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

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