Crisis Actors

CBS News has endured some questionable headlines of late—its old owners’ embarrassing settlement of a lawsuit brought by President Trump; its new owners’ apparent determination to put Bari Weiss, an anti-woke commentator whom Puck’s Dylan Byers recently credited with a “broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition,” in charge (and acquire her Free Press while they’re at it); a recent edict, following pressure from the Trump administration, that its Sunday show Face the Nation air interviews in full—and so the network was perhaps glad, yesterday morning, to be able to tout an exclusive: the Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett’s first TV interview since she was confirmed to the court five years ago next month. Other major outlets had tried and failed to land sit-downs with Barrett, who has a book out; she was apparently slated to appear on The Daily, the flagship New York Times podcast, only to cancel. In an era, however, when the prestige of linear TV is in question and the lines distinguishing it from other types of media are blurred, CBS did not land the first interview with Barrett, tout court, nor even the first of her book tour. (Not the first to be publicly presented, at any rate.) Indeed, that honor went to Weiss, who hosted Barrett for an event in New York last week. Ahead of time, the Free Press (which also published an excerpt from the book) said that Barrett’s “work on the bench reflects the kind of intellectual seriousness—and humility—we admire.” Onstage, Barrett returned the compliment, describing herself, in perhaps the most predictable utterance of 2025 so far, as a “huge fan” of the outlet. With friends like these, who needs to kick the shit out of the establishment?

In addition to the Free Press and CBS interviews, Barrett sat down with USA Today and has other public-facing events planned—but it is nonetheless rare for journalists to be able to put questions to a sitting justice, given that the latter tend mostly to express their thinking in written opinions from the bench (or, increasingly, not, but we’ll get to that later). In an ideal world, it would probably be for the best for jurists who hear sensitive cases, and judge them strictly on their legal merits, not to merrily mouth off in the media—and, like various colleagues past and present, Barrett has sought, on her book tour, to convince the public that we do indeed live in this ideal world, insisting that justices follow the law in good faith and are absolutely not politicians in robes. This, however, has always been a fiction, one that has now become all but impossible to credibly sustain—and, given that various justices have seemed quite happy to mouth off (or flag off) when it suits them, be that to excoriate the press or hawk a book, it hardly seems an unfair demand that they subject themselves to the journalistic scrutiny we expect of their robeless brethren. On the few occasions that they do, the discrepancies in their approach aren’t hard to spot. On CBS yesterday, for instance, Barrett declined to weigh in on the substance of various matters that could come before the court, but did seem prepared to state that Trump running for a third term would violate the Constitution. This might seem obvious, but again, these are not ideal times.