Bari Weiss tried to return fire after George Clooney blasted her for “dismantling” CBS News by inviting the Hollywood superstar to tour the network’s newsroom, all while making an unsubtle swipe at his recently announced French citizenship.
“Bonjour, Mr. Clooney! Big fan of your work. It sounds like you’d like to learn more about ours,” the CBS News editor in chief wrote in an email that was first obtained by The New York Post.
“This is an open invitation to visit the CBS Broadcast Center, where I’m spending the holidays working to relaunch the Evening News with my colleagues,” she continued. “Tune in January 5.”
The Independent has reached out to CBS News and Paramount for comment.
In a wide-ranging interview with Variety this week, Clooney – whose father was a longtime television news anchor – railed against mainstream news organizations for capitulating to Donald Trump and paying him to settle his defamation lawsuits.
“When Clooney played [Edward R.] Murrow last spring, CBS News was settling a frivolous lawsuit with Trump so that he’d approve the sale of its parent company, Paramount, to Skydance. That enraged Clooney, as did ABC News’ similar settlement with the president over a defamation claim,” Variety pointed out.
“If CBS and ABC had challenged those lawsuits and said, ‘Go f*** yourself,’ we wouldn’t be where we are in the country,” Clooney declared. “That’s simply the truth.”
Weeks before Trump returned to the White House for the second time, ABC News’ parent company Disney paid Trump $15 million to settle his complaint over anchor George Stephanopoulos inaccurately asserting that Trump was found “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll civil case.
Trump, however, had actually been found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll. While legal analysts at the time told The Independent that the ABC case “would have been a close call” if it went to trial, First Amendment experts warned that the settlement could have a “chilling effect” on the free press.
This past summer, meanwhile, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle his “meritless” defamation lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris – amid a politically fraught $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media that was approved by the Trump administration weeks later.
One of Hollywood’s most outspoken liberals, Clooney also took issue with the “MAGA-friendly” direction of CBS News since Skydance’s David Ellison purchased Paramount, which has included installing Weiss – the “anti-woke” founder of center-right Substack site The Free Press – as the news network’s leader.
“Bari Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak,” he exclaimed. “I’m worried about how we inform ourselves and how we’re going to discern reality without a functioning press.”
An “animated” Clooney, who recently portrayed legendary CBS News anchor Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway play Good Night, and Good Luck (adapted from Clooney’s 2005 film), also fumed that some journalists and media organizations have abandoned their “mission to hold the powerful to account.” This prompted him to reference a Murrow quote from the play.
“‘Let’s not confuse dissent with disloyalty.’ I mean, what a beautiful, important statement about who we are at our best. But all too often we fall short,” he told Variety.
Since her ascension as the head of CBS News in October, Weiss – who also sold The Free Press to Ellison for $150 million – has faced withering criticism from staffers and media observers alike over her efforts to overhaul the network.
This has included booking herself to moderate a primetime town hall with Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk, prompting network employees to label her “shallow” because it “revealed that all she really wants is to be on TV herself.” Despite the less-than-stellar ratings for the Saturday evening special, Weiss soon announced that the network would be launching a town hall and debate series called Things That Matter, with Vice President JD Vance as the first participant.
In recent days, however, Weiss has faced intense blowback over her last-minute decision to spike a 60 Minutes story on the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to the notoriously violent El Salvador prison CECOT.
Amid speculation that she yanked the segment due to Donald Trump’s recent anger at 60 Minutes and Ellison looking to gain the president’s approval for his hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, prompting the story’s reporter to accuse Weiss of making a “political” decision, Weiss could soon be facing a “revolt” among the network’s staff.
The backlash has grown so intense that former CBS News journalists are drawing up a public letter to deliver to Ellison this weekend, urging him to “send a message” to Weiss and tell her to stop interfering with 60 Minutes.
“The editorial interference threatening 60 Minutes doesn't just betray journalism's core principles—it endangers the crown jewel of CBS News that has helped sustain the network financially and editorially for generations,” the letter reads.
Meanwhile, according to her email to Clooney, Weiss is currently hard at work prepping for the latest reboot of the perennially third-place CBS Evening News.
After failing in her bid to poach big-name talent from other networks to take over the nightly broadcast’s anchor chair, Weiss revealed this month that CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil – who has long been a favorite of hers – had gotten the gig. The move was not well-received among some CBS News staffers.
One staffer, for instance, described Dokoupil as a “mediocre straight white man” who only got the job because his views align with Weiss’s pro-Israel stance, while another added: “It’s an insult to the storied news giants who came before him.”
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