CBS News Controversies and Ratings

Welcome to another episode of This Fucking Guy, the series where we spotlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I'm Earon Ryan, host of Crooked Media's hysteria podcast. and on this the fortieth episode of this Fucking guy, happppy fortieth to us, we're discussing one of today's most successful professional victims. Antioke crrusader turned CBS News editor in chief, Barry Weiss. Mary's a pioneer in the same way that actual pioneers were pioneers. That's to say that ideologically speaking, she shows up in places where people have been living for thousands of years and acts like she discovered this cool new thing called being a center right conservative with a Zionist streak Weiss was born on march twenty fifth, nineteen eighty four in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Lou and Amy, owned companies called Weiss House and Weiss Lines, which sell interior design notions and flooring respectively Weiss and her three younger sisters were raised in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, and she had bought Mitzvah at the Tree of Life synagogue. She was the student council president in high school and a self described nerd, picture Lisa Simpson, but a Yanzer. She claims that her parents differed politically. Her dad was the conservative and her mom was the liberal, but in an interview with a local newspaper, Both claimed that the most important issue to both of them was what was good for Israel Writer Glenn Greenwald would later claim that Zionism has always been Berry's North star. For our purposes, we're using the definition of Zionism contained in Encyclopedia Britannica, which is to paraphrase here, a Jewish nationalist movement that originated in the later half of the nineteenth century with the goal of establishing a Jewish national state in Palestine. Today, people who call themselves Zionists tend to defend and justify Israeli actions as part of the state's right to defend itself even as those actions appear morally indefensible to a growing number of people. Additionally, self identified Zionists, including Barry Weiss, are often associated with anti Arab and anti Islam animists. Now, to be anti Zionist is not the same as being anti Semitic. Jewish people are among Israel's most outspoken critics. But as we'll see soon, Barry Weiss's worldview depends on the definition of anti Zionism to encroach so far onto the definition of anti Semitism that the two are the same. Barry didn't invent doing this, but she's certainly one of the most prominent practitioners of it. And now the word Zionism has been stretched and pulled in so many directions that it means everything and nothing. That's the bait and switch Don't want to let Israel do whatever it wants. You're antiemitic. You're not antiemitic. Then you stand for the systematic exclusion of people critical of Israel from mainstream thought For a more in depth and much much funnier version of this, please check out the podcast Bad Hasbra, hosted by my Pal Matt Leib. But back to Barry. After graduating from high school, Weiss went straight to Israel on a Gap year program, where she studied at a feminist Yeshiva and helped build a hospital for bedouins in the desert When she was there, she got into musical theater, which to think of it. she does kind of give theater kid who never made it out of the chorus. Weiss then attended Columbia University where she fell in love with a female classmate by the name of Kate McKinnon. Yes, that Kate McKinnon, as in the comedian. The two dated on and off for years, and Barry claims they're still good friends. Which in Kate's defense, if what Barry says is true, I've heard that Barry Weiss is a great hang as she is a shitty opinion haver And who among us doesn't have a problematic friend or two? Colombia was where Barry began her decades long career of attacking and smearing people she deemed insufficiently pro Israel. She was a crown prrincess of Ccel Culture before the term was even a pet expression of podcast rightoids, and all while claiming that what she was doing was actually defending freedom. Orwell would be proud. So here's the story of Barry's first Crusade. In two thousand two, a group called The David Project was formed to quote, combat anti Israel bias on university campuses and quote, document campus harassment of Jewish students cutting through the media friendly spin, The David Project is a right wing organization founded by Ralph Avy Goldwaser and David Jacobs, two bald old men, not college kids Rich guys pour money into campus activism all the time. The Daily Wire, Praggger University The David proroject walked, so Turningpoint USA could strut through a corridor of pyrotechnics In two thousand four, that group, in collaboration with pro Israel students at Columbia, created a short documentary style film called Columbia Unbecoming, which was shown several times around campus Among the film's rapped audience was a young Barry Weiss Columbia Unbecoming featured a series of interviews with a handful of Colombia students and one rabbi, acccusing professors in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Dpartment or MLC bullying Jewish students and teaching classes that were unfairly biased against Israel. It singled out three professors specifically George Saliba, Joseph Masad, and Hammid Dabashi. I took Professor Saliba's intro to Islamic civilization. att the end of the semester I guess the icing on the cake was that we saw a video about contemporary politics in the Middle East And without any framing at all, we witnessed a video that showed a march of Arabs from the region And you will march in which they hold up banners that say deeath to Zionism, and they chained slogans like deeath to Jews While that may be an accurate portrayal of what goes on in the Middle East, I was kind of