Real Reason Anderson Cooper Left CBS News Amid Bari Weiss & Trump's Hostile Takeover

0:04Oliver Darcy:Today, I am joined by former CNN senior media reporter. He left CNN and founded Status, an independent media industry newsletter and podcast. Welcome to IHIP News, Oliver Darcy. Oliver, how are you today? I'm doing well. How are you? Very well. I mean, I say that, but then you think about what's going on with the government and you're like, can I say that? it's this weird split screen life that we're living i'll tell you i'm not doing as well as cash patel in that locker room oh my god that is so bad oliver it's just so embarrassing that the head of the fbi is behaving that way and stealing valor yeah um quite a moment but uh we'll we'll try to be as amped up as him.

0:55Oliver Darcy:Okay, let's get to the CBS and Barry Weiss and Anderson Cooper leaving 60 Minutes. You broke this story. And what is the real reason why Anderson Cooper left 60 Minutes? Well, officially, as you know, he cited family and saying he wants to spend more time with kids. But the reality is behind the scenes, he had grown quite uneasy with the direction CBS News was taking under Barry Weiss and under David Ellison's ownership. And that's according to two people familiar with his decision making on this. He was offered a renewal deal. CBS News came to him. They wanted him to renew. In fact, they not only wanted him to renew, they wanted to make him the face of 60 Minutes and expand his footprint at the network.

1:46Barry Weiss was very keen on this. But at the end of the day, I think he decided that he didn't really feel comfortable being associated with Barry Weiss's version of 60 Minutes, her version of CBS News. And Anderson Cooper does not need the money. He already has a CNN show. He has a hit podcast. And so he ultimately decides, I'm just going to pass on this. I'm not going to be here. And I think the real question is, what happens to 60 Minutes going forward? Is he the first big name correspondent to leave or will, you know, Leslie Stahl and Bill Whitaker and Scott Pelley and others, will they follow suit soon?

2:25Oliver Darcy:So it's interesting, you know, we all grew up with 60 minutes. It's just like a part of your childhood hearing the clock tick. And then you think about the Ellison family, they are multi-billionaires multiple times over. So they're based on what they're doing, they're not really getting into media to make money. It's just my opinion. It looks like they're getting into media to control narratives, which is the opposite of what the media should do and what the administration wants, which is propaganda channels. And so Barry Weiss's role at CBS, is she operating under like just misguided hubris that she thinks she's so great?

3:10Oliver Darcy:Or is she executing Larry Ellison's desire to control American media narratives, despite profit or a little bit of both? Your opinion? I think it's a mixture of a lot of things. I think Barry Weiss has certainly a point of view that she started her own outlet, The Free Press, with. I think it's often misguided. And I think her editorial philosophy, which I think really comes down to equalizing, but it's like a false both sidesism, right? Like we're going to give Donald Trump his say, and we're going to give someone else their say, and people can figure it out. And both sides are maybe equal. I think that's been her philosophy.

3:49And I think that David Ellison has become a big fan of hers. That's according to my understanding. I'm talking to people around him. He's a big fan of the free press. And he brought her into, I think, I believe he thought he was going to digitally invigorate the network with someone who he views as having started a successful digital business on Substack. But also, I think there's no doubt that they want to placate this administration and they want to curry favors so that they can get some additional deals done that require government approval. And right now, you're seeing them make a hostile takeover play for Warner Brothers Discovery, which is the parent company of CNN and HBO and obviously one of those pictures.

4:33and that deal requires government approval. And their main argument to shareholders is, we think we're the best suitor for this company because we are basically friends with the Trump administration so we can get this deal through. Netflix, which is the company that has actually struck a deal with Warner Brothers Discovery for some of its assets, they're saying they can't get the deal done. We can get the deal done because Donald Trump likes us. And so obviously, Donald Trump does not care about what Paramount puts on Paramount+. He's not watching Landman or Yellowstone. He's watching CBS News in 60 Minutes.

5:08And you don't want to rock that boat too much. And so I think you're seeing Barry Weiss try to avoid landmines and is steering this network, obviously, in more MAGA-friendly waters. I don't think she's outright MAGA, but I certainly think she's not throwing the fastballs that others would throw in her position.

5:31Oliver Darcy:I think it would be remiss if we didn't discuss the fact that Larry Ellison is a hardcore Israel supporter, and he actually donated money to the IDF in the middle of a genocide. Barry Weiss is a hardcore Israel supporter, right? So they have this in common. All of the capitulations that you see from law firms to media to corporations, you would think if you were reading about this that and not watching it, you never seen a video of him like 300 years from now. Well, he must be 25 or 30 if all of these people are going to suck up to him like this. And the fact that he's like 80 and they're all like just, you know, completely capitulating moral, total moral collapse makes me think, okay, what is their game plan here?

