Jon Stewart slammed Bari Weiss on Wednesday over her controversial reign as CBS News’ editor-in-chief when asked to make a “media bet” on either her or “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, who will leave his CBS home in a week.
“Oh, come on,” Stewart said when hit with the listener question on his “Weekly Show” podcast.
“That’s like the Knicks versus Sixers,” said producer Gillian Spear, likening the matchup to the New York team sweeping Philadelphia in the NBA playoffs.
“No, that’s like the Harlem Globetrotters versus the Washington Generals,” chirped Stewart in a nod to the iconic basketball entertainment troupe and its less-than-spectacular opponent. “That’s not even modern NBA competition. That’s old-school, classic, king v. clown.”
After CBS’s parent company, Paramount, made way for its Donald Trump-aligned CEO David Ellison last year, he installed conservative journalist Weiss to head its news division, a move critics argue has led to a rightward shift.
Weiss has faced waves of backlash, including in December when she abruptly yanked a “60 Minutes” segment on the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador.
She also reportedly rewrote Tony Dokoupil’s script just ahead of his first night anchoring “CBS Evening News” to cast President Donald Trump’s operation in Venezuela as a “cunning maneuver to box out China, Russia and Iran.” The move apparently caused the anchor to stumble over his words on the air.
As Weiss continues to lead CBS’s news division, Colbert is set to bid farewell to the network with the final episode of “The Late Show” airing next Thursday.
His supporters have suspected political pressure played a role in CBS’s decision to pull the plug on the program. The network insists it was due to “purely” financial reasons.
Stewart described Colbert as a “generational broadcaster, talented in so many different dimensions.”
“[He’s] a lovely human being, not chasing some outdated, preconceived notion of centrism or whatever the fuck it is that they’re doing over there … although, to be fair, Stephen also would’ve fired everybody at ‘60 Minutes,’” quipped Stewart in a likely nod to reports of possible layoffs at the news program.
“Not out of ideology. Pure vengeance and spite,” he continued. “Bet on Colbert all day long, baby! All day long!”