Bari Weiss' CBS appointment signals the Ellisons' desperate drive to create Israeli state TV, leveraging Larry Ellison's massive IDF donations to purge critics like Ta-Nehisi Coates and install pro-Israel editors such as Shinda Rice. This strategy responds to collapsing American support post-October 7th, utilizing draconian TikTok measures and appointing former IDF soldier Erica Mandel as hate speech manager to censor dissent. Ultimately, these moves reveal a transparent effort to control information flow and suppress free speech rather than address genuine national security concerns. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Israel Loyalists Buying Media00:07:34
All right, we need to talk about the way in which Israel loyalists in the United States are not just buying up America's most influential media companies and television networks and social media platforms in order to purge it of Israel criticism and turn it into Israeli state propaganda.
That's something I've been reporting on for over two years now.
It's that they're getting so desperate because of collapsing approval and support for Israel in the United States that they're doing it in a way that is so desperate, so transparent, so brazen, so unhidden.
And I want to talk to you about the latest developments at CBS News, owned by the extremely Israel devoted Ellison family, the multi, multi billionaire Larry Ellison, the second richest person on the planet, and his son David.
And they installed Barry Weiss, who spent her whole life at Columbia and then in media and now at CBS, trying to censor and destroy and purge and silence critics of her precious country, Israel.
What's going on there now is beyond what I even thought they were willing to do, given how brazen it is.
Now, just a quick note.
A lot of you have been commenting that there's a reduced number or quantity of videos here on this channel.
And there is slightly.
And the reason for that is that we're now doing most of our work at Substack.
We went there a few months ago.
I returned to Substack, actually, after I stopped doing my nightly show on Rumble.
And you can see that's where we report on a lot of events, including the FISA vote this week, the Iran war, all sorts of other issues, the White House correspondence that are shooting, and what it means and what it doesn't mean.
And we do a lot of videos there as well.
So if you want, you can.
Go to greenwald.substack.com, subscribe to our work there.
We would appreciate if you do, if you want to follow the reporting beyond just the videos that we do here.
All right, let's get into this.
So, if somebody were to ask me, what is the event over the last couple of years that received far too little attention, media and political attention, than was deserved given its significance, I would not really hesitate to answer.
I would say it was the fact that Congress took a social media platform that was used by more than 100 million Americans, voluntarily used by more than 100 million Americans, especially young Americans, which is TikTok, and Passed a law in cooperation with the Biden White House that either banned TikTok or forced a sale into the hands of American companies or American billionaires that they felt more comfortable in terms of how they would censor and control the flow of information.
And a TikTok ban was something that was lingering in Washington for years because of the concern about China, the purported concern about China.
It went nowhere.
It never got anywhere near enough votes, it was never even brought to the floor.
It was something people were talking about.
But the supposed fear of China was never close to enough to get the votes needed.
It was only after October 7th.
When both parties started realizing that there was a collapse of support for Israel because of the destruction of Gaza, that they were seeing these things, young people were especially on social media, principally TikTok.
And that's when they hit the panic button and said, We need to do something as draconian and shockingly extreme as banning TikTok.
We can't allow this anymore in our country because it's generating too much support for Palestinians and too much opposition for Israel.
And that is exactly every person involved in Congress who participated in, advocated for, got that ban passed, will tell you that was the reason.
Here is just for one example this is NBC News shortly after.
October 7th attack, November 1st, 2023.
The ADL had come out and said, Jonathan Rebat, the CEO of the ADL, said, I'm warning Joe, we need to ban TikTok.
We have a huge TikTok problem.
And then lo and behold, people in Congress took up the TikTok ban when it was totally dormant.
And here you see the reporting critics renew call for a TikTok ban, claiming the platform now has an anti Israel bias.
The perceived performance of pro Palestinian content on the platform depends on how you parse TikTok's data.
I mean, it was genuinely shocking that we had an entire social media platform.
Used by over 100 million Americans voluntarily, banned or forced a sale into the hands of pro Israel loyalists simply because of concern that people were using their free speech on TikTok to talk about what the Israelis were doing in Gaza.
That was causing a decline in support, not just for Israel, but for US financing and arming of Israel.
It was the first exposure a lot of people got to this bizarre relationship with the US, where it finances and funds and arms a country that has millions of citizens with higher standards of living than millions of American citizens.
And in American political life, and I can tell you this as somebody who has been writing about this issue for a long time, it is, I never thought I would see in my lifetime a collapse of support of Israel this precipitous or this extreme, or certainly not this rapid.
But this is the context for everything.
