George Clooney Accuses Bari Weiss of ‘Dismantling’ CBS News, Denounces ABC and CBS for Settling Trump’s Defamation Lawsuits

A Hollywood star and major Democratic fundraiser, George Clooney — who recently starred as a legendary CBS News journalist, Edward R. Murrow, in a Broadway play — is criticizing the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, for her management of the Tiffany Network’s embattled news division. Ms. Weiss faced a firestorm of internal leaking and criticism last week after CBS News delayed the broadcast of a “60 Minutes” segment critical of President Trump hours before it aired. The segment had already been internally approved, put in TV listings, and promoted. The segment, about the maximum security prison in El Salvador where the Trump Administration sent some deported Venezuelan migrants, accused Trump officials of wrongfully sending the men to be tortured and sexually abused. The correspondent behind the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, said in an internal email that was promptly leaked to elite news outlets that the decision to pull the piece was not “an editorial decision,” but a “political one.” Ms. Weiss later said in a memo that the segment was held because it did not include the “full context” and did not provide content to “advance” the story beyond what had already been reported about the conditions in the prison. Ms. Alfonsi’s piece, which could be viewed in full online after a Canadian partner of CBS aired it, said that the Trump Administration had refused CBS’s request for an interview. However, Axios reported that the Trump Administration did provide extensive written comments for the story, but those comments were not included or even acknowledged in the final script, creating the misimpression that the Trump Administration had stonewalled CBS News. In an interview with Variety, Mr. Clooney said, “Bari Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak.”“Am I worried about film studios? Sure. It’s my business, but my primary loyalty is to my country. I’m much more worried about how we inform ourselves and how we’re going to discern reality without a functioning press,” he added.Mr. Clooney, his second wife, Amal, and their eight-year-old twins were recently granted French citizenship. Mr. Clooney — who had previously spent much of the year in a palatial villa he owned on Italy’s ultra-exclusive Lake Como — told Esquire that he moved his family out of Hollywood because he was “worried about raising our kids in L.A., in the culture of Hollywood. I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life.”Ms. Clooney, a prominent anti-Israel lawyer, has British and Lebanese citizenship in addition to her newly acquired French citizenship. Last spring, Mr. Clooney starred in the Broadway adaptation of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” a drama about Murrow and his decision to take a stand against Senator McCarthy. Mr. Clooney was cast as Murrow in the play. Twenty years earlier, Mr. Clooney played Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, in the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”Mr. Clooney, whose father was a well-known local news anchorman and variety show host, told Variety that he invited “60 Minutes” journalists to attend rehearsals of the Broadway show.The Hollywood star also criticized CBS News’s former management for settling President Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over its editing of Vice President Harris’s October 2024 interview with “60 Minutes.”“If CBS and ABC had challenged those lawsuits and said, ‘Go, f— yourself, we wouldn’t be where we are in the country,” Mr. Clooney said. “That’s simply the truth.”Ms. Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel and anti-woke outlet the Free Press, was installed after David Ellison, the chief executive of Skydance, acquired CBS News and signaled that he wanted to purge the network of a left-wing bias. Since Skydance’s acquisition of CBS was finalized in August, “60 Minutes” has continued to produce stories critical of Mr. Trump. The newsmagazine program also gave an interview to a former Trump supporter turned critic, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mr. Trump has criticized CBS News’s new owners, writing in a post on Truth Social that they are “NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP.”Former CBS journalists are preparing a petition to Mr. Ellison to “send a message” to Ms. Weiss about the decision to pull the “60 Minutes segment, the New York Post reported. The journalists are also planning to urge Mr. Ellison to support CBS’s journalist independence. Ms. Weiss has defended the decision to hold the “60 Minutes” story. In a memo sent on Christmas Eve, she wrote that news organizations need to regain Americans’ trust and that “no amount of outrage” will “derail us.”“We are not out to score points with one side of the political spectrum or to win followers on social media,” Ms. Weiss said. “We are out to inform the American public and to get the story right.”Although liberal journalists speculated that there were political motivations behind the decision to hold the “60 Minutes,” some journalists and commentators argued that Ms. Weiss may have been justified. In her memo, Ms. Weiss said the segment did not “present the administration’s argument” for why it sent Venezuelans to El Salvador. She said it did not provide any content to “advance” the story, such as whether members of the Trump Administration regret the policy in light of reporting on the “horrific conditions” at the prison. She also suggested the journalists should try to interview the administration’s border tsar, Tom Homan. A staff writer at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf, shared the memo and wrote, “I’ve published on the CECOT story, I want more Americans to know about it (read my piece!), I want 60 Minutes to cover it, and this memo seems… like normal and plausibly sound reasons to delay its broadcast.”A conservative commentator, Mary Katharine Ham, wrote on X, “These seem like normal, reasonable requests.”CBS News did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

George Clooney Accuses Bari Weiss of ‘Dismantling’ CBS News, Denounces ABC and CBS for Settling Trump’s Defamation Lawsuits

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