CNN and MS NOW Spotlight the Insular, Self-Righteous Media Culture Bari Weiss Is Trying to Fix in Coverage of CBS Drama

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Would you turn to a Boston Red Sox fan for an evaluation of Derek Jeter? What about Amber Heard for Johnny Depp? Bill Clinton for Ken Starr?

At CNN and MS NOW, where segments are often constructed with the objective of providing a particular, partisan answer rather than producing an interesting, well-rounded debate, they might say yes.

On Wednesday’s edition of the latter’s Deadline: White House, host Nicolle Wallace professed to be “nervous” to discuss the news cycle-consuming drama at CBS over the firing of Scott Pelley.

“I’m such a fan of both of yours. I never mis anything either of you say,” Wallace told ex-CNN stars Jim Acosta and Don Lemon, both of whom have since established themselves as, if not far-left, reliably left-wing voices in independent media. What followed was an embarrassment to all involved in producing it.

Lemon said he was “triggered” by Pelley’s departure following the 60 Minutes star’s unprofessional outburst at a staff meeting on Monday.

Acosta insisted that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and the Ellison family, her bosses at Paramount Skydance are “trying to put together a state-dominated media system.”

Wallace asserted that a nefarious “they” had already “made a lot of progress toward destroying the free press,” citing the existence of Fox News and The Washington Post‘s tack toward the center as proof.

The whole ensemble sounded like more like a group of failing-out college freshmen in a remedial program who had been treated like Very Special™ boys and girls for too long by their parents than like thoughtful adult commentators they have, at least in theory, been well-compensated to be.

An hour later on CNN, Jake Tapper assembled another ideologically homogenous group composed of Scott MacFarlane, the CBS alum who fled for deep blue waters of MeidasTouch earlier this year and Terry Moran, the former ABC News White House correspondent who was fired last year over a tweet about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller in which he declared that “what’s interesting about Miller is “not brains,” but “bile.”

Anyway, guess where these two came down on the goings-on at CBS?

Sure enough, MacFarlane deemed Pelley “the living Mount Rushmore at CBS News,” while Moran submitted that “There’s one reason this is happening, which is that the management at CBS wants to curry favor with [Donald] Trump, because the new owner of CBS wants his business interests to come out correctly, by his lights, under the Trump administration.”

Tapper steered the conversation much more ably than Wallace and acknowledged Weiss’s view that CBS has long had a “liberal spin” and  “untrusted by the American people,” but it was more lip service than earnest effort to represent the other side.

And that’s why, try as they might to discredit and smear her, Weiss’s peers just keep substantiating her argument.

No one working on Wallace or Tapper’s show raised their hand to suggest that they seek out a panelist with a more sympathetic view of the reform effort at CBS (Tapper noted that CBS had declined to offer up a representative, but that should hardly come as a surprise given the inherent PR and potential legal pitfalls) rather than running the tedious three-man weave they ended up with.

And that’s why there was no one to point out that CBS has continued to hold Trump’s feet to the fire on Weiss’s watch.

Or that Pelley’s tantrum in front of 60 Minutes’ staff would be grounds for dismissal in any industry.

Or that Sharyn Alfonsi, one of the correspondents whose departure led to Pelley’s meltdown, had tarnished the show’s reputation with a botched hit piece on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R).

Or that the movement of one media organization ever-so-slightly to the right hardly constitutes an attack on the First Amendment or free press.

So while the panelists articulated the predictable answers they were invited to deliver, they also exemplified the insular, self-righteous media culture that Weiss is appropriately eager to blow up.

Watch above via MS NOW and CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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