Can Bari Weiss save the mainstream media from woke journalists?

How does a rigidly ideological institution out of touch with mainstream opinion and laboring under the burden of its declining appeal and finances react to efforts to bring it back to the mainstream? It fights like hell to do everything to smear and sabotage the efforts of those trying to save it.

That’s the story of what is happening at CBS News in a nutshell.

Bari Weiss, 41, has been under fire since being named editor-in-chief of CBS News in October. Since then, she’s been the subject of withering criticism in a snide profile published in The New Yorker (titled “Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News”) and a host of other stories published elsewhere in liberal media, in which scores of anonymous disgruntled CBS News employees have been quoted depicting her as an ignorant, biased wrecking ball, determined to destroy a great institution.

No more a ‘Tiffany Network’

She’s been tasked with the job of leading CBS News from a position as the least-watched broadcast news outlet back to relevance. That won’t be easy, given that the outfit she was given command of has seemed at times to best represent the damage that progressive ideology has done to journalism.

The staff of CBS News is probably no more rigidly left-wing than that of NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post or any other pillar of corporate media. But it has continued to act as if it is still “The Tiffany Network.” That was the nickname it got during the heyday of early television in the 1950s and ’60s, when giants like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and others established it as the most prestigious television news outlet. At the heart of that reputation was the notion of its objectivity and reliability that Cronkite helped create with his sober, knowledgeable demeanor, even if he and everyone else at CBS leaned to the left politically.

The problem is that no one really believes that myth about the current version of CBS or any of the other liberal outlets that similarly still pretend to be practitioners of down-the-middle journalism. Like the rest of what is still considered the mainstream media, CBS has become a bastion of ideological liberalism in which dissenting views are rarely, if ever, heard.

Challenging Ta-Nehisi Coates

A key moment for CBS came in September 2024, when author Ta-Nehisi Coates was interviewed on its morning show to discuss his latest book, The Message. It’s an appalling leftist diatribe that, among other things, described his 10-day visit to “Palestine” (by which he meant Israel, and Judea and Samaria) and his false assertion that Israel is an “apartheid” state that resembles the Jim Crow South. Added to that is his belief that it should be destroyed. Though the book was published a year after the Hamas-led Palestinian terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it never once mentioned the words terrorism or Hamas.

Coates had been treated like royalty, and his screed went largely unchallenged throughout his book tour. But that morning, Tony Dokoupil, one of the CBS morning hosts, mildly challenged Coates on the extremist nature of his writing, as well as his unwillingness to even try to listen or take into account other points of view other than his pre-existing prejudice against the Jewish state. For that offense, Dokoupil was roundly denounced by many fellow CBS staffers and forced to apologize in a struggle session-like meeting. In tapes of leaked internal meetings, executives said Dokoupil’s decision to challenge rather than fawn upon Coates didn’t meet their journalistic “standards.”

Dokoupil’s temerity went against the grain for most members of the mainstream media press. They are not only overwhelmingly liberal and opposed to President Donald Trump. They have been indoctrinated in the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that label Israel and Jews as “white” oppressors in the elite schools where most of them were educated. Like Coates, they, too, are uninterested in even pretending to be objective and have long since replaced journalism with ideologically motivated activism. That explains why most of the corporate media, like Coates, mimicked Hamas propaganda since Oct. 7.

That’s also why any idea that these outlets could be turned around and made to return to what used to pass for journalistic standards seemed like fantasy. Indeed, the Times not only has fully surrendered to woke politics; that is now part of its business plan, as it has monetized its ideological rigidity by appealing solely to the credentialed elites that now dominate the political left.

But it’s a business plan that wouldn’t work for a broadcast network like CBS. By definition, it must appeal—as it used to in its salad days when Murrow and Cronkite hosted the day’s news on camera—to broader audiences that cut across all demographic boundaries to get the ratings that would make it successful again.

The Coates-Dokoupil confrontation would be remembered when, after a corporate shake-up, ownership of the network changed hands.

Salvaging a declining network

In 2025, Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, merged with Skydance Media, a company controlled by David Ellison, the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, founder of the Oracle technology company. As part of the process by which he won regulatory approval for the merger, Ellison promised that he would promulgate “a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.”

That was considered by some a nod to the Trump administration. But it turned out that Ellison meant it. And he proved it by tapping Weiss as editor-in-chief of the news division while also purchasing The Free Press for a staggering $150 million (instantly making Weiss a rich woman), which was folded into the same corporate umbrella as CBS.

In many ways, she is the ideal person to attempt to salvage a network mired in a historic slump, sitting in last place in the ratings wars among broadcast networks. She has a glittering résumé, including stops at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, before she exhibited her unmatched entrepreneurial talent by founding The Free Press in 2021, which quickly assumed a position as one of the most interesting independent outlets in the media sphere.

In the bifurcated American landscape of the 21st century where virtually everything seems to fall under the category of right-wing or left-wing, Weiss is hard to characterize neatly. She is neither. She’s a centrist who has been skeptical of President Donald Trump while also appalled by the dead hand of woke leftist ideology. She’s also a proud Jew and a supporter of the State of Israel. At the same time, she’s a gay, married woman with two children and who holds liberal views on social issues that don’t fit the stereotype of a traditional conservative.

In contemporary journalism, that still marks her as an exponent of ideas that the overwhelming majority of people who work for mainstream media despise.

