Plus, Trump’s new favorite Bush-era neocon, and CBS News keeps getting more right – and white.
By Justin Baragona, Reposted from Zeteo, April 1, 2026
Good evening, and welcome to this week’s ‘Ragebait.’
Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, we dig into how Jake Tapper taking on Hasan Piker is making many wonder if the CNN anchor is pandering to his soon-to-be new bosses. Plus, Donald Trump thinks a Bush-era neocon is “Brilliant” and CBS News is doing all white.
Tapper ‘Auditioning to be CNN’s Dokoupil’
Three weeks after drawing the ire of progressives for targeting Zohran Mamdani and his wife for hosting pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, CNN star Jake Tapper is once again under fire for taking aim at a left-wing critic of Israel and painting that person as antisemitic.
In this instance, Tapper’s target is popular progressive streamer Hasan Piker, who has suddenly found himself the focus of a cancellation campaign by centrist groups and right-wing Jewish publications looking to marginalize his influence in upcoming Democratic primaries.
This latest segment by Tapper, which featured a panel consisting of ‘Being Jewish’ podcaster Jonah Platt and no defenders of Piker, was roundly criticized by leftist journalists and commentators – including Mehdi himself – as “deeply irresponsible” for portraying Piker as a “fringe” figure peddling “Jew-hatred.”
The Monday afternoon CNN discussion, which came mere hours after Platt loudly defended Israel’s one-sided death penalty law aimed at only Palestinians, prompted accusations that Tapper was pandering to his soon-to-be corporate bosses – vocal Israel supporters and donors who recently hired a self-avowed “Zionist fanatic” to run CBS News.
“Tapper auditioning for the Ellisons to be CNN’s [Tony] Dokoupil,” ‘Majority Report’ co-host Emma Vigeland quipped on X, referencing the father-son owners of Paramount who just won their hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.
“Tapper’s already auditioning for the Ellison takeover like he won’t be on Substack in 2 years, after being replaced by an AI Anchor who’s directly programmed by Smotrich,” comedian Francesca Fiorentini tweeted.
Of course, since the Ellisons purchased Paramount last year, CBS News has taken on a more conservative, pro-Israel stance under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, the founder of the anti-woke, center-right blog The Free Press.
Piker’s “rise as a prominent voice on the left is now driving a wedge between Democrats – and for good reason,” Tapper declared during the Monday segment. “Hasan Piker’s past and present is checkered with controversial, if not outrageous, if not bigoted statements.”
Besides airing a handful of selectively edited clips of Piker’s comments, including one where he referred to Orthodox Jews in Israel as “inbred,” Tapper also read from a recent op-ed by centrist political group Third Way that argued Piker was “anti-American, anti-women, anti-Western and anti-Semitic. No Democrat should engage with him.”
“He’s able to sort of get away with some of this stuff in these subtle ways, when really his impact is just as harmful as any out-and-out antisemite,” Platt, who recently raged that Ms. Rachel “has a problem with Jews,” grumbled, asserting that Piker will “just sub ‘Jew’ for ‘Israel’” to provide cover for his supposed antisemitism.
This came a few weeks after Tapper brought on Liberal Fascism author and hardcore neocon Jonah Goldberg to rage about Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji. Besides ludicrously likening Khalil to the Ku Klux Klan, Goldberg joined Tapper in criticizing Duwaji’s Instagram likes – which Weiss’s Free Press had been obsessively covering, fuming that the NYC first lady approved of “radical anti-Israel content.”
Shortly after the segment about Piker aired, the streamer reacted by saying it was “absolutely insane” that Tapper was doing a segment on his “antisemitism” on the same day that Israel signed a death penalty law for Palestinian detainees.
Others, meanwhile, pointed out that Piker’s “inbred” comments were largely taken out of context while taking Tapper to task for not having a pro-Palestinian voice on the panel.
Interestingly, just hours after Tapper’s segment calling on Piker to essentially be de-platformed, the left-wing Twitch streamer appeared on CNN anchor Elex Michaelson’s late-night broadcast to talk about his recent relief trip to Cuba. (And, like clockwork, the right-wing StopAntisemitism organization blasted CNN for giving Piker a “platform.”)
And while Tapper did not discuss the Israeli death penalty law during his Monday broadcast, he did air a report from correspondent Jeremy Diamond during Tuesday afternoon’s program. That also came two days after Tapper, in response to a separate story by Diamond, denounced the Israeli military’s detention and assault of a CNN crew reporting in the West Bank as “completely unacceptable.”
Though critics are currently joking that Tapper is currying favor with the Ellisons with these recent segments, it isn’t as if the CNN star has only recently taken aim at prominent Muslims or expressed pro-Israeli sentiments. In 2024, for instance, Tapper smeared Rep. Rashida Tlaib by putting words in her mouth, only to later say he merely “misspoke.”
One former longtime colleague of Tapper’s pointed out that the anchor has found himself under outside pressure in the past when reporting on Israel and Palestine.
“Everything is a performance,” the former colleague continued. “It’s all theater, and he is so practiced at that, so expert at that. He’s so careful about his reputation and how he’s perceived. It’s all just one hugely studied kind of performance.”
