CBS Pulls Report Challenging Trump Foreign Policy – OpEd

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 U.S. 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’s editorial leadership, which has systematically suppressed Palestinian voices in favor of Israel and Trump.

In another example of manufactured consent, Weiss’s CBS rejected a 60 Minutes story that made the Trump administration look bad on El Salvador. Incidentally, since the end of last summer, the U.S. 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 copieswould surface.” Indeed, according to Variety, the “report yanked by Weiss about the horrific treatment of detainees deported from the U.S. to a prison in El Salvador has leaked online after appearing on a 

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