What Bari Weiss Doesn’t Get About CBS News

At an all-staff meeting on Tuesday, CBS News’s editor in chief Bari Weiss—perhaps the record-holder for the fastest the word embattled has ever been appended in front of a new job title—laid out her vision for the network she had taken the reins of only a few weeks earlier. Weiss is decidedly not a journalist and prior to her appointment at CBS hadn’t come within touching distance of the broadcast news industry. Her relatively short media career includes stints editing op-eds at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and founding The Free Press, a website devoted to pressing societal problems such as “people are being mean to J.K. Rowling and the IDF online.” With her new charges in attendance, Weiss finally revealed her vision board for the future of CBS News, and the watchword is “scoops.” 

“Not scoops that expire minutes later,” she explained. “But investigative scoops. And, crucially, scoops of ideas. Scoops of explanation. This is where we can soar—and where we’ll be investing,” she said. Later that day, Tony Dokoupil, Weiss’s handpicked anchor for CBS Evening News, interviewed his own mother. 

Here are some questions that the veteran journalists were no doubt asking themselves as Weiss jabbered at them: What are “scoops of ideas” and why are they so crucial? For that matter, what is “a scoop of explanation”? Weiss didn’t offer much in the way of clarity—that’s for the grunts to figure out, after all. But she did provide one hint at the same meeting, when she unveiled a new slate of contributors to CBS News. 

If you’re looking for “scoops” as they are traditionally understood in journalism—new information that no one else has reported—these luminaries are not exactly a murderer’s row. There is not, as far as I know, a single person on this list who can call themselves a reporter, let alone someone with a track record as a shoe-leather scoophound. It, instead, largely consists of Free Press contributors like Niall Ferguson—who, among many other things, has argued that John Maynard Keynes’s economic ideas were bad because he was gay and that their implementation caused the collapse of the British Empire—and Coleman Hughes, whose most notable contribution to the outlet was an extraordinarily flawed piece that attempted to cast doubt on the notion that George Floyd was “murdered.” 

Other contributors include Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, the increasingly rabid anti-woke right-wing think tank; RFK Jr. ally and vaccine-skeptic Dr. Mark Hyman; and Derek Thompson, the permitting-reform enthusiast who, at least by the standards of this list, appears to represent “the left.” (He also wasn’t hired by Weiss and said he had signed on as a contributor seven years ago.) 

At first blush, it’s a group that tells a lot that we basically already knew: Bari Weiss wants to turn CBS News into The Free Press, pushing the editorial product in a rightward direction and shoring up the overall Weissification of the network, which now is more pro-Israel (and more hostile toward its critics) than it was before, more skeptical toward issues related to diversity and identity, and generally more willing to embrace anyone who has received the ire of “the left.” 

If Bari Weiss has been a lightning rod for controversy throughout her career, she has also never really surprised anyone. This is what people said she would do when she was hired, and that is precisely what she is doing. This is, it seems, what Weiss meant when she shouted, “Let’s do the fucking news!” at CBS’s staff shortly after taking on the role. 

Weiss seems to be under the impression that she can simply scale up what she was already doing at The Free Press and that this can be easily accomplished by putting the enormous resources of CBS News behind it. Under her leadership, she said, she will transform the network into “the best-capitalized media start-up in the world.” (CBS News is not a start-up.) Many other outlets, including some legacy ones, have embraced this approach in recent years. It’s not clear if Weiss understands that these efforts have yielded subpar results or if she believes that she is simply different from everyone else. She will fail for a simple reason: She doesn’t actually understand the network she’s running. Or, for that matter, journalism.

Weiss was installed at CBS because Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire who bought the network last year with his son David, is friends with Donald Trump and wanted someone there who he was confident could shift the network toward MAGA. But if Ellison only wanted to shift the network rightward, there would be many candidates for the job—including many with bona-fide broadcast experience. Weiss is there because she has one neat trick: She has managed to become a preeminent flatterer of right-wing plutocrats. This has allowed her to convince Ellison that she’s the one who can transform CBS, win back millions of viewers who have long tuned out the news, and most of all conjure the specific billionaire-friendly worldview on CBS’s platforms and charm the hoi polloi. There is, for this reason, something delicious about her failure, which is already well on its way: Ellison’s arrogance and Weiss’s smugness have combined into a supernova of stupidity and ineptitude. 

