Everyone is up in arms, and rightly so, about what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS News in general and 60 Minutes in particular. The firing of Scott Pelley will reverberate in American journalism history as a symbolic execution of the single most groundbreaking and successful news program in the annals of U.S. broadcast television. Two of the program’s other prominent on-air correspondents were fired, as well, and we’ve seen countless news stories this week about the chaos and turmoil that have resulted. Three of the show’s remaining correspondents—Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, and Jon Wertheim—reportedly huddled this week to discuss their next move; Stahl is currently out of contract.

This is a tempestuous time at one of the nation’s most staid journalistic institutions. But let’s back up a minute to appreciate how we got here. How did someone like Weiss, with no broadcast news experience, get put in charge of the network with the longest and proudest news tradition in the country? Well, we know the answer to that question. David Ellison, head of Paramount (which owned CBS), hired her last October, three months after the Trump administration approved the takeover of Paramount by Ellison’s company, Skydance. Before that, of course, Weiss had started up the very successful Free Press newsletter, devoted mainly to attacking left-wing wokery and cancel culture for dedicated subscribers.

But the pivotal moment, or actually moments, in her career came before that. The first was her hiring, in April 2017, by The New York Times. The second was her famous departure from that same paper, which she cynically and shamelessly used to get a bevy of wealthy, angry, rich men to stake her to the Free Press. You know that saying about how sometimes liberals are so open-minded that their brains start falling out their ears? Weiss’s ascent provides a lesson in how liberal institutions can sometimes place such value on proving that they’re open-minded that other liberal values, like standing for actual liberal things in the world, get tossed aside.

On April 12, 2017, as the nation’s most important newspaper was settling into the first Trump era, the honchos of the Times made an announcement. They were hiring Bret Stephens away from The Wall Street Journal. Stephens was, of course, conservative in outlook. He made for the third conservative at the generally liberal op-ed page, after longtimer David Brooks and the comparatively youthful Ross Douthat.

Well … OK, then. Brooks had been at the paper since the 1990s; Douthat since 2009. One could maybe, possibly justify adding a third after Trump’s election, to "understand" the conservative mind and the sentiment apparently flowing across this great land (even though that sentiment won 2.8 million fewer votes than liberal sentiment, but never mind that). Mind you, though, that it sure isn’t as if The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times and the New York Post started making an effort to understand the liberal mind after Barack Obama won. The Journal has one nonconservative columnist, William Galston of the Brookings Institution, who is a friend of mine and can fairly be described as liberal-centrist. The Washington Times and the New York Post, from what I can see, have zero.

But fine. Stephens. One might have thought that would have been enough. But no! A mere two days later, on April 14, came the beaming announcement that the Grey Lady was nabbing its second Journal opinionista of the week and hiring Weiss: "It is with great excitement today that we announce that we’ll be expanding the desk’s range, voice, and reach with the hiring of Bari Weiss." The announcement explained that Weiss would be "commissioning the kinds of quick, off-the-news pieces that are such a critical part" of our yadda-yadda-yadda and would be doing so with the "signature verve and humor" so evident in her Journal oeuvre.

That’s one of those eye-of-the-beholder questions. Here is her Journal corpus, at least the written part of it. Look, we’re all predictable to some extent, your humble servant included. I wouldn’t deny it for a second. But Weiss’s Journal pieces were predictable in a specific way that allows us reasonably to question precisely what the nation’s, nay the world’s, most important liberal opinion page found so alluring in them. Just sample these headlines: "The PC Police Outlaw Make-Believe"; "Is That Libidinous Latina Taco Gay or Bi?"; "Camille Paglia: a Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues."

A representative piece, from June 2015, called "Love Among the Ruins," chides those celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision that legalized gay marriage. Oh, don’t misunderstand—Weiss supported the decision, of course! But she found it troubling that the messages "blowing up" her phone were wholly focused on Obergefell v. Hodges with not one person taking time to decry the recent mass shooting in Tunisia or the terrorist attack in France.