surprised that he didn't frame it with anything like, this is not my perspective, or what you're going to see here may bother you a little bit. Now this video was specifically made to perpetuate one particular viewpoint, and that's that Arab professors at Colombia were targeting and intimidating Jewish students, and for that, they should be disciplined, maybe even fired the film does a pretty shitty job of proving its case. It bleeds with histionics, like in the clip we just watched, where it sounds like a girl was upset. She didn't get a trigger warning Now that's the kind of thing that columnist Barry would point to as a sign of generational fragility if it had to do with any other topic. But before Barry Weiss was clutching her pearls over the perceived snow flakery of college protesters threatening free speech on campus She was a college snowflake threatening free speech on campus. Radicalized by this highlight reel of unsubstantiated complaints, Barry and a handful of her Jewish classmates founded a group that led a campaign against the professors and named it Colombians for Academic Freedom, or CIF. It was a big enough deal that it drew the attention of prominent pro Israel figures like then Cgressman Anthony Weiener And the university launched an investigation into the claims that were made. But Here's the thing, the film fell apart under scrutiny. For example, none of the students complaining about Professor Masad in the film had actually taken a class of his. An article about the controversy quoted Barry Weiss, who claimed that all Msad talked about in his class was Israel, another student who had taken the same class said he'd only devoted a couple of weeks to it The Internal Columbia Inestigation found that there was, quote, no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that reasonably could be construed as antis Semitic, and quote, no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom. Not only were the professors not guilty of the offenses they'd been accused of But the report found that the professors had been victimized by a smear campaign organized by outside groups, some of which were trying to spy on the professor's classrooms Masat eventually did get tenure. He still gets harassed quite a bit though. Barry wasn't done. In two thousand seven, an anthropology professor named Nadia Abu al Haj was up for tenure at Barnard College, Columbia's All Women's sister School. Abu al Haj had written an award winning scholarly book called Facts onn the Ground, which questioned the Zionist narrative that a long archaeological record of Jewish presence in Palestine justified the establishment of a Jewish state in the region. The campaign against Abu Al Haj's qualifications and worthiness was led by Barry Weiss's group in cooperation once again with outside groups determined to pressure the college into denying the professor tenure. The petition, which was started by an Israeli settler contained fabricated quotes from Al Hj's work. It still got thousands of signatures. While Weiss and company were successful in helping make Abu Alhaj's life a nightmare for a short period of time, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Nadia Abu Ahaj was granted tenure that fall after Weiss graduated. At the time, Weiss was brand new on the mas headad of the opinion section of the Israeli newewspaper Herets, where she wrote a column condemning Abu Alhaj being awarded tenure called Facts in the Air Weiss, who is neither an academic nor an anthropologist, accused Abu Al Haj's anthropological work of undermining the very nature of facts themselves. That some mediocre white man confidence right there After college, Weiss entered the star making, frothing ideologue, pretending to be a mild mannered center right opinion haver pipeline. Fr Harrit, she worked at the forwward and tablet. And then at just twenty three years old, the Wall Street Journal opinion page snatched her up Barry would fall under the mentorship of then Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Stevenens, whose opinions have always been about as interesting as an expired tub of plain yogurt. But they loveved that shit at the New York Times, so in twenty seventeen, Weiss followed her mentor from the Wall Street Journal to the Greay Lady. Once there, she got straight to the business of being delighted by microwaved Reganera leftovers she'd rebranded as thrillingly naughty transgressive beliefs Barry wasn't afraid to take bold swings, like the time she published a columem about how women's march organizers were anti Semitic, which was a sort of rehashed version of another column she'd written earlier that year for tablet. which also claimed that the women's smart organizers were anti Semitic, which is a rehashed complaint she's been making against Arab Americans and Muslims since she was a wee college complainer. During her time on the Times opinion pages, she buttered her bread with columns critical of the Me too movement Not the actual Moo movement, a version of the Moo movement that she made up in her head Cobbling together a collage of the most extreme voices on Twitter. You'll find more straw men in Barry Weiss columns than you will in all the fields in Kansas. Take, for example, her column headlined, The probleroblem with Believe all Women. Weiss argues that the Meoo movement had created an atmosphere of fear for men and given a permission structure for bad actors to exploit a cultural moment to lob false accusations She cites the case of Roy Moore, who at the time was running for Senate in Alabama, and facing a smattering of stories that as an adult man, he'd preyed on teenage girls One woman had approached the Washington Post claiming that Moore had impregnated her and pressured into having an abortion Post reporters grew suspicious of the woman's story and discovered that she was