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There is a scene in The Sopranos every fan remembers. Davey Scatino, a degenerate gambler, gets into Tony Soprano’s card game and can’t pay.

So Tony takes his sporting goods store and starts a bust-out.

Not in a hostile takeover. Not in a leveraged buyout. He simply moves in, runs up the credit lines, orders pallets of merchandise on the store’s account, sells it out the back door, and when the inventory is gone, and the vendors are screaming, and the name over the door means nothing anymore. Scatino torched what was left of his life and walks away from the ashes.


A “bust-out,” they call it. You drain the asset, you collect the insurance, you leave the husk. There are prettier, more genteel terms of art for it in private equity, but they’re all part of the same spectrum.

I have been thinking about Davey Scatino’s sporting goods store all week. Because that is what is happening to CBS News, and Bari Weiss is the one holding the gas can.

This week they fired Scott Pelley after a career spanning thirty-seven years.

Pelley was the managing editor and was once CBS Evening News anchor, a seat held by giants like Cronkite and Rather. He was a correspondent who stood in war zones and famine-stricken nations, and witnessed catastrophes and triumphs closer to home, so that you, sitting in your living room, would know the world.

Bari Weiss and the little claque of toadies fired him for the crime of standing up in a staff meeting and saying the quiet part out loud: that the woman now running CBS News and, by extension, 60 Minutes was “murdering the show,” that she “does not love this place.”

Pelley was right. And being right is precisely why he had to go.

Let’s be honest about Bari Weiss, because she will not be honest about herself.

She built a brand on a single, lucrative pose: the brave iconoclast, the heterodox truth-teller, hounded out of the priggish New York Times by the woke libtard mob, off to found a plucky little independent shop where Real Journalism could breathe free.

It was a good act. It sold subscriptions. It got her a podcast, a tote-bag readership, and a permanent seat on the Aspen-Sun Valley-Davos carousel, where the people who own things go to admire one another and bask in their comforts.

Then David Ellison wrote a check. About $150 million for The Free Press, and a title new title: editor-in-chief of CBS News, for a 41-year-old woman who, as the trades noted with admirable bluntness, has no experience working in broadcast TV. Not all skills scale and transfer; being a columnist isn’t like being a leading a major network.

It helps to know that, but she doesn’t. Hubris? Greed? The temptation to play above your skill set? Sure. Ambition is a cruel mistress.

And she reports, conveniently, not through the org chart but directly to Ellison himself. His eyes. His ears. His hand on the throttle, all to please Daddy Donald.

Here is what Bari Weiss does not understand, and what every stalking horse before her has failed to understand right up until the moment they’re loaded on the trailer for the glue factory; you are not the star. You are the bait.

The independent-journalist costume was the entire point. It gave the demolition a vaguely principled, anti-woke face. It let the wrecking crew swing the ball while telling the world they were merely modernizing. She thinks she has been handed the keys to a great American institution. She has been handed the matches and told where to stand.

Bari Weiss’s transformation of CBS and its properties into Diet Fox misses the point. The Fox audience wants Fox. They want all the sugar, all the fat, all the caffeine, all the Brawndo-style electrolytes of sloppy populist rage.

When the building is sold, when 60 Minutes is a husk and the Murrow legacy is a logo on a streaming menu, and the accountability journalism that made the brand priceless has been safely strangled, she will discover what Davey Scatino discovered.

The people who run the bust-out do not keep the man who lit the fire. They keep the insurance money and the profits.

You buy a distressed asset…and CBS, post-merger, post-debt, was distressed.

You install management with no loyalty to the institution and total loyalty to you. You provoke the veterans into leaving or fire them for “cause.” Pelley. Tanya Simon, the executive producer. Sharyn Alfonsi. Cecilia Vega. Anderson Cooper out the door. You replace a legendary EP with a former tech columnist, Nick Bilton, another columnist and writer with no TV experience.

You kill the stories that cause trouble for the regime, like the CECOT segment on the migrants shipped to an El Salvador prison, which Weiss pulled hours before air. And you do it all while issuing press releases about “trust” and “fearless, independent journalism.”

This is not editing or a change of management direction.

