The three challenges Bari Weiss is facing at CBS

Weiss now faces three major challenges. The first is leading the network through a big-picture structural change that has foiled a generation of TV news executives. (Weiss is effectively parallel to President Tom Cibrowski.)

She’s tasked with revitalizing a network that has undergone numerous leadership changes and reshuffling over the last decade. During that time, CBS’ viewership has aged and declined, and its digital operation has lagged behind nimbler competitors, even as other television networks have found some limited success in the worlds of podcasting and digital video. CBS News may still have several of the top news programs on broadcast television, including 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning. But the audiences for those shows is in terminal decline, and it will be up to Weiss to figure out how to transform them to successful digital properties or create new ones in their stead.

The second challenge is building trust with her new staff.

During her first week on the job, Weiss embarked on a listening tour of the network and met with top staff and producers, many of whom left the meetings with cautious optimism about the network’s future. Some top producers and talent were impressed by Weiss’ desire to immediately juice the network’s political bookings, as well as her ability to actually nab a few notable guests, like former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. (She also discovered the fluid nature of TV bookings when two other former secretaries of state, Mike Pompeo and Antony Blinken, dropped out of a planned panel.)

That hasn’t necessarily translated to rank-and-file staff, who have viewed the moves with greater suspicion. On Friday, as Semafor first reported, the two unions representing CBS News employees told members not to reply to an email Weiss sent employees asking for information about their jobs and how they saw the network.

The third is trust with audiences.

Weiss spent most of her career on the opinion side of big American newspapers. The Free Press, which Paramount bought for about $150 million, paints itself as a voice of the center but draws its energy from the bitter US culture wars.

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the publication threw a raucous party at the Riggs hotel in Washington. Weiss mingled with then-CEO of X Linda Yaccarino, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, and Peter Thiel, and brushed shoulders with MAGA media personalities like Dave Rubin and the fighter Conor McGregor.

What will Weiss do to signal to the audience that CBS remains firmly committed to nonpartisan news — and willing to take on a president whose appointees regulate her parent company, and who is himself an ally of Larry Ellison, the father of Paramount CEO David Ellison?

For the moment, CBS News is insisting that the company it just absorbed will remain a separate entity, beyond Weiss’ dual role as CBS editor-in-chief and head of The Free Press. But institutional gravity is already starting to pull the two organizations together.

Staff at The Free Press are eager to start working with CBS News; reporter Olivia Reingold appeared on CBS News Friday morning to discuss her report that anonymous NYPD officers had been threatening to quit the force if Zohran Mamdani is elected New York City mayor. CBS and Paramount staff, including CBS political director Fin Gómez, were also in attendance at a Free Press event in DC where Weiss interviewed defense tech founder Palmer Luckey.