John Oliver Warns Viewers to Keep a Close Eye on CBS News in Wake of “Alarming” Bari Weiss Hire

John Oliver used his main segment on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight to take a close look at Bari Weiss, the newly appointed editor-in-chief of CBS news.

Earlier this month, Paramount announced that it had officially acquired The Free Press, the digital publication founded by Weiss, and would bring Weiss into the fold of CBS News, which, as The Hollywood Reporter recently reported, had been expected but also was greeted with dread inside the news division. Weiss works outside of the current org chart by reporting directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison, while The Free Press will remain a stand-alone business outside of CBS News.

Oliver began his segment on Weiss by noting: “Let’s start with the fact that she’s been given editorial control of a massive news organization, even though she’s never run a TV network, has no experience directing television coverage and, as one 60 Minutes producer pointed out, is not even a reporter. That is true. She didn’t come up through the news site of a newspaper, but through the opinion pages, which are a very different thing.”

As Oliver noted, Weiss “made a big name for herself” after being hired by The New York Times as a columnist.

The Last Week Tonight showed a clip of Weiss explaining: “My job explicitly was to bring in voices that wouldn’t otherwise naturally appear in The New York Times, either because other editors wouldn’t think to commission them, or the writers themselves would think, you know, The New York Times would never accept me.”

His response: “Yeah, she was apparently tasked with finding voices that The Times’ op-ed page would never accept, which is already a big claim given that before she got hired there, it published op-eds from, and this is true, Muammar Gaddafi and Vladimir Putin. If The Times had been around in the 15th century, I’m guessing they would have given an opinion piece to Vlad the Impaler. ‘Drinking the blood of my enemies isn’t disgusting; it’s beautiful and courageous.’”

Oliver noted that some of the columns Weiss wrote at The Times included “one in which she argued that the left had gone too far in policing cultural appropriation,” another that was “a largely sympathetic profile of the intellectual dark web, a term that she popularized for people like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro” and another one “suggesting progressives were so focused on labeling fellow Americans fascists, they missed opportunities to call out real fascism, which is just some weapons-grade whataboutism.”

That latter column, Oliver noted, got attention due to the fact that it contained links to posts from the official Antifa Twitter account, which that was actually a “well-known hoax site, which is pretty embarrassing. You don’t expect a Times writer to fall for online hoaxes like they’re your 75-year-old aunt on Facebook who keeps posting that message saying, ‘I hereby state that I do not give my permission to use any of my personal data or photos.’”

But her time at The Times came to an end after it ran an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, who argued that federal troops should be used put a stop to protests against police brutality. After the op-ed was published, many staffers argued that The Times shouldn’t have published it.

“And Bari Weiss wrote a series of tweets about a supposedly heated staff meeting characterizing it as a civil war between the mostly young wokes and the mostly 40 and up liberals,” Oliver explained. “That claim was strongly disputed by others at the paper, with one editor saying, ‘I’m in the same meeting that Barry appears to be live tweeting. This is inaccurate in both characterizations. It’s not a civil war, it’s an editorial conversation, and it’s not breaking down along generational lines.’ So to be fair, it seems Barry Weiss does have some reporting experience, specifically trying to report what was happening in the meeting, only to have our own co-workers say, ‘Hey, what the fuck are you talking about?’”

She resigned soon afterward and founded The Free Press.

“Its first motto was ‘Honest news for sane people,’ which feels scientifically engineered to trigger an eye roll,” Oliver quipped, adding: “In the five years since, it’s grown to roughly 1.5 million readers, although only around 1 in 10 actually pay to subscribe, meaning it generates subscription revenues of about $15 million a year, which isn’t nothing, but I would argue also not quite enough to justify someone spending $150 million to acquire it, as that is a revenues to valuation ratio that would make Mr. Wonderful [Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary] start vomiting blood.”

Oliver noted that Weiss has repeatedly insisted she’s only interested in the truth, but then played a clip of her talking about The Free Press‘ process for finding out the truth: “The identity of our brand is truth-seeking, and our premise is you cannot get to truth in an echo chamber. The only way that you get to truth is by sitting next to someone — this is what makes it so different from any newsroom I’ve ever worked in — witting next to someone who disagrees with you, who you still respect, admire them and collaborate with them.”

