Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press, has sold the four-year-old independent and emphatically non-woke news site to CBS’s parent company Paramount for a reported $150 million. She was also appointed as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Weiss left the New York Times with a damning letter of resignation after not being able to tolerate the paper’s flagrant Democratic and progressive bias. This morning CNN said that she “claimed” it was biased, just as Uri Berliner “claimed” that NPR is biased and Christopher Columbus “claimed” the world wasn’t flat. The New York Times and NPR (AND CBS, AND ABC, AND NBC…) are screamingly and undeniably biased to the extent that they can’t be said to be practicing trustworthy journalism at all.
Reportedly the CBS staff is freaking out over Weiss’s “10 core journalistic values” for the network news division. That the CBS culture is steeped in “advocacy journalism,” aka propaganda distribution, is proven by the fact that they are objecting to what was once accepted and standard journalistic values:
1.Journalism that reports on the world as it actually is.
2. Journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.
3. Journalism that respects our audience enough to tell the truth plainly — wherever it leads.
4. Journalism that makes sense of a noisy, confusing world.
5. Journalism that explains things clearly, without pretension or jargon.
6. Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.
7. Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.
8. Journalism that rushes toward the most interesting and important stories, regardless of their unpopularity.
9. Journalism that uses all of the tools of the digital era.
10. Journalism that understands that the best way to serve America is to endeavor to present the public with the facts, first and foremost.
The Horror.
Let’s see…how many of those ten principles were clearly breached when CBS’s pride and joy, “60 Minutes,” replaced one of Kamala Harris’s typical incoherent babbles with a (slightly) more coherent version omitting much of the word salad, right before the election so as many voters as possible might not catch on to the fact that Harris is an idiot ? I’d say 1, 2, 3, 6, and 10, a full 50%. Those ten principles are basic ethics: trustworthiness, integrity, fairness, honesty, competence. responsibility. Good luck to Weiss getting CBS to actually embrace them.
Also last week, MSNBC revealed “official 10 principles” from Brian Carovillano, SVP of standards and editorial partnerships, for its news reporting. They are, for anyone who has watched the network for more than 30 seconds, hilarious, the epitome of the Left’s corrupt “It isn’t what it is” culture. I’ll have a brief comment after each.
“Integrity: We uphold the highest ethical standards. We respect the law when reporting the news. We advocate for journalists’ rights. We protect and defend press freedom and the First Amendment. We respect our colleagues, our sources and the communities we cover.”
Comment: If there are any ethical standards MSNBC upholds, I can’t detect them.
“Accuracy: We aim to be accurate in our reporting 100 percent of the time. If we establish that our reporting is flawed, we take prompt action to correct or clarify the mistake.”
Comment: Utter fantasy. A recent example: all of the network’s reporters and pundits denied that Joe Biden had any cognitive issues throughout his disastrous administration. From just this morning: guest Keith Ellison again alluded to the lie that Donald Trump had called White Supremacists “good people” after the Charlottesville riot, without any correction by the MSNBC hosts.
“Fairness: We report the news with an open mind. We aim to give the subject(s) of our original reporting an opportunity to comment before publication.”
Comment: Does anyone believe the staff and on-screen personnel of MSNBC have “open minds”?
“Opinion: The views expressed by our opinion journalists and contributors are based on accurate, reported facts.”
Comment: Right. Symone Sanders, who has taken over the Angry Black Woman slot from the fired Joy Jones, said yesterday that it wasn’t Trump but “France and Great Britain” that made the Gaza cease fire possible because they recognized the (non-existent) “Palestinian state” and “made speeches.”
“Our Sources: Our objective is to rely on sources we can identify, by name, in our reporting. When anonymity is the only way to report critical information, we aim to have sources with firsthand knowledge and to be transparent about why we granted them anonymity.”
Comment: Much of what is claimed on MSNBC is based on no sources at all. For example, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace and “Prosecuting Donald Trump” podcast Co-Host Mary McCord implied that somehow Trump was responsible for a South Carolina judge’s house burning down, because he had been critical of one of the judge’s ruling. There is no evidence that the fire was caused by arson, and there is no connection to Trump at all.
