What Will Bari Weiss Do to CBS News?

In 2018, Bari Weiss, then an opinion columnist at the Times, wrote about the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, a loose “alliance of heretics” who were “making an end run around the mainstream conversation.” Adherents were photographed for the article in literally dark settings: glowering out from under an umbrella, perched amid mossy branches, standing half-obscured by bushes. Though they came from different ideological backgrounds, Weiss wrote, these figures—including Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture-capital fund, who had “half-jokingly” coined the movement’s name; Joe Rogan, an “MMA color commentator and comedian” with a hugely popular podcast; and Jordan Peterson, the already best-selling philosopher—felt they had been ostracized by legacy media outlets in the Trump era for voicing reasonable opinions. These positions ran the gamut: arguing that free speech was under attack, believing in biological gender differences, thinking that forcing Muslim women to “live their lives inside bags is wrong.” Many in the group were building channels of their own. Weiss was sympathetic, but did not quite commit to fellowship. “Having been attacked by the left,” she wrote, “I know I run the risk of focusing inordinately on its excesses—and providing succor to some people whom I deeply oppose.”

Weiss wrote this article at something like the midpoint of her Times journey. When Donald Trump won the Presidency in 2016, she was at the Wall Street Journal; the morning after the election, she sobbed at her desk, and realized that she felt too liberal for the paper and needed to leave. In 2017, she joined the Times, where this was definitely not a problem—but, after three years of being consistently derided (not least over the I.D.W. piece), she quit, and, on the way out, publicly accused her colleagues of cowering before the orthodoxies of Twitter and “bullying” her for committing “Wrongthink.” She has said that she voted for Joe Biden in 2020. But, by the beginning of this year, she was sounding more conciliatory about Trump, dismissing her prior anguish as “Trump derangement syndrome.” “There were two things, I think, that I didn’t know in that moment when I was crying at my desk,” she explained: “the kind of illiberalism that was born out of the reaction” to Trump, and the fact that he would enact “a lot of policies that I agreed with.”

Along the way, Weiss founded the Free Press, a news site hosted on Substack—where it is the best-selling politics offering, with roughly a million and a half subscribers, some eleven per cent of whom pay—that sits somewhere between the center and the right, without “center-right” feeling like a consistently accurate label. This was Weiss’s own end run around mainstream institutions, and the site has come to be seen, at least by its fans, as an expression of her “pro-Israel and anti-woke worldview—not to mention her broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition,” as Puck’s Dylan Byers recently put it. Weiss’s many critics would dispute that she was ever “anti-establishment.” Either way, she is indisputably back in the mainstream: the occasion for Byers’s piece was to report that David Ellison, the son of the billionaire Larry Ellison, and the freshly minted chairman of Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS News, was planning to put Weiss in charge of that outlet’s “editorial direction”; this morning, she was formally unveiled as its editor-in-chief. (Notably, she will report directly to Ellison.) The Free Press is coming along, too, with Ellison’s company having acquired it at a reported valuation of a hundred and fifty million dollars. According to a press release, Weiss will continue to lead the Free Press, but the site will “maintain its own independent brand and operations.”

Weiss arrives at a moment that feels almost existential for CBS News, whose owners have been widely and credibly accused, in recent months, of kowtowing to Trump. This summer, Paramount settled a risible lawsuit that Trump filed over edits to a “60 Minutes” segment about Kamala Harris that had displeased him. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Communications Commission approved Paramount’s merger with Ellison’s Skydance. More or less everyone saw these developments as connected; Stephen Colbert said—on CBS—that the settlement was a “big fat bribe,” right before his show was cancelled. (Executives denied any quid pro quo, and cited financial motivations for cutting Colbert.) Brendan Carr, the F.C.C. chair, did publicly welcome Skydance’s “commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” including measures to “root out” what he described as bias. Paramount Skydance also promised to appoint an ombudsman to oversee CBS News, and soon did, tapping Kenneth Weinstein, a right-wing think-tank type and recent G.O.P. donor. Last month, the network said it would no longer edit interviews on its Sunday show “Face the Nation,” after the Administration complained about cuts to a pre-recorded sitdown with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security.

In a recent profile of Weiss in the Guardian, the progressive journalist David Klion predicted that she would act as an “ideological commissar” at CBS, helping to further “enforce compliance” with the White House line. Others share the fear that a Trumpified Weiss is storming the citadel of objective journalism. Some version of this dynamic may well play out—as I see it, neither Ellison nor Weiss has accumulated enough benefit of the doubt for us to trust any promises to the contrary. But a MAGA-fied CBS isn’t a guarantee. The story is a bit murkier than Manichaean talk of stormers and citadels.

One could say that the Free Press focusses on the excesses of the left to an extent that provides succor to people Weiss opposes, or, at least, used to oppose. The right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who is often helpfully explicit about his aims, has described the site as a “beautiful off-ramp” for center-left élites whom he is trying to “radicalize” into “a kind of defector class.” But the Free Press is not Breitbart, and Weiss is not Steve Bannon. Last year, the Free Press polled its own staff and found its support was split, somewhat evenly, between Trump, Kamala Harris, and neither; since Trump returned to power, the site has rebuked his Administration for nakedly threatening Jimmy Kimmel, to name one example. Last week, Byers wrote that Weiss is “more consistently centrist than her critics care to acknowledge,” and that “it’s quite likely that her first brush with controversy will come when her free speech absolutism” puts CBS in conflict with Trump. Given the crêpe-paper quality of Trump’s skin, you don’t have to think that Weiss is a centrist or a free-speech absolutist (and I certainly don’t believe she is either) to see this as a plausible collision.

