Expectations are low for Bari Weiss as head of CBS News — Wonkette, for example, believes she’ll run the organization into the ground by insisting that the channel have a right-wing bias. But the Media Research Center has unending faith in Weiss, and MRC writer Curtis Houck in particular is a true believer. So when Weiss faced a bit of criticism from a familiar target, Houck rushed to her defense in an Oct. 9 post:
Doing their part to undermine and destroy Bari Weiss’s time at CBS News before she can even settle in, Oliver Darcy’s website Status posted Wednesday night a story filled with anonymous sources offering Mean Girls-esque smears of Weiss, painting her as “abrasive,” “chaos,” “erratic,” and someone who “struggl[ed] to effectively lead.”
The result of these leaks, of course, are a giddy prediction success at CBS News “may prove difficult.”
Natalie Korach made her debut writing on behalf of the far-left, hateful, press-defending site, down to the snarky headline and subhead: “A Bari Trying Time; While Bari Weiss faces skepticism inside CBS News, former colleagues describe her management style to Status as chaotic and abrasive—raising questions about how she’ll lead one of America’s most storied newsrooms.”
She got right to work taking pot shots at Weiss in the middle of the second paragraph: “Thus far, Weiss is being viewed skeptically inside CBS News, to put it mildly. Senior leaders inside the company are holding their breath as they cautiously get to know her[.]”
[…]For her part, Korach scoffed at Weiss because “it is a matter of public record that Weiss has no real experience leading a workforce the size of CBS News, let alone a television outlet” and the most she’s done in terms of leading was “only a few dozen” at The Free Press and a rocky “junior editor” stop at The New York Times.
The same could have been said about Korach’s boss Oliver Darcy running his own site after having been at CNN, Business Insider, and, before his change into a man filled with hate for conservatives, editor positions at Campus Reform and The Blaze.
That’s right — Houck can’t stop spewing hatred at Darcy after all these years. He also doesn’t bother to disprove anything that was reported on Weiss, baselessly insisting that the anonymous nature of the claims is sufficient. Instead, he declared that this criticism means “Liberal journalists hellbent on being stuck in their ways, unwilling to admit fault in widespread loss of trust in the press or, specific to CBS News, decades at third-place in the ratings.”
Houck returned the next day with another complaint:
Our friends at the Washington Free Beacon did us a great service late Monday by collating an exhaustive list of the most ridiculous meltdowns over CBS News announcing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and that parent company Paramount SkyDance purchased her site, The Free Press.
By Wednesday, the Associated Press got off the sidelines to offer a cartoonishly whiny piece that, if published earlier, would have made the roundup in sneering a “polarizing” person taking over a “fact-based” network that has supposedly never had “an agenda.”
Houck then personally attacked the AP reporter behind the profile:
Matt Sedensky sneered from the onset that this “polarizing voice” had “made a name for herself as an unflinching critic of mainstream news outlets,” but must now “run one.”
“To some, it is a triumph of an anti-woke crusader who could bring an even hand to at least one corner of a media they see as awash in liberal groupthink. To others, it amounts to the elevation of a person who is anything but evenhanded, a conservative posing as a centrist who will shovel half-truths and worse,” he huffed.
Sedensky dismissed the idea she “bills herself as a centrist” and, despite criticizing Donald Trump, he argued “her right-leaning views…have gotten the most attention, including criticizing corporate diversity efforts, colleges’ lack of political diversity and pro-Palestinian protesters.”
This, he said, “rankled liberals” and generated “animosity.”
He also poo-pooed her biography, dripping with disgust[.] […]
He even tried to insinuate her working-class persona was fraudulent because she “has hobnobbed with billionaires, guest hosted ‘The View,’ and even become a punchline on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ with [n]ewspaper and magazine profiles hav[ing] dissected everything from her college relationship with former ‘Saturday Night Live’ star Kate McKinnon to her unflapping charm.”
If a liberal gay icon were taking over a legacy media outlet, it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to say she’d receive a spread in, say, Vogue.
As before, Houck made no effort to disprove Sedensky’s reporting, nor did he consider the possibility that the right-wing slant of the Free Beacon may be the actual culprit here.
Tim Graahm spent his own Oct. 10 post taking his own shot at another Weiss critic:
Honk if you think disgraced Dan Rather has any moral authority to criticize someone else over how they sully the reputation of CBS News. People who deeply love a crusading leftist press even when it defrauds the public with phony documents and smears are the people who still love Dan Rather.
Rather took to his Substack page to pen a piece titled “MAGA Tested, Trump Approved News: A conservative opinion writer is now leading CBS News.” Because if your politics are two ticks to the right of Dan Rather, you must be “MAGA” news. “It is a dark day in the halls of CBS News,” he warns, like his fraudulent reporting never darkened the scene.
These jerks call themselves “independent” even when they sound like negative Democrat campaign commercials. Rather loves the I-word: “That deal and the hiring of Weiss signals to everyone, especially to the man in the Oval Office, that CBS is no longer independent, but under the tutelage of a conservative billionaire who is putting more than his thumb on the scale.”
Graham kept up his personal attacks:
These jerks also identify themselves as “sentinels of democracy” rather than lapdogs for the Democrats. “Rather than doing their jobs as sentinels of democracy, who independently cover the news and hold the powerful accountable, they now have to be concerned about how their pitches, their stories, and their scripts will be received by someone with a clear political agenda.”
Point and laugh at Dan Rather, claiming that never before have CBS News scripts carried “a clear political agenda.” CBS was so apolitical in “holding the powerful accountable” until the last week. In reality, they’ve gone from smearing Barry Goldwater as a Nazi to smearing Donald Trump as a Nazi.
[…]It’s times like these when you relish the idea that a large majority of the American people don’t trust this “mainstream” media that boasts that its partisan propaganda is precious independence.
Graham offered no proof that Trump is not a Nazi, which would seem to be the main standard of proof here — nor did he dispute the fact that Weiss will engage in partisan propaganda.