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<\/p>\nAdam Johnson is co-host of the Citations Needed<\/a> podcast and author of \u201cHow to Sell a Genocide: The Media\u2019s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza,\u201d which is available now<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bari Weiss\u2019s latest<\/span> hire for \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s lockstep support for genocide, which I document in my recent book on the subject<\/a>, has not abated, and in key ways it\u2019s only ramped up, become more explicit, and removed any remaining pretense of editorial independence. <\/p>\n The most obvious example of this is the Ellison family\u2019s $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\u2019s takeover of CBS News has seen numerous high-profile firings<\/a>, scandals<\/a>, and credible allegations of undermining <\/a>journalistic independence, allegations<\/a> of Trump toadyism, and a broader editorial push to the right<\/a>. <\/p>\n 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<\/a>. But there\u2019s another element at play: The Ellison family\u2019s documented support for Israel<\/a> and its broader ideological aims. As I noted<\/a> last December, Weiss was put in place by David Ellison precisely because<\/a> 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\u2019s attempt to turn the prestigious \u201c60 Minutes\u201d brand into another New York Post has been met with major internal resistance from high-profile reporters, producers, and news management.\u00a0<\/p>\n And despite Ellison\u2019s buzzy op-ed<\/a> for The New York Times today, where he pushes back on \u201cspeculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions\u201d and pledges \u201cindependence\u201d for the newsroom, Weiss\u2019s latest hire makes clear that her ideological coup of the once-vaulted \u201c60 Minutes\u201d brand is right on schedule.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The hiring of Tanya Lukyanova, a video journalist for The Free Press, as an associate producer for \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d 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 \u2014 if boilerplate \u2014 reporting on Russia, but over the past year, under Weiss\u2019s direction, she has veered into outright right-wing tabloidism. This climaxed with her contribution to two of the most shameful supposedly journalistic contributions since Israel\u2019s genocide<\/a> in Gaza began in late 2023: an article she produced herself in September 2025 helping justifying Israel\u2019s unprecedented attacks on journalists<\/a> in Gaza, and an article she co-bylined in August 2025 downplaying mass starvation<\/a> in Gaza.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The September 2025 article, \u201cGazan Journalists Say Al Jazeera Works Hand in Glove with Hamas,\u201d relies almost entirely on alleged Gazan sources procured by the Center for Peace Communications. This is a pro-Israel front group that poses as a \u201cpeace organization\u201d and has peddled similar dubious narratives elsewhere<\/a>, almost aways designed to create the narrative that Gaza is little more than 2 million Palestinians being held captive by Hamas, who desperately want Israel to bomb their way to liberation. The group\u2019s board of directors<\/a> includes major pro-Israel funders, as well as Dennis Ross, a long-time pro-Israel pundit and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, itself a spin-off from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The CPC is run by Joseph Braude, who in 2004 pleaded guilty<\/a> in federal court for illegally smuggling artifacts out of Iraq, namely 4,000-year-old marble and alabaster stone seals he knew to be stolen.\u00a0<\/p>\n At no point in the story was the shady past of the \u201cCenter for Peace Communications,\u201d or its overt Zionist advocacy and funding, mentioned by Lukyanova, who presents them merely as a good-faith humanitarian organization. The shameful guilt-by-vague-association piece proceeds to imply, over and over again, that any connection to Hamas, no matter how remote, makes journalists a fair target<\/a> for Israeli killing<\/a> \u2014 without once reckoning with the numerous<\/a> active and former members of the Israeli military who make up the ranks of Israeli and U.S. media. <\/p>\n It relies heavily on New York Post reporting because 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. Lukyanova dutifully lends this shoddy racist incitement the veneer of respectability.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Israel has killed more than 240 media workers<\/a> in Gaza since October 2023, including several prominent Al Jazeera journalists such as Mohammed Samir Wishah, Hossam Shabat<\/a>, Mahmoud Wadi, and Anas al-Sharif<\/a>. In airstrikes in late 2023 and early 2024, Israel killed the wife, 7-year-old daughter, 15- and 27-year-old sons, and two nephews of longtime Al Jazeera reporter and Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, effectively wiping out his whole family while failing to kill<\/a> al-Dahdouh himself after he was injured in a separate attack. <\/p>\n The Costs of War project at Brown University deemed<\/a> Israel\u2019s war on Gaza the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded. Lukyanova\u2019s anonymously sourced \u201cexpos\u00e9\u201d accusing Al Jazeera reporters of being \u201caffiliated with Hamas\u201d came just two weeks after +972 Magazine revealed<\/a> a secret Israeli military propaganda campaign to tie critical reporters to the designated \u201cterrorist organization,\u201d using what it calls a \u201cLegitimization Cell.\u201d<\/p>\n This is who gets ahead in U.S.-based journalism: not who is most humane, or accurate, or fair, or speaks truth to power, but those who serve the needs of power.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Lukyanova\u2019s other major contribution, published along with Olivia Reingold, was \u201cThey Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems.\u201d The article led to widespread<\/a> backlash and criticism for its callousness, bizarre logical leaps, and the implication that starving children was No Big Deal if those being killed<\/a> by Israel\u2019s deliberate campaign of hunger<\/a> as a weapon of collective punishment<\/a> happen to have preexisting conditions<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Natasha Lennard noted<\/a> for The Intercept at the time, Anne Frank wasn\u2019t directly killed by the Nazis but died of typhus as a result of the Nazis creating the condition for such a disease to spread in their concentration camps to claim its intended victims. Drop Site News followed up<\/a> on the 12 \u201cGazans\u201d whose brutal suffering Reingold and Lukyanova decided to well, actually<\/em> and found \u201ctheir underlying health conditions did not drive the deterioration of their health. Instead, it was the lack of access to food and medicine that drove their acute medical crises. Such is the hallmark of a famine. The first to fall victim are generally those who had underlying conditions to begin with.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This is consistent with much of Lukyanova\u2019s non-Gaza output. While ??plenty of her journalistic output is conventional in nature, she has published several articles promoting schlocky regime-change narratives aimed at various U.S. enemies, namely Iran<\/a> and Venezuela<\/a>. Lukyanova has shown a willingness \u2014 and apparent eagerness \u2014 to use her influential platform to promote war, starvation as a weapon of war, attacks on reporters, and related ideological orthodoxies of U.S. and Israel aggression.<\/p>\n\n
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