PITTSBURGH, PA - This week, Bari Weiss, the controversial new right-wing head of CBS News, crossed the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette picket line to participate in a front-page puff piece that painted her as a scrappy “Pittsburgh girl” who was forced to drive an old station wagon while she was in high school.
Weiss, who has spent more than 20 years living in New York City, has attempted to use the image of Pittsburgh as a blue-collar town to paint herself as scrappy. The glowing profiles of her Pittsburgh roots almost always omit that her father inherited Weiss House, one of the most high-end furniture stores in Pittsburgh, as well as a large flooring company, Weisslines.
Weiss has most prominently used her Pittsburgh ties to the Tree of Life Synagogue, where she was bat mitzvahed as a child in the 1990s. In 2018, a gunman killed 11 Jews who belonged to three different congregations using the building.
The shooter said that he was explicitly targeting one of the congregations in the building, Dor Hadasah, due to their support of immigrant rights. The shooter at no point even mentioned Israel.
However, Weiss used her childhood connection to Tree of Life to launch herself into fame with her book How to Fight Anti-Semitism. Weiss has repeatedly cited the massacre to argue that anti-zionism is anti-semitism, and supports the genocide in Gaza. This is even though many in Dor Hadash, the congregation that was targeted, vehemently disagree with much of Weiss's public comments, editorial direction, and approach to fighting anti-semitism.
I’ve attended services at Dor Hadash, was nominated for an Emmy for my work on the Tree of Life Massacre, and I was there that morning as their dead bodies were removed from the synagogue. For years, I have watched as many in our Jewish community in Pittsburgh have been frustrated by Weiss's attempts to paint herself as a scrappy Pittsburgh Jew to argue for Zionism.
Now, in crossing the picket line at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Weiss is using the services of scab reporters to further solidify her Pittsburgh ties to justify her extreme right-wing politics.
The decision to cross the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette picket line is also a scary sign to the unionized staffers at CBS News, who have been pushing back. While Pittsburgh is a union town, Weiss politics represent the anti-union extremism of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Weiss First Targeted DEI Staffers, Now Targeting Union
In October, CBS News announced that right-wing commentator Bari Weiss, previously of the conservative outlet Free Press, which she co-founded, would be taking over as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News.
Her appointment shocked many as the 41-year-old Weiss had no prior experience in TV or broadcast news. However, Oracle Co-Founder Larry Ellison is the majority shareholder of Paramount, which owns CBS News, and a hardened Zionist, leading many to believe that’s why Weiss was appointed.
During FCC hearings on CBS’s parent company, Paramount's merger with Skydance, Trump’s FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, said that approval of the merger would be contingent on CBS News’ pledge to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.
Weiss has conducted investigations into staff performance, asking CBS staffers in early October for memos explaining why their jobs were important. The Writers Guild, which represents CBS News staffers, has vigorously fought back against these memos.
“Many of you have expressed concern to us about the purpose of the email, and we share those concerns,” the Writers Guild wrote in an October email urging its union members not to cooperate with Weiss’s investigation.
Then, last week, Weiss announced that 100 staffers would be laid off across CBS News. Quickly, Black and brown staffers took to social media to denounce the layoffs as adversely affecting staffers of color.
“Every producer who was laid off on my team is a person of color,” veteran Black CBS news producer Trey Sherman wrote on an Instagram story. “Every producer on my team who will be relocated within the company is white.”
Scab Reporter Wrote Weiss Profile
Weiss's crossing of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette picket line sends a scary signal that, despite labeling herself a “Pittsburgh girl,” she does not share the union values of her hometown.
The Pittsburgh NewsGuild had been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for three years. The union has repeatedly asked public officials and other journalists not to give interviews to the scab-run newspaper, link to it, or subscribe.
On Thursday, Weiss was covered in a front-page profile of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette titled “How Pittsburgh Native Bari Weiss Learned to Listen, Lead, and Argue.” The article was written by a young reporter, Evan Robinson-Johnson, who crossed the picket line to take his entry-level position in the news industry after studying for five years for his bachelor's and master's at Northwestern.
(Out of respect for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette picket line, we will not be linking to the story.)
The scab Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article implies that Weiss grew up working class. The scab reporter writes that “Before the Shabbat dinners, there were the carpool rides in an old Ford Taurus station wagon. As a teenager, Bari Weiss would pick up friends throughout Squirrel Hill — until the day the car finally broke down at Fifth and Negley.”
However, the article does not mention the considerable wealth of the family. Weiss’ father had inherited the Weiss House, a high-end furniture store founded in 1943 in Shadyside, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. The family still owns Weisslines, a high-end custom flooring company.
