Bari Weiss, CBS News, and AI: Not the Right Mix

Mother Jones illustration; Alberto E. Tamargo/Sipa USA/AP

The appointment of Bari Weiss, the former New York Times opinion writer who started the heterodox Free Press website, to lead venerable CBS News set the media world in a tizzy. Since she had no experience in television broadcast news operations, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, must have selected her for ideological and editorial reasons. Weiss had positioned herself as the scourge of supposedly woke and DEI-driven liberal media, presumably a stance that appealed to Ellison, the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison, a Trump supporter who put up much of the money that financed his son’s recent takeover of Paramount.

Weiss’ first days at the network yielded worrisome signs. She asked senior staff at 60 Minutes, why does the country think you’re biased? This query suggested she buys the right-wing narrative Donald Trump propels about the media. CBS News, according to recent polling, is actually one of the most trusted news outfits, and the overall decline in popular trust in the media has been fueled over the past few decades mostly by a steep decline among Republicans—who have been the target of a concerted campaign waged by Trump and, before him, other conservative leaders (and Fox News!) to discredit the media. (A loss of trust among Democrats and independents has occurred but it’s been less pronounced.) Trump and the right’s war on the media has largely succeeded. And Weiss, whose rise to power has been a result of her crusade against the libs, seemingly accepts Trump’s terms—not a good sign.

Nor were other recent developments at CBS News that the New York Times reported: “In the two weeks that she has worked at the network, Ms. Weiss has not promoted any articles or reporting from CBS News on her X account, which reaches 1.1 million followers...As a Middle East peace deal came into view, Ms. Weiss shared numerous pro-Israel opinion pieces from The Free Press, and an editorial that said Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, had failed ‘the Hamas test.’” She seemed more interested in opinion warfare than news reporting. And according to Status, Weiss has been considering hiring Fox News host Bret Baier and bringing back to CBS News Catherine Herridge, who was laid off from the network last year and whose past work included credulously reporting hyped-up Republican charges of Democratic misdeeds.

Weiss’ inexperience, her embrace of the right-wing assault on the media, and her eagerness to boost her political opinions over her network’s reporting are all reasons to worry about her tenure at CBS News. But there’s something else: artificial intelligence.

Larry Ellison is deeply involved in the AI gold rush. He’s chairman and founder of Oracle, a critical player in the AI boom, providing cloud computing and infrastructure for many AI applications and partnering with OpenAI. (He’s predicted, with enthusiasm, that AI will give us a surveillance state in which citizens “will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”) And David Ellison, like most CEOs these days, is looking to AI to turbocharge his company.

AI may well be the biggest story of the coming years, and a news organization owned by a corporation with huge interests in the sector and run by a person plopped into the top slot because of her views, not her broadcasting know-how, might feel pressure on this front. But what’s most concerning is indeed the issue of trust—though perhaps not in the way Weiss has approached it.

We are on the cusp of a dangerous new world. There’s much to worry about regarding AI—most notably, massive job displacement and assorted doomsday scenarios about the end of humanity. But at this moment, a potential peril is at hand: the end of truth. You might have heard that before. The introduction of Photoshop years ago was going to make all photographs—and, thus, all news images—suspect. Yet we got on.

The threat now is more profound. A few weeks ago, OpenAI introduced a new version of Sora, its application that allows users to create short videos entirely through AI. You want a video of yourself reaching the top of Mt. Everest? No problem. Initial reviewers—it’s not yet widely available, but it soon will be—have praised the easy-to-use program and the realistic-looking videos it produces. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s leader, has proclaimed Sora “the most powerful imagination engine ever built.”

But just as Sora can manufacture fanciful creations, such as a dog conducting open-heart surgery, it can yield the deepest of deep fakes: videos of prominent people making statements they never said, of natural disasters or terrorist attacks that didn’t happen, of crimes that were not committed, or military strikes that did not occur. As the New York Times reported, “In its first three days, users of a new app from OpenAI deployed artificial intelligence to create strikingly realistic videos of ballot fraud, immigration arrests, protests, crimes and attacks on city streets—none of which took place.” The possibilities are endless—and damn scary. Faked videos could intensify or trigger conflicts, undermine elections, defraud consumers, swing financial markets, and frame people.

Sora has guardrails—for now. There is a watermark noting its videos are AI-generated. You may not produce videos of living people uttering words they did not speak. The production of videos with graphic violence is not permitted. But clever folks have already found ways to evade the limitations, and other systems won’t even bother with such restraints. Very soon our social media buckets will fill with AI slop. Much of it will be irrelevant and of no import. But there will be malicious disinformation produced to inflame, defame, mislead, and frighten for political advantage, for profit, or just for kicks. How will we know what’s real?

In a less imperfect world, the government might be of use in this regard and monitor and address the most malevolent and consequential AI disinformation. But liberals would not want to see the Trump administration in charge of such fact-checking, and conservatives for years have viciously assailed and beaten back counter-disinformation efforts mounted by government agencies, colleges, nonprofits, and other entities, decrying them as Big Brother censorship aimed at silencing right-wingers. I understand their concern, for Trump has essentially turned MAGA into one big disinformation operation. It’s no wonder his allies attack endeavors to confront such propaganda.

