Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee at CBS’ Cozy Correspondents Dinner

By Stephen Rodrick

Stephen Rodrick

Bari Weiss’ approach to free speech has always been fungible. Weiss and other conservative students at Columbia complained in 2005 that professors were limiting students’ ability to speak freely about Israel in the classroom. The students’ solution was making a one-sided documentary about their angst. Weiss labeled the professors racist and some activists called for them to be fired.

This was the first step for Weiss in a career that eventually landed her at The New York Times as an op-ed columnist. She famously departed from the paper three years later, decrying the Times’ suppression of opposing viewpoints and whining that colleagues were being mean to her in Slack chats. (One of the great arguments for curbing free speech was Weiss’ essay on Australia.) 

Weiss’ drama gene always benefits her and she quickly segued into creating The Free Press, whose approach to journalism is the conventional wisdom of the counter-intuitive take. Recently, The Free Press railed against pro-Palestinian protests at her alma mater and other American universities when the paper could free itself from reporting that media accounts of starving kids in Gaza was a hoax. The Free Press became such a trusted ally of the Trump administration that the paper laundered the news that the president was withholding $400 million in funding from Columbia, accusing the university of not curbing antisemitism protests, with a headline shouting “EXCLUSIVE.”

Last year, David Ellison’s Skydance bought Weiss’ paper for $150 million in a series of transactions that ended with the company purchasing CBS. Now Weiss runs CBS News, where a senior producer was recently frog marched out of the building a few days after pleading with new anchor Tony Dokoupil to ask Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tougher questions in the wake of the United States’ undeclared war on Iran. Dokoupil had earlier proclaimed that his CBS Nightly News would be more “transparent” than Walter Cronkite’s version. This can only be true if Cronkite had argued that the Vietnam War was a great idea up to the last helo leaving Saigon in 1975.

Editor’s picks

The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far

The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

All the pieces were clicking into place like a toddler’s Duplos, so it wasn’t a surprise when Weiss’ CBS and parent company Paramount announced they would host noted free speech advocates Hegseth, deportation czar Stephen Miller and FCC chairman Brendan Carr at this weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C. The soiree will feature a keynote speech from Donald Trump, another noted friend of the press. It has been reported that Trump’s remarks will involve the listing of grievances and verbally beating the shit out of the press with an aluminum bat.

Miller’s long war on the press has been well documented, but in Trump’s second term he has maintained more of a dark wizard operating the mouth of a foul-mouthed Oz, and working the gears and levels of a government terrorizing brown people. Still, he has occasionally reverted to form. The Washington Post reported in 2025 Miller that accused the media of siding with “terrorists” in its coverage of undocumented immigrants, told them they live in condos in nice areas and decried the “cancerous, communist, woke culture that is destroying this country.”

It’s almost the weekend so let’s just hit the whoppers in Hegseth’s high intensity war against freedom of speech and the press. Shortly after his confirmation, Hegseth evicted all the actual reporters from the Pentagon, replacing The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN with Breitbart and right-wing huckster Cam Higby. I guess this really isn’t that bad once you consider that noted bald podcaster Tim Pool was asking questions at the White House. (Hegseth’s actions were recently thrown out of court with the judge labeling the move as, uh, a violation of the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech.) 

Last week, Hegseth denounced reporters’ coverage of the war as “garbage” and “incredibly unpatriotic.” He then made an analogy that the press was like the Pharisees, the ancient elites in the New Testament that hounded Jesus. This made Hegseth the silver medalist in the administration’s weekly “We are the Jesus” competition to Trump’s Last Temptation of Christ robe-wearing cosplay.

Related Content

Of course, this would have received more attention if Hegseth’s libertine brother Kash Patel wasn’t investigating a New York Times reporter because he didn’t like their coverage. Hegseth is still trying to keep up, just yesterday the Defense Department fired the ombudsman for Stars and Stripes, a government-run but independent military newspaper, who is responsible, here we are again, for maintaining the paper’s dedication to freedom of the press. 

FCC Commissioner Carr’s actions against the media have been classic hatchet man. He leaned on ABC affiliates to cancel Jimmy Kimmel after the comedian’s remarks on Charlie Kirk, saying things could either go “the easy way or the hard way.” Last month, Carr decried the media’s coverage of the war, posting: “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.”

Carr’s seat at the CBS/Paramount table is the most obvious tell, since he cheered for Ellison’s Skydance purchase of the network. “The new owners of CBS came in and said, ‘It’s time for a change. We’re going to reorient it towards getting rid of bias,’” Carr said. 

There was a tariff of course. Carr leaned on CBS first to pay $16 million to Donald Trump for what the administration saw as unfair editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. Now, Bari Weiss edits 60 Minutes. 

And the beat goes on.

It’s not hard to see what Weiss gets out of putting her dignity in a blind trust by hosting The Three Amigos of the media apocalypse. (She got an early start on the weekend by dining with Trump last night at a dinner hosted by Ellison). Weiss and Ellison are simpatico in their ardent support of Israel and know they must make hay with Trump over the next 33 months. They both know a deep reckoning on American-Israeli relations is coming under the next president whether it be a Republican or Democrat. Every day, they’re burning daylight.

What is harder to see is what America gets out of it other than a knowledge that the deep state still exists with only the name tags changed. This was all foretold by a columnist writing after the 2020 election.

Trending Stories