There was no shortage of hot takes about Bari Weiss’ appointment as CBS News’ top editorial exec — and speculation that David Ellison paid $150 million for her contrarian outlet The Free Press mainly to appease the likes of Donald Trump by trying to point out that he desires to make CBS News “anti-woke” and root out alleged liberal bias.
Predictably, Weiss’ arrival at CBS News rattled the troops. WGA East warned staffers to not reply to her memo asking for details on “the way you spend your working hours” until the union received assurances that the responses wouldn’t factor into layoffs or “discipline.” CBS told the WGA that employees wouldn’t be disciplined for not responding.
However the episode reflects the fear and uncertainty of what Weiss plans to do at CBS News. A variety of observers have expressed dire warnings and anger over Ellison’s putting her in command of news operations.
Dan Moderately, longtime anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” called Weiss “one of the polarizing figures in today’s American media landscape” and lamented that her appointment marks “a dark day within the halls of CBS News.” (His post was titled “MAGA Tested, Trump Approved News.”) Latest York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie , Weiss’ former colleague on the paper, called her impending CBS News appointment “a heartwarming story of how being an unethical and talentless hack is not any barrier to your success when you’re willing to endlessly flatter the wretched views of wealthy dipshits.” Jon Oliver slammed Weiss as having “spent years putting out work that, for my part, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading.” And so forth.
Weiss maintains that she simply desires to “seek the reality and tell it plainly.” The Free Press’ 170,000 subscribers “demonstrated that there’s a marketplace for honest journalism,” she wrote on X Oct. 6. “And so they’ve given us a mandate to pursue that mission from a fair larger platform” at CBS News. She has supporters, by the best way: Conde Nast’s Anna Wintour said Weiss is “a really achieved young woman” who has the makings of a fantastic leader.”
It’s true that trust within the news media is at an all-time low. Per a Gallup poll fielded Sept. 2-16, 28% of Americans agreed that they had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, TV and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” That’s the bottom the figure has been since Gallup began measuring Americans’ confidence in news reporting in 1972. To Weiss and others, that’s proof that news organizations must change in the event that they wish to remain going concerns.
Meanwhile, as Variety’s Brian Steinberg has identified, CBS News does need some shaking up: The news division’s series of senior execs over the past few years have been unable to show around “CBS Evening News” and “CBS Mornings,” whose rankings remain stuck in third place behind time-slot rivals at NBC News and ABC News.
Nevertheless, a significant component within the decline of Americans’ trust in media has been the attacks on the news media by Donald Trump and his fellow MAGA travelers. Over the course of 10 years, Trump has written nearly 3,500 social media posts that attack the press. On Thursday, the president’s lawyers refiled a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the Latest York Times, alleging its reporters have knowingly and maliciously maligned his achievements. (The Times says the refiled suit is meritless and that “nothing has modified.”) This comes after he received $16 million payouts from suits he filed against ABC News and CBS News’ “60 Minutes”; he’s also filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on the bawdy birthday letter he once sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
Why is Trump relentlessly antagonistic toward the news media? (Note that he’s lashed out at ostensibly friendly outlets like Fox News when it suits him.) In response to “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, after Trump won the 2016 election she asked him why kept railing against the press. Per Stahl, Trump replied, “ why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, in order that once you write negative stories about me, nobody will consider you.”
In that context, there could also be nothing Weiss can really do to vary the perception (or misperception) that mainstream media is irreparably unfair. Regardless, additional changes are undoubtedly ahead for CBS News under her watch — not least of that are looming job cuts, as Paramount Skydance is about to make hundreds of layoffs. It’s sure to be a bumpy ride.