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Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social [ [link removed] ]. Subscribe to her Substack, Indistinct Chatter [ [link removed] ].
With her latest hire, Bari Weiss’ continues her jaw-dropping attack on the credibility of CBS News.
Weiss reportedly told colleagues she wanted to “blow up” [ [link removed] ]the network. She has steered the marquee evening newscast off a ratings cliff, ripped a hole in the heart of the network’s crown jewel, 60 Minutes, and purged a growing number of hardworking journalists from throughout the organization. Now, she’s hired someone for the network’s investigative unit who specializes in tabloid style reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and other related topics.
I wish I was kidding, but I’m not.
Seriously, what on earth was she thinking when she hired Josh Boswell [ [link removed] ], tabloid reporter for the conservative Daily Mail [ [link removed] ] who has done hundreds of reports on Hunter Biden? Bari Weiss booted reporting veterans Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega, but she just put a guy who does National Enquirer-type coverage on the CBS News investigative team. Yikes.
Clearly Weiss’ new hiring standards are appalling. [ [link removed] ] Don’t know a damn thing about broadcast news? [ [link removed] ] Great. Only worked for MAGA media? Even better. No media experience at all but a stint at a right-wing think tank or with Republican Senator Tom Cotton (or both)? Better still. Think Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize? [ [link removed] ] The best.
New Political Litmus Test at CBS
Not only is fact based journalism experience unwelcome at Weiss’ CBS, to be on Team Bari, a.k.a the B team, you really can’t be an objective journalist at all.
Never mind how many groundbreaking news stories you’ve done, you’ve got to pass Weiss’ political litmus test. Remember Weiss has never been a news reporter, she’s an opinion writer who clearly doesn’t understand or value credible, fact-based journalism. In fact, she sneers at it.
The real key to working for Weiss at her degraded version of CBS News is includes being anti woke, anti-Muslim [ [link removed] ], passionately anti-Mamdani [ [link removed] ], and a holding a stringent belief that mainstream media — like CBS News itself — is corrupt and biased. (It’s not.)
If you check all those boxes, there is probably a job at CBS News waiting for you. You’d probably seal the deal with a resume full of obsessive tabloid style coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. That’s apparently what did it for Josh Boswell [ [link removed] ].
Hunter Biden’s Laptop Lore
There are few things that scream MAGA like its years-long obsession with Hunter Biden’s laptop. It is the holy grail of red meat topics that sits in the MAGA hall of fame right alongside Jan 6th, the 2020 election, Russia collusion, DEI, CRT, “woke” politics, the hagiography of Charlie Kirk, and COVID conspiracy theories.
Of course, it’s Hunter Biden’s laptop that also helped propel Bari Weiss to her unlikely perch at CBS News, so it’s no wonder that Boswell caught her attention.
Weiss’ infamous “Twitter files exposé” in 2022, shortly after Elon Musk purchased the social media platform, was built on allegations that Twitter, Facebook, and mainstream media all suppressed information about the Hunter Biden’s laptop. Her flimsy, often false, claims [ [link removed] ]helped make her the darling of right wing tech bros and ultimately led her to a “billionaire summer camp” [ [link removed] ]where she connected with David Ellison, who now owns CBS.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Unrepentant, despite the fierce public blow back when she gutted 60 Minutes, Weiss is continuing to gut bedrock journalism from the core of CBS News, steering it away from its mainstream, middle-of-the-road roots towards Trump-friendly coverage [ [link removed] ]. You may not see it in every story or every show, but there is still plenty of evidence that Weiss is moving the traditional nonpartisan news giant to the right.
A big part of that right-wing transformation is purging CBS journalists and replacing them with people like Boswell and the woefully-miscast [ [link removed] ]60 Minutes [ [link removed] ] executive producer, Nick Bilton. [ [link removed] ]Like Weiss herself, nearly every one of these new hires is remarkably unqualified and ill-suited to a work in broadcasting, particularly at this high level.
CBS Journalist Purge
Since Weiss took over CBS News last fall, upwards of 200 people have lost their jobs either through firings [ [link removed] ], layoffs [ [link removed] ]or buyouts [ [link removed] ]. Hundreds of years worth of invaluable journalism experience was gone almost overnight. And this is not about cost savings, because she is replacing the lost talent with new, political hires.
As a journalist, I mourn this stunning loss of credible, objective independent news talent. I think of all the leads that won’t be followed and important stories that won’t be told. 60 Minutes alone lost some of the best investigative reporters, editors and producers in the country in the Weiss purge. That, of course, includes Scott Pelley, whose 51 Emmy awards for actual journalism pretty much disqualified him from participation on Team Bari.
Just a few weeks after firing Pelley, Weiss hired Boswell from that journalism stronghold, The Daily Mail [ [link removed] ], as an investigative reporter. His bio proudly boasts that he was “the first reporter to authenticate Hunter Biden’s infamous abandoned laptop using top cyber forensics experts.”
Coming Up Next on CBS: Tabloid Garbage
Who knows how many stories Boswell has done on the former president’s son [ [link removed] ]; I stopped counting at [ [link removed] ] 170.
Hiring someone like Boswell and puffing them up as an investigative reporter is as sure as sign as any which direction CBS is headed under Weiss. No more award-winning Pelley investigative pieces.But if you are hungry for tabloid trash, CBS has got it covered.
Just to give a sense of the important work Bari Weiss’ new investigative reporter has been doing, here are some recent headlines:
Hunter Biden’s stripper baby mama asks for him to be ARRESTED over claims he is still failing to pay her child support [ [link removed] ]
Secret double life of Kristi Noem’s cross-dressing husband Bryon: The pouting ‘busty bimbo’ photos and trove of explicit messages [ [link removed] ]
Pioneering astronaut’s deathbed revelation of his close encounter with aliens in his BEDROOM just six days after crashing space ship in California desert [ [link removed] ]
Charlie Kirk suspect’s disturbing secret kinks: Sickening cache of porn searches revealed ... his pedophile friend … and ‘Furry Shades of Gay’ game [ [link removed] ]
There once was a broadcast network that strove to report the news to Americans. It nurtured talents from Edward R. Murrow to Walter Cronkite to Scott Pelley. Large numbers of Americans counted on it. It was brave. It reported the news without fear or favor.
Bari Weiss and the thin-skinned billionaires didn’t like that. They prefer reporters who fear them. They want to be favored. Now that network is dead and Weiss is building in its place a machine to propagate supermarket tabloid garbage and right-wing political propaganda.
There is a silver lining. Americans are not fools, and they are turning away from CBS newscasts [ [link removed] ]in record numbers. It seems plenty of ordinary people still value the hard work of real journalists, even if billionaires and their hack editors fear them.

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