Bari Weiss at CBS Is Manufacturing Consent for Trump's Structural Viciousness |
According to the concept of “manufactured consent,” elaborated by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman in the 1980s, the media carries out a propaganda function in support of the dominant political system. In the United States, this consent has favored particular governments beyond the US government itself—for instance, Israel in its conflict with Palestinians. A recent example has been CBS, owned by David Ellison’s Paramount and under Bari Weiss’ editorial leadership, which has systematically suppressed Palestinian voices in favor of Israel and President Donald Trump.
In another example of manufactured consent, Weiss’ CBS rejected a "60 Minutes" story that made the Trump administration look bad on El Salvador. Incidentally, since the end of last summer, the US State Department has dropped criticism of both Israel and El Salvador in its human rights reporting, merging the interests of CBS with the politics of the current administration. When journalist Sharyn Alfonsi wrote the segment about the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador and what life there is like, the content was pulled at the last minute because Weiss said it needed more reporting and balance, even when journalists at CBS invited all sides for a comment. They insisted that the decision was political and not editorial.
Jeffrey St. Clair for CounterPunch recently stated that “CBS under [Bari] Weiss may be worse than Fox News, because nobody takes Fox seriously as a news source and many do CBS, though not for much longer, one suspects.” Andy Borowitz pointed out that, “When Bari Weiss and CBS decided to censor the report on El Salvador’s brutal prison, they didn’t realize that bootlegged copies would surface.” Indeed, according to Variety, the “report yanked by Weiss about the horrific treatment of detainees deported from the US to a prison in El Salvador has leaked online after appearing on a Canadian-TV app.”
Sharyn Alfonsi did not hold back in her criticism of CBS:
Alfonsi further explained:
Back in 2020, Weiss, in her resignation letter to the New York Times, stated that “self-censorship” and “fitting a predetermined narrative” to satisfy “a narrow audience rather than allowing a curious public read,” led her to quit.
Just before that in 2018, she authored in the Times, “We’re All Fascists Now,” a right-wing lament that basically talks of a center-left discourse threatening free speech by its mere interrogation of the hard right. In essence, Weiss complains of the left trivializing fascism only to cover up the fact that she accepts hard power and state authority and structural violence as forms of conventional wisdom beyond criticism. Cultural norms are not really “left leaning,” but it is certainly useful for her to present them this way. Weiss is in the business of providing security to dominant groups in advancing and advocating the consensus required by the state-corporate news nexus.
Weiss might discount how popular fascism was and is in the context of US history in the first place. When you factor in the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, which peaked at 6 million-plus members in the early 20th century, American admiration for Mussolini, and the regional popularity of the German Bund, the United States has a horrific past with extreme right affiliation. Just over 1 in 3 Americans listened in the 1930s to Charles Coughlin, an outspoken supporter of Nazism.
But you don’t even need to go far back in history to see the