Why Bari Weiss Wins

American journalists cannot confront what Weiss represents because they cannot confront what they did to Gaza

No Greater Honor

Larry Ellison is a very rich man. Larry Ellison is a very powerful man.

And Larry Ellison loves Israel.

The co-founder of Oracle, whose software helps run some of the world's most powerful institutions, sits on a fortune that has made him one of the wealthiest individuals in the world - second richest to be exact. This kind of wealth has granted Ellison access to the highest echelons of power: the ability to host heads of state at his private estate, to cultivate relationships with political leaders and to shape the institutions through which influence itself is exercised. Like our media.

AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

The issue that has been closest to Ellison’s heart is that of Israel. For years, he and his family have been among the most prominent American (Jewish) supporters of Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces, having donated tens of millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF. In 2017, Ellison made a $16.6 million contribution that was, at the time, the largest single donation in the organization's history.

Ellison has spoken publicly of his admiration for Israeli soldiers, describing support for them as both an honor and an obligation, while maintaining close relationships with senior Israeli political figures, including Benjamin Netanyahu. His commitment to Israel has never been a private matter of personal conviction; it has been expressed through philanthropy, corporate culture, his social circles and his own words.

“For 2,000 years, we were a stateless people, but now we have a country we can call our own. Through all of the perilous times since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home. In my mind, there is no greater honor than supporting some of the bravest people in the world, and I thank FIDF for allowing us to celebrate and support these soldiers year after year. We should do all we can to show these heroic soldiers that they are not alone.” - Larry Ellison, 2017

It has also been expressed - perhaps most detrimentally - through his family’s takeover of the American media landscape over the past three years, the installation of Bari Weiss as the czar leading the reformation of our news media and shifting editorial and algorithmic priorities.

The speed with which the Ellison family - with dad Larry and son David at the helm - have accumulated influence over the American information ecosystem is difficult to ignore. Oracle now sits at the center of TikTok's U.S. operations. Through Skydance, David Ellison acquired Paramount, assuming control over CBS News and 60 Minutes. Paramount then purchased Bari Weiss's Free Press, elevating Weiss into one of the most powerful editorial positions in broadcast journalism. And if Paramount Skydance’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery goes through, then CNN could soon join an expanding portfolio of media institutions operating within the Ellison sphere - with Bari Weiss leading the way.

In the span of just a few years, one billionaire family has come to wield extraordinary influence over the platforms through which millions of Americans live, consume and understand their lives, the news and the world around them.

CBS News via Getty Images / Michele Crowe

And while many American journalists are loudly lamenting the fascistic circus before them - one single family, deeply ingratiated with the President of the United States, coming to control key facets of influence on American life - they will ultimately lose whatever fight they think they can or should put up. And this is because American journalists - whether as a collective or with prominence - are not able and willing to recognize Weiss and her Ellison patrons for who they are and what they are doing.

There is a lot moralizing over her increasing power and influence but there’s no confrontation with why this is happening.

And that is because we, too, as journalists are culpable for Weiss’ win.

The (Zionist) Elephant In the Room

It is not an overstatement to say that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7th created an inflection point in contemporary history. The operation itself, and Israel's U.S.-backed campaign of extermination and expansion that followed, ruptured a political order that had persisted since Sykes-Picot. The institutions that had long upheld that order remained formally intact, even as their legitimacy came under increasing scrutiny. And the assumptions that sustained that order - about power, legitimacy, who has the authority to narrate violence and determine whose violence is justified, and who has the power to dictate life and death - began to unravel in full public view.

And it was the Zionist narrative - both American and Israeli - around Palestine and Palestinians that saw its unraveling accelerated. Social media became a critical space through which Palestinians documented, in real time, their genocide. Day in and day out, every day Palestinians - including those barely out of adolescence - shared images, footage and words about their grief, their losses, their joys, their memories and what it meant to be a Palestinian, what it meant to be in Gaza. Social media became a place where millions of people, especially younger audiences, encountered histories of dispossession, learned about the role of U.S. support for Israel, and witnessed what Zionism looks like in practice: an ideology that saw the slaughter of children not as collateral but as necessary to its own survival.

The Zionists lost control - and they knew it. They’d, after all, been here before.

In the 1980s, during the Israeli bombings of Beirut and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, Arabs and Muslims were - for the first time - showcased as victims of Israeli terror in the American press. President Ronald Reagan called the Israeli slaughter a “holocaust” in a private letter to Menachem Begin and the long-revered Israeli commando became a criminal in the American registrar - at least briefly. The response to this narrative loss, in 1982, was the creation of “CAMERA” - an organization dedicated to identifying perceived anti-Israel bias and pressuring news organizations to amend their coverage advocating, instead, for narratives that uphold myths about Israel and its interests.

Since its inception, CAMERA has successfully lobbied for hundreds of corrections in major media outlets, seeking to streamline a pro-Israel line in news reports and editorials. It has smeared journalists whose work it disagrees with and launched boycott campaigns against news organizations it believes are not responding with enough deference to its requests.