Her new roster of contributors fits in neatly with some of Weiss’s other brilliant ideas, which include town halls with Vice President JD Vance and sociopathic OpenAI founder Sam Altman, as well as televised “debates” about feminism and religion (sponsored, of course, by Bank of America). What Weiss means when she refers to “scoops of ideas” is, in other words, just more punditry. That’s the big idea. What CBS News needs is less news gathering and more blather. Fewer straight stories and more slant. Who needs facts when a collection of blatherskites can tell you how to feel about the facts?

For what it’s worth, punditry has been good to Weiss. She built a name for herself at The New York Times by pushing “heterodox” ideas like “Jordan Peterson is actually cool and smart” and “College students are actually as bad as Trump” onto the newspaper’s editorial pages. When her colleagues pointed out the shallowness of her pieces or simply made fun of her, she spun it into martyrdom. She resigned from the Times, the organ of the American establishment, claiming it was now being run by Marxist social justice warriors. 

The Free Press, the site she soon built in her own image, catered to people who agreed with her and who believed, preposterously, that the Times was too hard on Israel and too soft on trans children. It turns out that many of the people who hold these beliefs are older and quite wealthy. For a specific type of very rich person, Weiss is a prophet—and in Larry Ellison, she landed a true believer. 

When critiquing—or even just making fun of—Weiss and The Free Press, it’s hard not to sometimes feel like you’re playing their game: They want to present themselves as blazing truth tellers, heterodox thinkers, and, above all, the enemies of, say, liberal opinion columnists at The New Republic. But make no mistake, there is nothing uniquely dangerous or radical—or even particularly interesting—about anything Weiss is doing. You don’t have to travel far to find someone expressing vaccine skepticism, advocating “colorblind” politics, defending the state of Israel, or expressing concern that kids these days are just a little too “woke.” The Free Press exists for people who believe these things but also want them presented in ways that are familiar to longtime readers of the Times (because they are old and don’t know how to get YouTube on their TV because their grandchildren don’t talk to them).   

Weiss’s real strength at The Free Press was flattering people with these hoary views by suggesting that they were actually members of a hunted and intellectually oppressed minority of reasonable, level-headed people with forbidden ideas. The world had gone mad, it had lost its common sense, but the readers of The Free Press got the red pill just in time. Older people have always been afraid of younger people, who they see as dangerous radicals and Jacobins, but Weiss valorized the readers of The Free Press: They understood that, this time, college students really were Jacobins, bent on instituting pogroms and making gender-reassignment surgery mandatory. Those pesky kids would have gotten away with it, if The Free Press hadn’t blogged it. 

Credit where credit is due: There are a lot of aging reactionaries out there. In a very short time, this posture proved lucrative. The Free Press currently has over 150,000 subscribers and was purchased late last year by Ellison for the ludicrous sum of $150 million. 

It may be that the narrow success of The Free Press has convinced Weiss that she has discovered the secret sauce for reversing the decades-long decline in trust in the media writ large, instead of what should be obvious to everyone: She successfully exploited a lucrative niche. The manifesto she released earlier this year suggests that she has come to believe the former: It includes bullet points like “We love America” and “We report on the world as it is.” It’s all very high on its own supply—a blunted belief that Weiss can pander her way out of widespread distrust in mainstream media by making the network more overtly patriotic and less inclined to dwell on bad news. (CBS News, for instance, spent considerably less time on Monday covering the murder of Minneapolis VA Nurse Alex Pretti than its competitors.)

But Weiss’s new hires suggest that she’s had another brainwave to bring back those who have tuned out the mainstream media: Populate it with content from people who also hate the media. There is little reason to believe that anyone on this new roster is capable of actually winning back viewers with scorched-earth punditry. In fact, the opposite may very well be true. This type of phony debate, as I wrote last year about Weiss’s vision for CBS, is why many people have tuned out mainstream news in the first place. More to the point, Weiss’s vision operates along purely contradictory lines: CBS cannot be more neutral if it is simultaneously elevating a slightly different set of biased, and in some cases shrill, partisan viewpoints. 

