Bari Weiss, CBS News, And The Conservative Media Takeover

While media giants cave to frivolous Trump libel lawsuits and muzzle late-night hosts who step out of line, CBS News’ parent company has announced that the billionaire-backed conservative provocateur Bari Weiss will be the network’s new editor-in-chief.

Today on Lever Time, we’re going back in time to understand how we arrived at this present-day media hellscape. Who set this plan into motion, and how do we fight back?

Click here to pre-order our new book, MASTER PLAN: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.

A full transcript of today’s episode is available below.

TRANSCRIPT

Following is an automated, unedited transcription of this episode. If you plan to quote any part of this transcript, please first confirm that it is correct by listening to the audio.

[00:00:00] David Sirota: From The Lever's reader-supported newsroom, this is Lever Time. I'm David Sirota. If you only just started paying attention to the inner workings of the media industry, you might think that America's information environment has transformed overnight. In the past few months, President Donald Trump extracted settlements from media giants.

His underlings have vowed state retribution against his opponents. His administration has defunded public media. The president's biggest boosters own the algorithms that decide what information is amplified and what information is suppressed. Meanwhile, media companies are merging into ever larger conglomerates.

Some have muzzled White House critics as their companies seek presidential favors, and the President is reportedly brokering a deal to hand yet another social media platform over to his billionaire allies, and now capping it all off. A tech billionaire has placed CBS news under the control of a conservative provocateur.

Today on Lever Time, we're gonna give you the secret, untold story of how we got to this Orwellian moment in American history. Spoiler alert, it was all part of a really big plan that's coming up on today's episode.

[00:01:26] NBC Clip: A major shift in the landscape of TV News. Paramount Skydance announcing that they've made Barry Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News and acquired her online news and commentary organization, the Free Press.

[00:01:38] David Sirota: Earlier this week, conservative Opinion columnist Barry Weiss made headlines and it looks like she'll be making even more of those headlines in the future.

Here she is celebrating her new job.

[00:01:50] Media-Opoly SNL Sketch: This move is a testament to many things. The Free press team, the vision of Paramount's new leaders, the luck of starting an independent media company at just the right moment, and the courage of my colleagues to leave behind Old Worlds to build a new one.

[00:02:05] David Sirota: If you're unfamiliar with Barry Weiss, here's what you need to know.

She was an opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times. But in 2020 she resigned. She had defended the Times publication of a controversial op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who called on the military to handle Black Lives Matter protests across the United States with a quote unquote.

Overwhelming show of force in Weiss's resignation letter that she posted online. She claimed that she had been harassed for her political views and that the New York Times was too easily swayed by the left. So Barry Weiss went on to start her own media company called The Free Press, which has reportedly drawn in 1.5 million subscribers and 170,000 paid members.

Barry Weiss succeeded in doing something difficult. She built an independent news outlet. I have firsthand experience doing that here at The Lever, and I can tell you that is no easy task, but in Weiss's case, it's a lot easier when you're a mouthpiece for power and money. The free press was never really independent.

The conservative tilted publication is reportedly backed. By billionaire venture capitalists. And what does the free press do with its piles of money? It mostly publishes cynical culture. War hot takes that deliberately distract from the economic glass war. It's news, and I'm using that term loosely here, seems to placate the tastes and grievances of rich people, which is probably why the free press attracted oligarch investors who have enough money.

Connections to guarantee success. Now we're building the opposite here at The Lever. We're a news outlet that does real original reporting. We follow the money and we call out abuses of power instead of publishing culture war clickbait. And for that work, I don't think CBS news is calling me anytime soon to run their newsroom.

While Barry Weiss counts her millions and her stock options from the CBS deal, the lever will continue to rely on subscriber support and self-published book sales. And the thing is, we're growing fast. Like crazy fast. Over the last 90 days, we've seen a 23% growth in our subscribership. Side note, go subscribe to our free newsletter right now at lever news.com/daily.

It seems to me that lots of people are realizing that independent media is more important than ever right now. Why? Because everyone sees that what's going on right now in the corporate media industry will deeply change everything that Americans read. See and hear from the so-called mainstream. And I think there's an understanding now that this change isn't really about journalism at all.

It's about politics, power, and a decades long master plan.

