Watch the '60 Minutes' segment Bari Weiss and the regime don't want you to see

Thanks to Canada, the American people can see the horrors the federal government is perpetrating in our names

The exceptional journalists at 60 Minutes revealed a tale of U.S.-sponsored torture, rendition and false imprisonment of more than 200 Venezuelan men in a Salvadoran gulag. The reporters and producers sought comment from the Trump regime, and from the government of El Salvador. They put their story through the CBS legal department and through Standards and Practices — where I once worked, briefly, so I can assure you they are strict. Despite all of that, right wing, anti-DEI Substacker Bari Weiss, who because she has the right ideology for her new billionaire bosses, if not any actual qualifications, currently runs CBS News, canceled the story’s debut, claiming it needed more reporting and an on-the-record quote from the regime.

This despite the network having already begun promoting the trailer and again — the journalists who put together the segment having already sought comment, which the regime declined to provide. Despite what sure looks like an attempt to bury the segment altogether, to curry favor with Donald Trump and the regime, it has broken through Weiss’ wall of regime capitulation thanks to a mistaken airing on the app of Canada’s Global Television Network. And it’s well worth the 13 and half minutes to watch and know the truth:

Everyone who cares about the integrity of the U.S. news business in the face of Trump’s blatantly autocratic tendencies and the rush of billionaires to suck up to him on the way to acquiring and consolidating as much of the media we consume as possible, should be thanking CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi for sending that epic email to her colleagues and getting the story of Weiss’ interference with the network’s journalism out there.

How to not make friends or influence people

Needless to say, Bari isn’t exactly making friends at CBS. Between her self-aggrandizing ratings failure of an on camera debut in an infomercial with Charlie Kirk’s widow, to her weird plan to turn the Tiffany Network into one endless version of the old CNN debate show Crossfire (or maybe a TV version of Turning Point USA itself… though apparently even thirsty mean girl Megyn Kelly refused to play along) to her apparent intervention to spare the feelings of the Trump regime as they continue to rendition immigrants, some of whom are tortured abroad, she is proving to be even more of a disaster than even I and some of her other critics anticipated.

But it’s of a piece with what has been a years-long obsession among the non-Fox cable networks to woo right wing viewers. Having lived through the Andy Lack era at NBC Universal, when the hot hires were Megyn Kelly (for two failed, embarrassing shows that flamed out when she finally did her big reveal as a blackface fan) and a failed evening show for Greta Van Susteren, I can’t begin to tell you how often we had to hear the lecture about all of the people in middle America who were just one Republican political booking or one conservative-friendly story away from tuning in to the artist formerly known as MSNBC. And I’ll never forget during that era, having what would have been the first allegation of sexual abuse by Russell Simmons — complete with an on the record interview — shelved by my network, using the same Bari Weiss lingo: “story’s not ready …. needs more reporting…” only to have a dozen more allegations come out after my story was killed, amidst legal threats from Simmons’ attorney. I even got in trouble when the alleged victim, Sil Lai Abrams, leaked our text exchanges in frustration over the story being dumped. Around the same time, NBC also killed Ronan Farrow’s story blowing the whistle off the Harvey Weinstein #metoo scandal. So the idea of killing stories to protect the powerful isn’t exactly new.

The biggest lie ever sold, besides the one that a failed businessman who needed a job on The Apprentice to appear successful was qualified to be president of the United States, is that the mainstream media is liberal at its core. These media companies, for the most part, want nothing to do with politics (Fox “News” and its right wing clones excepted) and largely genuflect toward the powerful and influential. How do you think we wound up with a near unanimous media chorus cheering for war in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, despite their being zero evidence that either country participated in the Saudi terrorist-led attack? The dirty little secret is that the people who run these networks are by and large CNBC-watching conservatives, libertarians or just cold hearted businessmen who jump at the chance to lean right, or to give Republican presidents and their administrations the benefit of the doubt. Republicans are who give them tax cuts and deregulation. That’s what they actually care about. And most of the journalists who work for those Republican CEOs just want to do the work. Unlike myself, and other opinion journalists, most people who work in the news media are not ideological, in my experience. They’re just nose-to-the-ground reporters and producers — particularly when you’re talking about the networks. Do they tend to gravitate toward stories where people are being victimized by the powerful? Absolutely. But that could only be seen as ideological if you believe that the powerful are their own interest group that needs to be protected.

The tension between media ownership that genuflects toward power and media workers who challenge the powerful is not a new thing, or even just a Trump thing. It’s a real thing. But what Trump has done is to warp the process by insisting that this tension be resolved by the journalists becoming cheerleaders for him, simply because the media bosses already are. Trump clearly want to reshape American media so that it looks and behaves more like what they have in Orban’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China or even Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. That should be unacceptable to every American, regardless of party. Of course we all know it’s not — given that the right has spent a generation training itself to demand that its ideological and political preferences be presented as “the fair and balanced news.”

Tell the truth and shame the Devil

Bottom line: Ms. Alfonsi and her team did the work. Their work deserves to be seen, regardless of how Donald Trump, Kristi Nome, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan and the other ethnic cleansing ghouls feel about it.

Also this, which explains why Bari so loves Kirkworld…