This is asset-stripping. It is the leveraged-buyout playbook applied to the First Amendment. The remaining correspondents, Stahl, Whitaker, Wertheim sit waiting to find out whether they are inventory to be sold or merchandise to be burned. They already know the answer. They are just waiting for the receipt.

And do not forget how the asset got distressed in the first place. Trump sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview; the suit was widely understood to be entirely frivolous, but Paramount, which owned CBS, settled rather than fight. They paid the protection money. The Weiss installation is what comes after the protection money. First you make them pay. Then you make them yours.

The hatred of the press in this country runs on two floors, and you have to understand both, or you understand nothing.

The ground floor is for the rubes. The media are libtard socialist shills who hate America. It’s loud, it’s cheap, it fills arenas, it moves merch. It’s been a part of the GOP’s messaging since 1960. It is designed to make sure that when a real reporter lands a real story, half the country has already been inoculated against believing it. That floor is an endless circus of “J’accuse, liberals!” And the circus is the point…it keeps the crowd looking up at the high wire while the real work happens in the basement.

The basement is where the actual agenda lives, and it has nothing to do with bias and everything to do with accountability. 60 Minutes did not threaten anyone because it leaned left. It threatened people because it knocked on doors that powerful men wanted left shut. Because a producer with a camera and a sixteen-minute slot could end a CEO, expose a defense-contract fraud, surface a cover-up, make a senator sweat.

The goal of the strip-down is not to make the news more conservative. The goal is to make sure the door-knocking stops. To eliminate the accountability function entirely for business interests, for political interests, for the men who own the men who own the network.

Rick Wilson’s Against All Enemies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A press that cannot hold power to account is not a press. It is a public-relations department.

I know what 60 Minutes was, because I stood on the other side of it. Years in and out of government, prepping principals for The Interview, and I will tell you the truth we all knew: other than “Bob Woodward is on the line,” a 60 Minutes request was the Super Bowl. Hell, I’ve been interviewed by 60 Minutes, and even after years of doing media training, I still had a “Whoa” moment when I sat down.

It was the one knock you could not spin your way out of. That ticking stopwatch was the closest thing American power ever had to a conscience it could not buy. Until they did.

The men who built this country were not sentimental about the press. Half of them were savaged by it. Jefferson, who wrote that a government without newspapers was a fate worse than newspapers without a government, later groused that nothing in a paper could be believed. They knew the press was loud, unfair, and frequently wrong.

They were right.

The press was and still is a human institution, living, breathing, flawed.

And they protected it anyway. First.


Before the right to bear arms, before the protection against unreasonable search, before any of it, the First Amendment. They put the free press in the foundation, not the attic, because they understood a thing that Donald Trump and his employees Larry and David Ellison also understand perfectly and intend to exploit: a free press is the only private actor in the entire constitutional design whose specific job is to make powerful people uncomfortable.

Madison called the people’s right to know the popular information that arms them against tyranny. Strip that away, and you don’t get a quieter country. You get a darker one. You get a Potemkin republic where the powerful are never asked the question, where the stopwatch never ticks, where the door is never knocked.

That is the project. That is what the matches are for.

So watch what happens to Bari Weiss, because it is the most predictable thing in the world. She will finish the job. The veterans will be gone, the troublesome stories spiked, the brand sanded down into something safe and streamable and toothless.

And somewhere in a year or two, when the ratings crater and the prestige evaporates, and the asset has been fully drained, the men of Ellison’s world will need someone to blame.

It will not be them. It is never them.

It will be her. The brave independent truth-teller will get hung out to dry by the very corporate masters who handed her the gasoline, and she will be genuinely, wide-eyed astonished, because the one story Bari Weiss never managed to report was the one about herself.

Davey Scatino never saw it coming either. He thought he was a player. He was the merchandise.

Light it up, Bari. Just remember who profits in the end.

And it’s not you


Rick Wilson
https://open.substack.com/pub/therickwilson/p/bari...

wrong on weiss. already won. she has outperformed expectations, and certainly talent, with the freepress payoff.

and if lani weiss, of all people, is unable to next grift into any of dozens of pro-militant isreali propaganda outlets, then those PACs must be in trouble.

lol

Scott Pelley is a brainless hack. 60 Minutes is a leftist, partisan skin suit pretending to be a journalistic enterprise.

