Bari Weiss Even Worse At Her Job Than Previously Imagined

Recently fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley sat down with The New York Times over the weekend for a lengthy interview about the end of his tenure at CBS News, which Bari Weiss has been speedily destroying with her incompetence. Pelley had a few things to say that confirmed Weiss, already one of the worst operators in the history of network TV, has no idea what she’s doing.

After he was fired with cause for daring to speak up to newly installed executive producer Nick Bilton in a staff meeting, Pelley released a statement in which he claimed that he had recently been instructed to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” During his interview with the Times, Pelley revealed that he was referring to Weiss’s attempts to meddle with his report on the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis. From the interview:

It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

This is about what you’d expect from Weiss, but I think the most interesting piece of this interview comes just before that bit, when Pelley is giving some context for why he found Weiss’s interference so offensive:

I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.

As Tommy Craggs previously pointed out here on Defector, Weiss is failing so badly and earning so much negative attention not because she’s burst through the walls of CBS News and started turning it into a right-wing propaganda machine, but because she’s too stupid and incompetent to just quietly pull the levers that are already in place. Any propagandist worth her salt, facing down the task of reporting on the killings of Good and Pretti, would have understood that you can only make so much chicken salad out of chicken shit. With this particular story, the ideal outcome for someone with Weiss’s motivations would be a gentle reframing of the state’s obviously evil actions as the tragic result of “clashes” between protestors and police. Weiss, however, was too stupid to realize that Pelley and his producers were already doing that, and so she pushed them a little too far by asking them to lie about the direction that a pair of car tires were pointed in. This is Weiss’s biggest failure: The structures and principles of prestige journalism are already designed to efficiently manufacture the kind of narratives Weiss is looking for, but her own self-absorption prevents her from just sitting back and letting the machine do what it does.

Weiss is failing at this because she’s not actually a propagandist. She’s a cutlure warrior who sees every step of her career as part of a process in which she is bringing her enemies to heel. A smart operator would have agreed to take over CBS News, changed absolutely nothing, and then eventually taken credit for transforming the centrist news network that produced high-quality but ultimately regime-friendly journalism into a centrist news network that produces high-quality but ultimately regime-friendly journalism. Weiss’s vision is too narrow, and her motivations too petty, to accept such an easy victory. So instead she goes around sticking her finger in people’s eyes until even someone as white-bread as Scott Pelley can’t help but become an agitator. What’s going on at CBS News isn’t so much a clash of ideologies—it’s not like Weiss was put in charge of the World Socialist Website—but a clash between people who know how to do their jobs and a woman who doesn’t. Pelley even said so in his chat with the Times:

And the bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence. The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air. The entire hour of “60 Minutes”! It was the night of the Grammys. “60 Minutes” was the lead-in to the Grammys, and we almost didn’t have a broadcast.

Bari Weiss is far from the first evil person to attempt to wield influence over the American news business, but you’re not going to go very far in that job if you’re dense enough to risk the ratings value of a lead-in to an awards show.