‘We Need to Be the News’: Inside Bari Weiss’s Bumpy Revamp at CBS

Her reimagining of “CBS Evening News” is under heavy scrutiny, and even became a punchline on her own network on Sunday at the Golden Globes.

Bari Weiss’s message to the “CBS Evening News” team was blunt.

“Let’s make sure every single night has something with viral potential,” Ms. Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, wrote to top producers as they prepared for the show’s new anchor, Tony Dokoupil, to start his tenure this month with a two-week tour of the country.

“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.”

Ms. Weiss has achieved that goal — perhaps not in the way she hoped.

Her reimagining of CBS News has faced heavy scrutiny, and even became a punchline on her own network: At Sunday’s Golden Globes, broadcast by CBS, the host, Nikki Glaser, earned one of her biggest laughs when she declared that CBS News was “America’s newest place to see BS news.” (David Ellison, the technology heir who controls CBS and installed Ms. Weiss, was in the audience.)