Bari Weiss Let Benjamin Netanyahu Pick His Own Softball Interviewer
from the billionaire-pseudo-journalism dept
What’s left of CBS News recently landed an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a bit of a doozy (transcript, video). There’s a part where Netanyahu tries to blame foreign social media bot farms for the rise in people disgusted by his government’s carpet bombing of children. There’s a part where he pretends to not actually want billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars.
And there’s this part where he likens himself to Churchill and makes some strange comments about Hitler:
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: They implant themselves among civilians, you know, so that they have civilian casualties and they can put it on the tube or in your cell phone. So, yes, I mean, I don’t know how to fight it. I mean, Churchill, without cell phones and without digital campaigns and farm bots was labeled a warmonger in the 1930s because he said, “You have to stand up to Hitler.”
MAJOR GARRETT: Hitler, right.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: And they accused him of being a warmonger. And Hitler didn’t even say “death to America, death to Britain,” you know. I– I think he might have planned it, but he didn’t say it. And still they accused him of that.
The interviewer, Major Garrett, spends absolutely no serious time pushing back against the claims Netanyahu makes. Or meaningfully addressing indisputable evidence that the Israeli government has engaged in widespread genocidal war crimes on the U.S. taxpayer dime. When Netanyahu tries to dismiss the massive civilian casualties in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon as minor and innocent mistakes, Garrett has no response.
Garrett doesn’t normally work for 60 Minutes. He was brought on board from elsewhere within CBS because Netanyahu specifically asked for him. According to Oliver Darcy’s excellent media newsletter Status, 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl was trying to land the interview with Netanyahu when Weiss intervened and shuffled the interview over to Garrett, causing (more) internal anger:
“But behind the scenes, Status has learned that famed “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl had also been gunning for the interview but was upstaged by CBS News boss Bari Weiss, who booked Netanyahu herself and handed the interview to Garrett, who is notably not a “60 Minutes” correspondent. The move sparked hostility and amplified the already strained relationship between Weissand the reporting team at the iconic newsmagazine.”
Not so iconic anymore.
The New York Post (for what it’s worth) also indicates that Netanyahu got to select his interviewer as a condition of CBS landing the interview. Weiss, a self-described “Zionist fanatic,” was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison specifically for this sort of softball treatment of global autocrats, and had already been under fire for censoring stories that displeased the Trump administration.
There’s been a mass exodus at CBS for months as actual journalists bristle at the obvious shift toward soggy corporatist agitprop under Weiss. While Weiss was hired on to modernize CBS and make autocratic billionaire ass kissing exciting, viral, and good for ratings; the whole experiment has been a monumental failure so far, with CBS News recently seeing its lowest ratings in a quarter century.
Weiss rose to prominence at her weird little troll blog Free Press, which obviously hasn’t translated well to running a television network. Case in point: Weiss’ preferred new CBS News anchor, Tony Dokoupil, is having to broadcast the network’s coverage on Trump’s China visit from Taiwan because Weiss and friends failed to secure his visa on time for the trip. This mirrors other similar competency issues like Weiss making last-minute unapproved changes to teleprompter text that screws up broadcasts.
Beyond the clownish nature of it all, it remains an open question who this sort of stuff is actually for (beyond the extremely rich people endlessly trying to control information flow). Despite having a massive fortune, Ellison seems incapable of creating propaganda people actually want to watch, and even their target audience — center-right bigots with impaired critical thinking faculties — aren’t tuning in because they have a universe of other terrible (but far more entertaining) choices.
Like Jeff Bezos’ sad and desperate effort to repurpose the Washington Post into what now feels like a satirical billionaire-coddling rag, all the money in the world can’t seem to produce class warfare agitprop actual human beings want to consume. Almost as if the behaviors of the global authoritarian extraction class are starting to reach a point where they’re simply too heinous and ham-handed to spin.
Filed Under: bari weiss, benjamin netanyahu, gaza, journalism, larry ellison, major garrett, media, propaganda, softball interviews, war crimes
Companies: cbs, cbs news, paramount
Comments on “Bari Weiss Let Benjamin Netanyahu Pick His Own Softball Interviewer”
“Put it on the tube”
He even speaks like he’s from Churchill’s era. Not surprising he does war crimes like it.
There’s only about 4000 billionaires in the world in total. That’s a very extinctable number.
What else would you expect from Fox news?
Interview
Extremely rich people have been trying to control information flow for a long time.
The only difference now, is that not all are from the extreme left.
Re:
What a stupid fucking thing you’ve said here.
Re:
There’s never been an “extreme left” anywhere near the levers of power in this country. Shit head.
Re:
That’s cute, that you think there are billionaires who are leftists. At best, you’ll find centrists who lean an inch to the left, because nobody becomes a billionaire without doing things that would anger most leftists.
Re:
Apparently “extreme left” means “basic press freedoms and human rights, but not that much or we’ll upset our donors” but go on outing yourself as a horrible human being I guess.
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Please, share the list of those socialist billionaires that rule everything, and no, Neoliberal George Soros doesn’t count, you assholes just pretend he does because you don’t much care for his religious and ethnic background for some reason.
OK, Bibi, we get it that you think Hitler was better than the Palestinians.
Re:
It’s always the same rhetoric: attacking Israel is attacking all the Jews in the world.
And as no Jewish state/country was existing for Hitler to destroy it, he couldn’t had killed all Jews in the world, but now it exists so Jews became a bigger target than during WWII.
So for Weiss, Israel = all Jews, and so all Jews must support Israel. That’s how she genuinely thinks Netanyahu is some kind of hero, and not doesn’t deserve the arrest warrants for war crime issued by the International Criminal Court.
If the person you interviewed leaves happy odds are good you've been used
An interviewer willing to hold the other person’s feet to the fire over their statements and positions and accepting that they might only get the one interview because they pissed off the other person so much that they’re not willing to come back for a second is a good way to get actual journalism done.
An interviewer who only lobs softball questions, was handpicked by the person being interviewed and is perfectly happy to nod along agreeably to anything said is how you get propaganda and/or unpaid PR releases.