From the Broadcast News Gossip department:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an appearance on the now Donald Trump–friendly CBS News because of the actions of the network’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.

The progressive Democrat Mamdani, to whom the president has taken an unlikely shine, had been in talks to do a sit-down interview with Robert Costa for CBS News Sunday Morning.

However, Mamdani has now backed out because Weiss has stirred CBS News to launch wave after wave of negative press coverage of the mayor, Vanity Fair’s Aidan McLaughlin first reported in his Party Animals newsletter.

Hostile press coverage, they mean. The euphemistic word “negative” is so useless there; I wish journalists or their editors would stop using bland empty adjectives like that.

This includes Weiss reposting a CBS News clip of Iranian dissident and activist Masih Alinejad criticizing Mamdani’s description of U.S. strikes on Iran as “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” along with a fire emoji on X.

Part of the problem there is that Trump is the wrong guy to be helping Iranian dissidents and activists. He’s doing what he’s doing because he likes to blow people up.

Status recently reported CBS News staff were concerned that Weiss—an outspoken supporter of Israel and a fierce critic of progressive “woke” ideologies—was trying to steer the network toward the same editorial stance as The Free Press, the media company she founded, which is also highly critical of the New York mayor.

What a surprise: she has the same views in two different places. Who saw that coming?