actually part of a right wing sting operation designed to discredit the other accusers. The post did not believe that woman. The reporters did their jobs. There was no outcry from feminists about the post reporter's refusal to believe her without question. But somehow in Weiss's view, this incident revealed a fatal weakness in the Moo movement. Now let's stop for a second, revisit that headline. Now see what the headline did. It puts the phrase believe all women in quotes as though it's a quotation. But in the article, the only person who says, believe all women Barry Weiss, who has declared it the huntress' war cry. So technically a hntress that Barry Weiss came up with said it, not Barry, I guess. To prove her case that feminism had run amuck and was out to take down innocent men, Weiss quoted a tweet from a teen vogue columnist and claimed that countless women were sharing similar views in private What women? How many Berry How do you know I was working in a different newsroom at the time, also writing columns about the Moo movement. Nobody serious was saying believe all women. The phrase was believe women, a slogan that meant take allegations of sexual misconduct seriously. To take allegations seriously is to follow up on them by looking into whether or not they are true. Some of them will turn out to be true, and some of them won't. But it was easier for people like Barry Weiss to portray the folly of the M toooo movement if she pretended that the battle cry was believe all women rather than engage with the complexity of reality, which was that society was grappling with how to balance justice for victims and fairness for the accused Feminists were not in lockstep about this. There was a lot of debate and discussion. Barry pretended we were this big group of blue haired slut walkers going around confiscating the ball sacks of men who told them they were pretty at work one time. Barry did this shit all the time. Rather than engage with reality, she engages with a sillier version of things that exist only in her imagination or on Twitter, and pretends that everybody on the left is like this and then beats up on that imaginary monolith. This was on display in her hit parade of tedious contrarianism, like I'm glad the Dke March banned Jewish stars. Whin she tells the story of how a Pide parade in Chicago kicked out three women displaying rainbow flags with a star of David on it.Qote, Has there ever been a crisper expression consequences of intersectionality than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dke march, she wrote. Hold the phone. The words she used imply that all Jewish lesbians were banned from a march, or that the Jewish lesbians were banned because of their Jewishness which would have been bad, but the real story is that three women carrying the one specific flag were kicked out And that's not the same as all Jewish lesbians being banned. Furthermore, according to the Washington Post There was more to the story. From the March organizers, the three women quote repeatedly expressed support for Zionism during conversations with Chicago Dyke March collective members We have since learned that at least one of these individuals is a regional director for a wider bridge, an organization with connections to the Israeli state and right wing pro Israel interest groups. The Chicago Dke March Collective is explicitly not anti Semitic. We are anti Zionists, the statement added. The Chicago Dke March Coective supports the liberation of Palestine and oppressed people everywhere. But Barry never let facts muddy up a story of the demise of reasonability at the hands of the Sillian indulgent left Her now notorious column, We're all fascists now, had to have a correction tacked to it. when one of the random Twitter accounts she cited as evidence of systemic oppression of conservative voices turned out to be fake. Barry Weiss's three Cheers for Cultural appropriation pretends that random bloggers and Twitter accounts engaging with separate distinct discussions about the origin and ownership of specific cultural artifacts were the ones dictating what every progressive thought about everything. Now I could go on and on about Weiss's pathological strawmanning, but I don't w tona raise my blood pressure. Putty of people have dove in on Weiss's weakness in fashioning and argument I haven't seen as many people talk about Weiss's weakness in fashioning a joke when she tries to be funny and shits out prose that reads like a treasury of Cathy cartoons folks Humor wise, Berry Weiss is a tote bag. She's an attitude tea notted at the corner, worn on a five K fun walk through Branson, Missouri. Her jokes are stale popcorn. Her piece, the summer bucket list of a thirty five year old woman is a litany of gentle self deprecation that Bridget Jones would have used as an emergency maxip pad. Try not to drink more than half a bottle of pinot Grigio on weeknights. Restart weight watchers. Tell Jenny to drag you to Saturday morning meetings Get a little tan. Was this coln written by the inside of those Dove chocolate wrappers? I cannot believe that this ran in the New York Times Okay, so maybe your call imagining Comey's text to his wife will be funnier Here's an excerpt two hundred six PM DT cornered me, telling me to drop the Flynn thing. Let it go, he just wouldn't stop. Remember what he said to Billy Bush was like that two two hundred seven PM. feeling bad about summer again, sad face. Tell me again about that thing you said about hindsight, Ned reminding sixM BW. Can we get a grandfather cllock for the house? seending you some eBay links to check out. This shit makes Maureen Dow sound like Tina Feay. No wonderers she thinks her wife Nelly Bowles is the funniest writer in the world. But I want to take some time now to reflect on the legacy of a piece that aged just about as