have picked a more Orwellian term for her authoritarian news outlet taking a wrecking ball to Western institutions on behalf of Israel.”
Venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks have invested in the Free Press, and Howard Schultz, who used to be CEO of Starbucks, has also given money to the paper.
Skydance is being told that the price for selling what is now mostly a Substack blog is between $200 million and $250 million, which is a very high price. To give you some background, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, paid $250 million for The Washington Post in 2013. It is one of the most popular and important newspapers in the world.
Big Changes at CBS
Although Weiss’s job at CBS News seems simple, the company is not really supportive of the Palestinian cause. The network kept playing very questionable Anti-Defamation League claims about a supposed wave of antisemitism moving across America. They also kept using Israeli talking points, like calling the Gaza Health Ministry “Hamas-run.”
A report by MintPress News found that it has also hired a lot of former Israeli soldiers and politicians to work on its news stories. Gili Malinsky, for example, was a captain in the IDF’s public relations department. He was in charge of a group whose job it was to tell the world about the Israeli military. Before she became a staff writer at CBS, she also worked for Friends of the IDF.
“Resistance” Media Support MAGA
The Ellison CBS deal is part of a bigger trend in the U.S. media landscape, where the Trump administration’s tough methods make the press give in to its demands. Earlier this year, CNN officials said they would change their political stance from pro-Democrat to more moderate. They told their employees not to oppose Trump. Mark Thompson, the network’s CEO, met with editors many times in January and told them to be “fair-minded” with Trump and not to “pre-judge” his second term in office. Anchors were also advised not to “show outrage” during Trump’s swearing-in. Several important CNN personalities, such as anchor Jim Acosta (who lost his White House press credentials after a fight with Trump), left the network.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, two MSNBC anchors who were widely considered as the faces of the Democratic “resistance” to Trump throughout his first term, said publicly that they were revising their editorial stance toward the president. Brzezinski told their viewers, “Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different.” She went on to say, “That starts with not just talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.” She said that they had gone to Mar-a-Lago to meet the new president in person.
Other networks that didn’t change have died. The Trump administration canceled funding to NPR and PBS earlier this week. Both networks may have to close soon. Voice of America went off the air for a while because of a similar power grab by Trump, but it came back in June with new leadership and a new political point of view.
Social media has also changed in a similar way. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, said in January that his platforms (Facebook and Instagram) will be “prioritizing free speech” and moving their content moderation functions from California to Texas, where there is less worry about “the bias of our teams.”
He also said that Trump supporter and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joel Kaplan would take over as the company’s President of Global Affairs from Nick Clegg, who used to be the U.K. Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister. Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close friend of Trump, was named to Meta’s board of directors. This was perceived by practically everyone as a very public bow to the MAGA movement.
Elon Musk, a big Trump fan and unofficial cabinet member, bought Twitter in 2022. Since then, Twitter has become more openly right-wing, just like Facebook. Musk’s actions, such openly supporting far-right and other racist views on the site, caused millions of liberal users to leave and relocate to smaller sites like Bluesky or Mastodon.
The Trump administration is still after TikTok, even though the company has hired State Department officials, Israeli spies, and troops to operate its business.
In the end, the fact that the son of the second-richest billionaire in the world is hiring a provocateur who is very pro-Israel and has built a career spreading questionable stories and stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment to help run one of the country’s most important newsrooms should worry anyone who cares about independent journalism.
The CBS News/Bari Weiss story shows how oligarchic media dominance and pro-Israel lobbying are both becoming more powerful in public debate. It is a disturbing sign of the greater deterioration of journalistic freedom in the U.S., as state-aligned forces try to silence opposition and keep support for Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Source: MintPress News
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Author: StevieRay Hansen
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