Responded Oliver: “I mean, maybe, maybe that is how you do it as an opinion writer, but that is not how you get to truth as a reporter, is it? You do that by leaving the newsroom and reporting. … And I’ll be honest, there’s not a ton of hard journalism on The Free Press site. There’s really not much of anything there. There’s usually just a handful of new posts a day which can even include weird shit like editorial cartoons from David Mamet, the playwright. And if you’re thinking, ‘I didn’t realize David Mamet could draw’ — fun fact, he can’t.”

Oliver then went through a list of headlines on Free Press stories, including: “I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back,” “I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired,” “I Took Religion Out of Christmas. I Regret It,” “I Want People to Have More Kids. Does That Make Me Far-Right?,” “I Was Called an ‘Inbred Swine’ at Princeton Last Night,” “I’m 17. And I’m Immunized From Woke Politics,” “My Family Was Hunted by Nazis. But I Was Fired For ‘Defending Hitler,” “My Husband Wants to Be Cremated. I’d Ignore His Dying Wish” and “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty.”

Joked Oliver: “It feels like we’re just two weeks away from an article titled ‘I Dressed My Dead Wife up as Hitler for Her Funeral, and Now Her Woke Family Is Mad at Me.’”

He said that a look at The Free Press‘ homepage might not give the impression that the outlet is conservative. “But once you start reading its articles, the pronounced theme that starts to emerge is the left has gone too far,” Oliver said. “Basically, whatever issue you feel like that is true for — Israel, campus politics, DEI or police reform — you’ll find articles there to reinforce that opinion. And look, I’m not saying the left never goes too far or that it’s immune from criticism at all, but it can sometimes feel like The Free Press’ conclusions can get out ahead of its evidence, which brings us to the fact that some of its pieces can be pretty poorly fact checked and in ways that feel important.”

Oliver then brought up examples of stories reported by The Free Press that other outlets had contradicted with their own reporting, including accusations that the Transgender Center at the St. Louis Children’s Hospitalwas prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy without appropriately conducting mental health assessments; another on crime in Austin; and a third on starvation in Gaza.

As for that latter story, it was shared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his social media account with the caption “Facts matter.”

This “is terrible for multiple reasons, including if Netanyahu ever shared one of our stories, I think I’d burn this place to the fucking ground,” Oliver quipped.

He added of his decision to focus his main segment on Weiss: “The truth is, we wouldn’t even have done this story were it not for the fact Bari Weiss has just been named editor-in-chief of CBS News, and that feels different because there are many opinion-heavy outlets out there from left to right and with low to high editorial standards. This show [Last Week Tonight] is, among other things, an opinion outlet, and while our staff works incredibly hard to research stories before we write something and vigorously check our facts afterwards, we’re also not the news. And I wouldn’t want anyone who led a pure opinion outlet, not even one that I happen to agree with, to suddenly be running CBS News. But it is especially alarming to have someone doing it who has spent years putting out work that, in my opinion, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading.”

Oliver then criticized Ellison for “think[ing] that she and her editorial sensibility make her a good fit for the job.” He also noted that Ellison is reportedly planning to make a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of HBO, home to Last Week Tonight. That “isn’t ideal, although I’ve gotta say, if what he likes about Bari is that she forces him to have hard conversations to get a bit uncomfortable, maybe he’ll like this,” he added.

The host went on to note that the future of CBS News is unclear under its new editor-in-chief. “Maybe Bari Weis will completely reshape CBS News,” he said. “Maybe she’ll flame out.”

But he cautioned his viewers to pay attention to any differences at the news organization going forward: “It is worth keeping an eye out for subtle changes there because, while I’m sure many of CBS’ good journalists will continue to do great work, if you start seeing people resigning or getting fired, or you start seeing stories that seem off in some way, especially if it involves the left going too far on a topic Bari Wise cares about, it’s worth asking yourself why that might be, because unfortunately the much bigger answer might be that a billionaire has chosen to inject contrarian right-leaning opinion journalism into an American icon.”