poorly as a piece of op ed journalism can age. And that's the feature Barry wrote on the so called intellectual Dark web IDW. Published back in may twenty eighteen, meet the renegades of the intntellectual Dark Web. It's the real headline. was immediately met with ridicule. People called it the intellectual Dork web. It didn't help that the people featured on it are dorks, and that accompanying the article were portraits by Damon Winter that were so self serious that they were silly. Winter had won the Pulitzer Prize in P photojournalism for his work covering the two thousand eight Obama presidential campaign. and now He's taking a glamor shot of Jordan Peterson furrowing his brow. But anyway, I digress. A lot has changed since twenty eighteen, so let's catch up on all the luminaries Barry identified as the IDW. All right, so there's Sam Harris, who is largely known for palling around with the author of The Bell Curve, a widely debunked book that claims racial differences in IQ are due to inherent differences in biology Since the peiece ran, he's taken a big zg toward Zionism, argued that Islam is the motherload of bad ideas, and has released a podcast episode titled Anti Zionism is Anti Semitism Eric Weinstein, a stay puffed marshmallow man shaped scientist who has been called a physics grifter and a pseudo intellectual Charlatan by his critics, but more importantly works closely with Peter Theal over at Teal Capitol, and perhaps most importantly, is a pro Israel. Also, Eric's grimomacing brother Brett and his wife Heather Haying, both of whom were professors at Evergreen State College. their jobs because of woke And now they host an anti woke podcast. Conveniently, Brett being bullied by woke, had been the subject of another Weiss column months prior. There was also Jordan Peterson, frail uncle of the Manosphere. He's written extensively about the threat of anti Semitism after the attacks of october seventh, twenty twenty three. And in the immediate aftermath of the attack, he posted to X, giveive him hell Netanyahu, enough is enough. And he added Benjamin and Yahoo. Now to the ladies. There's Claire Lehman of Quillette, who you guessed it is also a Zionist with such a virulent distaste for Islam, that critics have described her as white supremacist adjacent. She's also defended Israel's slaughter of mostly civilians in Gaza. But don't worry, The Dark Web isn't all white. There's also Ayan Heri Ali, a Somali born critic of Islam who had been a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute which is one of America's most prominent right wing think tanks. It's hardly the wild west of renegade ideas, as Barry had characterized the IDW. In twenty twenty three, Ali converted to Christianity in preparation for what she called a civilization war that is coming for the West. Sounds cool and normal. Finally Dave Rubin, a comedian who wasn't afraid to tell it like it is, but who also happened to coincidentally be an avowed self proclaimed Zionist and apologist for Israeli military actions, especially in the wake of october seventh. In september twenty twenty four, six years after his Marquis debut in the Pantheon of Barry Weiss's IDW, a DOJ indictment alleged that tenant media, where Ruben worked was actually covertly funded by Russian state media, which had been paying influencers, including Ruben to push pro Russia pro Trump and anti LGBTQ talking points. Ruben claimed he had no idea. Gitar Riff. Earlier this year, Peers Morgan banned Ruben from his program after Ruben sided with Ben Shapiro on coverage of Israel. Morgan called Ruben a treasonous little weasel Speaking of littleittle Weasels, Ben Shapiro is also one of the main dors of Barry's Dangerous Brains Club Ben hated the Barbie movie so much that he lit a Barbie on fire and threw it in the trash. Ben is, sayay it with me now, a self proclaimed Zionist who has defended the actions of Israel. Now, not all the ascended alright adjacent figures were given equal credulity in Weiss's feature Well, she called Candace Owens Sharp. She seemed to draw a distinction between her and the people she considered a part of the IDW. Same thing for Kanye West and Mike Cernovich. Wh These are the figures in the clickque least likely to be supportive of Israel, and each of them tends to be flat out anti Semitic Looking back now, it seems like the piece was just a vehicle by which to cleave the Zionist alt right into its own free thoughtought collective far away from the Israel skeptics who use words like globalists The only people who got to be in Barry's club were people who were pro Zionist or anti Islam enough to match Barry's worldview That's it It makes sense that the first two letters of IDW are also ID. Now I'm sounding like Candace Owens. Reflecting on what the members of the group had to do with her, Barry wrote quote Like many in this group, I'm a classical liberal who has run afoul of the leftft, often for voicing my convictions and sometimes simply by accident. 