The media meltdown over Bari Weiss at CBS News pulling a 60 Minutes segment from a discredited reporter over basic journalistic issues has now gone past personal attacks and into outright libels and lies.
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer published an article claiming that “Weiss, who, notwithstanding her description of conditions at CECOT as ‘horrific,’ had previously praised El Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele for making El Salvador safer.”
Serwer’s basis for this was Zeteo, Mehdi Hasan’s site, which has all the politics you expect from a veteran of Al Jazeera. Quoting Zeteo is already a horrendous move. But it’s pretty clear that Serwer was quoting this based on Zeteo’s social media graphics which claim that Bari Weiss praised Bukele.
The actual Zeteo post states that…“’The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax.’ This is what Bari Weiss’s The Free Press wrote in April about CECOT – the infamous mega prison in El Salvador.”
And then “Weiss separately gushed about the popularity of El Salvador’s president, who describes himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,” and how safe he’s made the Central American nation.”
Zeteo predictably provides no source for either claim.
The “’The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax” line comes from a Free Press TGIF humor column not written by Bari Weiss. And the piece doesn’t actually praise El Salvador or Bukele. There’s no citation or source for the claim that Weiss praised Bukele. The fact that Serwer linked to Zeteo and Zeteo linked to nothing and offered no actual quote suggests that the source either doesn’t exist or has been badly misrepresented.
From here this looks like straight-up libel of a familiar kind in which the media launders social media claims.
This comes a day after the New Yorker tweeted an article by its editor, David Remnick, which mentioned the fake Epstein-Nassar-Trump letter and the line “Whether or not the letter is valid”.
This behavior is making Bari Weiss’ points about fair journalism far better than her own letter could. The media has become a pathological factory of lies in which anything that serves the right political purpose is rushed out the door, even if it’s completely false. Every accusation being directed at her is really a confession. The media is willing to tell any lie. It has no shame, no standards and nothing except a desire to score political victories at any cost.
The media has become less credible than the politicians and political causes it covers. And that says everything.