6:19Oliver Darcy:I mean, clearly Larry Ellison is aligned with Benjamin Netanyahu's idea that we have to control tick tock in order to control narratives and that's what scares me so much about this they're using trump the biggest dipshit of a president we've ever had let's face it there's no deep way to put it as a useful idiot i think that i think that what's alarming is if you look around at the media landscape right now it's very much controlled by billionaires who are bending the need to Donald Trump, right? If you look at all the major, you know, whether what happened at Disney with Jimmy Kimmel, you see that situation playing out.

6:59You see, obviously, what's happening at CBS right now, Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post, Patrick Sinqiang with the Los Angeles Times, like down the list it goes, you see billionaires and corporations capitulating to the president. And what's really sad about it is that like, if you think about the the people who are supposed to safeguard society and push back against the authoritarians. It's the most powerful people, right? They're supposed to safeguard. These are the people who also portrayed themselves as like, we stand up for democracy back in 2016. And like, we have fact checking and we're going to hold this administration accountable.

7:37It shouldn't be the average, you know, Joe on the street, who's like taking up his Saturday, you know, of what working double duty shifts to protest some of these actions, it should be the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world or the Jeff Bezos, the people who have unlimited money, who have amassed so much power, and who are obviously collectively much stronger, I think, than the person in the Oval Office. Instead, you've seen them being the most selfish and do everything they can to safeguard their own wallets. And I think that's what's really alarming is like, you would never think that sort of thing would happen in America, I guess.

8:13You would think that these powerful men would show some backbone. And at the end of the day, they're not the ones doing anything. It's really the American people in the streets saying, we've had enough. All right.

8:25Oliver Darcy:So you see these traditional media structures that have all the money in the world bending the knee to him. But then you have independent media, which is growing at an astronomical rate. Cable news is kind of now like the typewriter to the iPhone. And so the space that you and I are on right now is kind of like the new iPhone of it. And you see Pam Bondi and Donald Trump go after Don Lemon, independent media. And I understand that you've covered this closely. Do you think that this is a scare tactic by the administration to try to silence independent media voices like yours and mine. Of course, I think that's exactly what they're doing.

9:09I mean, I think this is very evident that they are trying to intimidate the press. And not only, I think, the new media, which I do think that they, certainly Donald Trump, who is a good study of the media, understands the power. That's why he did all those podcasts with the Manosphere in 2024. But they want to silence everyone, right? They're filing lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal. They're going after the New York Times. They're threatening everyone. And that's certainly to chill speech. And it's so ironic because Donald Trump and his administration came in as supposedly being pro-free speech.

9:43Remember Donald Trump in the Oval Office, I think on inauguration, they signed some random free speech thing. I am the free speech president. And really, in practice, he is doing everything he can to silence his critics. He doesn't believe in free speech for anyone who doesn't agree with him. And I think that certainly having the FBI arrest Don Lemon and charge him after two courts rejected them doing this, I think that is – there's no question this is meant to send a chill down the spine of every journalist covering this administration, particularly those in new media who don't have the resources of a billion-dollar company behind them.

10:27Oliver Darcy:Does it send a chill to you to do? Because it doesn't, I don't know if maybe I'm wrong about this, but I'm not scared of them. I'm not scared of the fascist. I see them as just such shapeshifters. I mean, I see Kash Patel acting like a nut. You see Donald Trump more concerned about his decorating. You see Pam Bondi can't even stand up for victims of child rape. You know, she walks in there and so like these i i don't have i'm not scared of them i'm more scared of the pain that they exact on marginalized people in this country than i am personally scared of them what's your take on on being scared by their actions i mean i'm not scared of them but i do think they can cause and inflict pain on people they want to and even if you have no legal case which i think you know every time he files one of these lawsuits we always ask legal experts like What do you make of it?

11:24And they always say, this is absurd. This is not, this is meritless, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, these companies have lawyers and a lot of capital behind them to defend themselves against meritless lawsuits. You know, the president of the United States using the federal government to go after someone like Don Lemon, that's going to be very expensive and very difficult right now. He has the DOJ, the DOJ has his phone. Yeah. Who knows what they're doing with it, right? They're going through his text messages. they can inflict a lot of pain on people. So am I scared of these people? No. And will we ever back down or soften our coverage?

12:00Definitely not. But I don't think, I think it's important to realize that they can push a lot of painful buttons for people. And that's the whole point. They want to make examples. And the minute you start letting that fear or like, you know, seep into coverage is I think that's, you know, you don't, you can't allow that. And I unfortunately think that's what's happened in a lot of other media outlets, but we shouldn't downplay what they're doing either. And even though they're a very incompetent bunch, Don Lemon's going to be stuck in court for a while and it's not going to be a comfortable next several months or years for him.