Barry Weiss claims that Legacy Media has sold out to liberals, and yet she has now become the editor-in-chief of one of the largest television news networks in the country, despite her having zero experience producing television news or overseeing a broadcast newsroom, what she does have is a conservative ideology, which is what this is really all about.

The thing is Weiss's, CBS news coup seems to be a very sudden and unexpected change in the media landscape. Along with other recent developments, president Donald Trump has been extracting settlements from big media companies. Media conglomerates have started pulling Trump's critics off the air, likely in search of merger deals, but as abrupt as this Orwellian turn may seem.

These developments are actually not so new. The hiring of Barry Weiss is the culmination of a scheme launched half a century ago by some of America's most influential power brokers. As we expose in our new book Master Plan, which you can order right now@levernews.com slash book. Our new book traces the secret history of how corruption was legalized in America and today.

We're gonna give you a little taste from chapter four of that book where we reveal how all of these changes specifically in media came from a scheme hatched a long time ago. Our research uncovered never before reported documents, plus a coordinated plot to destroy accountability journalism and make news outlets into champions of the rich rather than adversaries of power.

If that seems like an exaggeration, consider that almost exactly. 50 years before Barry Weiss's appointment at CBS CBS's own president joined a conservative anti-democratic political project and began shifting his news division's, media coverage away from scrutinizing corporate power. That sounds like fiction, right?

Well, it's not. We found a letter where that CBS official explicitly bragged about what he was doing. It was a sign of what was to come.

In the first half of the 20th century journalism swung from the early triumphs of investigative reporting to the excesses of Citizen Kane, like oligarchs wielding their media properties as political weapons. Really, child

[00:07:41] Joseph Coors: people will think,

[00:07:42] Fox News: what I tell 'em to think.

[00:07:44] David Sirota: But by the early 1970s, the pendulum was swinging back towards the muck breakers.

Journalism had, once again become a problem for the ruling class. During the Watergate era, reporters exposed national security and corporate scandals and gave a platform to citizen advocates like Ralph Nader, who were holding power accountable.

[00:08:04] Walter Cronkite (from Phillip Morris party): Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, filed suit today charging that the administration and the dairy industry.

Illegally set up political front organizations to help finance President Nixon's campaign

[00:08:16] David Sirota: irate about Nader and other activists. A prominent tobacco industry attorney named Louis Powell penned a 1971 manifesto for the nation's largest corporate lobbying group, the US Chamber of Commerce. Louis Powell never actually read his manifesto aloud, so we asked another Lewis comedian Lewis Black to read parts of Powell's memo and bring some of his message to life.

Here's what Powell wrote about the media.

[00:08:42] Lewis Black as Lewis Powell Jr.: Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits and the enterprise system to survive.

[00:08:54] David Sirota: Lewis Powell argued that media companies should therefore start deliberately amplifying defenders of the status quo and stop providing platforms to critics of big business,

[00:09:06] Lewis Black as Lewis Powell Jr.: much of the media for varying motives, and in varying degrees.

Either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these attackers, or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes.

[00:09:19] David Sirota: Joseph Pulitzer famously said that journalism should quote. Always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers. Never lack sympathy with the poor. Always remain devoted to the public welfare.

Never be satisfied with merely printing news. Always be drastically independent. Never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty. But in 1971, Lewis Powell was making the opposite argument. He wrote that the news media had become too welcoming of those who challenge Power Powell's solution.

Take control of the media.

[00:09:56] Lewis Black as Lewis Powell Jr.: The National Television Network should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs, but to the daily news analysis, which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system

[00:10:18] David Sirota: in the now infamous Powell memo.

Lewis Powell Implored Corporations to bring their grievances directly to the Federal Communications Commission, which could threaten to take action against media outlets refusing to tow the line of those in power. Sound familiar?

[00:10:34] NBC Clip: Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.

[00:10:36] David Sirota: That's Donald Trump's current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr.

Recently appearing on a conservative commentator's podcast last month. He was condemning Jimmy Kimmel's comments about MAGA. Just hours later, a B. C affiliates pulled Kimmel's show off the air as their parent company was seeking merger approval from Trump's administration. It was a perfect rendition of how Powell seemed to believe corporations and media companies should treat critics of power

[00:11:04] Lewis Black as Lewis Powell Jr.: as these bright young men from campuses across the country seek opportunities to change the system, which they have been taught to distrust.

