I have spent the better part of my life watching the slow, wet collapse of the Fourth Estate, and yet, somehow, the corporate ghouls at CBS still manage to find new ways to make my skin crawl. The latest exercise in journalistic cowardice involves a 13-minute segment on Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration—a piece of television that was reportedly mothballed at the eleventh hour by CBS News’s supposed Editor-in-Chief, Bari Weiss. After a month of sitting in a digital vault collecting metaphorical dust, the segment finally aired this week with 'few changes.' If you’re looking for a more perfect metaphor for the absolute state of modern media, you won't find one; it’s a story about people being discarded, told by a network that treats its own integrity like a disposable napkin.

Let’s talk about the 'few changes' for a moment. If you pull a story for a month and then air it virtually untouched, you aren't an editor; you're a hostage-taker who finally realized the ransom isn't coming. It suggests that the initial 'concerns'—the typical corporate-speak for 'we’re terrified of the blowback'—were as hollow as the heads of the people who still tune in to watch 60 Minutes between commercials for shingles medication and luxury SUVs. The delay wasn't about accuracy. If it were about accuracy, they would have fixed the errors in forty-eight hours. No, the delay was about optics. It was about waiting for the political wind to shift just enough so that the network wouldn't have to face the wrath of whatever mob was currently screaming the loudest.

On one side, we have the MAGA cultists who view any reporting on the human consequences of the Trump administration’s deportation policies as a personal attack on their orange deity. To them, these Venezuelan men aren't humans; they’re 'talking points' to be dismissed with a wave of a grease-stained hand. On the other side, we have the performative liberals at CBS who want to pat themselves on the back for their 'bravery' in finally airing the segment, ignoring the fact that they sat on it until it was practically stale. It’s a circular firing squad of stupidity, and I’m the only one left with a clear view of the wreckage.

The irony of Bari Weiss—the self-appointed high priestess of 'unfiltered truth' and the 'New Free Press'—reportedly pulling a segment because it didn't fit the vibe is almost too delicious. It’s the ultimate punchline. Everyone is a free speech absolute until the speech in question threatens the brand, the bottom line, or the next invitation to a cocktail party in the Hamptons. It proves what I’ve been saying for years: there is no 'independent media.' There is only 'access media' and 'ego media.' CBS is a decaying carcass of a legacy brand trying to stay relevant in an age where the truth is less important than the speed at which you can deliver a dopamine hit of outrage to your specific demographic of idiots.

And what of the 13 minutes? That is the duration of the attention span CBS grants to the total displacement of human lives. Thirteen minutes, sandwiched between pharmaceutical ads. They take the genuine suffering of deported men and package it into a neat, digestible block of 'content' to be consumed by suburbanites who want to feel a fleeting sense of moral superiority before they go back to scrolling through TikTok. The deportees are just props in a larger game of ratings and political positioning. If their suffering didn't serve as a convenient cudgel against the previous administration, CBS wouldn't have spent 13 seconds on them, let alone 13 minutes.

I find it fascinating that the segment aired with so little alteration. It means the 'editor' didn't actually have a problem with the facts; they had a problem with the reality. They wanted the reality to be different, and when it refused to change, they simply hid it in a drawer for thirty days hoping we’d all forget. But I don't forget. I remember when journalism was about more than just managing the 'vibe' of the evening news. Now, it’s just a PR department for the status quo, run by people who are more afraid of a mean tweet than they are of failing their primary mission.

We live in a world where 'news' is just archived outrage, curated by cowards and consumed by the lobotomized. The delay of this report is a testament to the fact that the gatekeepers are more concerned with the gate than they are with what’s behind it. They’ve turned the news into a slow-motion replay of a car crash where everyone is arguing about the color of the car instead of the bodies on the pavement. Spare me the 'few changes.' The only change that matters is the one that happened to the industry itself: the transition from being a watchdog to being a lapdog that’s too scared to bark until the intruder has already left the house.