I guess it stands to reason that electing the worst, most corrupt president in the United States would infect other areas of our Glorious Best System in the World(tm), and why would the media industry be immune? Why wouldn’t an outright grifter just mosey on into one of the most storied journalism outlets and not only immediately diminish it, but also greaty damage one of its most respected institutions?

Grifting Crybaby Bari Weiss has made a career out of being fake-canceled from the New York Times and being a crusader for “free speech,” which means no one is allowed to have an opinion that isn’t the same as Bari. When she was named editor-in-chief of CBS News, it was predictable what would happen if you were paying attention to her grift over the last 10 years. And yeah, that includes destroying the reputation of 60 Minutes.

On Sunday night, Bari decided that a fully vetted 60 Minutes segment on the torture of migrants in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison should not air. This is the same prison where the Trump administration has sent more than 280 men, and whose conditions Weiss herself has described as “horrific.” Apparently, though, protecting the perpetrators of sending people to those horrific conditions was the most important thing.

Trump supporters applauded. Weiss has previously praised El Salvador’s strongman president Nayib Bukele for making the country “safer,” and nothing says safety like indefinite detention and state-sanctioned brutality. The episode neatly captures the modern free-speech paradox: speech must be protected at all costs…unless it’s inconvenient to the right/GOP.

According to 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, the segment had already cleared CBS News’s legal and standards departments multiple times. “It is factually correct,” Alfonsi wrote in an email later leaked to The New York Times. Pulling it after that, she said, wasn’t editorial judgment but a political decision. That’s why so many people interpreted the move as censorship by proxy: a news executive stopping a story the government would rather not see aired. Weiss was recently installed by Paramount’s new owner, pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison, a helpful reminder of how media consolidation makes political pressure easier, not harder.

Editors spike stories all the time. But when a rigorously reviewed investigation is killed at the last minute, questions are unavoidable. By Monday night, the unaired segment was circulating online anyway, via a Canadian source. So, we got yet another case of regular people showing more respect for democratic principles than elite gatekeepers.

You can very clearly see why someone whose job it is to protect war criminals would need this pulled from the airwaves: It’s visible proof the Trump administration is operating concentration camps.

— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2025-12-22T23:22:48.073Z

This is probably bad for Weiss because it kills any chance for this story to run unaltered, since

we can all see the original. I guess her only recourse would be to give her friends in the Trump administration their own story to try to debunk this report.

Such a thing would be par for the Bari course. Weiss has long championed a narrow, highly conditional version of free speech. That worldview brought us here. Nasty tweets were once treated as a threat to democracy, but jailing or deporting people for pro-Palestinian advocacy is fine. Campus protests were a national crisis, but the federal government pressuring universities to conform ideologically is also fine. Book bans, research censorship, and museum sanitization are all fine, so long as the right people are doing it.

The free-speech panic was never about defending open debate. It was about ensuring control over who gets to speak and who doesn’t. Weiss once warned ominously about “redrawing the bounds of acceptable thought.” Now she proudly describes that as her own mission. The difference is simple: when she redraws the lines, she gets to decide where they go.

Putting someone like that in charge of CBS News is completely insane, and I doubt it lasts much longer. At least I hope. Bari’s grift has suckered a lot of powerful people in the media world who view themselves as Very Smart and Serious People. But as major names at CBS like Scott Pelley continue to speak up about how much of a bad choice she has been to run CBS News, her hold on her job is probably loosening.

Maybe the next time you are trying to destroy a news institution, put someone in charge who actually knows what journalism is, so you can actually pull it off. Or maybe don’t. That would be better for everyone.

The last word goes to The Arctic Monkeys.