In the past few months, the group has forced at least two changes in the New York Times, which sometimes responds to CAMERA with quiet edits and sometimes with formal corrections. The Times removed the use of the term “occupation” from a description of Israeli military forces and made a correction to language describing Palestinian deaths in Gaza.

Emblematic of CAMERA’s influence at the Times is the fact that [Joseph] Kahn’s father, Leo Kahn, was a longtime member of CAMERA’s board — though before Kahn rose to prominence at the paper. By the time Leo Kahn joined the group as a board member in 1990, it was already famous for its aggressive pursuit of corrections and wording changes in the media to reflect a more pro-Israel stance. And, according to the Times’s profile of Kahn when he was elevated to his current post in 2022, he and his father often “dissected newspaper coverage” together. - The Intercept, 2024 (emphasis added)

And pro-Israel groups saw this, again, following October 7th. Student groups, across the country, weren’t marching for Israel, for Israelis - on October 8th, they were issuing statements and marching in the streets for Palestinians. This was striking for Zionists: campuses have been where American Jewish Zionist groups and donors have spent millions - if not billions - over the last twenty years to offset the growing popularity and influence of BDS. From campus Israel officers to free trips to Israel to helping fund anti-BDS efforts, American Jewish Zionist groups and individuals have long understood how fundamental monopolizing the narrative on Israel and Palestine, for young Americans, is.

And so there was an immediate intensified effort to reassert control over the flow of information and take back the monopoly on the narrative. And we saw this happening everywhere: anti-genocide content creators reported being shadow-banned; Palestinian journalists and activists saw their accounts suspended, their posts removed and their reach diminished - all of it a systematic, approved policy of censorship.

Between October and November 2023, Human Rights Watch documented over 1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch publicly solicited cases of any type of online censorship and of any type of viewpoints related to Israel and Palestine. Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel.

[...]

Human Rights Watch found that the censorship of content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook is systemic and global. Meta’s inconsistent enforcement of its own policies led to the erroneous removal of content about Palestine. While this appears to be the biggest wave of suppression of content about Palestine to date, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has a well-documented record of overbroad crackdowns on content related to Palestine. - HRW, 2023

Across 2023 and 2024, we also begin seeing an aggressive expansion of the antisemitism narrative: criticism of Israel was collapsed into a hatred of Jews; opposition to genocide was recast as demanding another Nazi Holocaust and solidarity with an occupied people facing extermination was transformed into criminal activity that necessitated institutional and state investigation.

The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt was everywhere, on every channel, talking about the dangers of the loss of the narrative, the ‘growing antisemitism’ and how students, especially Palestinian students, had to be investigated for ‘material support for terrorism’. And then there were all the congressional hearings about antisemitism on college campuses that also started immediately following October 2023.

TikTok became a particular source of anxiety because it represented something mainstream media no longer could: an alternative information ecosystem, one less capable of maintaining longstanding monopolies over narrative. Blonde-haired, blue eyed college girls were talking about the Palestinian right to armed resistance, about the 2016 MOU, anti-Zionism and the need for their colleges to divest from Israel immediately. Of course they called it anti-semitic and necessitating a ban or takeover.

“You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion — the impact of images — dominates,” - Antony Blinken

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.” - Mitt Romney, 2024

And as Palestinians were slaughtered by the tens of thousands, Americans were repeatedly returned to the same narratives of Israeli victimhood, Israeli trauma, Israeli fear; Jewish trauma, Jewish fears. As Gaza was reduced to rubble and flesh, coverage focused on Israeli hostages, Jewish divisions, and the emotional toll of war on Israeli society and Jewish communities here at home. Even if the conversation on trauma and suffering was based on lies - ranging from 40 beheaded babies to mass rapes.

Palestinian suffering was present, but it was told as a tragedy born out of necessary violence; Palestinians, themselves, were rendered into unreliable witnesses to their own genocide. Whatever stories were told about their deaths, about their pain, their grief had to obfuscate and justify the Israel license to annihilate them.

Israelis were always killed, Palestinians always died.

And so news organizations tied themselves into knots to obscure Israeli war crimes and reframe anti-genocide protest as evidence of a resurgence of 1940s-style antisemitism rather than a moral (and bare minimum) response to mass slaughter of a nation.

Blood-soaked camera of Palestinian journalist Mariam Dagga / AFP/Getty Images

Many journalists have publicly resigned in protest of their newsrooms’ complicity in the genocide of Palestinians and thousands of others have signed open letters demanding that the most basic journalistic standards be applied to the coverage of Gaza (here, here, here, here, here, here). Never in modern history have so many journalists been killed covering a single conflict; Palestinian journalists documenting the genocide of their own people have been killed at an unprecedented rate, many alongside their families, their homes reduced to rubble, their names folded into casualty counts and rarely, if ever, making it into headlines - except to have their lives criminalized and their murders justified. The sheer number of their deaths, as well as the manner in which they were killed, shows a deliberate systematic policy of murdering journalists. And, three years later, international journalists still cannot enter Gaza without an IDF embed and editorial intervention.