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And of course, her prominence caused her detractors to visit her Cancel culture quQeen past Merary Weiss has attempted for years to finesse her multiple campaigns against insufficiently Zionist academics at her school into something morally consistent with her self declared free speech advocacy. She tweeted in response to Glen Greenwald's twenty eighteen takedown of her quote When I was an undergraduate student at Columbia, I advocated for the rights of students to express their viewpoints in the classroom. But Meghan Greenwell, who had been on the staff of Columbia's campus newspaper at the time, jumped into the fray tweeting Barry, I have no desire to be involved here, but your synopsis of the events of two thousand four, two thousand five is unfair. You weren't simply advocating for students' rights. You were calling professors racist. I know because I wrote or edited most of the stories about it. Greenwalell then linked to a story wherein Barry Weiss claimed that professors were racists. Glenn Greenwald noted, quote, That's what makes this whole spectacle so amazing. The New York Times is allowing one of its colonnists to masquerade as a stalwart defender of campus free speech and academic pluralism while utterly ignoring and allowing her to falsely deny her own long history in trying to stigmatize and punish professors who criticized Israel to the point where the NYCLU stepped in and dnounced her campaign as a dangerous threat to academic freedom Even Greenwald's spicy anti Weiss rants aren't enough to embarrass Barry though. In twenty nineteen, Weiss stuck her nose into a campus fight at Stanford University. This one was over the Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley, whose work had caricatured right wing Jewish figures. Weiss retweeted a student oped comparing Valley's work to Nazi propaganda. So the campus talk from a guy who draws silly pictures was forced to be relocated to a secure facility off campus due to concerns about safety. People love to hate on Barry because in addition to being smug and wrong, she was also ad doork It was easy to dunk on her. One of Barry's cringiest moments came in twenty eighteen. It was the Winter Olympics, Women's figure skating, the big show. Japanese American skater Marai Nagasu landed a triple axle In a swell of patriotic pride, Weiss tweeted a video of the skill with a caption, immmigrants. They get the job done God I wish Aelssa were here to roll her eyes with me, but since she's not, I'll do it. U This is a bastardization of the line from the Broadway Musical Hamilton, which in twenty eighteen was already considered to be a little chewgy. But to make matters worse, the line isn't immigrants they get the job done. It's immigrants we get the job done. Plus, Magasu was born in the US. She's not an immigrant She's just Asian People on Twitter were quick to correct weiss, but Barry decided to just tweet through it Yes, yes, I realized, felt the poetic license was kosher. A lot of people who already hated Barry Weiss got mad online about it, which actually turned out to be great for Barry Weiss since it helped her meet her daily minimum value of vitamin V for victim. Woke had done it again. Ccel culture run amuck By now, we've probably established the Barry Weiss Mo, A like an asshole, When called out on it, cry about how you're actually the victim. People who have talked about bad relationships in therapy probably know this as Darvo, Deny attack, reverse, victim and offender Berry's inability to tell the difference between real life and Twitter was starting to annoy her coworkers. She'd use her Twitter account to attack and belittle her New York Times colleague's work. As an opinion writer, she was subject to more lax social media policing than those who were actually reporting and editing stories By the summer of twenty twenty, it appeared that Berry was frustrated by the fact that no matter how big of an asshole she was at work couldn't manage to get herself fired. After all, what better evidence that cancel culture is a thing than to get canceled yourself? She almost got there when she involved herself in the newsroom fight over Senator Tom Cotton's op ed, urging the president to send troops to liberal cities that were sites of protests of the murder of George Floyd Patt's column send in the troops, prompted hundreds of Tes employees to sign onto a letter condemning its publication, and for editorial page editor James Bennett to resign Weiss was a huge dick about the whole thing, breathlessly describing an intra newsroom fight between the mostly young woes and the mostly forty plus liberals. But a month later, when Barry herself resigned, she accused the paper and her colleagues of bullying her. In her resignation flounce, which she posted to her own website, she wrote, quote, Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers My work and my character are openly demeaned on company wide slack channels where masad editors regularly weigh in. there, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly inclusive one. while others post axe emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter With no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action, they never are There are terms for all of this, unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I'm no legal expert, but I know that this is wrong. It's hard to take Berry's claims of being a free speech martyr seriously when she had a regular column at one of the most widely read newspapers in the world, and had the ability to commission pieces from other writers of her choosing and was featured regularly alongside her new television bestie Bill Marer on his TV show for Boomer Uncles. In fact, earlier in the very letter in which she accused the Tes of marginalizing conservatives and centrist voices, she'd bragged about how many centrist and conservative voices she'd brought to the paper. No matter. whether this characteristic Weisian display of curated victimhood was part of a long planned move into independent journalism or truly the result of Weiss being the victim of woke Barry was well on her way to her next chapter, Substack Voiss's publication was first known as commommonense and then the free press. Its mission statement was a regurgitated version of Voyice's resignation letter from the Times And people fucking loved it Partly because it reflected a general unease vast swathes of America's Normies had with the power they perceived the left had over culture But it did so in such a way that enabled its readers to assure themselves that they were still superior to Fox News viewers, even though they believed pretty much exactly what