Seems worth noting at this point that Weiss's internal critics at the Times were correct and her many apologists among elite pundits were wrong

LOL "Bari killed this meticulous story because it was unfavorable to the Trump administration" is literally the story they're giving to their stenographer

Almost every story Weiss greenlit at the Free Press lacked sufficient context. It's kinda their entire schtick.

Ya good analogy bsky.app/profile/futu...

Incompetent courtiers being put in charge of key technical positions and then totally botching them was a recurring feature and major weakness of historical absolute monarchies and authoritarian regimes. Anyway, Bari Weiss,

I honestly wish Hallmark Christmas movies ran year long and that people who feel nostalgic for simpler times would just watch that instead of Fox News.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

I'm not saying this to be snarky, but Bari doesn't actually know how a national newsdesk is run because when she was at NYT she was on opinion and the Free Press doesn't count because it was much smaller and explicitly propaganda.

They're scared because there's actually never been a better time for it; the Republicans have never been more unpopular. A ham sandwich could beat some of these guys.

Bari Weiss is the logical endpoint of corporate media. This is what happens when people who hate journalism are in charge of it. The only way journalism works is when it’s independent from the power it’s supposed to hold to account, which means ownership can’t have anything to do with those in power

Woman comes to US at age 6. Graduates nursing school. Work permit. No criminal record. Snatched and imprisoned by ICE for 6 months now. About to be forced back to Honduras. A life destroyed and one less nurse. Merry Christmas. www.nola.com/news/educati...

like, this isn’t a person who you can tell “ummmm as the proprietor of a right wing opinion substack i think i know when a TV news story months in the making about foreign prisons is ready”

this is how you know bari is incapable of operating at this level. pulling rank on some desperate lackey at the free press does not equip one with the requisite skills to try and fuck over a veteran correspondent who’s been on her network’s flagship program for more than a decade.

Spiking a news story the day before publication to protect an authoritarian regime is like stuffing ballot boxes after the polls close to rig an election. It's not how the pros do it; if you waited that long, you're already in trouble; and you're not fooling anyone.

I suspect that what's gonna happen is Bari Weiss will be quietly sidelined (if not fired) but the descent of CBS News into conservative propaganda will continue under whoever runs it next all the same because that's what the owner of the network wants.

maintaining the fiction that cbs news would remain relatively objective under her leadership was a *lot* more important — to the admin, to cbs news, to david ellison and to bari weiss — than killing this story was, and it’s incredibly funny she didn’t know that

Censoring a story about the outsourced regime gulag is not consistent with freedom of speech. But it is consistent with the belief that “free speech” is when conservatives can say what they want and when you can say what they want.

They were never defending freedom of speech. They were defending a right to monologue. The former cannot coexist with the latter.

A reminder: Bari Weiss signed the Harper's Letter.

"Volunteer position" is the most lawyerly worked-over description they could come up with to make it sound as far as possible from being an "office."

Landry rushed to clarify he isn't resigning as governor of Louisiana and this will be, like, his side gig I guess. The state constitution explicitly bans state officeholders from simultaneously holding any federal office.

We’re totally on your side except on policing, immigration, foreign affairs, support for trans people, regulations, anti-trust, healthcare and safety net spending

Why did CBS delete this promo and cancel this from airing in full?

All of these links went to promotion of this story earlier today. All these links are dead now — that's how thoroughly they've scrubbed this.

when they say "take the country back," they're not talking about winning elections

Current issue of @theonion.com nails it again.

Ask any historian, and this is a standard experience. The project you envision you will write turns out to be something different in the end. Why? Because you go where the sources lead you, and you can never get there if you rely on technology that only builds off of established knowledge.

This is a great example of what historians do and what actual research looks like. I read this thread to my former graduate advisor, who taught European history for 50 years and who I now care for full time. He was guessing the next post before I could read it aloud. AI can’t replace historians.

Democrats in Congress have thus far failed to make a stink out of Pam Bondi's ethical conflicts (some of which she tried to hide during confirmation), most notably w/GEO and Qatar. But Luigi Mangione's defense team may force that issue, claiming she had conflict bc of past ties to United Health.

minaj is on the verge of having her $20M home forcibly sold by the court to cover a $500K debt, in case you wonder what’s going on here

Is this no 4?

They see reading as largely bothersome, and want to "get what they need" out of a text--which is of course completely objective and always correct 🙄--as quickly as possible. They didn't know how learning actually works, and they operate from such an impoverished idea of what it means to think.

Building on this, “Feeding AI” also devalues the labor of archivists, while endangering original records as well as the authenticity and reliability of the records. People do not understand that end of the work and assume we can just digitize everything. No. No we cannot.

This. We need this nationwide. I am done with idly letting "internal investigations" be the carpet that we sweep all their corruption under. Every county should have a rotating board, not unlike jury duty. Why isn't this already the norm?

“when did you, jd vance, apologize for being white” feels like a pretty natural question for the press to ask the vice president now

I'm not so easily shocked these days, but it might actually be shocking that the vice president of the United States is as violently, smugly, publicly racist as he is.

Sometimes we just have to admit that we don’t want to hear from people. We don’t actually want a debate We ain’t trying to be “better people” We trying to make the wrong people stop talking and mind their business .

A group chat Vance was actually in btw, as an adult male pushing 40

will note, neither for the first nor the last time, that this admin from top to bottom has zero message discipline and no coherent communications strategy whatsoever, everyone’s freelancing, all the time

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

So deeply not kidding when I say that the current paradigm of "Gen AI" is doing deep, lasting harm to our ability to make knowledge, meaning, & truth w/ each other. Like… it's really fucking us up & if we don't stop it soon we're gonna see a kind of negative chaos frankly unimaginable to most ppl 👍🏾

In one of the newly released Epstein files, a survivor called Sarah Ramone explicitly accuses Clinton, Trump, Branson, Epstein and then-Prince Andrew of rape. www.justice.gov/multimedia/C...

Over the past eight weeks, the dismissal rate of the Trump DOJ's criminal complaints in D.C. has risen to 21% — compared to 0.5% over the past decade. Some errors came after senior officials made public statements that strayed from the allegations in sworn court filings, violating department rules.

I wrote about the conservative quest to restore the "true" Constitution, the Antebellum Constitution, shorn of the egalitarian nonsense in the Reconstruction Amendments, a document that replaces equality with a society of dominators and the dominated. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

The ways JD Vance could become president: 1) Trump dies in office 2) 2028-29 coup attempt succeeds That’s it

From October: You can’t cover Washington accurately and not mention white supremacy presswatchers.org/2025/10/you-...

Censorship. The Plot to Enslave America

People are rightly disgusted by this speech, but it’s a measure of fascism’s normalization that many see this as more of the awful same rather than what I think most of us who’ve been reporting this beat hear it as: a significant calculated escalation. Full alert stuff.

This is straight-up, unvarnished Klan language from the Vice President of the United States. We've had a lot of racist vice presidents and this one might be in the running for top of the list.

Oh, look there: an editorial-interference canary.