Here is A Times of Israel article from earlier this month.
Poll finds 60% of Americans, 60% have an unfavorable view of Israel, up sharply since 2022.
The Pew survey adds to recent findings that sympathies for Palestinians are eclipsing support for the Jewish state, shows 56% of U.S. Jews have little or no confidence in Netanyahu.
I mean, I can't express to you, if you're new to this issue, you might think, oh, yeah, people don't like Israel.
If you go back even five, 10 years, let alone 20 or 30, it was basically unheard of to even express harsh criticism of Israel, let alone have it be.
This unanimous view that bipartisan devotion to Israel, the media devotion to Israel, the money devotion to Israel was on lockdown.
This spiraled so quickly.
It's arguably one of the most significant political effects of having a dispersed and diffused flow of information as a result of social media that isn't controlled by a handful of large corporations with the same interests.
That's why TikTok had to be put back into the hands of people like Larry Ellison because they were hitting the panic button.
Larry Ellison, as I said, is buying up media outlets all over the place.
Here's a New York Times profile of him.
Larry Ellison, a media mogul like no other.
The database billionaire and his son, David, are Trump favorites.
The family could soon control an empire that includes CBS, Paramount, Warner, CNN, and a piece of TikTok.
And actually, Larry Ellison now leads the consortium that purchased TikTok.
I mean, it's a buying up and consolidating not just of news media, but also social media and Hollywood.
You have been here about Paramount and then Warner Brothers.
A huge chunk of Hollywood.
Imagine with the Ellisons controlling that.
Imagine trying to get a filmmate that's even slightly critical of Israel, a documentary.
I'm running into the people who control Hollywood in an unprecedented extent, to say nothing of all these major media outlets and social media platforms.
Now, Larry Ellison, just to be clear, is somebody who has a long time demonstrated devotion, in fact, a supreme devotion, not to the United States, but to Israel.
Here's a Times of Israel article from November 17th, November 5th, 2017, that shows that Larry Ellison is the single largest donor.
To the friends of the IDF, a record $53.8 million raised for IDF soldiers at a Beverly Hills gala.
Larry Ellison donates $16.6 million.
Says, Since Israel's founding, we, he's using the first person pronoun we for Israel, not the United States.
Since Israel's founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home.
Larry Ellison's home is not the United States, even though all his wealth is due to Silicon Valley and U.S. government funding of the internet research that led to Oracle and led him and hit that industry to dominate the world and make huge numbers of billionaires.
He's got the wealth in the United States, but his loyalty is to Israel.
They're not doing a gala in Beverly Hills to raise funds for homeless veterans of American wars.
They're doing it for Israeli soldiers.
And Larry Ellison, in his own words, are telling you, we ask the IDF to defend our home.
He means Israel.
That is who he identifies with.
This is the person buying up all of our media outlets and social media outlets.
Turning CBS Into State TV00:10:03
And obviously, one of the first things that happened at TikTok soon as talk of this began to emerge and it became clear that this is going to happen is they put an IDF soldier, a former IDF soldier, In charge of censorship on all matters Israel and anti Semitism at TikTok.
There you see in the Jerusalem Post.
TikTok's new hate speech manager is a former IDF soldier and a proud Zionist.
Erica Mandel's new position involves developing and driving the company's public policy positions on hate speech according to her job description.
You understand this?
This is an American citizen, an American woman, did not even think about joining the U.S. military, didn't fight for the United States government.
She went to Israel and enrolled, enlisted in the IDF, a foreign military, because that's her allegiance.
And now she's at TikTok suppressing and limiting and controlling what Americans can and can't say about Israel after the main reason that got transferred to Larry Ellison's hands and the hands of Mark Andreessen, another Silicon Valley.
Billionaires is because they knew that TikTok was a major reason why Americans were getting the full picture of Israel and not just the propagandized limited one that they've long fed on.
And they install an IDF soldier as the chief censor.
Do you see what I mean when I say it's so brazen and they're not hiding anything anymore?
Now, at CBS News, there's been all sorts of hilariously inept decision making from Barry Weiss, who they installed as CBS News editor in chief, even though she has no remote experience in television news or anything else, charges 60 minutes, CBS Morning Show.
CBS Nightly News.
One of the very first things that Barry Weiss did was she hired someone by the name of Tony Dockapol to occupy the seat that Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite once occupied, which is anchor of CBS News.
Now, obviously, the network news has become infinitely less influential and important.
That's not where most Americans get their news, but it's still a not trivial source of information.
Barry Weiss put Tony Dockapol there.
