Bari Weiss Prepares to Do to CNN What She's Doing to '60 Minutes'

"One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing," Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said about Charles Dickens's overwrought melodrama, The Old Curiosity Shop. VodkaPundit readers will be pleased to learn that Yours Truly is more warmhearted than ever, laughing my patootie off at the long-delayed justice finally coming to CNN.

By now you must be well aware — and perhaps chortling as hard as I am — of what's happened recently as 60 Minutes, where new CBS News chief Bari Weiss and her henchman, Igor, are in the middle (one hopes) of a much-needed shakeup.

Sorry, kidding about the Igor thing. It's just that I spend so much time following the mainstream media, where Weiss is either Dr. Frankenstein or Dracula or some other monstrous villain, and her hand-picked executive producer for 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, must be Igor or Renfield. 

And Another Thing: Please stop trying to get me to appreciate Dickens. He was paid by the word and never failed to take full advantage. 

Anyway, as my Five O'Clock Somewhere partner in thoughtcrime, Stephen Kruiser, put it last week, "60 Minutes correspondent and the former anchor of the CBS Evening News Scott Pelley pitched a hissy fit during a staff meeting, saying that Weiss was 'murdering 60 Minutes.' On Tuesday evening, Pelley was fired."

This is where I'd remind you that whether it's CBS or CNN, the Democrat-leaning lesbian Columbia grad is considered frighteningly right-wing for the got-dam commies infesting both organizations. 

The 60 Minutes survivors — and like a small plane crash involving Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Fidel, you pray there won't be any — can either learn to play ball the Weiss and Bilton way, or find out what their actual worth is on Substack and BlueSky. 

So my question to you, gentle reader, is this: Who at CNN will play the role of Scott Pelley?

You hope it's Dana Bash, don't you? I know I do.

But here's why you should absolutely positively get your hopes up that somebody at CNN is about to Pelley themselves into irrelevancy, courtesy of the New York Post. The paper reported late Tuesday that "CBS News boss Bari Weiss is likely to gain editorial oversight of CNN if and when Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is approved."

Approval would come from the Trump administration, which makes it seem like a bit of a no-brainer. Although according to Axios, "several Democratic state attorneys general and European regulators are still evaluating the merger," and that "state attorneys general from California and New York are part of a group that is preparing a lawsuit to block the deal."

So we'll have to wait and see.

Maybe the truly joyous part — even if you're only half as warm-hearted as Yours Truly — is that "Paramount executives are said to have held preliminary discussions with several candidates who would come in and run the business-side operations next to Weiss."

In other words, Paramount wants to bring in somebody with green eyeshades to tighten belts at the money-losing (not to mention audience-shedding) news network. 

Jake Tapper's current contract — which expires next year — pays him $7 million annually. Does anyone, even current management, believe that Tapper brings anything like that much value to CNN?

Now you hope it's Tapper who leaves in a huff or gets himself fired, don't you? I'm pretty sure I do.

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