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CBS News takes a tabloid turn after purging veteran journalists
Hunter Biden's laptop is red meat for MAGA. So Bari Weiss has hired a tabloid 'reporter' for the CBS investigative unit who has done obsessive coverage on that topic. I wish I was kidding but I'm not.
With her latest hire, Bari Weiss’ continues her jaw-dropping attack on the credibility of CBS News. Weiss reportedly told colleagues she wanted to “blow up” the network. Destroy is a better word. Weiss has steered the marquee evening newscast off a ratings cliff, ripped a hole in the heart of the network’s crown jewel, 60 Minutes, and purged a growing number of hardworking journalists from throughout the organization. Now, she’s hired someone for the network’s investigative unit who specializes in tabloid style reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and other related topics. I wish I was kidding but I’m not.
Seriously, what on earth was she thinking when she hired Josh Boswell, tabloid reporter for the conservative Daily Mail who has done hundreds of reports on Hunter Biden. Bari Weiss booted reporting veterans Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega but she just put a guy who does National Enquirer-type coverage on the CBS News investigative team. Yikes.
Clearly Weiss’ new hiring standards are appalling. Don’t know a damn thing about broadcast news? Great. Only worked for MAGA media? Even better. No media experience at all but a stint at a right-wing think tank or with Republican Senator Tom Cotton (or both)? Better still. Think Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize? The best.
Weiss imposes new political litmus test at CBS
Not only is fact based journalism experience unwelcome at Weiss’ CBS, to be on Team Bari, a.k.a the B team, you really can’t be an objective journalist at all. Never mind how many groundbreaking news stories you’ve done, you’ve got to pass Weiss’ political litmus test. Remember Weiss has never been a news reporter, she’s an opinion writer who clearly doesn’t understand or value credible, fact based journalism. In fact, she sneers at it.
The real key to working for Weiss at her degraded version of CBS News is includes being anti woke, anti-Muslim, passionately anti-Mamdani, and a holding a stringent belief that mainstream media - like CBS News itself - is corrupt and biased. (It’s not.) If you check all those boxes, there is probably a job at CBS News waiting for you. You’d probably seal the deal with a resume full of obsessive tabloid style coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. That’s apparently what did it for Josh Boswell.
Hunter Biden’s laptop is still red meat for MAGA
There are few things that scream MAGA like its years-long obsession with Hunter Biden’s laptop. It is one of the red meat topics that sits in the MAGA hall of fame right alongside Jan 6th, the 2020 election, Russia collusion, DEI, CRT, ‘woke’ politics, the hagiography of Charlie Kirk, and numerous Covid conspiracy theories. Of course, it’s Hunter Biden’s laptop that also helped propel Bari Weiss to her unlikely perch at CBS News, so it’s no wonder that Boswell caught her attention.
Weiss’ infamous ‘twitter files’ ‘expose’ in 2022, shortly after Elon Musk purchased the social media platform, was built on allegations that Twitter, Facebook, and mainstream media all suppressed information about the Hunter Biden’s laptop. Her flimsy, often false, claims helped make her the darling of right wing tech bros and ultimately led her to a ‘billionaire summer camp’ where she connected with David Ellison, the now owner of CBS. The rest, as they say, is history.
Unrepentant, despite the fierce public blow back when she gutted 60 Minutes, Weiss is continuing to gut bedrock journalism from the core of CBS News, steering it away from its mainstream, middle of the road roots towards Trump-friendly coverage. You may not see it in every story or every show but there is still plenty of evidence that Weiss is moving the traditional non-partisan news giant to the right.
A big part of that right wing transformation is purging CBS journalists and replacing them with people like Boswell and the woefully miscast 60 Minutes Executive Producer Nick Bilton. Like Weiss herself, nearly every one of these new hires is remarkably unqualified and ill-suited to a work in broadcasting, particularly at this high level.
Weiss purges dozens of CBS journalists
Since Weiss took over CBS News last fall, upwards of 200 people have lost their jobs either through firings, layoffs or buy outs. Hundreds of years worth of invaluable journalism experience just gone almost overnight. This is not about cost savings, because she is replacing the lost talent with new, political hires.
As a journalist, I mourn this stunning loss of credible, objective independent news talent. I think of all the leads that won’t be followed and important stories that won’t be told. 60 Minutes alone lost some of the best investigative reporters, editors and producers in the country in the Weiss purge. That, of course, includes Scott Pelley, whose 51 Emmy awards for actual journalism pretty much disqualified him from participation on Team Bari.
Just a few weeks after firing Pelley, Weiss hired Boswell from that journalism stronghold, The Daily Mail as an investigative reporter. His bio proudly boasts that he was “the first reporter to authenticate Hunter Biden’s infamous abandoned laptop using top cyber forensics experts.”
Coming up next on CBS: Tabloid Garbage
Who knows how many stories Boswell has done on the former president’s son; I stopped counting at 170. Yes, he’s done at least 170 Hunter Biden stories in the past 4-years. Hiring someone like Boswell and puffing them up as an investigative reporter is as sure as sign as any which direction CBS is headed under Weiss. No more award-winning Pelley investigative pieces, but if you are hungry for tabloid trash, CBS has got it covered.
Just to give a sense of the important work Bari Weiss’ new investigative reporter has been doing, here are some recent headlines:
There once was a broadcast network that strove to report the news to Americans. It nurtured talents from Edward R. Murrow, to Walter Cronkite, to Scott Pelley. Large numbers of Americans counted on it. It was brave. It reported the news without fear or favor. Bari Weiss and the thin-skinned billionaires didn’t like that. They prefer reporters who fear them. They want to be favored. Now that network is dead and Weiss is building in its place a machine to propagate supermarket tabloid garbage and right wing political propaganda.
There is a silver lining. Americans are not fools, and they are turning away from CBS newscasts in record numbers. It seems plenty of ordinary people still value the hard work of real journalists even if billionaires and their hack editors fear them.
Jennifer Schulze is a former local TV news exec, reporter & producer based in Chicago with a few opinions about the news. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social and Substack at “Indistinct Chatter.
Never ever forget, the nickname for the Daily Mail is the Daily Fail, due to the unending mistakes in it!
No mention of the Ellisons and other oligarchs swinging the wrecking balls and giving rise to propaganda media, but that is good, hard-hitting journalism of the muckraker kind—a term especially appropriate for these times, when wealthy media moguls are reviving the worst instincts of the Gilded Age tycoons who viewed journalism not as a public trust, but as a tool of power.