the Fox viewers believed for the same reasons It was MGa but pH balced for people who drink red wine and downhill ski. Even before it attracted subscribers, it attracted the attention and money of billionaires who needed Americans to be mad at woke, so they wouldn't turn their anger at them. It's a tried and true diversion tactic, but hey, it works. Weiss turned on the charm she's famous for in person and main stays on the pantheon of Silicon Valley douche bags like Mark Andon opened their wallets to her. She rarigged in goobbs of seed money, but Barry didn't know what she was doing. Here are some ringing endorsements of Weiss's prowess as an editor in chief from her former employees, from Claire Malone's Reporting at The New Yorker. Berry had no idea how newsrooms worked, but she knew that she needed to call her operation a newsroom I think if you sat her down and said, can you explain the difference between a news story, an investigative story, and an enterprise story? she could tell you what it means, and she wasn't gonna to let that slower down Here's another She was so brilliant and charismatic, and if she started a church, we all would have joined. And within a couple of months, we all wanted to jump out a window. She was completely stubborn and couldn't take guidance. Free press promised its readers that it would tell the truth and let its readers make up their own minds Critics took note of how far short they fell of this. One critical post on the unpopulous noted a few low notes, like the time columnist Eli Lake compared the actions of twenty something fuck boys tasked with slashing the federal budget under Elon Musk's doge program to the founding fathers. James Madison Balls Basically the same guy In another post that aged poorly, a Free press writer prematurely thanked Doch for successfully rooting out waste from the federal budget. Subsequent analysis has found that the program actually cost the government money and achieved nothing but sowing disarray. But hey, at least it got rid of DEI hires, whatever those are. Speaking of DEI hires, the Free press's cofounder was none other than Barry Weiss's kid sister, Suzie Weiss Susie Weiss is a self satisfied little shit who made her debut eight years prior, when in twenty thirteen, she'd written a column for the Wall Street Journal where her big sister worked, weird, bemoaning the fact that she hadn't gotten into any of the Ivy League colleges she'd applied to She mused that maybe if she wasn't a boring white girl, if she'd say, worn a headdress to school or had two moms, she'd have gotten into pen I'll let little Susy Weiss explain it on the Today Sh Well, it's a funny story, actually. The piece was written I got rejected from a bunch of schools in one day and like any teenager, I'm sure we're like millions of teenagers that day, I was crying to my mom and she said, I cannot hear about this anymore. Just go talk to someone else. So I called my sister and I was crying, but she was hysterically laughing. And she said, G write this down. So I did, and this is what came out of it. Let's see. I make fun of two moms Having killer SAT scores, the diversity it's a satire. That's the point. Just like thirty Rock is a satire, which pokes fun at things that are politically correct. That's what I was trying to do. Diversity, I think is a wonderful thing. I think it's great. I think all colleges should have a holistic approach to every college applicant. I do, however, think that in this day and age We're being judged on things that we cannot control. Oh, the irony of a high schooler who got published in the Wall Street Journal because of who her sister was and whose entire professional career is because her sister keeps giving her things complaining about unfair advantages. Meritocracy at work, am I right But back to Barry's publication. If there were a museum of Bad opinions, this free press article from april twenty twenty five would get its own gallery wall. It was by Bataya Ugar Sargon and headlined, I used to hate Trump Now I'm a Mga leftfty. was The president is giving the working class its best shot at the American dream in sixty years. That's why I support him. The pieace also claimed that Trump's tariff scheme would fix America's masculinity crisis and restart American manufacturing. Did that happen Anybody? did that happen It's rare that an opinion turns this bad this quickly. Like Barry's writing, the free press relied on cheap tactics that were tough to refute. The youngpopulous put it this way, quote The free press uses subjective first person reporting to render judgments on institutions that are hard to falsify. Unlike ordinary reporters, these authors don't have to obtain corroboration from different sources, seek comment from the institutions being investigated, and then adjust the article's framing if they're offered valid evidence that cast doubt on their working thesis. This genre of journalism can be done well, but the free press uses it to convey its twin conceits that establishment voices are not to be trusted, and that the free press alone is a trustworthy source that speaks uncomfortable truths that others suppress, end quote, as a banger. Meanwhile, Barry was out to smoke out woke where it slept, collollege campuses. In twenty twenty one, she and a handful of other insufferables including one of the co founders of Pallantier, founded the University of Austin. Not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, which is a real school. UATX, as it was known, touted itself as a merit first institution of higher learning. Everybody who met the academic requirements for admission and wasn't an obvious red flag, got in. Its faculty consists of professors who were canceled at other institutions It is unaccredited. It doesn't charge tuition And it only offers one degree. Curiously, it's absent