“Emerging Technologies: We use generative AI and other technology tools when they can improve our journalism, but we will not publish content created solely by AI, and we disclose any public-facing use of AI.”
Comment: Using only AI for MSNBC reporting would be likely to improve its quality. I can’t imagine it making the network’s biases any worse.
“Perspectives: We believe our audience is best served when our journalism reflects a variety of perspectives on the world we cover.”
Comment: Then MSNBC has no interest in “best serving” its audience.
“Transparency: We disclose to our audience any commercial initiatives that may intersect with our editorial content.”
Comment: I have no evidence to the contrary, but as this list proves, MSNBC cannot be trusted and lied routinely.
“Independence: We avoid any real or perceived conflicts of interest. We do not accept gifts or favors that could appear to influence news judgment.”
Comment: But MSNBC is conflicted, because it has built an audience that doesn’t want any news or opinion that challenges their far-left biases. It is in its financial interests to continue being dishonest, and that interest conflicts with their ethical duties as journalists. Guess which interest wins.
“Who We Are: Our journalists hold themselves to the same high standards of professional and journalistic integrity in their outside appearances and on their personal social media.”
Comment: That one is especially funny. “The same high standards” are no high standards at all, but technically the statement is true.
Final Comment: An ethics code is supposed to let stakeholders in a profession’s activities know what values it is truly seeking to embody in its mission of serving the public. An ethics code (or statement of principles) that is document designed to deceive the public into believing an organization is something it is not is unethical to its core.
Ethics Alarms 
This week I saw someone discussing Bari Weiss’s ascension with horror and mentioned in discussing CBS’s daring to settle the “60 Minutes” lawsuit that editing someone’s statement is standard practice! Yikes! Everyone does it! Nothing to see here, move along (.org).
Maybe not everyone, but it sure as hell is extensive, even here. Every excerpt from a full statement is editing someone’s statement. There could be no reporting of speeches, heck, no discussion of this point or that from a speech or statement without some editing, other than just repeating the full transcript. It only is when you dive into the details that you can discern whether or not the editing changes the meaning or thrust of what was in the original.
Further evidence of the need to peruse more than one site when trying to understand a controversial issue, and of the need often to go to original sources (not so easy to do when it comes to political reporting).
True. Yet there is good faith editing and bad faith editing, when the intention is to distort and deceive.
Not just any facts, mind you, only the most carefully selected facts, skillfully sculpted and colored to reflect only the most desirable of narratives.
I guess I don’t understand their freak out. They fundamentally believe they are being unbiased and that unbiased conclusion is that conservative conduct is wrong and that reality is where progressivism is right. Therefore unbiased journalism must appear biased against people who thing wrongness is right.
(Which is, remarkably, true).
All civilizations go through conversational cycles where eventually two diametrically opposed ideas have to duke it out before one of them rises from the ashes as the accepted truth.
They literally can follow Bari Weiss’s principles and still mask their own biases in them.
“Let’s see…how many of those ten principles were clearly breached when CBS’s pride and joy, “60 Minutes,” replaced one of Kamala Harris’s typical incoherent babbles with a (slightly) more coherent version omitting much of the word salad, right before the election so as many voters as possible might not catch on to the fact that Harris is an idiot ? I’d say 1, 2, 3, 6, and 10, a full 50%.”
On the other hand, they stuck like glue to #9, by using “all of the tools of the digital era” to great effect.
–Dwayne
There is a sound business rationale for CBS to differentiate itself from the other cable news and broadcasting outlet, as the market for news with a decidedly left-wing slant is oversaturated.
I also hope that Bari Weiss has and uses her authority to fire those at CBS who refuse to fall in line with the new direction.
Again, I hope she’s a quick learner, has thick skin, and a cadre of enforcers to deal with what she’s walking into.
Sorry to be that guy, but I had to pop in to point out that Columbus didn’t set out to prove the world was round (I believe we can blame Washington Irving for that bit of legend). Learned people understood the world was round since the ancient Greeks noticed it didn’t cast a horizontal shadow on the Moon, and ships coming in from the horizon appeared mast-first. What Columbus believed was that the Earth was actually smaller than people thought, hence going east to get to India was a viable option. He was wrong, but you can be wrong and still make history.