Bari Weiss’s “60 Minutes” Hires Producer Who Downplayed Gaza Starvation, Justified Killing Journalists

Bari Weiss’s “60 Minutes” Hires Producer Who Downplayed Gaza Starvation, Justified Killing Journalists Bari Weiss attends the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2026, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Bari Weiss’s latest hire for “60 Minutes,” whose major journalistic output includes smearing genocide victims and putting a target on the backs of reporters in Gaza, shows that the full-blown right-wing tabloidification of the television news program is charging ahead. If one held out hope that U.S. media would seek to reverse course after its support for genocide in Gaza over the past 34 months, those hopes were severely misplaced. The mainstream media’s lockstep support for genocide, which I document in my recent book on the subject, has not abated, and in key ways it’s only ramped up, become more explicit, and removed any remaining pretense of editorial independence. The most obvious example of this is the Ellison family’s $8 billion purchase of Paramount and overtly right-wing revamp of CBS News, which kicked off in earnest last year. A former gold standard of centrist journalism, Weiss’s takeover of CBS News has seen numerous high-profile firings, scandals, and credible allegations of underminingjournalistic independence, allegations of Trump toadyism, and a broader editorial push to the right. Related Scott Pelley Shows How Legacy Media Got It Wrong — Before Bari Weiss Made It Worse This campaign has been, in large part, aimed at sucking up to Trump to push through the much bigger prize of a $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. But there’s another element at play: The Ellison family’s documented support for Israel and its broader ideological aims. As I noted last December, Weiss was put in place by David Ellison precisely because of her years of strident, pro-Israel coverage and willingness to push the boundaries of racism and cynicism to pursue this cause. So far, Weiss’s attempt to turn the prestigious “60 Minutes” brand into another New York Post has been met with major internal resistance from high-profile reporters, producers, and news management. And despite Ellison’s buzzy op-ed for The New York Times today, where he pushes back on “speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions” and pledges “independence” for the newsroom, Weiss’s latest hire makes clear that her ideological coup of the once-vaulted “60 Minutes” brand is right on schedule. The New York Post is exactly what Weiss wants CBS News to look like in the near future: lurid incitement mixed with shoddy sourcing and anti-Palestinian racism. The hiring of Tanya Lukyanova, a video journalist for The Free Press, as an associate producer for “60 Minutes,” was announced Friday. Lukyanova has previously done video and research work for the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and Semafor. She rose the ranks of journalism doing critical — if boilerplate — reporting on Russia, but over the past year, under Weiss’s direc