Isaac Saul (21:35)
All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to my take. So first, I should probably start with a little bit of a brief disclosure of sorts. I know Barry Weiss in a distant, professional sense. I've never met her in person, but we've exchanged emails and direct messages on X. And this year I actually published a piece in the Free Press that she edited and worked with me on. In many ways. Before its acquisition, the Free Press was similar to Tangle, a subscription based email first independent news outlet. Everyone that I know who knows Weiss personally describes her as a thoughtful, kind and ethical boss, colleague and friend. I've had a hard time honestly finding people who've spent real time with her and also speak ill of her. And while I have criticized the Free Press for reliably promoting feature pieces that are uniformly anti progressive and pro Israel rather than offering genuine ideological gender diversity, I really do genuinely admire what she's built and I respect that she shaped and sold a successful media business that offered something unique in our news environment. In fact, my experience working with Weiss does partially inform my view on this controversy. Most relevantly, I do not think she is afraid to criticize the Trump administration. My Free Press piece was critical of Trump while defending Politico against claims that that it received improper government funds, and she pushed me to take some arguments further in that direction. The Free Press has been a frequent and effective critic of the Trump administration, and Weiss herself has long been openly critical of the president. So when news first broke of this piece being pulled, my instinct was to wait and see. Like many others, I was alarmed by 60 Minutes correspondent Sharon Alfonsi's statement, but I didn't think one reporter's account of her story getting spiked was undeniable proof of CBS currying favor with the Trump administration. I figured Weiss had her own justification, and probably a reasonable one to hold the peace. Having now fully considered Weiss's explanation, my honest opinion is that she has a few things going for her, while a few things that make her decision look pretty bad. First, she's right that news outlets across the country have covered this story relentlessly and that the story that was leaked did not really add fresh details or deepen my understanding of what has already been reported. She's right that 60 Minutes often aims to add new perspectives, new reporting, and a kind of deep investigative reveal. It's one of the premier shows in news, and pushing reporters to find that angle here to me seems reasonable. Second, she's also right to question the value provided by a two minute sequence within the segment featuring students from the University of California, Berkeley's Human Rights center, who researched the Salvadoran prison. Weiss applauded the group's work in her memo, but doubted that a group of college students researching the prison provided an authoritative enough voice to occupy two minutes of a roughly 15 minute cable news segment. I think that's fair. Likewise, I found myself wondering if such valuable time in a segment of this nature could be put to better use than showing a group of students confirming previously known facts about the prison. Third, pushing her team to get some administration officials to actually sit for an interview is reasonable. Alfonsi aptly responded that you cannot make this a requirement to publish a piece, otherwise a government body could kill a story by simply refusing to comment on it. But in Weiss's defense, she didn't require that, and she offered a few names of people like Stephen Miller who have been more than willing to comment publicly and would provide viewers with a panoramic view of the story. She even offered to personally facilitate introductions with those officials. I respect that nudge. Pushing for on camera interviews is worth the effort, even if the administration refuses it. Yet other parts of the memo look much worse for Weiss. First, and most important, is her insistence that 60 Minutes should explain the genuine dispute about the Trump administration's legal argument, and that the administration has argued in court that detainees are due judicial review. Damningly, the administration has not argued that detainees are due judicial review in fact, the administration has argued the opposite. This is a core part of the controversy Weiss seems to misunderstand. Yet one of her own reporters at CBS made abundantly clear in their segment. Indeed, Attorney General Pam Bondi submitted a guidance for implementing the Alien Enemies act that stated in clear terms an alien determined to be an alien enemy and ordered removed under the proclamation and 50 USC 21 is not entitled to judicial review of the removal order in any court of the United States. And then the administration did exactly what it said it would. It deported men to seekot without judicial review and in some cases without any due process at all. These were the fundamental issues at hand that drove months of news coverage, including here at Tangle and by the way, at the Free Press. Second are the details of how Weiss shut the story down. According to several outlets that reported on the decision, Weiss missed many of the initial screenings and only intervened at the very final stages of publication. This, simply put, is just bad management and editorial process. The story was widely promoted on CBS's social media and network shows, and it was so far along that it was already scheduled for release on a streaming app in Canada, which apparently didn't get the message to pull it. In fairness, I know what running a media company is like, and if I were asked to go be the news director of CBS while still running Tangle, I'm sure I'd miss a lot of meetings. On the other hand, that's the whole problem with the situation Weiss finds herself in, and it's probably an indication that she needs to choose one job and do it. Third and finally is CBS's broader business context. Weiss joins CBS with a very clearly stated goal to make it a network trusted by Americans across the political spectrum. But that cannot just mean winning the trust of the right. The President has publicly and privately bragged that Larry and David Ellison, CBS's new owners and the people who hired Weiss are huge supporters of his and assured Trump they would make the outlet more conservative. She is no doubt aware of the optics here and that Trump has been complaining publicly about cbs, not yet giving him the favorable coverage he deserves. Amid all this, CBS's parent company, Paramount, is competing with Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. And Trump's government could play a deciding role in the deal. Weiss should, at bare minimum, proceed with caution, knowing how any decision she makes could cause CBS to lose credibility with its existing viewers. The outcome of all those factors the fundamental story here is most concerning of all Weiss's memo unjustifiably pushed to advance a legal argument. The Trump administration isn't even making at the same time, the network is under a great deal of pressure not to upset the Trump administration. To that end, Jonathan Shade under what the left is saying is 100% correct, that the administration and CBS have not earned the benefit of the doubt. We should view this skeptically, the same way we would if a friend of a hypothetical president, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, bought Fox News and then hired an editor in chief who demanded it change its coverage of her administration. Personally, I'm skeptical that Weiss would spike a story for overtly political reasons, because I've seen how she works when nobody is watching. But the stakes of her every move are obviously different now, and adjusting CBS's primetime offerings have far more consequence than changing a few lines in a piece from me on her own independent website. If her goal was to actually limit the reach of this story, she's only done the opposite. You can watch the segment yourself, and it is worth your time. Whenever the final 60 minutes piece airs, we should watch it with a critical eye to ensure CBS is continuing to uphold its journalistic mission and and holding the administration to account. All right, that is it for my take today. We have a staff dissent which is conveniently from Will K. Back, who's reading down the main story today as well. So I'm going to pass it back to Will for his dissent and we're skipping the your questions answered today for space, but Will will finish up the pod and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace.