Bari was exercising “free speech” as she has always understood it when she killed a story on behalf of the administration she was hired to support
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No matter how many elite pundits fell for the world’s most obvious con, you can’t claim she’s not consistent:
On Sunday night Bari Weiss, the editor of The Free Press and the new head of CBS News, abruptly stopped a forthcoming 60 Minutes report on the torture endured by migrants in the brutal El Salvadoran prison CECOT, where the Trump administration has sent more than 280 men.
Trump supporters praised the decision from Weiss, who, notwithstanding her description of conditions at CECOT as “horrific,” had previously praised El Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele for making El Salvador safer. More broadly, the whole affair neatly encapsulates the bizarre anti-free-speech free-speech discourse of the past decade, the purpose of which has been to justify restricting any speech that conservatives disapprove of while framing liberal censoriousness as equivalent to state censorship.
According to Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who reported the segment, the story had already been reviewed by CBS News’s legal and standards departments before it was pulled.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct,” Alfonsi wrote in an email that was leaked to The New York Times and other outlets. “In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” The reason this whole saga is disturbing is that many observers—Alfonsi among them—interpreted it as an instance of state censorship by proxy: the head of a news organization putting the brakes on a story the government would rather not air. Weiss was recently installed at the head of CBS News by Paramount’s new owner, the pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison, which illustrates the risks of media consolidation, creating a single pressure point for an authoritarian government to coerce obedience if it so chooses.
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The reason so many of yesterday’s free-speech champions transitioned so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors is that their definition of free speech never included the right of others to talk back. They were not defending a universal right to freedom of speech; they were defending a right to monologue. They could say what they want, and you could shut up and like it. The cynicism of the effort can be known by its fruits: an administration that issues executive orders “protecting” free speech while engaging in the most sweeping campaign of state censorship since the Red Scare.
To the extent that there is or was something distinct called “cancel culture” (harsh, even violent censoriousness has a long history in America), its contemporary iteration is largely a creation of the perverse incentives of social media. Highlighting extreme and nasty behavior is the easiest way to keep people scrolling, posting, and interacting. That’s a structural, not an ideological, problem, and it’s not something that can be solved by purging or censoring one point of view.
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When I say that CBS News’s Bari Weiss understood this, you needn’t take my word for it. In November, shortly after being given the reins to one of the oldest broadcast-news organizations in the country, Weiss used identical language to describe her own project: “I think it’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture,” Weiss said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a censorious, gatekeeping way.”
What’s the difference between her “redrawing the lines” of acceptable speech and other people doing it? What makes one “censorious” and “gatekeeping” and the other not? Well, because she gets to decide. That’s what so much of the free-speech panic was ever about: making sure the right people were in charge of what you see, hear, and read. Notably, this has very little to do with reporting the news, which is supposed to be what CBS News does. But if the point of installing Weiss was to ensure that she would gatekeep on behalf of right-wing interests, that is precisely what she appears to be doing.
In that 2018 column, Weiss complained that so many people seemed to believe that “the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst.” Seems like they were right to be concerned. Upon reflection, her conclusion that misguided leftists were focusing on minor issues when there were true threats to freedom of speech was prescient. It applies neatly to the campus PC obsession that helped elevate Weiss to a position where she could block the publication of a story about the United States government rendering men to an overseas gulag without trial.
What “free speech” means to Weiss is that she has the right to say whatever she wants, and you have the right to either agree with her or to shut up. And this is what it means to anyone defending her transparently indefensible actions.