Here's a Vanity Fan article.
Tony Dockapol is the face of the Barry Weiss revolution at CBS.
Will he survive it?
And no one even knew who Donnie Docopil was.
He was the host of that trivial chatter show, the Gossip Morning Show with Gail King.
They would have like on reality TV show contestants and like Oprah type authors.
It's like a light thing for people getting their kids ready to go to school in the morning.
And she elevated him.
And the only thing anyone knew about Tony Docopil, and obviously this is all that mattered in his elevation, was that he had, in an unusually aggressive way, berated Ta Nehisi Coates after he released his book about Israeli apartheid in the West Bank, accused Ta Nehisi Coates of writing a book that would be.
Found in the backpack of a radical.
Tony Dockapil is married to an Israeli woman.
Barry Weiss saw that and her eyes lit up and made him the CBS News anchor.
Now, unfortunately for Barry Weiss and for Tony Dockapil, CBS News nightly news ratings have been in collapse almost as much as American support for Israel.
Here you see a New York Post article just from yesterday.
More bad news for Barry Weiss's CBS as viewership nosedived in the latest Nielsen rating.
They have collapsed in ratings since Barry Weiss took over and they put Tony Dockapil there.
Now, I don't think David Ellison.
Matt Mines.
I don't think she's there to boost ratings.
I think she's there to turn CBS News into a propaganda outlet, a state TV outlet for Israeli TV.
And if you doubt that, let's look at what just happened.
A lot of people have been purged from CBS News since Barry Weiss took over.
People have been there for decades, which on the one hand, just standing alone is to be expected.
If you're David Ellison and you think you're hiring some like creative, young, fuzzy, revolutionary type outsider, which is how they see Barry Weiss, which just I'm talking about their perception there.
We can talk about.
How hilarious that is on another day.
But if you see her as that way, she's going to come in and her job is to overhaul CBS News, which has become stagnant.
So a lot of people are there for a long time are going to be replaced with people who are being brought in.
That's normal.
But in Barry Weiss's case, it's not that she's bringing in people with a big audience or who are likely to be watched.
She's bringing in people whose only qualification is extreme loyalty to Israel.
And the people she's firing, their only failing is that they're not.
Here's from the New York Post, which I'm using the New York Post on purpose because the very Zionist, Israel friendly newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch.
And If I used NPR or CNN or the New York Times on these issues, people would say, oh, it's the New York Times or CNN.
So I'm using the New York Post on purpose.
This is a couple of days ago.
CBS News ousted the London bureau chief, Claire Day, after she clashed with Barry Weiss over Iran and Gaza coverage, say sources.
And there's been a lot of reporting on this.
This is the first article.
One of the first CBS News has ousted London bureau chief, Claire Day, after she clashed with editor in chief, Barry Weiss, over the network's coverage of Iran and Gaza.
A CBS source told The Post that Shinda Race, a newly hired foreign editor from The Wall Street Journal, will lead all international coverage across CBS News and will be based out of London starting May 11.
And a memo to Stafford, the CBS News president, Tom Chabrowski says our London Bureau will be moving to a new editorial leadership structure with the introduction of a foreign editor role overseeing all international coverage.
Now, the question is who is this person that Barry Weiss just elevated to all international coverage for CBS News after a fine-grained woman who was too balanced on the questions of Gaza and Iran wasn't devoted enough to Barry Weiss's agenda of state TV for Israel?
I need to show you who she is.
I was even shocked.
Even as much as I know Barry Weiss, I've been writing about Barry Weiss, I know Barry Weiss, I know exactly who she is.
She's been trying to get people fired who are insufficiently supportive of Israel or critical of Israel since her days at Columbia, despite rebranding herself as an icon of free speech and leaving the New York Times by claiming the New York Times is illiberal because it suppresses views that deviate from its orthodoxy.
So ironic, since that's exactly what she's there to do at CBS News and is doing.
So I just need you to see who this person is that she just put in charge of all international coverage for CBS News after firing the longtime London editor because of concerns about her coverage of Gaza and Iran.
Here's Barry making the announcement.
On X yesterday.
Incredible news out of CBS News this morning.
Incredible, incredible.
Shida, that's Shida Rice, joins us as foreign editor.
Shinda has it all.
Shinda, Shangi, Shangi has it all.
She's a scoop hound reporter, a brilliant editor, and a clear eyed leader.
She's also curious, dogged, exacting, and tireless.
More here.
Okay.
Shinda is none of those things.
What she is, is completely embedded in the Israel First community in the United States and has proven that she exploits and abuses her journalism, often alienating her colleagues.
