The Trump Boomerang Effect: Bari Weiss, Meet Ozymandias - Jonathan Alter
Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, is about to become the latest example of what you might call the Trump Boomerang Effect.
Shortly before airtime on Sunday night, Weiss pulled a piece by 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi about Venezuelan migrants being sent to CECOT, a brutal Salvadoran prison. The ostensible reason was that Stephen Miller — Donald Trump’s Joseph Goebbels — was not in the piece. But CBS News, which thoroughly vetted Alfonsi’s work, had repeatedly asked the Trump Administration to provide an official to be interviewed for their side of the story.
Alfonsi wrote in a note to the staff on Sunday night that the decision was “political” and if not reversed would give Trump veto power over 60 Minutes:
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.
Big props to Alfonsi for standing up.
Here’s what I’m confident will happen next: Weiss will scramble to protect her reputation. This piece will run soon—probably next Sunday— and will get monster ratings, as the bootleg Canadian version already is. If Weiss has any sense she will learn the lesson that Bob Iger absorbed when ABC briefly bent the knee to Trump, who wanted to kill Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Trump’s intimidation boomeranged and made Kimmel bigger than ever. Just as Trump can no longer mess with late-night, he won’t be able to force Weiss to kill stories he doesn’t like. She will continue to be careful about CBS News’ coverage of Trump, but won’t want to be seen as caving again.
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https://open.substack.com/pub/oldgoats/p/the-trump-boomerang-effect-bari-weiss