So who is this Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News?

She was a critic of cancel culture who is now a leading advocate of cancel culture from the right.

In one of her founding columns in her Free Press blog, “The New Founders America Needs” from a 2022 address at the “conservative” University of Austin she made sneering references to land acknowledgements and pronouns. (”Now, you can find land acknowledgments at Starbucks seriously, a reader sent me a photo of a land acknowledgment hung in the coffee shop in Toronto”). She went on to say that land acknowledgement are part of the insanity of woke and zealous critical theory.

Land acknowledgemens are a mark of respect

It is highly probable Bari Weiss has never met an indigenous person in her elitist east coast life. Nor does she have any understanding of indigenous history. Indigenous people across the whole of the American continents built high civilizations for thousands of years prior to tne colonial era. Making a land acknowledgment is acknowledging and recognizing those achievments.

I live on the traditional territory of the Haisla Nation. I use land acknowledgements to show respect for my friends, neighbors and co-workers and the history of the indigenous nations of the northwest coast.

There are more east coast conservative columnists and substackers who have also sneered or even laughed at land acknowledgments. One has to question how much respect they have for people outside their own circle.

I have strong disagreements with some of the aspects of left wing cancel culture and deplatforming but Weiss’s ideas of an ideal liberal society what she calls a “coalition of the sane” actually cancels and excludes the majority of human beings on this planet.

Censoring 60 Minutes

Weiss “postponed” a thoroughly researched 60 Minutes item the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador that holds hundreds of Venezuelan people deported from the United States without due process or any pretence of a trial.

I watched the 60 Minutes item after it appeared on the Global News app and was reposted on numerous sites online. (CBC News reported Dec. 23 that the segment was available for at least two hours at day later on Dec. 22, on the Global News app before it was removed.)

I worked for investigative shows at CBC. It is clear the segment was a pretty standard investigative story. There would have been a preliminary edit, script approval by senior producers and news management, and, as was reported, checked with lawyers and broadcast standards, then a final edit. The real horrors of the prison are not emphasized (60 Minutes is still in a “family” time spot). It was an account of Venezuelans held in the prison. The Trump administration refused comment ahead of time, which is not a reason to “postpone” the segment. Today’s government and corporate spinners do that all the time. The only reason that the segment was censored was that thou shalt not criticize the Great Leader Trump and his minions.

According to various media, including the New York Times, Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran 60 Minutes correspondent wrote a private note to CBS colleagues where she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for political reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Weiss responded in a statement “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”

Yet according to the news reports she did not attend any of the preliminary screenings, something any competent news manager would have done on a item with potential controversy.

Her deliberate ignorance and contempt for history, her total lack of experience in hard news only proves Bari Weiss is the wrong person to run a news organization but that is the era we now endure, as the free press slowly dies in most parts of the world, allowing the oligarchs to rule.