Bari Weiss & co put the BS in CBS

This administration’s assault on the media has been relentless. I’d like to say it’s also shocking in the sheer scale of it, but honestly, I’m not surprised. Since Day One of Trump’s second term, he’s been demanding that media companies pay him tens of millions of dollars (Paramount, ABC, Disney), and demanding the firing of late-night hosts who hurt his feelings. These were all red flags. But Scott Pelley’s firing from “60 Minutes” this week is the one that stopped me cold.

Pelley was terminated Tuesday after confronting new executive producer Nick Bilton — a man with, in Pelley’s words, “slender” qualifications for the job — about the recent firings of longtime “60 Minutes” producers. When Pelley met with Bari Weiss and Bilton and asked for answers, they stonewalled him for ten minutes. He was fired the next day. Bilton’s termination letter claimed Pelley had “hijacked” a staff meeting. Pelley called Weiss’ public account of their falling out “disingenuous.”

This is what the end of an institution looks like. Weiss was installed at CBS News as a compliant mouthpiece for the Trump-allied Ellisons, who bought Paramount and now need government approval for a merger that would also hand them control of CNN. Government collaborators are on the verge of controlling a massive share of American news, and they’re pushing out the journalists who won’t play along. First, Anderson Cooper walked away, then came the firings of Tanya Simon, Cecilia Vega, Sharyn Alfonsi and now Pelley. The institutional knowledge lost in the brain drain will irreparably damage an American institution. 

I wrote about this in my book, “The Day After,” putting it in the full historical context it deserves. This is an exclusive excerpt. 

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Under Trump’s second coming, the Foxification of the media has accelerated. Media companies are not just acquiescing to Trump’s coercion; they are actively turning themselves into a pale imitation of a Roger Ailes creation.

The leader of the pack is Skydance Media, which in August 2025 bought Paramount in an $8 billion deal that includes the movie studios, the CBS broadcast network, and Paramount’s cable channels such as Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. The deal sailed through the FCC approval process because Brendan Carr had already shaken down his targets. In particular, he was ready to take his metaphorical baseball bat to CBS News because of a discrepancy between two edits of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign. The difference between the two interviews was microscopic. But it was all Trump needed to claim that he’d been the victim of a great media conspiracy. Even less than the ABC News error, the CBS News edit was barely worthy of a clarification, never mind a correction. The slim pickings didn’t deter Trump from filing a $20 billion lawsuit — that’s billion with a b — against CBS and Paramount in October 2024.

Astonishingly, the media company agreed to enter into mediation about Trump’s fantastical lawsuit, whereas in normal times it would have laughed its way to a legal version of flipping the bird. Along the way, it forced out the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, who resigned from his position in April 2025 rather than cave in to political or commercial extortion. And in July 2025, it agreed to a nonsensical $16 million settlement, which just happened to be the same number ABC had paid the nonexistent Trump presidential library six months earlier.

Under Trump’s second coming, the Foxification of the media has accelerated.

The bed-wetting did not stop there. The same month Paramount dumped a pile of cash into Trump’s lap, it canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which had been the most pointedly anti-Trump of all the late-night talk shows. That was just three days after its host, Stephen Colbert, called the $16 million deal “a big fat bribe.” CBS claimed that the show had been canceled for financial reasons.

Within weeks, Brendan Carr waved the deal through. Why so soon? Was it the $16 million big fat bribe? The cancellation of Colbert and the caving at 60 Minutes? Was it the promise of an ombudsman to root out supposed bias at CBS News? Or possibly Trump’s claim that CBS News would give him $26 million of free airtime? All the above — and so much more. Because Skydance is not your ordinary media company; it’s more like another Fox News, politically aligned with Trump and more than ready to intervene on behalf of their shared political mission. Skydance is owned and run by David Ellison, a son of the tech titan Larry Ellison, who is worth around $400 billion. Larry Ellison has been a top conservative donor for at least a decade and even took part in a call to challenge the 2020 election results. One of David Ellison’s first moves as owner of Paramount was to appoint Bari Weiss, a conservative opinion columnist who loves to hate liberals, as editor in chief of CBS News. That was after he paid her an eye-popping $150 million to buy her Substack newsletter.

Whatever Ellison may be, he is not a savvy businessman if he pays those kinds of prices for a newsletter that might scrape together $20 million in annual revenue. And whatever Weiss may be, she is not an editor in chief of a network news organization. Together, they are ideological soulmates, trying to Foxify a legacy media company. The phenomenon is not exactly subtle. Trump is reshaping the media landscape to maintain and extend his grip on power. The Ellisons are merely grabbing their opportunity in that Trump-shaped hole in our democracy. “Larry Ellison is great, and his son David is great. They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “They will make the right decisions. They’re going to revitalize CBS. Hopefully, they’ll bring it back to its former glory.” He was musing about changes at CBS just as the Ellisons were putting together a bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a $60 billion deal that would give them control not just of another movie studio but also of cable channels including HBO and CNN.

With legacy news organizations in their pocket, the Ellisons could do anything Trump wants. Sure enough, White House officials made it clear that they wanted to see the Ellisons take over Warner Bros. Discovery. They even talked about the programming changes they wanted to see at CNN. It turns out they aren’t all that interested in the next season of The White Lotus on HBO.

For other media giants, that might be galling, but it’s just the way the game is played in an autocracy. Comcast, the owner of NBC, tried joining in on the corporate fawning and bribery. It donated millions of dollars to Trump’s new ballroom at the White House, even though there was no transparency in the donations, the demolition, or the construction — not a good look for a communications company but a great look for a corporate giant looking to curry favor with an autocratic leader. It was just never going to be enough to appease someone who hates Comcast’s progressive MSNBC cable channel, even if it was renamed and spun out of the company as MS NOW.

If you’re going to Foxify yourself, you need to switch your politics. You need to neuter your criticism. You need to stop being the arbiter of truth and embrace the notion that ignorance is strength.

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Brian Tyler Cohen is a progressive independent creator. He has over 13 million subscribers across all social media platforms, including a YouTube channel with five billion views and counting. His show, No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, is a destination for the top names in politics. His first book, Shameless, was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and his second book, The Day After, will be released on July 14, 2026.