Yet the profession that so often speaks of press freedom and journalism’s essential role in democracy has largely failed to extend those principles to the Palestinians, to covering their extermination (with, of course, exceptions). This silence isn’t revelatory - its functional, to protect American interests and culpability in the genocide by protecting Israel.

And this is why Weiss’ ascension became inevitable.

Bari Weiss Wins

The difficulty American journalism faces in confronting Bari Weiss or the growing influence of the Ellison family, beyond some angry tweets and maybe some frustrated emails, is not about professional etiquette or even cowardice. It is that doing so honestly would necessitate a reckoning with the press’ own role in shaping the very landscape that allows, with ease, for the Ellison family to do as they are doing and for Bari Weiss to assume the power that she has.

Weiss is not particularly talented or savvy. She’s not even, by every account, very competent. She is, in fact, rather boring - the most interesting tidbits shared about her in a 2019 Vanity Fair profile, part of a clear attempt to manufacture a public intellectual, are that she once dated former SNL star Kate McKinnon and that she had pen on her boobs during the interview. What has distinguished Weiss throughout her career has been neither intellectual rigor nor journalistic innovation, but ideological consistency. Zionism has been the animating force of her public life, shaping her politics, her professional trajectory, and her understanding of the role journalism ought to play.

Even as a student at Columbia, Weiss helped lead campaigns against Arab professors and scholars critical of Israel, including Joseph Massad, efforts that foreshadowed the project that would later define her career: narrowing the boundaries of acceptable discourse around Israel while recasting that narrowing as a defense of liberal values.

The question, then, is not why Bari Weiss has arrived at this moment. We know why: she is being rewarded for her ideological zeal to protect Zionism, to protect Israel, at the expense of the most basic journalistic ethics and principles.

The question: what now?

Backed by the Ellison family and positioned to influence some of the country's most powerful news organizations, Weiss now poses a threat not because she represents a break from the values of American journalism, but because she exposes them. Her ascent reveals how readily journalistic institutions have accommodated the narrowing of acceptable discourse around Israel, at the expense of the Palestinian nation - and that is what makes them so ill-equipped and unwilling they are to confront the consequences of having done so.

Because to confront, in a real sense, what the Ellisons and Weiss are doing is to acknowledge what the past three years have been about. It is to acknowledge the role our news and popular media have played in pushing the very lies -about antisemitism, about Israeli violence, about Palestinians - that enabled the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Those same lies will now be more lazily, and more transparently than ever before, baked into all coverage: whether about Arabs and Muslims, the Trump administration, LGBTQ communities, Black communities, poor Americans or undocumented Americans.

Not a single major piece in the mainstream press examining Weiss’ ascension - particularly the possibility of her assuming editorial control at CNN - has meaningfully connected it to the broader American Jewish pro-Israel advocacy project of the past three years: the manufacturing of antisemitism as the defining lens through which criticism of Israel is understood and the insistence that news media have become hostile to Israel. Both, of course, accompanied by the publicly repeated demand to reassert control over the narratives on Israel.

Bari Weiss wins because there is no meaningful resistance to her. The Ellisons win because there is no meaningful resistance to them. There is no resistance to their explicit project of consolidating control over the flow of information and the narratives available to Americans. Armed with billions of dollars, technological infrastructure and a friendly president, the Ellisons will continue to acquire as they see fit. And Weiss will continue to flourish within them because she has long been a dutiful participant in this project, ideologically zealous and with a long record of doing exactly what she is doing now.

The Good News

Weiss and the Ellisons may win at the institutional level, but they are part of a project that is dying - that of the American empire, of Zionism, of our news industry. People cannot unwitness what they have witnessed. You cannot unsee the shredded bodies of children pulled from beneath concrete slabs; you cannot unsee emaciated babies, blood-soaked hijabs and fathers carrying plastic bags filled with what remained of their sons and daughters. You can’t spend months watching Palestinians document, in real time, the annihilation of their families and emerge unchanged. And you especially can’t go back to believing the killers, especially as they continue killing.

Nor can you forget what that annihilation revealed about the country you live in. You do not forget watching every major institution - political, cultural, journalistic - contort itself in defense of another state’s right to exterminate an occupied people living in an open-air prison. You do not forget being told that there is no money for healthcare, for housing, for affordable groceries, for schools, for debt relief, while billions of your tax dollars continue to finance the bombing, displacement and starvation of other families.

The institutions may yet succeed in disciplining dissent and consolidating control over the mainstream narratives available to Americans, but they will not change what we have witnessed and what is that we now see so clearly.

So let Weiss win, let the Ellisons win - their efforts and their zeal reveal what’s being dismantled, not what’s being built.