More fact-deprived MAGA slop from the Free Press

As Bari Weiss implodes 60 Minutes — more about that imminently — Radley Balko has an exhaustive piece showing about the embarrassing coverage her now CBS-owned group blog is giving to the treatment of refugees under the Trump administration:

In a public letter this week, Pelley accused Weiss and her regime of “murdering” 60 Minutes and its legacy. He said she and her new regime tried to “inject falsehoods and bias” into their stories, an allegation that echoed Alfonsi’s account about the handling of her CECOT report. At the time, Weiss claimed that Alfonsi’s piece needed more sourcing and told her to push harder to get a response from the Trump administration. It was a dubious justification, one that appeared to betray a serious misunderstanding of the moment we’re in. This is an administration that lies and misinforms routinely. Falsehoods and propaganda are central to its agenda.

Of course, Weiss understands perfectly well the moment we’re in. She knows she wasn’t put in charge of CBS News because of her skeptical nature or keen journalistic eye. She was put in charge because she has shown that she can leverage a carefully crafted image as an iconoclast and teller of truths to launder MAGA propaganda so that it’s more palatable to centrists. She was put in charge because the Ellisons need Trump’s blessing for their mega merger – and if ever there was a favor tailor-made to win Trump’s approval, it’s kneecapping a major news network and toppling one of the last remaining pillars of broadcast journalism in the process.

Weiss has positioned herself and her publications as bold disruptors, then leveraged that image to legitimize some of Trump’s worst rhetoric and policies. And few issues better demonstrate that pattern than immigration.

A few months ago, a video that popped up in my Facebook feed. It featured Madeiline Rowley, then a reporter for the Weiss-led Free Press, doing an interview with the morning show of Weiss-led CMS News.

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This brings me to Rowley’s coverage of immigration, asylum, and refugee issues for The Free Press.

Bari Weiss has always touted herself as pro-immigration and pro-immigrant. But from the start, The Free Press’s immigration coverage has put more emphasis on mocking the supposed naiveté of immigration advocates and the cultural left than, say, the dangerous rise of nativism and white nationalism on the right.

When it launched in January 2021, the publication leaned heavily into the “Biden’s open borders crisis” narrative. And while it still publishes occasional pro-immigration pieces, that perspective has been overwhelmed by its water-carrying for the right on more immigration-adjacent issues like crime, Gaza, multiculturalism, protest and campus activism, anti-elitism (a fairly hilarious position given the social status of Weiss and her cadre of billionaire funders), and disdain for NGOs, academia, and institutions like USAID.

Rowley, who started writing for The Free Press at the end of 2023, was formerly a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the think tank that employs rabid anti-immigrant voices like Heather Mac Donald and Christopher “They’re Eating Your Pets” Rufo. A recent sampling of her social media feed makes pretty clear where her politics lie: She has pined for the days of prison slave labor, praised Donald Trump, amplified Rufo, pushed general anti-immigrant propaganda, and simped for authoritarian Trump policies like pursuing “fraud” claims against defense attorneys who represent people seeking asylum.

I’ve been critical of The Free Press’s self-described “heterodox” approach to journalism, which has repeatedly prioritized ideology over accuracy. When I exhaustively documented the factual errors in a column about the conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Weiss didn’t issue any corrections. Instead, she invited me on to her podcast to debate Coleman Hughes, the column’s author, then published a response from him that was also riddled with errors.

So when Rowley’s CBS News video popped up on my Facebook page earlier this year – along with language praising the Trump administration for promising to improve the refugee program – I was immediately skeptical. After watching it, I was dumbfounded. Rowley not only lauded the administration for promising to fix the problems she laid out in her piece on the Afrikaners, she declared that these fixes would improve the resettlement program “for years to come.”

CBS News viewers weren’t told that Trump has done all he can to eliminate the program entirely, and is now mocking the very idea of America as a refuge for the persecuted by admitting only Afrikaners.

In her initial Free Press report about the Afrikaners, Rowley did at least include a few obligatory lines about Trump lowering the refugee cap, and how inviting the Afrikaners was “highly controversial.” But that’s a sweeping understatement of what it really is: a cynical, naked appeal to racism, white nationalism, and conspiracist grievance.

In one especially galling part of her CBS interview, Rowley mentioned an Afghan refugee who she said “was essentially neglected by their agency and placed in a home where there was no furniture . . . It was inadequate care.” Her implication was that the administration’s promise to do better by Afrikaners would also benefit people like this anecdotal Afghan refugee.

That isn’t merely wrong, it’s a deceptive whitewashing of the specific cruelty this administration has shown toward Afghan refugees. Under federal law, the U.S. is supposed to provide a path to residency for Afghan citizens who aided U.S. forces during the war. For years, veterans and advocates have said the federal government has failed to keep that promise, and that as they waited, the translators, sources, and informants who helped them were in danger. The threat became much more pronounced after the U.S. withdrawal, in 2022, so the Biden administration created Operation Allies Welcome, which accepted 90,000 Afghans who had aided U.S. forces, along with their families, though only after extensive vetting.

Look for Rawley to be a 60 Minutes correspondent soon, along with Alex Berenson, Matt Taibbi, Olivias Reingold and Nuzzi, and Kill Tony.