In other words: "The left" is so obsessed with its narrow, woke agenda that it doesn’t care about mass shootings or terrorism. It’s gibberish. Obviously, people can celebrate something they support without feeling some overwhelming, Dostoyevskian guilt about suffering on the other side of the world. Besides, I am 100 percent certain that if she’d bothered to look, she could have found quotes from Democratic politicians and human rights groups and other wokesters denouncing those tragic events. But the key to writing a column like that is not bothering to look. Smart liberals know that conservative trick and know not to indulge it.

But anyway. They hired Weiss. You would have thought that would have been enough. But no! Two years later, the Times hired a young conservative firebrand named Adam Rubenstein, who also had The Wall Street Journal on his résumé.

Nothing unusual happened for a while. Then, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, the Times ran the instantly infamous op-ed by GOP Senator Tom Cotton arguing that it was time for the military to restore order. That contention, when put that way, is controversial but not necessarily objectionable. But many of Cotton’s particular assertions were extreme. To take one example, addressed by the Times in a later editor’s note: "For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of ‘cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa’; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece."

Editors also should have done more to square the case he made in his op-ed with the rhetoric he’d previously deployed to make the same case, in which he called for the invocation of the Insurrection Act (which the piece cited) and further recommended that "no quarter" be given to targeted demonstrators. As David French pointed out, "no quarter"—which mean enemies should be killed on the battlefield rather than be taken prisoner—"has been a war crime since Abraham Lincoln signed the Lieber Code in 1863." By not forcing Cotton to reconcile the position in his op-ed with the more incendiary ideas that inspired it, the Times editors laundered his original demand for violent extremism into erasure.

Rubenstein edited the piece, encouraging the inclusion of photos of federal troops protecting Black students in the 1960s South, as if people protesting the violent, nine-minute murder of a citizen were analogous to racist hordes denying rights to other citizens. A huge controversy ensued.

Weiss apparently had nothing to do with the piece, but she cynically seized on the opportunity the fracas presented to resign, citing a deeply inhospitable workplace. She announced her decision on her website, in a roughly 1,500-word letter to the Times’ publisher, rebuking him for allowing other Times employees to say rude (and admittedly sometimes quite vicious, if her account was accurate) things about her.

The letter went into several details that in most workplaces, probably including The New York Times, are typically thought and assumed to be private and confidential. But naturally, to some, revealing these behind-the-curtain anecdotes marked Weiss as a truth-teller and a martyr. And this, along with her general profile of alerting the elites to the latest lunacy at the Dalton School (and her rabidly pro-Israel stance), is what made her a hero to men like David Ellison. She started a Substack originally called "Common Sense," which morphed into the Free Press after she raised capital from people like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Bobby Kotick, and Howard Schultz. The first three are all Republicans (Andreessen was once a Democrat), and Schultz is an independent.

For her own part, Weiss always used to call herself a centrist-liberal or a sane liberal or some such thing. That may have been true at some point, to some extent. But now, it’s quite clear that she is not just conservative, she’s MAGA. Maybe not in her heart, but overwhelmingly in her actions, and it’s actions that matter. She was placed at CBS by Ellison to crush the left and advance Donald Trump’s agenda, so it’s no surprise that that is precisely what she’s doing. And no matter her level of incompetence, she’ll stay there as long as she’s doing that—and as long as she’s not killing the stock price.

And it all can be traced back to that week in April 2017, when The New York Times decided it had to be broad-minded in the wake of the election of the most narrow-minded man to occupy the White House since Andrew Johnson—or maybe ever. And now the chief beneficiary of the paper’s broad-mindedness is advancing that narrow-minded man’s agenda while destroying the country’s most venerated television news operation.

Oh, and Adam Rubenstein? Whatever became of him? He shared Weiss’s sharp instinct for self-promotion. He quit the Times six months later and took to the website of The Atlantic to write a self-pitying piece about the brouhaha that his own sloppy editing caused.

And today? Well, the day after Ellison named Weiss head of CBS, CBS announced the hiring of Rubenstein as deputy editor, where he is reportedly part of Weiss’s "inner circle." Take that, Walter Cronkite.

Last week’s quiz: "You scream, I scream …" A summer-ish quiz on ice cream.

1. Many ancient cultures had frozen desserts—shaved or crushed ice mixed with honey or other syrups, for example. But in which ancient empire did they concoct the first frozen dairy dessert, with water buffalo milk, flour, and (eeew!) camphor?

