Bari Weiss Has Thrown the CBS News Killswitch

What do you think happens to the next story about immigration enforcement abuses? Or the next investigation into deportation policy? Or any story that might embarrass the White House at an inconvenient time?

Some of those stories will still get pitched. Some will still get made. CBS will still do critical coverage of the administration sometimes, if only to maintain the pretense of independence. But the calculus has changed. The risk-reward math is different now. And at the margins, that means stories that should get told won’t get told. Not because anyone explicitly killed them, but because they never got started in the first place.

That’s the kill switch working as intended. It doesn’t just stop one segment. It changes the entire editorial culture. It makes self-censorship so routine that nobody even notices it’s happening.

Alfonsi’s memo said she cares “too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.” According to CNN, some CBS staffers are “privately discussing whether they can continue working under the current leadership.” Others are “threatening to quit.”

I don’t know how much any of that matters. Alfonsi is one correspondent. The institution is being reshaped around her. The Ellisons have billions of dollars and a clear vision for what they want CBS to be. Weiss has a mandate from ownership to remake the news division. The journalists who are uncomfortable with the direction things are going can fight, or they can leave, but they probably can’t stop what’s happening. If they leave, they’ll be replaced with partisans who agree with the direction Weiss is pushing the network.

And what’s happening is the construction of something new: a media apparatus that spans broadcast, cable, streaming, and digital, controlled by a family with deep ties to the Trump administration, run on a day-to-day basis by someone whose commitment to free speech has always extended exactly as far as the interests she supports. If the Warner Bros. deal goes through, that apparatus will also include CNN, HBO, and a portfolio of cable networks reaching tens of millions of Americans.

The 60 Minutes that broke the Abu Ghraib story, that made powerful people afraid of the phrase “Mike Wallace is here,” is not long for this world. Maybe it’s already gone. What replaces it will look like 60 Minutes. It’ll have the same theme music and the same ticking stopwatch. It might even do good journalism sometimes, on topics that don’t threaten the interests of ownership or the administration they depend on.

But it won’t be the same thing. You can’t be an “investigative powerhouse,” as Alfonsi put it, if the subjects of your investigations can veto your stories by refusing to participate. You can’t hold power accountable if the people who sign your checks need favors from that power. You can’t tell the truth if telling the truth is bad for business.

Somewhere out there, there’s a story about the next human rights abuse, the next government scandal, the next thing the administration doesn’t want Americans to know about. Maybe it involves CECOT. Maybe it involves something we haven’t heard of yet. Under the old rules of journalism, a network like CBS might have pursued that story, taken the heat, and trusted that the audience would reward them for it.

Under the new rules, that story probably won’t get pitched. And if it does get pitched, it won’t get approved. And if it somehow does get approved, it’ll get killed before it airs, just like the CECOT segment, because somebody upstairs will decide it’s not worth the trouble.

That’s the kill switch. It’s working perfectly.