Adam Johnson

I'm a little skeptical of it.

Barry Weiss was brought in for the explicit purposes of being an ideological enforcer for the Ellison family.

So the idea that they would withdraw her power, it could be because of pushback from internally from reporters.

I mean, obviously, there's a lot of the people there.

They just lost Anderson Cooper over this.

view it as illegitimate, that they've completely destroyed the firewall between ownership and editorial independence such as that it existed under Sherry Redstone, who herself intervened three separate times because they thought 60 Minutes' coverage

was too critical of Israel.

And then she sold it to the Ellison family, who, of course, is the largest private donor to the IDF.

And they bring in Barry Weiss, who obviously has a history of being staunchly pro-Israel.

But there was a lot of pushback internally, I know, from several reports that she had kind of gone too far or kind of flew too close to the sun in terms of editorial intervention.

And of course, they're using 60 Minutes effectively to suck up to Trump.

So they'll approve the much more important

prize, which is CNN and Time Warner and that whole empire, which is far more valuable than Paramount, which is only $8 billion.

I'll believe it when I see it, because I think the reason why she was brought in was pretty explicitly to weed out what was perceived as anti-Israel bias or woke or anything considered too liberal.

It was a combination of right-wing grievances that she was there to enforce.

My sense is that they may be trial ballooning this to see if this eases off some of the tensions from their more established reporters.

What shocked me the most?

I suppose not a lot shocked me, although the asymmetry of the data was pretty profound.

So we looked at bias by comparing, for example, the first thing we compared was what we call emotive words, which is when an Israeli is killed, US media, whether it's New York Times or CNN or MSNBC describe it as brutal or savage or barbaric

or a massacre or a slaughter, whereas when Palestinians are killed, overwhelmingly our data shows by about 100 to 1.