The Media Research Center has long been a fan of Bari Weiss ever since she loudly quit the New York Times, giving her a platform to complain she was being silenced (even as she was appearing on CNN to make that claim). Weiss went on to cheer her right-wing leanings by the promotion of the so-called Twitter Files on her Free Press website, where she was eventually joined by Uri Berliner, the guy who blew up his career at NPR in order to be a right-wing martyr.
Weiss has continued to be a right-wing cause celebre for the MRC. Clay Waters spent an August 2024 post whining that the new York Times did a profile of her:
New York Times reporter Matt Flegenheimer unloaded an almost 5,000-word attempt at a hit piece on journalist Bari Weiss, who founded The Free Press after resigning from the Times in 2020. The snarky tone paired with the story’s vaguely threatening cover art and the endless series of feeble jabs that don’t land suggest a failed attempt at a hit piece — with perhaps a scoop of professional jealousy in the mix?
The online headline deck carried the same vibe: “Bari Weiss Knows Exactly What She’s Doing — The founder of The Free Press has built a new media empire by persuading audiences that she is a teller of dangerous truths.” The whispered subtext: “But we know better, don’t we?”
[…]Flegenheimer dealt with the end of Weiss’s Times career, after she wrote an open letter to the paper’s publisher, citing “bullying by colleagues” and an “illiberal environment” in the wake of the fallout from an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) calling for the National Guard to be deployed to quell violent protests during the George Floyd riots.
In his words, Weiss tweeted “about a ‘civil war’ at the paper between ‘the (mostly young) wokes’ and ‘the (mostly 40+) liberals.'” The reporter sniffed: “Many colleagues called this a maddening oversimplification.”
Really? Weiss isn’t the first former Times journalist to be forced out by the paper’s resident wokesters — former opinion editor James Bennet wrote of the paper’s “culture of intolerance and conformity” for The Economist.
Waters didn’t actually prove anything in the Times profile to be wrong — he was just mad that someone dared to criticize a fellow right-winger.
Because of all of this, the MRC was quite gleeful about rumors that Weiss might be made the head of CBS News in the wake of new ownership (which the company paid off Donald Trump to ensure approval for the merger). Curtis Houck chortled in a Sept. 4 post:
Puck’s Dylan Byers dropped the bombshell Wednesday night that the rumored deal was “on the 1-yard-line” for CBS News’s parent company SkyDance to acquire former New York Times writer Bari Weiss’s indefatigable site The Free Press and grant Weiss a senior role inside CBS News.
Predictably, this has and will continue to send liberal journalists both inside the network and outside it into hissy fits that will dwarf one-time CNN boss Chris Licht’s failed desires (and orders from his superiors at Warner Bros. Discovery) to return the network to a serious news outlet and not a Trump hate factory.
Byers wrote that, for nearly a year, SkyDance boss David Ellison “has been courting” “an acquisition of The Free Press, the defiantly heterodox news and opinion media entity founded by Bari Weiss.”
In fact, Licht mismanaged his way out of his CNN job in trying to make the network more right-wing. Houck then had a fit of Oliver Darcy Derangement Syndrome:
Former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy was apoplectic at his newsletter site Status, whining this move by Ellison would be “revealing and hypocritical” given his early comments about wanting to depoliticize the network.
He further screeched about Weiss for the crime of being a “stridently pro-Israel, proudly anti-‘woke’ culture warrior” and “built her brand on polarizing political commentary—supposedly the type of material Ellison signaled to reporters that he wishes to run away from.”
[…]He found CBS News staffers to say they were “[n]ot happy AT ALL” and predict what Darcy dubbed “a firestorm inside the newsroom, especially over coverage of Israel and Gaza” and “some employees would be ‘apoplectic’ at the idea of taking editorial direction from her.”
And there it was. CBS News journalists are happy that a Jewish woman would be in a senior news position.
Yes, Houck is that desperate to portray Darcy and every employee at CBS News as an anti-Semite because Weiss apparently wants to skew Israel-related coverage. He also didn’t dispute the accuracy of anything Darcy wrote.
Jorge Bonilla hyped the rumor a day before, adding, “Bari Weiss can’t get to CBS quickly enough.” The next day, Houck promoted new rules at CBS about interviews, concluding: “Between this, the long-rumored purchase of The Free Press, and granting Free Press founder Bari Weiss a senior CBS News role, the liberal media could be on the verge of losing one of the ‘Big Three’ to reality.”
Right-wing bias does not equal “reality” — something Houck is apparently too blinded by his own partisan bias to see.