from Barry Weiss's Wikipedia page, but you know what the University of Austin does have a bust of Barry Weiss on display in the library. It was made by an AI three D printer. And judging by how little that thing looks like Barry Weiss, I think we can rest assured that AI will not be replacing sculptors anytime soon. In october twenty twenty five, Paramount Skydance purchased the free press for one hundred fifty million dollars because what is money? That move was made by David Ellison, weird little son of Larry Ellison, a billionaire, Maga acclyte The younger Ellison appointed Barry Weiss to be editor in chief of CBS News. Now Barry had no relevant TV experience and in fact, had never done any real news gathering herself before beyond cherry picking tweets that helped her build her straw leftist. And the free press had about sixty employees while CBS News had about twelve hundred Weiss would soon prove to be exactly the idiot that people feared she'd be. She appointed as her deputy Adam Rubenstein, who had edited that atrocious Tom Cotton New York Times piece that urged Trump to send troops into American cities to attack protesters after the death of George Floyd Berry ended her first meeting with the entire newsroom with the cheer. Let's do the fucking news ny. Words of what have sounded natural emerging from the mouth of Sccession's Kendall Roy, in a scene meant to make Kendall look and sound like an entitled dfus who is in over his head. Berry traveled everywhere with bodyguards, which her colleagues made fun of behind her back. She urged colleagues to turn in more coverage of protests in Iran after seeing some videos that turned out to be from protests from three years ago which her colleagues also made fun of behind her back. Then the layoffs started. Eight on air personalities got the acts, all were women. CBS News employees also noted that staffers of color tended to lose their jobs while white employees got moved to other positions So how did Barry do the fucking news? Well, Weiss has a thwarted Theater Kid's desire to be cast in the leading role, despite having the on camera charisma of instant mashed potatoes. She moved into the office once occupied by CBS head anchor Scott Pelly, overlooking the entire newsroom When her network landed a coveted interview with Erica Kirk, whose husband Charlie had been publicly assassinated months prior, Barry volunteered to handle the town haall style event herself rather than tapping a more seasoned actual journalist to handle it One of the things that has happened over the three months since Charlie was murdered is that people have gone through the thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hours of words he produced. And I want to read a few that have captured the most attention especially on the political left, okay Yeah Some gun deaths were, quote, unfortunately worth it to preserve the Second Amendment, he said. Acknowledging that he wishes he didn't feel this way, he said I'm sorry, if I see a black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified He said the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four was a mistake Now I realize that all of those quotes come from longer conversations that he had on his show. correct. But he did say those things. And Charlie is being memorialized by many people as a person who promoted civil discourse, as a person who said C come to the front of the line, let's have a civil conversation. How do you square that with the statements I just read I would love for everyone to be able to watch the full and entire Clint of what he said Charlie didn't care what skin color you were. He didn't care what religion you were His favorite word was earn. He loved knowing that people worked hard to earn what they got what they got earn He worked so hard to build Turningpoint USA My husband is not to be deteriorated to two sentences He's not He is a thought leader and he was brilliant of a man This whole thing was so confusing. They were both acting and they're both bad at acting. Erica acted Possessed Barry did her best impression of somebody that knew what she was doing. Why was it a town hall What was the purpose of the event Who was the event for Unfortunately, none of those questions were answered prior to its execution. The piece, which aired on a Saturday night was a ratings bust, even with the Alu assist of the Army Navy game as a lead in It turns out that Weiss and David Ellison overestimated how many American conservatives would turn away from the leg cams and bottle blonds of Fox News to watch a frumpy bisexual interview an unsettling widow Gen Greenwald, perhaps winner of the biggest Berry Wise Hater Award, which No hate from me. Congrats, Glenn Greenwell. pointed out in the aftermath of that event that despite the fact that CBS News has seven million YouTube subscribers, the town hall had only racked up seventy two thousand YouTube views in two days Then there was the DeCopal debacle. Hey, that almost rhymes. Weiss took her hatchet to the CBS morning and evening shows at once by moving Tony De Copal from the former to the latter, alienating viewers of both in the process. Why Tony DeCopal? It have been that back in twenty twenty four, CBS News had spiked an interview that DeCopol had conducted with Tanhisi Coatates. Coates was promoting a book he'd written that was sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians. D Kopel, whose ex wife and two kids live in Israel, compared Coates to a terrorist. Somebody leaked audio of the meeting, killing the piece to the free press, and Weiss published it I'm sure it was a coincidence that Deopel was the one who got the nod for the evening news based entirely on merit Ono Copel's first broadcast anchoring the evening news, Weiss fucked with his teleprompter copy before broadcast, leading to this embarrassing