To serve the interests of Israel, which is what CBS News is for, which is what the Ellisons are there buying up media to do.
I just can't believe what a caricature Barry Weiss chose.
Like, choose someone more subtle who's willing to serve and devote themselves to Israel for like career advancement or whatever.
To pick someone like this, okay, let's look at who she is.
I mean, the more I researched her, the more I couldn't believe it.
Here's the Wall Street Journal bio on her.
She came from the Wall Street Journal.
She was an editor there.
There you see her in all her glory, Shinji Rice, deputy bureau chief of the Middle East and North Africa.
The last paragraph contains a little bit of biographical information.
She is a graduate of Yeshiva University, which is a university overwhelmingly of Jewish students, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
She lives with her husband, Dob Weiss, and there are three children in Tel Aviv.
So she lives in Tel Aviv with her husband, Dob Weiss, and she has been involved very recently in a major journalistic scandal.
You may recall that there was reporting that the UN Agency for Human Rights, UNRWA, that operates in Gaza, that was the only agency feeding starving people in Gaza, delivering medicine.
Was accused of being part of Hamas, basically.
This came from Wall Street Journal reporting.
It was a big scoop.
It actually led the Biden administration to cut off funding for UNRWA by claiming it was part of Hamas.
This all came from the Wall Street Journal.
The editor of that story was Shine to Rice.
And the problem is that it seems to have collapsed completely, even according to the Wall Street Journal.
Here is reporting from Semaphore, which is Ben Smith's outlet.
This is from August 4th of 2024 when the article came out.
It was the article came out January.
29th, 2024.
There you see it.
Intelligence reveals details of UN agencies' staffs linked to October 7th.
They blamed UNRWA for it.
Around 10% of the Palestinian Agency, 12,000 staff, has links to militants, according to an intelligence dossier, which of course came from Israel.
And Shindy, the editor of the new in charge of all international reporting for Barry Weiss and CBS News, was the editor on this story.
And Max Tani, who's the media reporter for Semaphore, said the Wall Street Journal still can't confirm their January story about US agency for Palestinians.
And here's part of what that article said In January, the Wall Street Journal made an explosive charge.
Quote, unquote, intelligence reports.
They reported that not only had 12 members of UNRWA taken part in the October 7th attack on Israel, but 10% of their 12,000 workers had ties to militant groups.
But months later, the paper's top editor overseeing standards privately made an admission.
The paper didn't know and still doesn't know whether the allegation based on Israeli intelligence reports was true.
Quote, the fact that the Israeli claims haven't been backed up by solid evidence doesn't mean our reporting was inaccurate or misleading or that we have walked it backwards.
There is a serious correctable error here.
Elena Cherny, the chief news editor, wrote in an email.
Earlier this year, seen by some before.
But reporters covering Gaza and the Middle East Bureau were concerned about Deputy Middle East Bureau Chief Shanji Race's leadership and privately discussed asking editors to remove her from the leading coverage.
They also raised concerns about Carrie Keller Lynn, a freelancer tapped to cover the war for the journal, and she was one of the byline reporters bylined on the Uniris story working for Shanji Race, who had liked a series of social media posts mocking Palestinians.
It's so unbelievable that this is the woman who Barry Weiss replaces a 20 year veteran who apparently wants to report critically about Gaza and the war in Iran, which Barry Weiss cannot tolerate.
The Allisons didn't buy CBS News for that and replaced her with this lifelong Israel firster like Larry Allison, like Barry Weiss.
Removing Balanced Gaza Coverage00:05:46
All right, so let's look at a little more of who she is.
Here is her wedding announcement.
Very lovely.
Let's take a moment to celebrate matrimonial joy.
It is the New York Times wedding announcement from 2016.
There you see her in all her glory, Shandi Rice and her.
Newly betrothed husband, Dov Weiss.
Shanji Race, a daughter of Dr. Deborah Race Fox of Suffer, New York, and Finkus Race of Manhattan, is to be married May 29th to Dov Weiss, the son of Toby Hilson Weiss and Rabbi Abby Weiss of Riverside in the Bronx.
The couple graduated from Yeshiva University, both of He Kamala, not she, but He Kamala, congratulations.
They also received master's degrees in modern Jewish history and a rabbinical orientation.
Like I said, if I wanted Barry Weiss to do the most extreme thing, to Reveal what really is going on at CBS News and at media outlets around the country being gobbled up by the Ellisons.
I would try and create a person like this for her to drive somebody out who's been there for 20 years for the crime of being balanced on Gaza and Iran and replace her with somebody like this.