Who or what is left to protect reality? Who’s going to vet the AI-orchestrated falsehoods to come? This is what we need the media for. Major news organizations will have to assume the task of quickly scrutinizing disinformation and misinformation, telling us whether the video of a tsunami heading toward the West Coast or another of thugs beating up a senator or one of explosions in downtown Chicago are legitimate. When a video appears of a political candidate confessing to a heinous crime or telling a racist joke, we will need to look to a source to determine whether that occurred. This should be the job of major news operations.

Of course, the big media outlets—the New York Times, CNN, broadcast news—tend to be for-profit enterprises. Who knows if becoming all-important arbiters of reality will fit their business models? But most important will be if their vetting is trusted. These institutions will have to be believed by large segments of the population—though there will always be people who will be unpersuadable.

Thus, we return to Bari Weiss. She accurately points out that the news media has fallen on the trust scale. But she appears to have fallen for the false right-wing explanation: They’re too damn liberal. Though it’s early in her tenure at CBS News, her ideologically fueled appointment does not inspire confidence that Ellison (or the Ellisons) intend to direct CBS News in the direction where it could function as one of the essential vetters in this new and chaotic information ecosystem.

Like many in the non-mainstream media, I have long been critical of various aspects and actions of major news outlets, while recognizing they often produce wonderful and consequential works of journalism. Yet as the AI Matrix approaches, my hunch is that we are going to need large institutions with influence and reach (no matter if their audiences are smaller than they once were) to help us prevent the truth from being wiped out by a flood of lies. As consumers of information, we will have to learn not to accept the first impressions caused by AI disinformation and wait for confirmation—an exercise humans are not well designed for. (In the jungle eons ago, Homo sapiens could not afford to take their time to evaluate a possible threat. That could endanger them. Immediate absorption of information and snap judgments were essential for survival.) And we will need somewhere to turn for guidance.

CBS News is positioned to provide what might become the most valuable service of the news industry. Yet Weiss is not the obvious choice to guide it toward this mission. Perhaps she will surprise us. I’m rooting for what used to be called the Tiffany Network. But if we’re all left alone on the sea of AI slop, our democracy will drown.

For that list I recited, see this Wall Street Journal piece.

Our esteemed panel of judges tries hard not to fixate on Donald Trump. But that’s unavoidable. At least this week, they were able to limit him to one entry, a rather disconcerting comment. Talking to reporters at the White House, Trump declared, “We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again. We just can't let that happen...I know Kash is working on it, everybody is working on it. And certainly Tulsi is working on it. We can't let that happen again to our country."

Trump seemed to be saying that no Democrat will be allowed to win another national election—and that he will use the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA to make sure of that. This is a full-scale attack on American democracy, and every Republican, CEO, and conservative mouthpiece who doesn't object is complicit.

Remember crazy Glenn Beck, who became a right-wing hero during the tea party era by hawking conspiracy theories claiming that Obama was setting up concentration camps and scheming to ruin the economy so he could impose himself as a socialist dictator? We don’t pay much attention to Beck these days. But he’s still peddling noxious bullshit to right-wing rubes, including this social media post:

The complete refusal of MAGA and far-right fanatics to accept political differences and their demonization of political opposition is a toxic and dangerous brew. Trump and his minions keep denigrating the Democratic Party and the tens of millions of Americans who oppose Trump’s actions as hate-America radicals, terrorists, and commies. The GOP and the right are striving to fully delegitimize the Democrats and annihilate them. The Ds better wake up and take that to heart.

This past week, Trump, the Biggest Liar in the GOP, commuted the seven-year prison sentence that was handed to former Rep. George Santos—the Second Biggest Liar in the GOP—after Santos pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft. The commutation also wiped out the requirement that Santos, whose schemes included swiping money meant to cover surgery for a service dog for a disabled Navy vet, pay restitution of $373,750 and a forfeiture of $205,003. After leaving prison, Santos immediately started complaining:

I’m betting you cannot remember all of Santos’ outrageous lies, which included prevarications about various elements of his biography, including the schools he attended, his religion, his previous employment, his family history, his mother’s death, and having been a volleyball star. He also did not explain how he acquired the more than $700,000 he loaned his congressional campaign. And now he gripes that New York City, under a Mayor Mamdani, would not be a good place to raise kids. It might be more accurate to say that about any household that includes him.

I do take this ridiculous commutation personally. My colleague Noah Lanard and I broke major news during the silly Santos scandal in 2023. We were the first to discover that his campaign finance reports were fraudulent, full of large donations from people who either didn’t exist or didn’t send Santos any money. Santos was a fraudster, but he flattered Trump and won this reward: a commutation from one con man to another in an obvious case of projection for Trump.

The judges opted this week to nominate Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) for a joint entry. In separate media appearances, Ernst pushed the antisemitic trope that George Soros was the puppet master behind the No Kings protests, and McClain deplorably said the protesters supported communism and antisemitism. 

