LOS ANGELES - OCT 4: CBS_ at the Carol Burnett 50th Anniversary Special Arrivals at the CBS Television City on October 4, 2017 in Los Angeles, CA Image: Kathy Hutchins/shutterrstock.com
Substacker Dean Blundell has a long look at the Epstein-related baggage now sloshing around Bari Weiss' CBS News, and the argument is not that proximity proves guilt. It is that a newsroom built to interrogate power can only get squeamish when the power is all over its own org chart.
Blundell lines up the uncomfortable pieces: Weiss' wife and Free Press co-founder Nellie Bowles, who says she met Epstein as a journalist; CBS contributor Peter Attia, whose Epstein correspondence was apparently chummy enough to alarm normal people; and the Ellison/Paramount ownership world now remaking CBS News from above. None of that is a conviction. All of it is newsworthy, especially when the people involved are taking over an institution whose job is supposed to be asking rich, connected people ugly questions.
Bari Weiss is the editor-in-chief of CBS News. Her wife and Free Press co-founder, Nellie Bowles, appears by name in the Department of Justice's Epstein files — not as a passing mention, but as a confirmed guest. In September 2018, a decade after Epstein's first conviction for sex crimes, Bowles, then a Times reporter, accepted an invitation to his Manhattan townhouse. The correspondence is in the files: an assistant writing on Epstein's behalf, Bowles replying "Wednesday at 11am is perfect! I'll be there then!" A month later, Epstein was emailing her about her personal life.
Bowles has an answer for this, and it's not a bad one: she went as a journalist, chasing a profile, and she later used the reporting. "So secret that I wrote about the meeting," she posted, "and used the reporting from it … twice … for the NYT." Take her at her word. A reporter meeting a newsworthy subject is the job. File it as defensible.
But hold onto the texture of it — the easy familiarity, the personal-life chit-chat a month later — because it turns out to be the least damning Epstein thread running through the people who now run CBS News.
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