Internet 1, Bari Weiss 0
-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on December 24, 2025
By now all of you reading this have seen plenty about the spiked CECOT story at 60 minutes this past Sunday, so I won’t go into all the details here. Suffice it to say that while I was a surprised at the boldness of the move, I wasn’t surprised at all that it happened. When billionaires spend as much as they did to buy a massive TV property just to curry favor with the Trump Administration, they aren’t going to pussyfoot around using that property to their advantage.
I’m sad, of course, to see the most valuable brand in TV news go up in flames the way it did on Sunday.
60 Minutes is, simply put, no longer a legitimate news program and CBS News is no longer a legitimate news organization-thanks to editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and the Paramount Skydance owners. Every single person who works on the 60 Minutes program—including its highly paid correspondents—should have already resigned in protest. As of this writing, I haven’t seen that any of them have done that, which I find disappointing.
I won’t dwell here on what’s already happened regarding the spiked piece, but will instead share what I think this horrendous incident tells us about what to expect in the future—and how to fight it. It’s clear that Weiss and others with her lack of journalistic integrity are going to pull stories they see as critical of the Trump Administration (and future administrations from which they need favors for their billionaire owners) by citing journalistic “standards” they think the public will accept as legitimate. In the CECOT story case, Weiss said she pulled the piece because it was lacking an on-the-record comment from a Trump administration official. For the average person hearing that, it sounds legit, right? News stories have people on both sides if they’re fair, right? Except if you look at it logically, any administration that wanted to prevent a negative story about it from airing or publishing could simply refuse to comment—and there would never be a negative story about that administration again. Journalists don’t give veto power to the people they are covering. That’s one of the first things we teach in journalism school.
As I publish this on Christmas Eve, this is what the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is showing us.
The billionaire class will continue to buy media properties with significant news organizations (CNN, you’re next), and the Bari Weiss clones they’ll put in charge are going to continue to run the newsrooms with the appearance of being legitimate and independent. But if any stories threaten the current administration in Washington, they’ll be “pulled for more reporting” and never see the light of day. That would have worked this time except Weiss apparently doesn’t know how her network’s distribution system operates and the story went out on the Canadian airing of 60 Minutes and eventually reached the internet.
The key to getting real journalism out there is to take matters into our own hands.
If the owners are going to go through the motions of producing stories only to kill them when they threaten the administration, it means those finished stories still exist. The real journalists still working at these news organizations must work like a wartime resistance and leak these stories out. It happened by a lucky Canadian accident this time. But we won’t get that lucky again. We need to build a network inside the networks that can smuggle out the content the bosses kill. Frankly, as long as the story has been thoroughly reported and has all its journalistic elements, we can leak them out even if they’re not completely polished for air or print yet.
There are many ways to get these stories out and online where potentially many more people will see them than if they had aired or published as originally planned. Just look at the numbers for the CECOT story. 60 Minutes averages about eight million viewers a week. Since the CECOT story leaked and ended up on YouTube and other platforms, I would argue it’s reached a much larger audience than it would have airing on CBS. Looking at YouTube alone, Sen. Cory Booker posted the story on his YouTube page and it has already garnered 1.2 million views. Add that to all the other users who have posted it and I’m sure it has far exceeded eight million views by now. This is the sort of rebellion needed as the billionaire class threatens to take away legitimate journalism.
I’m not saying this will be easy.
The billionaires will fight back. Some people will get fired. Copyright claims will kill a lot of the posted videos and articles. But as in any good resistance, the tide will start to turn. Perhaps the public will even start to realize the sort of independent journalism on which they’re missing out, thanks to corporate ownership deleting it one story at a time. That will be good for real independent journalists at nonprofit and locally-owned media outlets. Fighting back will hurt, but it will make us stronger.
In the Dickens tale, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge what may come, but it is not set in stone. Through his actions, Scrooge is able to change his future, but of course, Scrooge was in charge of his own affairs. He manages to turn things around on Christmas Day, leaving us hopeful his future is now brighter than what the ghost showed him. Sadly, we journalists don’t—or soon won’t—control our news organizations. But I find hope this Christmas Eve that we can use technology of which Dickens could never dream to reshape our own futures, getting past the Scrooges that run the business side of our industry to get important reporting that critically looks at those in power into the hands of the public where it belongs.