12:37Oliver Darcy:Yeah, I completely agree with your take on that. They can make your life absolutely miserable and expensive. All right. Looking ahead, the media landscape for heading into the midterms in 2026, Something that bothers me, like I think about Elon Musk owning the algorithms of X. I think about Mark Zuckerberg, who said that Joe Biden, an 80-year-old man, made him feel neutered. I think about this neutered man owning the algorithms of Instagram, of Facebook, and all of the AI people. And I worry about the way people get their news now in little quick bites, like you're on your phone. It's like, oh, it's a cute cat.

13:19Oliver Darcy:Oh, there's the punch the monkey. Oh my God, somebody got shot in Minnesota. Oh, look, this would be a great vacation spot. It's real disjointed the way we're processing information now. How much of a worry do you have about these morally collapsed, neutered, their words, not mine, billionaires controlling the algorithms? I think it's, you know, goodness, I think it's very worrisome. And I think it's really shameful that our regulators in Congress and our lawmakers in Congress have not passed any sort of regulation to keep these big platforms in check. But seeing what they have done since Donald Trump took office, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg removing protections for misinformation, hate speech, eliminating fact checking, or you've seen what Elon Musk has done, which has turned Twitter into X, which is now basically a MAGA fever swamp.

14:17And you look around all the tech companies, even YouTube, you know, YouTube platformed OAN, the right wing conspiracy channel on YouTube TV. And so you see what the decisions they're making. And it feels like all the guardrails are gone. You know, there were some guardrails that were erected after Donald Trump won in 2016 when people grappled with the fact that misinformation misled a lot of people and they seemed to take it seriously. And then after Donald Trump incited the insurrection, they booted him from their platforms. They showed some backbone. And now it's like we've completely gone back to square one.

14:57It just seems like there is no nerve from these platforms to stand in Donald Trump's way. And with Larry Ellison owning a piece of TikTok now, and again, not wanting to anger the very thin-skinned man in the White House, you really start to wonder how these algorithms are going to be used. And even if they're not tilted in one way or another, I think you could certainly argue that on X, they are certainly tilted toward Elon Musk. But even if they're just totally neutral, I think the absence of having like some antibodies in the system in the form of fact checking or not allowing misinformation to run rampant on the platforms, I think that ends up benefiting Donald Trump.

15:44Because he's happy to play in the mud. He's happy to play dirty. He's happy to lie and misinform. And I think typically on the other side, Democrats are not engaging in that sort of behavior. But if you can poison the well just a little bit, cloud everything for everyone, it ends up benefiting Donald Trump. And so, I don't know, I worry that everyone is just getting information from these apps on these phones, and there are really no protections on there anymore. Yeah.

16:19Oliver Darcy:And I, Larry Ellison acquiring TikTok was really the, the, um, a gift to Benjamin Netanyahu. Benjamin Netanyahu had a conference where he sat down with American influencers and said, we need to own TikToks. It is the next place where we need to go to fight this war, which is a propaganda war because so many Americans saw what was happening in Palestine. and it's bothering. It's, I mean, watching little kids get blown up and shot and people's houses being annihilated is really a problem. So you have people that are associated with Israel now that are saying stuff like now that the TikTok images are subsiding, they're intentionally, they don't want us to see the truth about what murderous fascist war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is doing to Gaza, which also now we know from Axios is why Kamala laws, because the Democrats didn't have moral clarity on that.

17:20And even at home, you look at like what's going on with these ICE apps, right? Where people are, you know, they're reporting ICE and Apple, I think, and Google have taken some of these ICE apps away. And the administration is pressuring companies like Meta to crack down on these groups that are sharing where ICE is policing. And these companies are complying. And so, again, I think there's a big issue when our information flows through people who have no actual principles. And what we've seen in this administration is that all these principles these companies claim to have, they don't. They just, they're apparently very flimsy, right?

18:07Like after the insurrection, I remember everyone came out and they said, we're not donating to anything, you know, members of Congress who supported the, um, the, uh, the stop the steal stuff. We're not going to support them. We're not going to, we're going to completely back off, um, you know, uh, associating ourselves with anyone that pushed the big lie. And I think there was a real question of whether like Fox news was even in that boat, right? I mean, obviously, they were pushing election misinformation. They spent$770 million settling with one voting technology company. And it's like, you know, there are questions with like, should Comcast be beaming Fox News into everyone's homes?

18:47And we are so far from that conversation now. It's like, again, all these principles these companies claim to have turned out to be total BS. They have none. And maybe we shouldn't have been so naive to even believe anything that they cared about, you know, on being good citizens of the, you know, of our democracy. But I think that's been really remarkable to see, too.

19:13Oliver Darcy:Yeah, I had Kara Swisher on the pod and she said that the big tech guys believe in nothing. And if Kamala would have won, they'd have their pronouns in their company bios. And I thought, you know, that's probably exactly it. They're just billionaire prostitutes. Oliver, thank you so much for joining me. And I wish you the best of luck with your new venture status. And I hope to collaborate with you again soon. Thank you so much.