Don’t Forget Who First Stole CBS’s Integrity

It’s hard to imagine CBS News’ reputation recovering, at least unless and until it changes hands again.

By Seth Stern

It’s easy to understand why the outrage over CBS News’s recent self-censorship and propaganda has largely been directed at CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and her boss, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison.

First Weiss spiked 60 Minutes’ story about CECOT, the Salvadorian prison where the Trump administration sends your neighbors after its masked goons abduct them. Then her choice for anchor of CBS Evening News, Tony Dokoupil, concluded his Tuesday broadcast with a pathetic segment “saluting” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and apparent viceroy of Venezuela, for being the “ultimate Florida man.”

Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash

Though Weiss made a fortune concocting ways to blame literally everything on wokeness and Gen Z, she is hardly qualified to run a news network the scale of CBS News competently, let alone with journalistic integrity. We haven’t yet heard her explanation for Dokoupil’s bizarre bootlicking, but her excuse for killing the CECOT piece was insulting—essentially, let’s put it on indefinite hold until the administration decides to answer questions it’s been dodging for a year.

After all, maybe Kristi Noem has a perfectly good explanation for her photo-op in front of Salvadorian prisoners (whom she falsely implied were the U.S. deportees whom the administration falsely claimed are violent criminals and members of Tren De Aragua, which the administration falsely claimed is controlled by Venezuela’s government) crammed into cages.

And Ellison torpedoed CBS’s reputation, perhaps irreparably, when, to grease the wheels for his acquisition of Paramount, he agreed to appoint a partisan “bias ombudsman.” He did that knowing full well that the administration he sought to appease uses “bias” as code for criticism.

But anyone paying attention knew who Weiss and Ellison were long before this latest episode. You can only get so mad at the bull for breaking all the china. The better questions are how it got into the shop in the first place and how to keep it out going forward.

Ellison’s predecessor, former Paramount chair Shari Redstone, engineered this debacle. And unlike the crew of oligarchs and grifters now running the show, there was reason to expect better of her. She started her tenure speaking at galas about “values such as a commitment to shining a light on the actions of those in power and unyielding adherence to the truth and an unshakable sense of ethics and integrity.”

That lasted until the truth contradicted her ideology and integrity hit her in the wallet. In August, Redstone admitted to The New York Times that she tired of the pursuit of truth when CBS began reporting critically of Israel’s actions in Gaza. She grew frustrated that those ethics she once heralded meant she couldn’t put her thumb on the scale, and she wanted out. She knew Ellison was interested, ideologically aligned, and unburdened by principle.

Then, Donald Trump sued her newsroom for $10 billion (he later upped it to $20 billion) over its routine editing of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Redstone, like everyone else with a passing familiarity with the First Amendment, knew the lawsuit was absolutely frivolous. Trump and Federal Communications Chair Brendan Carr appeared to be scheming to launder a bribe through the court system in exchange for Carr’s approval of Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount.

But Redstone saw an opportunity to teach those damn truth-adherers a lesson about disobeying the rich and powerful. “Part of me thought, maybe Trump could accomplish what I never got done,” she told the Times, referring to her inability to force her views on journalists. Plus, she needed the cash – at least as much as any billionaire heiress “needs” a few more moneybags.

Her company, National Amusements, carried significant debt, which Skydance would take care of for her. And then there was the $180 million severance and benefits package she received from the transaction, plus the estimated $350 million for her stake in the company.

That’s how Redstone went from espousing “unshakeable” ethics to embracing a Trump shakedown. Journalists did not want to settle Trump’s lawsuit because of what it meant for CBS’s reputation. Directors and officers feared the liability risks that come with paying bribes. Redstone, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to get paid with the assurance that Ellison would continue her crusade to control CBS journalists. Within a few weeks of Paramount writing a $16 million check, Carr’s FCC cleared the merger.

Fast forward a few months and Ellison’s highest profile hire, Weiss, has expanded the censorship far beyond the reporting on Israel that bothered Redstone, spiking the CECOT story when the administration declined to provide comment. As 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi put it, “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”

It’s hard to imagine CBS News’ reputation recovering, at least unless and until it changes hands again. The journalists Weiss hasn’t laid off are reportedly looking toward the exits. And who is to say it’ll stop with CBS? The news isn’t the only Paramount business that depends on a strong First Amendment. What happens if the next Transformers film somehow offends MAGA?

Or perhaps the more immediate concern is what happens when CNN does? Paramount wants to expand its media empire through a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, recently sweetening its bid with a $40 billion guarantee from Oracle co-founder, Trump loyalist and David’s dad, Larry Ellison. The deal would give the Ellisons control of CNN—a longtime target of Trump’s “fake news” tirades—and there’s no reason to think they’d run it any differently.

So far, WBD prefers an offer from Netflix. Ownership cited economic reasons, as well as concerns about Paramount’s business decisions involving its sports holdings. But they haven’t raised concerns about what Paramount has done to CBS, or, better yet, proclaimed that they’d never sell CNN to ownership eager to throw newsrooms under the bus to curry short-term favor with politicians. It’s safe to assume they’d do just that if the price was right. One of many naive fantasies Trump 2.0 has shattered is that of the benevolent megacorporation rescuing struggling news outlets as a public service.

But ethics aside, those megacorporations need to wake up to the fact that bad journalism is bad business. If Paramount Pictures makes a lame movie, there’s little long-term impact. People aren’t loyal to movie studios. When a news outlet alienates its viewers through cowardice, it’s a different story. And though people generally don’t know which corporations own news networks, thanks to the high profile shenanigans of Redstone, Ellison, and Weiss, Paramount’s reputation is now inextricably linked to that of CBS—meaning, it’s tanked.

WBD shareholders need to ask themselves if they want to follow in those footsteps. Paramount shareholders need to not let the company sacrifice itself in furtherance of the family’s financial ties to an unpopular lame duck. And it’ll likely get worse. Weiss and Ellison running cover for the administration will only become more apparent if 2026 brings more illegal regime change operations and all the chaos and corruption that typically follows.

As legendary First Amendment lawyer James Goodale has said, corporate conglomerates unwilling to defend the First Amendment should “stay the heck out of the news business” and make room for people who value the Fourth Estate. If that problem gets solved, the Bari Weiss problem will follow. Serious news companies hire serious editors who don’t kill stories to please unserious presidents.

Seth Stern is the director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation and a First Amendment lawyer.

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