A Letter to Bari Weiss
The Only Thing You Pulled Was The Mask Off Yourself
Bari Weiss,
Your explanation for pulling the 60 Minutes CECOT report wasn’t just weak. It was the kind of weakness that tries to pass itself off as seriousness, mistaking hesitation for wisdom and calling it leadership because admitting fear would be too honest.
Calling a fully vetted, corroborated investigation into torture “not ready” because the alleged torturers didn’t get enough airtime is not editorial judgment. It’s hostage negotiation with yourself. You didn’t uncover errors. You didn’t dispute facts. You didn’t challenge a single sworn testimony. You just decided that reality needed a permission slip from power before it could be broadcast.
That’s not journalism. That’s customer service for monsters.
You didn’t delay the story to improve it. You delayed it to muffle it. You wrapped the decision in procedural beige because nothing smothers accountability faster than a memo written in the tone of an HR email about the office microwave. Pulling a report after it aired, without a real public reckoning, doesn’t protect standards. It teaches the audience that truth is temporary, and access is king. Blink once and the whole thing gets swallowed.
And the hypocrisy. My god, the hypocrisy. You made a career out of lecturing institutions about cowardice, censorship, and the moral rot of elite gatekeeping, then walked into one of the biggest newsrooms on earth and reenacted the exact behavior you built your brand trashing. Free speech, it turns out, is sacred right up until it becomes inconvenient for your job title. When the pressure arrived, courage was suddenly “not ready.”
Here’s the funniest part, though. It didn’t even work. The transcript exists. The testimony exists. The evidence exists. The reporting exists. The only thing you successfully buried was your own credibility. You didn’t protect CBS News. You stapled your name to the moment it flinched. History won’t remember the delay. It’ll remember who grabbed the wheel and swerved.
So let’s drop the pleasantries. If you can’t stand behind your newsroom when it publishes verified reporting that implicates power, you have no business running a news organization. If your first instinct when faced with documented human rights abuse is to ask whether the perpetrators feel sufficiently heard, then you are not an editor. You are a liability with a press badge.
For the sake of CBS News, its journalists, and the public that still believes journalism is supposed to punch up instead of bow down, you should resign.
Not out of spite. Out of basic workplace fit. This job requires a working spine, and until you receive intensive chiropractic intervention or locate one through evolutionary means, you are simply unqualified to hold it.
Thoroughly disgusted,
Rook T. Winchester
Do you want journalism that doesn’t blink, hedge, or ask permission from power before telling the truth? Subscribe to Closer to the Edge. We publish the reporting others pull, say the parts executives wish were quieter, and leave the blazers to people who confuse fear with judgment.
RIGHT FUCKING ON! This is what having a spine looks like Bari, in case you were wondering (but I’d bet you weren’t). You are exactly why the fourth estate is officially dead, bought and paid for by the oligarchs. Do you imagine you have curried favor, maybe gained admittance to the holy of Holies, secured your seat at the table? You have not…what you have done is signaled to the misogynist elite that you will surrender before attack, you have told these woman hating power brokers that you are a volunteer. Have fun at the bbq when they roast you 🤬
That little smirky smile shows regime an acceptable spineless face of ambition soaked in brainlessness with the propaganda instincts of a Pravda apparatchik. Let her read about Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov if want to know how your 'mentors' may eventually reward you.