If not indeed, despise. They seek employment in the centers of real power and influence in our country. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our

[00:11:32] David Sirota: people. A few months after Lewis Powell penned his now infamous Powell memo, president Richard Nixon nominated him to the US Supreme Court.

When Powell was soon after confirmed by the Senate, his corporate friends and clients celebrated the tobacco giant, Philip Morris, on whose board he served through a congratulatory party for Powell that included a FAE radio drama, valorizing Powell's Life, a radio drama hosted by CBS own Walter Cronkite.

[00:12:02] Walter Cronkite (from Phillip Morris party): A great change took place in the life of Louis Powell on October 21st, 1971. All things are, as they were them. Except

[00:12:11] David Sirota: you are there. This is actual audio from that party, which we found on a vinyl record hiding deep within Lewis Powell's personal archives. The party concluded with Powell receiving a gift of a judge's robe emblazoned with the logos of cigarette brands.

There's a photo of Powell holding up the robe in our new book. You have to see. To believe it as a Supreme Court, justice Powell would go on to engineer rulings that equate money to constitutionally protected speech, extend those constitutional protections to corporations aiming to buy elections and dismantle antitrust law.

But Powell's placement on the Supreme Court was just the beginning of this story because a movement was forming. His memo had sparked a corporate revolution. One targeting the media that's coming up after the break.

Welcome back to Lever Time. Lewis Powell's memo prompted the US Chamber of Commerce in the 1970s to create a task force to implement the memo's, directives. The memo instructed corporations to begin spending heavily on politics, advertising, and think tanks, building what we now know as the modern conservative movement.

This is where history started rhyming with the current media dystopia we're now living through rather than deploying journalists to expose the 1971 Powell memo and its new master plan for political domination, some of the nation's largest media outlets and their sponsors. Joined that master plan and began implementing it according to a never before reported document that we expose in our new book.

Members of the Powell Memo Task Force included CBS Vice President Richard Jenks, A BC Executive, James Hagerty, newspaper Magnate Edward Scripps, the second Metro Media executive. Mark Evans, ad Council Chairman Barton Cummings and Hill and Nolton President James Cassidy. In correspondence with a local media president who is enthusiastic about implementing the Powell memo, CBS President Arthur Taylor wrote that he was actively pressuring CBS news journalists to make their coverage more pro-business.

Taylor wrote that the memo quote makes good reading and is in accord with my own thinking that our free enterprise system is indeed in danger, not only due to the misunderstanding in academic circles, but I might also add the misunderstanding in media circles. Taylor wrote quote, I've been attempting as persuasively as possible for the last year to correct the situation at CBS News with some results, but I'm afraid it's going to take a long time.

It's been 51 years since then. CBS President Arthur Taylor wrote that letter, but with Barry Weiss now being installed as head of CBS News, it appears that Taylor's wish has been granted. Now CBS News was not the only media corporation influenced by the Powell Memo In 19 73, 2 years after the memo was first circulated, a group of business executives gathered in Dallas, Texas to talk about ways to implement the Powell memo.

You might recognize one of the presenters at that meeting. Here he is speaking in 1968.

[00:15:48] Roger Ailes: I don't believe anyone will ever be elected to a major public office again without the skillful use of television.

[00:15:55] David Sirota: Okay. Maybe you don't recognize his voice, but you might recognize his name. Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News.

Back in the early 1970s, Ailes began attending meetings about implementing the Powell Memo. Ailes impressed one college president who attended that meeting in Dallas, that college president wrote, quote, Ailes outlined the power which advertisers would be able to exert upon TV programming if they were moved to do so.

And he said that members of the Chamber of Commerce should hire Ailes and focus on quote where and how they can apply leverage and be given the tools to exert the leverage the following year. Ailes landed a job running TV VNA new television news network, bankrolled by Joseph Kors, the conservative beer mag.

While researching our new book Master Plan, we discovered a never before aired interview where Kors said he was stirred into political activism. After reading the Powell memo,

[00:16:58] Joseph Coors: it stirred me up because of some of the things that it said. The American economic system that brought a

[00:17:06] David Sirota: attack like Barry Weiss today, Roger Ailes, had little to no experience running a television newsroom.