The MAGA right needs to get its story straight. Is the Trump opposition covertly funded by a Jewish billionaire capitalist? Or is it controlled by antisemitic communists? If the answer is both, that’s a helluva coalition.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) is a MAGA radical who has been an election denier and something of a Covid denier. This week, he assailed the No Kings protesters as did many Republicans, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump (who boosted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown, piloting a fighter jet, and dumping payloads of shit on demonstrators), but Roy added an extra element:

The truth is the Marxist, the radicals, and the Islamists the Democratic Party promoted this weekend—they cannot handle the truth. The truth is that there is a king and that king is Jesus. And the president has been willing to say it, his administration has been willing to say it, and Charlie Kirk was willing to say it, and he got killed for it.

There’s no evidence that Kirk was killed because he was a Jesus lover. The best evidence so far is that Tyler Robinson, the alleged shooter, was angry about Kirk’s politics of hate. But Roy came close to winning for his vilification of Democrats as entirely anti-Christian and for his Christian nationalist rhetoric.

First place was a tie: disgraced New York City Mayor Eric Adams and disgraced former New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo. They each resorted to crude Islamophobia to denigrate New York state Rep. Zohran Mamdani, who’s leading Cuomo in the NYC mayoral contest. Adams, who was indicted for accepting bribes from a Turkish official and Turkish businessman (in a case Trump’s Justice Department eventually killed), suggested a Mamdani victory would lead to Islamic extremists running wild in the streets of the Big Apple:

Cuomo implied that Mamdani, a Muslim, wouldn’t be upset if there were another 9/11.

For these demagogic displays of anti-Muslim bigotry, Cuomo and Adams share this week’s (dis)honor.

Sometimes a single jab can say so much.

There was a strong reaction to the recent issue on Sen. Eric Schmitt, the MAGA Republican who skillfully presents the nativistic, racist, and Christian supremacy ideology of Trumpism. Millie Williams wrote:

It was chilling to see someone who articulated Trump’s message far better than he. 

Janice Wolter emailed:

Thank you for this piece. Schmitt is the type of person who can endure and promote this narrowminded elitism well beyond Trump’s “reign” in the White House. My fear is that we don’t have an individual strong enough to combat his narrative.

Linda Jack shared this thought:

Schmitt asserted that real Americans are the descendants of the white Christian Europeans who immigrated to the United States in the 1700s and 1800s. Mary MacLeod Trump arrived in the US in 1930, Ivana Zelníčková Trump in the 1970s, Melania Knavs Trump in 1996. By Schmitt's assertion, Trump and four of his five children aren't "real Americans."

Stephen Blake reminded us of history:

In the late 1930s in the run up to WWII, the original America First movement was fronted by Charles Lindbergh with basically the same shtick as Schmitt. He was a rabid white supremacist who believed that only white men could master aviation combat. He condemned immigrants, immigration, and anyone other than white men as un-American destroyers of American culture. Lindbergh, like many on Wall St, was a Nazi sympathizer who preferred fascism over the New Deal. Of course, the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor revealed the arrogance and stupidity of his racism, yet his world view persists, as you described.

Stu Rossman tried to strike an optimistic note:

I’m 76-years-old. Regarding Trumpites, it's a sad commentary that they support almost everything he says and everything he does—as long as he occupies the Oval Office. But history has shown that when the American people are adversely affected by the actions of their government, they will eventually rise up in one united voice against those in power—regardless of their party affiliation. So I've learned not to get overly worked up by the current state of affairs—although I do speak my peace on social media whenever warranted. Trump's hold on this country will prove to be just another aberration in the story of America. As always, the phenomenon will fade into just one of many that came and went.  

Stu, it’s pretty to think so. But it’s quite possible Trump and his crew will solidify their power sufficiently to thwart and repress opposition. That has happened in many countries. Populations do rise up eventually. But in many cases, it has taken decades, with much damage done before then.

Beth Bower wrote in response to the issue on Trump’s use of the phrase “the enemy within”:

My brother, a solid proud Trump supporter, is hiding behind a rock when asked what does Trump mean by the phrase. I posted an NPR report of Trump saying this famous term at the weird meeting of all the generals to suggest the military use Chicago (my home) as a military training ground. And I shared with him a few things that came up in my Google search about this rhetoric. My brother replies, "You're quoting Trump out of context!" But he wouldn't provide any proof of that. Your piece is the perfect answer! It has all the context we need. 

Beth, glad I can be of help during a family dispute. Hope all goes well at Thanksgiving.

After seeing a photo of Moxie wearing a Holter heart monitor, Paul MacMaster sent in this all-important comment:

I hope Moxie is healthy as a horse.

She’s doing great. At almost 14 years old, she developed a mild heart arrhythmia. The diagnosis explained why she had seemed a little sluggish of late and more prone to panting. I thought it was just the results of aging. The canine cardiologist prescribed sotalol, which we humans use to address heart rhythm problems. The medication has worked wonders. She is as active and alert as ever. Her appetite is great, and she won’t stop pestering me to play with her. Speaking of which...

“Where are you going?”
“I’ll be back soon, Moxie.”
“That’s what you always say. What’s ‘soon’?”
“Well, not too long.”
“You know, I can’t tell time. But I can tell when you’re lying.”