Trump’s return to power is, at minimum, essential context for Ellison’s takeover of CBS News and hiring of Weiss, in ways that are specific—Trump’s recent pressure campaign against the network and the role of his regulators in approving the Skydance deal; his apparent closeness to the Ellison family—and in the more general sense that he has exerted a rightward gravitational pull on the concept of what it means for media to be “mainstream.” (The denizens of the Intellectual Dark Web, it’s safe to say, would not be depicted hiding in a forest today.) Ellison will, perhaps, need to stay in the Administration’s good graces as he seeks approval for other deals, including a possible bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. Even if Ellison seems to care more about Warner Bros.’ entertainment properties—and Paramount’s, for that matter—than he does about news, it’s plausible that he sees hiring Weiss as throwing a bone to Trump while maintaining deniability in politer company. (Again, she’s not Bannon.) Publicly, Ellison has pledged to prioritize “truth” and “trust” at CBS, and said that he won’t politicize the network. At least some staffers say they already view this promise as worthless.

And yet it’s easy to imagine a world in which Harris won, and Ellison acquired CBS and hired Weiss anyway, to similar howls from the left. (His deal for the network was struck in the summer of 2024.) Though CBS might pivot toward Trump under her leadership, it’s a safer bet that her biggest impact will be on the stories that seem to animate her most—campus protests and Israel—whether or not Trump is involved with them. Ellison’s family is close to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, and Ellison was reportedly attracted to Weiss’s pro-Israel politics. (Not that the pair’s presence will invent tensions over Israel at CBS; prior to Ellison’s takeover, Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, repeatedly intervened to disparage editorial decisions that she felt were insufficiently sympathetic to the country’s cause.)

Ultimately, Weiss appears to be beloved of very powerful people who are distressed by the rise of wokeness, and who for some reason see themselves as “besieged outsiders,” as The Nation’s Jack Mirkinson argued recently. To read a profile of Weiss is to be slapped around the face by the names of élite admirers; those now include the Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose Saturnalian wedding Weiss attended in Venice this year. It’s often fair to describe such figures as pro-Trump, but not always, and I’ve previously argued that Bezos’s recent behavior—at least as expressed through the rightward tilt of the op-ed page at the Post, which he owns—has been driven more by a mix of self-interest and the self-mythologizing that Mirkinson describes than any doctrinaire commitment to Trump. The G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz told the Times last year that Weiss “doesn’t just speak to the 1 percent” but to “the one-hundredth of 1 percent. And they’ll listen.” Ellison fits this description, and then some. He probably didn’t need the pretext of Trump to listen, or to act.

Some of the coverage of Weiss’s hiring at CBS has highlighted the apparent gulf between her opinionated, fairly small-scale digital-media business and the “quintessential traditional” TV behemoth that she is about to inherit. Various articles have cited the towering legacies of the CBS anchors Edward R. Murrow, who has been lionized for taking on McCarthyism, and Walter Cronkite, who would famously sign off from the “Evening News” with the line, “And that’s the way it is.” Some staffers at CBS have suggested that they will give Weiss a chance, but others have compared her to Michael Scott, and predicted that she will quickly be chewed up and spat back out. “Is Bari Weiss considered objective or a journalist?” one source asked rhetorically, in an interview with the Independent. “Cronkite and Murrow would absolutely not think she is and would have tossed her out of the newsroom inside an hour.”

Maybe so—and a coming wave of insider stories attesting to Weiss’s difficulties in asserting her authority strikes me as the most inevitable outcome of this affair. But the mythology of CBS’s storied journalistic past belies a more nuanced reality. (Some of Murrow’s own colleagues thought that he was late to the battle with McCarthy, for instance.) And, while there is, to be sure, a difference between straight news and overt opinion, the line where those genres meet is fuzzy, and inevitably subjective. Even if CBS staffers (rightly) see the Free Press as opinionated, it might not see itself that way; indeed, the site claims simply to be covering the world the way it is, when mainstream newsrooms have abandoned that role. (Already, in the press release announcing her appointment, Weiss promised to make CBS News “the most trusted news organization of the 21st Century.”) This isn’t to say that everything is relative. But the truth rarely just reveals itself. The choices journalists make in seeking it inevitably inform the stories they tell.

Sometimes, the truth is viciously fought over. Trump and Weiss have certainly long been in combat mode, even if they might not always be on the same team. When Trump took on CBS earlier this year, its journalists did not back down from the stories they wanted to tell, either: one segment on “60 Minutes,” for example, quoted a source likening Trump’s intimidation of law firms to the behavior of a Mob boss, drawing another legal threat from the President; after Bill Owens, the show’s executive producer, quit, a correspondent said, bluntly, on air, that Owens felt he’d lost his independence from management amid the settlement and merger sagas. We’ll have to see what shape the fight takes from here. I don’t think that Trump has won just yet. I don’t think Weiss has, either. ♦