Who can forget Lesley Stahl whining about Hunter's laptop "not being verified"? Or their using of fake memos from Customs? Or rigging accident safety tests?

Or the Bush National Guard fake memo stuff.

No, Bari Weiss was brought in to actually restore some amount of professionalism to the place, and she's doing just that. Scott Pelley is at least smart enough to know he's better off getting fired so that he gets pieces like this written about him before he shuffles off to Substack.

https://www.minnpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/0...

wrong on weiss. already won. she has outperformed expectations, and certainly talent, with the freepress payoff.

Completely agree. This is just wishful thinking. The author is unhappy with what's happening at CBS, and consoles himself by concocting a story in which Bari Weiss is also unhappy (or is going to be unhappy).

If you want to compare what's happening at CBS to The Sopranos' bust-out, then Bari Weiss is not Davey Scatino in that analogy. She's Silvio Dante. She's one of the group who's doing the busting. She someone who wasn't at the store back when it was healthy - she's the one who was brought in to manage the bust-out.

She's never going to be sad about this. She wholeheartedly agrees with the idea that CBS News was too ideologically bent towards the left and that it makes good business sense to move it away from that. She's a true believer in the project, not a tragic victim. She got to go from being an online columnist to the editor-in-chief of one of the largest news organizations in the world, and every night she gets to sleep on a huge pile of money - even if she ultimately finds she's bitten off more than she can chew because she just doesn't have the skillset to run a big broadcast news organization, I bet she never regrets for a moment that she took a chance on trying.

I agree. She’s not the mark. She’s the hit man. She’s been given a pile of money to kill CBS News in general, and 60 Minutes in particular.

The problem with being the hit man is that you’re also the fall guy. You’re going to take the rap for the hit, not the big bosses. You’re there to protect the boss.

Back to 60 Minutes itself. If the remaining correspondents and production crew have the courage, they should all resign en masse. They could form their own independent news show, or offer themselves to some other mass broadcaster, like the BBC.

—Peter

I agree. She’s not the mark. She’s the hit man.

She’s both.

I agree. She’s not the mark. She’s the hit man.

She’s both.

I don't think so. She's 100% on board with the editorial changes at CBS News. No one's forcing her to do this. She not only is willing to do these things, but by all accounts, she genuinely thinks they're the right thing to do. This is her plan, too. She wants this reformation to happen.

If it fails, she's not a "mark," and she won't be the "fall guy" for the failure. She is one of the main architects and supporters of this plan to remake CBS News, not some hapless patsy.

I bet she never regrets for a moment that she took a chance on trying.

Taking a successful business from hero to zero is why she will be castigated for her failure. She is totally lacking in capability for what she is trying to do. She is the Global Crossing of the 2020s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing

If it fails, she's not a "mark," and she won't be the "fall guy" for the failure.

The whole point here is for CBS News to “fail” as an active news outlet that finds facts and reports those to the general population. It’s what Weiss wants. It’s what Ellison wants. It’s what Trump wants.

That’s exactly what is happening. CBS News is well on its way to irrelevancy as a member of the fourth estate.

But that is only part of Weiss’ job. The other part is exactly like a mob hit man. They’re expected to take the blame for the hit and protect the boss. If the police catch up to the hit man, the hit man willingly goes to jail and doesn’t implicate the boss as part of the conspiracy.

Weiss may not know it yet, but if there is some fallout for the loss of CBS News’ reputation and a trusted news source, Weiss is the one who must be found at fault, not her bosses, including Ellison. In that sense, she is the designated fall guy, just like the hit man.

—Peter

But that is only part of Weiss’ job. The other part is exactly like a mob hit man. They’re expected to take the blame for the hit and protect the boss. If the police catch up to the hit man, the hit man willingly goes to jail and doesn’t implicate the boss as part of the conspiracy.

Weiss may not know it yet, but if there is some fallout for the loss of CBS News’ reputation and a trusted news source, Weiss is the one who must be found at fault, not her bosses, including Ellison. In that sense, she is the designated fall guy, just like the hit man.

