President Donald Trump took a swipe at one of his own allies at the rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner.
The 80-year-old president mocked CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss as her time leading the network has seen controversy after controversy. Trump, speaking about what he views as his “accomplishments,” took credit for the new direction CBS News has taken.
“Under my administration, a once feared and powerful regime, that relentlessly attacked America has been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed, and now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions, but I, for one, wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News,” Trump said.
“She’s a wonderful woman,” he added.
The joke garnered only a handful of laughs, as did most of the president’s jokes, with many of the 700 guests in the room seen checking their phones as he launched his repeated assaults on the press.
The Daily Beast reached out to CBS News for comment.
Weiss, 42, was installed to lead CBS News after her “anti-woke” news and opinion blog, The Free Press, was purchased by Paramount Skydance for $150 million, of which David Ellison, a son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison, is the CEO. Weiss had no prior experience in television news before taking over the broadcast network.
She and Ellison, 43, have attempted to make the network more acceptable to conservatives, but that has resulted in nothing but turmoil as the network has seen buyouts, layoffs, and harsh criticism from departing staffers due to the network’s rightward lurch.
Their controversial leadership comes in the context of CBS News settling Trump’s lawsuit for $16 million last year, in which Trump claimed a 60 Minutes interview with his opponent in the 2024 election, former Vice President Kamala Harris, was deceptively edited. At the time that was settled, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was seeking regulatory approval from the Trump administration in its $8 billion merger with Skydance Media.
Top programming at CBS has seen a ratings collapse under Weiss. Ratings for CBS Evening News have steadily declined since Weiss made Tony Dokoupil the anchor, and CBS Mornings saw its smallest weekly viewership in the program’s history last week.
Weiss’s time leading 60 Minutes has been particularly tumultuous, as just three of the seven correspondents from the last season remain, following the layoffs of correspondents Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega, and Anderson Cooper leaving on his own accord.