Which apparently made him an attractive candidate to lead a political project masquerading as journalism at the time. One TVN staffer said, quote, the Coors, people trust Ailes because of his affiliation with Republicans and because he's not a newsman, they don't trust newsmen. In 1974, the Chamber of Commerce convened a secret meeting to review all of the ways that the Powell Memo's supporters were leveraging media to build the conservative movement.

In researching our new book, we discovered the seating chart and the minutes from that secret meeting. Here's a scene from episode four of our podcast series Master Plan, where we reenacted the moment when the chamber listed its media efforts. Their media outreach effort is massive now,

[00:18:06] Clip from Master Plan Episode 4: including a weekly column to more than 500 press and 300 radio and television outlets, public service spots to over 750 radio stations.

A monthly cable television feature used by more than 200 stations with a viewing audience of more than 4 million and monthly editorials used by 70 television stations. 225 radio stations and 300 newspapers.

[00:18:40] David Sirota: The US Chamber of Commerce also funded a film project released in 1976. They hired Jimmy Stewart. Mr. Smith goes to Washington himself to promote the virtues of free market capitalism.

[00:18:54] Jimmy Stewart: Happy Birthday, USA. What do you get for a country that has everything? Well, almost everything. Government bureaucracy is becoming a paternalistic monopoly that is burying us in paperwork and red tape it stifles initiative and it erodes the basic self-reliance, which is our American legacy.

If allowed to continue, it could bring an end to freedom and enterprise.

[00:19:23] David Sirota: Meanwhile Powell Memo Task Force member Barton Cummings. The head of the US AD Council used his position to launch a nationwide government-sponsored advertising campaign in partnership with President Gerald Ford's administration and major corporations.

To defend free market capitalism against its critics

[00:19:42] Ad Council PSA: who makes the American economic system work. I don't know. Right, and that's a problem.

[00:19:48] David Sirota: All of these efforts were the seeds of what was to come in the media. And what we're now living in today as the conservative movement built its political power in the 1980s, one of its loudest champions, president Ronald Reagan, killed the fairness doctrine that had required time for contrasting political content, a move that.

Birthed the right wing talk Radio monopoly.

[00:20:10] Rush Limbaugh: Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. A program exclusively designed for rich conservatives and right-minded Republicans and those who want to be either or both.

[00:20:18] David Sirota: When the Democrats regained power in the 1990s, things did not get any better. President Bill Clinton signed legislation deregulating the media in.

Which allowed a handful of mega corporations and now tech companies to buy up and control most of what we read, see, and hear from mainstream news.

[00:20:38] Bill Clinton: This law is truly revolutionary legislation that will bring the future to our doorstep.

[00:20:44] David Sirota: And then in the two thousands, George w Bush's administration further loosened local media ownership rules, allowing for even more consolidation.

At key moments along this dark journey, media conglomerates bow down to corporate pressure, avoided stories that Wall Street wanted hidden and parroted government lies.

[00:21:05] Fox News: The White House says it can prove that Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction, claiming it has solid evidence,

[00:21:13] David Sirota: which brings us, of course, to today.

Media industry consolidation has triggered mass layoffs of local journalists, allowing oligarchs and government leaders to more easily narrow the political discourse. Dissenting viewpoints have been shadow banned or simply shut out, and independent outlets have an even tougher time making sure that accountability journalism can reach large audiences.

Of course, every now and then the sound of protest did manage to slip through the matrix. For example, just after Clinton signed the new bill Accelerating Media Mergers, Saturday Night Live writers managed to slip this schoolhouse rock spoof about media consolidation onto the national television airwaves.

[00:21:58] Media-Opoly SNL Sketch: It's a media police, home media control by few corporations. Thanks, deregulation,

Disney, Fox, Westinghouse, and good old ge.

They own networks from c Bs to CNBC.

They can use them to say whatever they please and work down the of anyone who disagrees.

[00:22:20] David Sirota: But that sketch was promptly erased from all future reruns of Saturday Night Live.

Here in the Trump era, there's no longer any attempt to obscure what's really going on. Nine years ago, CBS's, CEO screamed the quiet part out loud. When asked about Trump's assent, he said,

[00:22:39] Leslie Moonves: it may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. That's all I gotta say.

[00:22:45] David Sirota: Of course, critics like Senator Bernie Sanders were once mercilessly ridiculed for daring to even mildly suggest that billionaires and corporate owners politically influenced their media properties.