This absolves Weiss of way too much. She's not some junior person here, a mere lacky or functionary like a soldier in a mob who is implementing the choices that others have made with no personal involvement. She's right up there in leadership. She's making the choices. She genuinely believes in this and is in the senior position. She's part of the "boss" circle, not the "hit man" circle. The mob boss can't be a fall guy - it's genuinely his fault, and he's not taking the fall for someone else.

That's Weiss. She's another mob boss in this analogy, just like Ellison. He's senior to her (he owns the company), but she's in that circle of the people who accurately and correctly should shoulder the blame for whatever happens at CBS.

No one's forcing her to do this.

No one has to. That’s the beauty of 21st century suthoritarianism.

He's senior to her (he owns the company), but she's in that circle of the people who accurately and correctly should shoulder the blame for whatever happens at CBS.

Why would there be "blame"? She was hired to fix CBS News. She's doing that.

This absolves Weiss of way too much. She's not some junior person here, a mere lacky or functionary

I’m not absolving her of anything. She is a willing participant in the destruction of CBS News.

But I think you give her too much credit. Sure, she worked for WSJ and NYT. And if you squint your eyes just right, you can probably make out an argument that she’s qualified to head up a large news organization. But she’s firmly in the MAGA “alternative facts” camp. She has no compunctions about lying to support her political views.

She was hired by Ellison to do one thing: get CBS News off Trump’s back. He didn’t have to tell her to do that. She’s simply moulding the news to her vision - a vision that is aligned with Ellison’s. A MAGA vision.

If you want to make her a mob boss, she’s at best a third string boss in charge of one small piece. She absolutely answers to Ellison. And Ellison is simply paying his protection money to the real mob boss - Trump. He’s paying that protection by hiring someone who won’t question Trump.

That makes her closer to hit man than mob boss in my book.

-Peter

If you want to make her a mob boss, she’s at best a third string boss in charge of one small piece. She absolutely answers to Ellison. And Ellison is simply paying his protection money to the real mob boss - Trump. He’s paying that protection by hiring someone who won’t question Trump.

But that's not really the factor, here. IMHO, a fall guy is someone who takes the blame for the misdeeds of others - so if the misdeeds are actually theirs, it's not appropriate to treat them as a fall guy. To use an extreme example, Goring wasn't a fall guy for Hitler. He did the things! He was guilty of his own crimes! He answered to Hitler, but he was 100% responsible for all the things he was accused of.

That's why even your illustration of a hit man isn't really a good example of a fall guy. If that hit man murders someone at the direction of a mob boss, and we prosecute him for first degree murder, he's not "taking the fall" for the mob boss. He's the one who committed the murder! He's the one who is entirely guilty of the crime he's being charged with!

The same is true of Bari Weiss. If she ends up destroying CBS News, then she will have been the one to destroy CBS News. She will have done so while answering to someone, but she will still be the one who actually did it. She's not a fall guy for anyone else - she's the one who actually did the thing!

Nor do I think it's at all likely that she can (or will) take any of the blame that would belong to Ellison. The hit man might try to shield his boss ("It was all my idea!"), and perhaps that will work in the context of a criminal setting. But Ellison won't be able to avoid the blame for what happens at CBS News. He's not avoiding it now! He's not going to be able to credibly assert that he didn't want the outcomes that Weiss produces, or that he wasn't involved in them happening. He's the boss.

If CBS News is destroyed, Bari Weiss will receive pretty close to exactly the amount of blame she will deserve for it. No less - she'll be the one who did it. But no more - everyone will know exactly the culpability that Ellison has.

No fall guy there.

She's right up there in leadership.

So was Tulsi.

So was Bondi.

So was Kristi.

And very soon, we’ll be able to say “So was Kash”.

obvious list of people who dont care cbs is garbage\defunct :

lani weiss, freepress payoff cashed.
ellison, among wealthiest on planet; his child just wanted a movie biz present so will take cbs tax writeoff as needed.
trump , because foxLite arrived too late.
MAGA because...colbert is truthy insulter? and it seems what trump wants, and that is 99% good enuf.

let's not tun this thread into those gop that may pretend to care.

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