Speaking only for myself, I find many of the ideas that Weiss, The Free Press, and the contributors she has brought on have advanced over the years to be odious—though that might be giving them too much credit; mostly I just find them to be pretty stupid. But even if I agreed with their ideas or thought they were particularly well executed—and again, I don’t—it still wouldn’t work for the task at hand. The problem is that you can get what Weiss wants to bring to CBS News—debate! analysis! shouting!—literally anywhere, including places that deliver it faster and better. Social media is awash with punditry. Even X, which Elon Musk is transforming into a one-stop shop for child pornography, bespoke racism, and the same 30 viral videos that are endlessly repackaged and tweeted out by scammers, is still awash with “scoops of ideas.” 

More specifically, cable news has long been a home both for idiots who pass themselves off as experts and the precise form of shallow, performative “debate” Weiss believes she is inventing. Weiss’s only innovation is to Free Pressify the product—and in fairness, I don’t recall CNN airing an hourlong debate about the proper role of religion in society. But this precisely is the kind of thing The Free Press has been doing for years, and it long ago reached its maximum potential. And that’s not nothing, as far as running a blog goes: 150,000 people pay for it. But there is absolutely zero reason to believe that anyone else in the country is clamoring for it. (Even if they were, they can easily get it by searching “religion debate” or “evangelical christian owns sjw atheist” on YouTube.) 

Weiss’s critique of mainstream media mostly boils down to the fact that it tips the scales in favor of ideas with which she specifically disagrees and excludes the voices it deems “radical” or “dangerous.” It’s true that anti-vaxxers and reactionary cranks are probably underrepresented in mainstream media—though it’s also worth noting that Ferguson and Salam, among other new CBS contributors, have been fixtures on TV for decades. It’s also very true that you can package this vision into a newsletter, snatch up 150,000 people willing to pay for it, and have your lucrative career as a media boss. That doesn’t mean that you can scale that up with the institutional prowess of the Tiffany network. And it could mean that you burn everything down in the attempt.  

What Weiss doesn’t seem to realize is that little of what she plans for CBS jibes with the realities of the current media environment. The product she wants CBS to undergo an entire culture shift to pursue can already be obtained elsewhere. Before Weiss took over, CBS was competing with ABC, NBC, and FOX. Now, thanks to Weiss’s brilliant leadership, it’s competing with every podcast and YouTube creator. A lot of people listen to dumb podcasts and watch stupid shit on YouTube, to be fair. But there’s no reason to suggest that they’re hankering to sit down and watch CBS do these things. Weiss is pursuing fool’s gold at the expense of what makes CBS unique and competitive in its own right: its ability to marshal incredible resources to gather news and information no one else has—before Niall Ferguson has the time to form an opinion about it. 

The tragedy of CBS’s Weiss era is that she is seemingly oblivious to the fact that the network is capable of doing meaningful work that you can’t really get anywhere else. She could be acquiring the news that seeds the punditry of tomorrow, instead of putting her cart in front of another cart and expecting it to start rolling without the help of a horse. There are only a handful of outlets in this country—its aforementioned network news competitors and newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (rest in peace, Washington Post)—that operate on the scale that CBS does or that can devote the kinds of resources it has to cover stories that meaningfully affect people’s lives. 

Weiss detests reporting because she doesn’t understand it. Her fixation on the way Donald Trump is covered—which she believes is too shrill and partisan—blinds her to the fact that CBS covers a lot more ground. Instead of recognizing that the network’s value comes from that reporting and the depth and breadth it offers, she is reducing the network’s core competencies to reflect the few things she understands, for which she’s already maxed out her audience. She’s destroying a rare, if not quite unique, strength to make CBS more like everything else. You can get punditry anywhere. Not many places do enterprising reporting like 60 Minutes. 

The fifth data point in Weiss’s manifesto was “We Respect Tradition, but We Also Believe in the Future.” 60 Minutes still has a home at CBS, though it has already been diminished under Weiss’s leadership. “Investigative scoops” still have a place at CBS, but they’re being crowded out in favor of “scoops of ideas” and “scoops of explanation.” Weiss is fully convinced that this is the future. The problem is that it’s already the present—and it sucks.