on air moment. All right to other news, as you just heard from Jill. to other news now Governor Walls. No, we're gonna do more, Kelly First day First day, big problems here. Are we going to Kelly here? or are we going to go to Jonah Kaplan We're doing Mark Kelly, possibly demoted from his retired rank of captain in the Navy. I'm Ron Burgundy This is why you don't hire bloggers to run TV shows In January, Z To's prem Thacker posted photo to Blue sky of a CBS news set surrounded by Jack Daniels branding, with the word whiskey Fridays with Tony De Copel positioned in the center. According to Thacker, quote, some staff were only first made aware of it as they encountered CBS testing out set designs of a faux stocked bar in the newsroom, featuring a large sponsor banner for Jack Daniels Thankfully, that never materialized, although it could have been, I don't know, maybe interesting. In the ensuing months, DeCoppo grimaced and mugged as he logged more embarrassing moments like the time he glazed Marco Rubio as the ultimate Florida man. Another time he did an awkward man on the street style interview where he asked Randooss in Grand Central Station to pronounce his last name, which I get the conceit behind is for months, I was calling him Tony Dracula Weiss wasn't done sucking ass. herer meddling has nearly tanked the credibility of CBS News's flagship show sixty Mutes In January, Weiss swooped in at the last minute to spike a segment on CCOotT using the flosy excuse that they hadn't gotten a response from the Trump White House The end result was a textbook example of the Stryzand effect trying to conceal something from the public, but the effort to conceal it only draws more attention to the thing you're attempting to conceal The segment aired in Canada, was ripped and uploaded to social media and was viewed millions of times Barry looked like an idiot In February, CBS News announced that it was bringing longevity author and health influener Peter Ata on as a contributor But soon his name appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files. His name appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files one thousand seven hundred times. Turns out not only was Aa quack adjacent, he was also pedophile adjacent. In one email, Atha assured Epstein that Pussy is indeed low carb. In another, he told Epstein that the biggest problem with being his friend was that, quote, the life you lead is so outrageous and thatet I can't tell a soul. In another email, Epstein informed Atha that he'd gotten a fresh shipment God why do these guys always sound like they're flirting with each other Aa had provided referrals to Epstein, said he could help him extend his life by five years if only to have more sex and stayed in an apartment owned by Epstein the grossest detail of this already very gross story is that in his book Tia had recalled staying in New York when his infant son had a heart attack remaining there through work But the Epstein files reveal that the day after his son was rushed to the hospital via ambulance in San Diego, Peter Aa was meeting with Jeffrey Epstein Now a sensible person would think this person is toxic. G this trash out of my newers room, get them off my network. But not Barry. Barry dug in. An internal struggle ensued. Finally after weeks of back and forth, Aa resigned In early April, Zateo reported that Barry was at it again with the newsroom meddling, this time on a piece that aired on CBS News Sunday morning. The piece, which had been in the works for months, focused on Israeli archaeological digs in occupied West Bank territory. Sources who spoke with Zateo say that Barry jumped in and messed with the script and deceptively edited some interviews in a way that upset one of the interview subjects Palestinian cultural heritage researcher named Zaayid Azhari One CBS news staffer referred to Barry's move as Pulling a se cot. I guess we can call it that now instead of the Stry ound effect, right? Pulling a seacot? I don't know. I like Stry Z effect Perhaps if she'd been doing the fucking news rather than fighting the insidious forces of Woke or behaving like a Netanyahu propagandist, she'd have noticed CBS newews hemorrhaging viewers In April CBS evening News boasted its second lowest overall viewership ever for the month. And in the twenty five to fifty four demographic, lowest ratings ever Just for comparison, the number one nightly news broadcast, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, averaged eight point five three seven million total viewers and one point five six million demo viewers during that time Barry and Tony's CBS Eing News averaged three point seven seven one million total viewers and four hundred and sixty seven thousand viewers in the adults twenty five to fifty four demographic for the week of april twentieth There were people who said when Barry Weiss took over CBS newews perennially that there had place nightly newews broadcasts. The only direction to go was up Barry showed them all, and in true contontrarian fashion has taken the venerated journalism outlet straight If past is prologue, this means Barry Weiss is about to be promoted to an even bigger job for which she's even less qualified. So there you have it, folks, Barry Weiss, the woman who has boldly gone where many, many, many, many, many white guys in golf carts have gone before. And because it's just me this time, I'm gonna make the unilateral decision about where she lies on a matrix of fucking guys. H. Where do I think she is? I think that she is a Tu belie leaving Zel it And I think she's a scheming sociopath I will not be answering any follow up questions. I've been talking for over an hour guys. This is too much talking. That about wraps up the time we have for this episode of this fucking guuy. 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