According to the network’s newly installed editor-in-chief, Alan Dershowitz, an 87-year-old former lawyer and friend of slain sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, is clearly the “charismatic” thought leader who should be promoted to the airwaves of CBS News.
The curious declaration of Bari Weiss, the heretical founder of the anti-woke digital outlet Tthat free press Joe Tiffany, who now leads the network’s news division, drew widespread mockery from reporters and commentators.
One columnist said, “Kids demand Alan Dershowitz,” while another sneered that it was “funny” that Weiss thought the way to reach the common American news consumer was to give more time to celebrity defense attorneys.
During an appearance at the Jewish Leadership Conference earlier this month, Weiss — a self-described “Radical centrists” and “Zionist radicals” – argued this in a recent debate The Free Press The hosting debate between Dershowitz and former NRA spokeswoman Dana Losh on gun control was indicative of his approach to moving CBS News forward.
Sitting next to right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, Weiss asserted that Dershowitz and Loesch not only represent the “center left and center right” of the political divide, but that their opinions and positions are “really where the vast majority of Americans are.”
Meanwhile, he decried that provocateurs such as white nationalist Nick Fuentes, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate and leftist Twitch streamer Hassan Pikar had large audiences and popular podcasts.
He said at the conference, “I don’t think they represent the values and worldview of the vast majority of Americans. And so this is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent of people who are on the middle left and the middle right who still believe in equality of opportunity.” “They still believe passionately in the American project, they still believe in all the things that everyone in this room believes in – which is liberty and freedom and individual responsibility.”
Saying that his goal at CBS News was to “get back to that sense of normalcy”, he said that his mission was not to create a “centrist news” operation, saying “they’ve all failed” because it was like “trying to force spinach down someone’s throat”. Noting that “we’re not going back” to Walter Cronkite attracting millions of viewers, Weiss explained how he thought the mainstream press could regain the trust of the American public.
He said, “I think it’s about redrawing the lines that fall within the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture. And I don’t mean that in a censorship gatekeeping kind of way.” “What I mean is, having people … who can be clearly distinguished between left of center and right of center when they interact with each other.”
pointing towards The Free PresidentOf the debate between Dershowitz and Loesch, who hosts a right-wing radio show, Weiss said it showed that “people who have wildly different opinions on the Second Amendment” can have “goodwill, very passionate, very charismatic disagreements and still like each other at the end of the day.”
Claiming that it is “always about who is in the room”, Weiss concluded that the Dershowitz and Losh debate is a good example of how “centrist news” does not have to have “an absence of disagreement and an absence of charisma”, but it can be “explicitly charismatic”.
Although the CBS News chief made his comments more than a week ago, his comments first gained attention Monday evening when the nonprofit investigative media site Drop Site News shared video of his conference appearance online. Drop site, pre-installed blocking Journalists Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill cover the Gaza War with a skeptical view of Israel.
“Bari Weiss says she wants to use her new post at CBS News to ‘redraw the lines of what comes within 40 yards of acceptable debate’ in American political and cultural life,” the site’s official “She says the aim is to sideline voices like Hasan Pickler, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and elevate ‘charismatic’ figures like Alan Dershowitz and Dana Losch who reflect ‘where the vast majority of Americans really lie.'”
Needless to say, given Weiss’s pro-Israel stance and the amount of controversy he has already generated in his short tenure as head of CBS News, it didn’t take long for criticism to mount over his comments about the need to sideline “charismatic” mainstream figures like Dershowitz.
“I saw some teens today. I asked them who best represents them. They told me that Gen Alphas and Zoomers are demanding more and more clips of Alan Dershowitz on TikTok and Instagram,” said Hannah Guess, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They can’t get enough of her. She is the voice of her generation. The voice that America needs.”
new York Times Meanwhile, tech reporter Mike Isaac wrote that “Taking a populist ‘we need to elevate the voice of the common man’ position and then immediately following through with it” was a lot of fun to do with Dershowitz. Vox’s Eric Levitz quipped that “America has a fever and the only cure is derash.”
Some joked that “we want more Dersh,” others sarcastically urged Weiss to “please make Alan Dershowitz and Dana Losch the avatar of your project” and “keep speaking up and saying all these things out loud.” Naturally, others also brought up the Harvard Law professor’s longtime relationship with Epstein, asking if “there are any other newsworthy topics you should ask Alan Dershowitz about.”
Meanwhile, Grimm suggested that Paramount head David Ellison – the CEO of CBS News’ parent company, to whom Weiss reports directly – was motivated to hire Weiss and buy his media startup because of what he argued at the conference.
Grimm wrote, “As you watch this, consider that she probably gave this exact pitch to David Ellison and he said, Yes, sure, here’s $150 million and the top job at CBS News.”
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, said, “When you become so good at the idea of a smart young person as an older person, they will line up to give you money.”
Contrarian podcaster Glenn Greenwald, who has been a vocal critic of Weiss in recent months, claimed that the CBS News chief’s voices “are strong enough to be mainstreamed”. Conversation There is always one thing in common: love of Israel. He also took a dig at the lack of audience for The Free Press’s debate between Dershowitz and Losh.
Greenwald tweeted, “The example of ‘charismatic’ mainstream debates Bari Weiss cites that she believes will revive CBS — namely, the gun control debate she hosted between Alan Dershowitz and Dana Losh — has been viewed by a total of 860 people in the 5 hours since it was posted.”
Still, there were some who advocated Weiss’s vision for the news network and applauded his comments.
“Their alternative is not restraint. It is transparency,” argued Mediaite’s Colby Hall. “Put people with really different worldviews in the same studio and let them debate in full force, in good faith, where the audience can see how the arguments are made. Real pluralism, not neutrality theater.”
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