Who is this Rabbi Weiss, who is her father in law?
She married Dove Weiss.
His father is Rabbi Avi Weiss.
And Avi Weiss is a leading rabbi for a long time, an activist for Israel.
And he was the personal rabbi of Jonathan Pollard.
Jonathan Pollard, of course, was the American, the American citizen working in the Pentagon who stole among the most sensitive defense and nuclear secrets and gave them to Israel.
He was convicted in American court, sentenced to 30 years forever.
Israel activists in the United States were pleading for leniency in the release of Jonathan Pollard, even though he was one of America's most notorious and destructive traitors.
When he finally got released under the Trump administration's first term, Mary Middleson, Donald Trump's largest donor then, flew him back on her plane, her private plane.
He received a hero's welcome from Netanyahu and Israelis.
As a traitor to the United States.
This is who.
And then Mike Huckabee met with him, an American official meeting with a classic traitor, not somebody like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning, who exposed secrets that the American people had a right to know about their own governments doing.
They didn't pass them to foreign countries, they informed the American people.
This is an actual traitor who secretly passed extremely sensitive documents to the country of Israel, the country of his loyalty.
And this woman who very wise hired her father in law was and is his personal rabbi.
And here he wrote a letter to the New York Times.
A letter to the editor to the New York Times in 2007 entitled A Plea for Jonathan Pollard.
On November 21st, Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. Naval Intelligence Analyst who supplied Israel with classified information about Iraqi chemical and nuclear buildups, that is not what he provided, entered his seventh year of solitary confinement.
As Jonathan Pollard's rabbi, I wrote President Bush on August 15th requesting that Mr. Pollard be part of the Middle East exchange to free American hostages.
And then Bush said, that's mixing apples with oranges.
Pollard is not a.
A hostage.
He's a traitor and a convict.
And he said why that was wrong.
And then he concludes his letter The humane thing for the United States to do in recognition of Israel's sacrifice is to release one repentant prisoner who has by now paid his debt.
Signed Rabbi Avi Weiss, Riverdale, New York, who is the father in law of the new editor for all of international affairs for CBS News, who herself has got caught peddling bullshit Israeli propaganda and Israeli intelligence reporting as Wall Street Journal reporting in one of the most destructive stories of the year that caused the United States and Europe.
To cut off funding for the one agency feeding Gaza by claiming that 10% of its workforce were connected to Hamas.
And even the Wall Street Journal says it can't prove that the Israeli intelligence reports on which that reporting was based, reported by a woman chosen by Shanji Rice, who herself had been liking on social media a bunch of posts mocking Palestinians after October 7th.
Do you see what's going on here?
You have Larry Allison leading TikTok, which is blamed for free speech and free information flows about Israel, with an IDF soldier, a woman who left the United States to go to Israel to enroll in their military, not her country's.
To supervise and censor speech about Israel on TikTok.
Larry Ellison is gobbling up media outlets when he is the single largest donor to the IDF.
When he speaks in the first person about we, meaning his country, he doesn't mean the United States.
He means Israel.
And then you have Barry Weiss being the henchman on behalf of the mission to turn CBS News into Israeli state media.
And not just CBS News, but Paramount and Warner Brothers.
Obviously, Barry's not doing that.
The Ellisons are doing that.
And ultimately, CNN.
That's a reason why so many anchors on CNN, like Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, you could see them calculating what they ought to be saying in preparation for the arrival of Barry Weiss, who's going to be in charge of their.
Media outlets as well.
This is very pernicious and very sinister.
And you don't need to be the slightest bit conspiratorial.
You don't need to be the slightest bit speculative.
They're doing it out in the open, out of, like I said, desperation over this polling data.
I don't think it's going to work.
I think this count is out of the bag.
And the internet is too big.
It's too free.
It's the reason, by the way, why I've made a free internet my primary cause above all others over the last decade, because I see the potential to subvert the way in which information has been controlled and maintained more than any other.
Tool I can identify.
But of course, they're going to do everything possible, everything possible.
They're going to destroy people's reputations, brand them anti Semites, blackmail them, release harmful information about them, buy a BD outlets, get them censored, all of which is happening.
And we're going to keep reporting on that.
But what happened just now at CBS News and the woman Barry Weiss chose is not like even she's demonstrated as a pro Israel fanatic.
It's that she produced one of the most dubious stories based on Israeli intelligence in the last couple of years that not even the Wall Street Journal could stand behind.
I think it's so important to realize the severity of this and how.
Transparent, and they don't even care about hiding it anymore.