A. Persian

B. Mughal

C. Incan

D. Chinese (Tang empire)

Answer: D, the Tang empire, which was in the first millennium BCE. All these ancient civilizations are astonishing, but you can rarely go wrong betting on China. 

2. Which American Founding Father was noted for his passion about ice cream, so much so that he is credited as having written out the first known U.S. ice cream recipe?

A. Thomas Jefferson

B. George Washington

C. George Mason

D. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney

Answer: A, Jefferson. I think this is quite well known? Here’s what the Monticello website has to say about it. 

3. Nancy Johnson, while living in Philadelphia in 1843, patented a device that began to expand access to ice cream from elites like the men in question 2 to the broader public. What was her invention?

A. The portable ice cooler

B. The insulated quart container

C. The hand-cranked churner

D. The automated vanilla bean extractor

Answer: C, the hand-cranked churner. Here’s the story on this little rivulet of American know-how. 

4. Howard Johnson, the orange-roofed (rooved?) twentieth-century American roadside staple, was famous for offering how many flavors of ice cream?

A. 10

B. 28

C. 31

D. 101

Answer: B, 28. If you were an American kid in the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s, you knew this one cold, so to speak. Here’s the list of flavors. Everyone knew this in that America, which is why this quick scene from Blazing Saddles was so funny.

5. Match the classic Dairy Queen product to its description.

Answer: Buster Bar = vanilla, hot fudge, peanuts; Dilly = vanilla with coating; Mr. Misty = ice drink; DQ Sandwich = vanilla between two wafers. I always ordered the Buster Bar. 

6. Low-fat ice cream was made possible in part by the discovery that a certain protein gave manufacturers the ability to add less fat content but still keep the product rich and creamy, preventing the formation of dreaded ice crystals. Where was this protein found?

A. In the urine of rhesus monkeys

B. In the sphincter muscles of certain dog breeds

C. In bat guano

D. In the blood of certain Arctic fish

Answer: D, in the blood of certain fish. I remember reading about this when it happened, 15 or 20 years ago. When I read things like this, I always wonder: How in the world did someone discover that? It’s really quite amazing.

7. In Stranger Things, Steve and Robin worked at an ice cream shop in a 1970s mall (until it was destroyed). What was it called?

A. Chilly Vanilly’s

B. Lickety Split

C. Count Chocula’s

D. Scoops Ahoy

Answer: D, Scoops Ahoy. IRL the actress who plays Robin is Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter, and she’s great. And of course you can now buy the ice cream.

This week’s quiz: "Bustin’ out all over …" The month of June, in history, literature, song, and popular culture.

1. Scholars believe that June became the sixth month of the year around 153 BCE, when the Romans reset the calendar. Before that, it was the 

A. first month.

B. fourth month.

C. eighth month.

D. twelfth month.

2. Which of the following obscure observations takes place on June 1? This year’s incarnation, so to speak, was celebrated across more than 100 countries—but few of them in East Asia.

A. Global Wind Day

B. International Sex Workers’ Day

C. World Milk Day

D. National Refrigeration Day

3. Speaking of days in June, a pretty important one was June 6, 1944: D-Day. Most people know, or think they know, that its military code name was Operation Overlord. But technically, Operation Overlord was the code name of the entire Normandy invasion plan. What was the code name of the naval and amphibious assault on the Normandy beaches?

A. Operation Neptune

B. Operation Poseidon 

C. Operation Charybdis

D. Operation Scylla 

4. What British author described a London June thus: "June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that."

A. Jane Austen

B. Anthony Trollope

C. Virginia Woolf

D. Anthony Burgess

5. In Bobbie Gentry’s scorching 1967 ballad "Ode to Billie Joe," on what day—"another sleep, dusty Delta day"—did the action of the song take place?

A. The first of June

B. The third of June

C. The tenth of June

D. June 30

6. According to TheKnot.com, June is a very popular month for weddings, accounting for 16 percent of weddings, according to its study of 2025 U.S. matrimonial ceremonies. But it actually tied for first with another month. Which month was that?

A. May

B. September

C. October

D. December

By the way, why did I call this quiz "Bustin’ out all over"? Answers next week. Feedback to [email protected]. 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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