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The Weiss Flag

It’s tempting to view Bari Weiss’s first big blunder—pulling a 60 Minutes segment critical of the administration’s deportation efforts—as purely political, which it may have been. But it may have been the product of something more mundane: Bari doesn’t know how to lead a newsroom.

Bari Weiss
By the time Bari made the decision to scrap the story over the weekend, it was already too late: The story was being promoted, and the ensuing controversy was unavoidable in light of the broader political climate in which the Ellisons had been advertising their rapport with the White House. Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Free Press
Dylan Byers
December 26, 2025

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On Monday, less than 24 hours after Bari Weiss made her now-infamous decision to postpone a 60 Minutes segment about a Salvadoran prison and ignited a Kimmel-level national freakout over the storied newsmagazine’s perceived capitulation to Trump, the show’s correspondents and producers convened for a weekly meeting. By then, battle lines had been drawn: Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the segment, had accused Bari of pulling it for political reasons—a charge reinforced by Larry Ellison’s subsequent $40 billion pledge to backstop his son David’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which will require regulatory approval. Trump has publicly chastised 60 Minutes—most recently for its interview with his new critic, Marjorie Taylor Greene—and it wasn’t hard to imagine that the Ellisons didn’t want the show further inserting itself into the deal calculus. (For the record: No one’s offered actual proof that the Ellisons put a finger on the scale to pull Alfonsi’s story.)