As a result of her wealth, Weiss attended Shady Side Academy, the most prestigious and elite prep school in Pittsburgh. In the profile, her father, a furniture and flooring business owner, spoke consistently about how they had encouraged Weiss to study and take a gap year in Israel, a privilege not afforded to most working-class Pittsburgh kids.
Congregation Targeted in Massacre Disagrees with Weiss on Israel
As a teenager, Weiss had her bat mitzvah at Tree of Life Synagogue, where 11 Jews in three different congregations were massacred. In his manifesto, the shooter explicitly said that he shot the Jews because of their support of immigrants rights. At no point did the shooter mention anything about Israel.
However, Weiss has repeatedly cited her personal connections to the massacre at Tree of Life to argue that opposing Israel is a form of anti-semitism.
“Those who call themselves anti-Zionists usually insist they are not anti-Semites. But I struggle to see what else to call an ideology that seeks to eradicate only one state in the world — the one that happens to be the Jewish one — while empathetically insisting on the rights of self-determination for every other minority,” Weiss said before the release of her book How to Fight Anti-Semitism, which draws heavily on her childhood connections to Tree of Life.
While Weiss has repeatedly drawn on her connections to Tree of Life, she has never cited that many leaders of Dor Hadash, the congregation that was targeted due to their support of immigrants' rights, who disagree with her heavily on the massacre.
The rabbi of Dor Hadash, Amy Bradack, traveled to the West Bank in 2023 on a trip organized by the peace group, Shleimut, to visit Palestinians who were under attack from the Israeli Occupation Forces and Zionist settlers.
Speaking of meeting a Palestinian who feared violence, Bardack told The Times of Israel that, "The fear and anxiety that he spoke about reminds me of those early days after the shooting."
Instead, Weiss used the massacre to attack the left for their critiques of Israel.
“Hitlerian anti-Semitism announces its intentions unequivocally. But leftist anti-Semitism, like communism itself, pretends to be the opposite of what it is,” wrote Weiss in her 2019 book How to Fight Anti-Semitism. ““Because of the way it can be smuggled into the mainstream and manipulate us—who doesn’t seek justice and progress? who doesn’t want a universal brotherhood of man?—anti-Semitism that originates on the political left is more insidious and perhaps more existentially dangerous.”
She has repeatedly accused US academics and Palestinian activists of being anti-Semitic.
Weiss Targeting Journalists
As the head of the Free Press, before taking over CBS News, Weiss was repeatedly accused of running fake news articles intended to target journalists and civilians advocating against genocide in Gaza.
In August, Weiss’ Free Press published an article titled “They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems”, which sought to discredit media reports of famine in Gaza. The incident led mainstream outlets like CNN and The Washington Post to put disclaimers questioning the validity of the claims of famine in Gaza.
Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu circulated the story on Twitter to discredit claims of famine in Gaza.
“Journalistic outlets love to boast about ‘impact,’ and this story has had more than its share,” wrote the editors of Free Press following the publication of the story.
However, an analysis done by the United Nations that same month found that famine was widespread in Gaza and caused deliberately.
“It is a man-made disaster, a moral indictment – and a failure of humanity itself,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in releasing the UN’s findings in August. “Famine is not about food; it is the deliberate collapse of the systems needed for human survival.”
For decades, Weiss has smeared or tried to discredit journalists who were critical of Israel’s role in Palestine. In 2004, after CBS's This Morning ran a segment with Pulitzer Prize-winning Black journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on his book The Message, which was very critical of Israel, Weiss published exposes seeking to discredit him.
Under Weiss’s watch, the Free Press has also gone after academics, particularly at her alma mater, Columbia University, creating fake news scandals that the Trump Administration has used as excuses to threaten to cut tens of millions of dollars in university funding. Weiss also helped lead the fight to defund National Public Radio.
“The pattern is clear: if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help,” wrote Jewish writer David Klion in a scathing Guardian expose on Weiss’ conduct.
One of the journalists whom Weiss targeted online was internationally acclaimed Palestinian journalist and poet Refaat Alareer. In October of 2023, Refaat Alareer said that Weiss’s attack on him made him fear for his safety.
“If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss and her likes,” wrote Alareer in October of 2023. “Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies seriously, and they act upon them.”
In December of 2023, Alareer and six members of his family were killed in a surgical bombing in their apartment.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor concluded that “The apartment where Refaat and his family were sheltering was surgically bombed out of the entire building where it’s located, according to corroborated eyewitness and family accounts. This came after weeks of death threats that Refaat received online and by phone from Israeli accounts.”