[00:22:58] CNN Clip: The Washington Post is pushing back at at criticism from Senator Bernie Sanders to 2020. Democratic hopeful blasted the post coverage of his campaign. And he argues that it is bias because it is owned by Amazon, CEO, Jeff Bezos.

[00:23:12] David Sirota: But today, all that billionaire influence is on display for all to see the Washington Post has been politically homogenized and few even bother to pretend that all the media industry mergers.

Defunding purges and surrenders have nothing to do with oligarch's self-serving ideological project. In fact, quite the opposite. If you read between the lines, it's almost as if media power brokers are bragging about their role in Louis Powell's original project, Weiss's Own Substack, the Free Press, which reportedly sold to CBS's Parent Company for $150 million.

Just published an essay from a former News Corporation executive and e-cigarette official Effusively Valorizing Lewis Powell, in the free press's Revisionist history. Powell wasn't an ideological zealot pushing to crush accountability journalism and sculpting radical precedents, legalizing corruption.

He was instead, quote, thoughtful, measured, and willing to listen to others as well as quote, less partisan and more cautious than other judges.

But at least now everyone can see what's really going on. It's right there in our faces and there's very little pretense, which means we can call all of this. What it has always been, not merely a recent and crass business ploy, but a decades long media powered effort to destroy whatever's left of journalism and the fourth estate that's supposed to deter authoritarianism.

And the good news is that at least some voices in Washington are starting to figure it out. Here's Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy using an appearance on M-S-N-B-C to describe the situation in language that you rarely ever hear aired on television.

[00:25:02] Chris Murphy: This is an extraordinary moment because at the same time that you're seeing companies like Nexstar and Sinclair try to control.

Political dialogue and take down Trump critics. You're talking about some new massive consolidation happening as well. The purchase of Paramount, which includes CBS and the Possible purchase by that same company, backed by the Ellison family. Good friends of Donald Trump, of CNN. So you have a world in which you may have allies.

President. Well, in the Murdochs with TikTok running, TikTok, running CBS running CNN, um, showing already that they're willing to fire people who are critical of Donald Trump. That's a really dangerous space for the country to be in. And again, tried and true tactic, Murphy rightly described how this is all straight out of the dictator playbook.

These despots take control of the media space. They reward the folks that run the media companies with. Um, big lavish paydays and in exchange criticism is not eliminated, but it is just turned down so that the political opposition really never has a shot to win a major election.

[00:26:08] David Sirota: So what's the answer?

Here's what Chris Murphy said.

[00:26:10] Chris Murphy: The second remedy is for the Democratic Party to make clear that if you give us power, we are gonna break. These corporate monopolies, and in particular, these media monopolies. And I will say for a long time the Democratic Party was often just as friendly as the Republican Party was to this consolidation of economic power in the financial services space, the banking space, or in the media space.

So if we want to be credible as a critic of Trump's slides, it totalitarianism, then we have to explain how we are gonna put, you know, local communities back in charge of their

[00:26:42] David Sirota: news. I completely agree, but I would add one more thing. If you're upset about the master plan that's now taken control of the media and taken control of the political discourse, you can fight back by supporting independent journalism that's helping combat the problem.

Look, it's not easy to ask for help, but we need it. Our reporting at the Lever, including this very podcast that you're listening to right now, it's funded by our subscribers. The more subscribers we have, the more we can challenge this master plan. But whether or not you subscribe specifically to us.

Please go subscribe and support at least some form of independent media. There's a big opportunity right now to build a real counter to the corporate media's propaganda machine, but it's going to take everyone pitching in. The only thing that's on the line is truth, democracy, freedom, and basically the entire American way of life.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Lever Time. Check out our new book, master Plan, the Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America. A link to order the book is in our show notes. Lever Time is a production of the Lever. This episode was produced by me, David Sirota and Natalie Bele. It was edited and mixed by Ron.

Do. Our theme music is by Nick Campbell. A special thanks to Louis Black for providing a voice for Louis Powell's memo. You can subscribe to Lever Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. For ad free episodes, exclusive bonus content and access to the levers, entire archive of investigative journalism, please consider becoming a premium subscriber.

Head over to lever news.com to learn more about becoming a paid subscriber, or click the link in this episode. Show notes. I'm David Erda. We'll be back next week with another episode of Leverone.