The ex-CNN staffer further observed that while “being very pro-Israel” was largely an uncontroversial stance to take for Tapper 10 years ago, the shift in public opinion amid the Gaza genocide – which has only been exacerbated recently by the Iran war – could put the CNN anchor in a precarious position.
“There is far more acceptance in polite society to talk about this stuff, especially after the protests on campus and ‘Free Palestine,’” the former colleague said. “And I’m curious how he manages that given that he wants to be on the popular side and be the hero.”
UPDATE: Representatives for CNN and Tapper initially declined to comment on the quotes in this piece. Since publication, however, a CNN spokesperson has called a claim in an earlier version of this piece, about Tapper and his father, a “complete fabrication and we deny it in the strongest possible terms.” Therefore, the piece has been updated.
Trump Now Loves the Bush Neocons
Remember when Donald Trump was railing against the neoconservatives who “lied” us into the Iraq War, saying George W. Bush made a “big, fat mistake” while campaigning on ending the forever wars?
Now, it seems, all is forgiven. And it’s not just Mark Levin and Sean Hannity who are influencing Trump’s Iran decision-making through his TV screen.
Meet Marc Thiessen, a “Brilliant” member of Trump’s ‘Fox News Cabinet,’ who has become a presidential favorite in recent months as the commander-in-chief’s bloodlust for war has grown – further showing Trump’s embrace of the Bush-era neocons that he promised to eliminate from the GOP a decade ago.
See, before Thiessen was a Fox talking head, he served as the chief speechwriter in the George W. Bush White House. In other words, he was one of the principal salesmen for the disastrous Iraq quagmire – a war that Trump (falsely) claimed he always opposed.
It was his criticism of the Iraq War that boosted Trump’s 2016 electoral hopes, as Trump repeatedly hammered one-time frontrunner Jeb Bush during the GOP primary over his brother’s Middle East campaign, calling it the “worst decision” in presidential history.
Additionally, Thiessen had been a fairly vocal critic of Trump’s over the years, and even when it was clear that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee again in 2024, the ex-Bush flack groused about the “mistakes” Trump had made and how difficult it was to support his campaign.
However, with Trump following Bush’s lead in warmongering Middle East adventures, Thiessen has become a full-fledged MAGA cheerleader while looking to advise the president via Fox. And since Trump loves anyone who kisses his ass publicly, he has made sure to sing Thiessen’s praises.
In other words, as Vox’s Benjy Sarlin aptly pointed out last month, the president’s boosterism of a “famously hawkish” Bush alum who sold America on the Iraq War shows that Trump’s “‘neocon’ purge was made up.”
CBS News Keeps Getting More Right and White
In her continued effort to reshape CBS News into a larger version of The Free Press, Bari Weiss recently announced the expansion of the network’s investigative unit – featuring the hiring of one of her Free Press reporters, Gabe Kaminsky.
According to multiple network staffers that I spoke with, these latest moves – which Weiss has framed as part of her “huge emphasis on scoops” – are just further proof of the anti-DEI chief’s push to make CBS News whiter and more conservative.
“There does seem to be a deliberate purging of POC, women, and 50+ under both Weiss and [CBS News president Tom] Cibrowski, so it doesn’t surprise me the makeup of the new team,” a senior CBS News staffer said.
Along with Kaminsky, who came up through the right-wing organization Young America’s Foundation’s journalism program and spent his entire early career at conservative outlets, the CBS News investigative unit hired former Washington Post reporter Daniel Gilbert and brought in three other CBS journalists. All five of the new team members are white, essentially doubling the size of the unit – which was already overwhelmingly white.
With David Ellison having already promised the Trump administration he’d eliminate all DEI initiatives at Paramount as part of his purchase of the company, recent layoffs at CBS News have seemed to disproportionately impact minorities and women. For instance, during last fall’s crippling cuts, all eight on-air personalities let go were female, and half were people of color. The network also eliminated its Race and Culture Unit, and a Black producer who was let go said CBS was engaging in “race-based layoffs.”
Meanwhile, most of the new full-time staffers that Weiss has recently brought in – such as Israeli-flag-waving correspondent Jonah Kaplan – have one thing in common.
“I may be wrong, but I think that since Bari started – she hasn’t hired a single person of color except for that racism denier Inaya Iman,” one CBS reporter told me, with the senior staffer adding: “There’s one POC woman [Weiss] hired in London. Inaya Folarin Iman. Look her up, read her stuff, and you’ll see why.”
Indeed, two weeks ago, Iman – a Black Lives Matter critic and a former Brexit party candidate who hosted a show on right-wing British network GB News – announced that she was joining CBS as a reporter.
In response to this story, a CBS News spokesperson sent the following Trumpian response: “Please refer to our previous statement about how Zeteo’s ‘coverage’ of CBS News is all fabricated lies. No exception here.”
Justin Baragona is Zeteo’s media columnist. He is a former senior media reporter for The Daily Beast & a correspondent for Mediaite.
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