Weiss had first gained notoriety as a pro-Israel activist when she was a student at Columbia University. She celebrated her bat mitzvah at Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in the heavily Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where a mass shooting during Shabbat-morning services in October 2018 left 11 worshippers dead. It became the entry point for How to Fight Antisemitism, a book published in 2019.

She became a symbol of the problem with contemporary journalism after she resigned from the Times in 2020. It happened following a disgraceful scandal when the editor of the opinion section was fired for publishing a piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), in which he advocated for the use of federal troops to put down violent riots by Black Live Matters supporters. The leftist-dominated newsroom of the Times revolted over the idea that their newspaper had published a view that they disagreed with.

In her published letter of resignation, Weiss said the paper was run by a mob on Twitter that had been harassing her because of her willingness to write and champion articles that challenged their assumptions. She not unreasonably came to the conclusion that, given the publishers’ acquiescence to this state of affairs, staying and fighting was futile.

So she started her own popular Substack, which eventually morphed into The Free Press run by her; her journalist wife, Nellie Bowles; and her younger sister, Suzy. It became a beacon of independent thinking that challenged the shibboleths of right and left, but because it wasn’t rigidly woke has been considered conservative by liberals.

A promotion for Dokoupil

Ellison has given her the power to transform CBS into an outlet that could be considered watchable by persons other than those who are ideological leftists. As a novice to broadcast news after a long run in print and online journalism, as well as someone who was parachuted into the leadership of the organization against the will of its employees, Weiss has encountered the sort of hostility that would intimidate a less determined person. But in her characteristically bold style, she has plunged ahead, albeit with a target on her back.

Unsurprisingly, the same newsroom that was ready to pillory Dokoupil is outraged because Weiss named him to sit in Cronkite’s old chair as the anchor of the network’s nightly news program. They were also angered by her decision to bring on other non-liberal voices, like historian Niall Ferguson and podcast host Coleman Hughes, as regular commentators.

A recent decision to hold a segment on a prison in El Salvador, where illegal immigrants deported from the United States were sent, that was scheduled to run on the network’s “60 Minutes” news magazine show, turned into a major kerfuffle. The notion that asking the producers to do more reporting, including interviews with Trump administration officials, was controversial would, in any other context, be considered absurd. The same is true for her reported skepticism about the network’s DEI-like “Race and Culture” standards commissars. But every move that Weiss makes is interpreted by liberal critics as evidence that she is a right-wing hack and that Ellison is forcing the network to appease Trump to pay for the merger approval.

As someone who has never shied away from the spotlight and who has been on an astonishing ascent to the heights of her profession at a very young age, it’s understandable that Weiss would be the focus of the drama at CBS. But the importance of what is happening there far transcends her personal story. The question of whether she succeeds or fails in her current position will speak volumes about whether or not just CBS but the mainstream media as a whole can be rescued.

Partly, this is a business story. As Weiss told CBS staffers in a town hall meeting, unless they are able to speak to a broader audience than the narrow segment that exists on the left, their future as a platform is in doubt. If they don’t change, as Weiss put it, they are “toast.” The same is probably true of NBC and ABC, as well as any other liberal outlet that hasn’t found a way to monetize its ideological stance in the long run.

At a moment when institutions have become bastions of left-wing ideology, there seemed little hope that the network could be reimagined in a way that would lead them back to the center of American discourse. But Ellison’s decision to put Weiss in charge of CBS is an opportunity that provides a blueprint for how that might happen.

If it does, it will happen with virtually all of the existing staff there kicking and screaming—and with other liberals decrying it as merely corporate appeasement of Trump.

The idea that on Weiss’s watch, CBS has become an outlet for Trump is ludicrous. But that’s the point about the current culture of American journalism. Any deviation from leftist orthodoxy, like the Times publishing a critic of BLM riots or someone challenging the antisemitic rants of Ta-Nehisi Coates, is considered not merely wrong but an expression of heresy that is indistinguishable from fascism.

Left-wing resistance and antisemitism

It is also significant that all of the criticisms of Ellison and Weiss are linked to the issue of Israel and Jewishness. The stories trashing them never fail to note that they are Jewish, support Israel and concerned about antisemitism. The Free Press’s stand opposing the horrors that took place on Oct. 7, taking a dim view of Hamas propaganda and a willingness to treat Israel’s existence as not up for debate was viewed by the people who ran Weiss out of the Times—and wished to do the same to Dokoupil (whose children from his first marriage live in Israel with their mother) at CBS—is evidence that it was a reactionary and racist outlet. The fact that she has also been attacked by right-wing Israel-hater Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host now platforming Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis on his podcast, illustrates how the extremes unite in their Jew-hatred.

At stake is more than just the career of Weiss or whether American society will reject the surge of antisemitism enabled by the mainstream media that has happened post-Oct. 7. It is also linked to the future of American democracy, which is already being damaged by a bifurcated media environment in which most citizens no longer read, listen or watch the same media (if they pay any attention to the news at all). As a result, they confront every issue with not just different perspectives, but dissimilar sets of facts and treat any disagreement with their pre-existing opinions as unacceptable. This is the reason why our discourse has become so extreme and intolerant of differences.

Given the uniformity of views among most of the people with jobs at elite journalistic outlets, it’s far from clear that Weiss can succeed. The opprobrium being rained down on her from other mainstream media is part of a campaign that seeks to make an example of her so as to deter other corporate owners from trying the same thing.

Still, that’s the key to understanding why her struggles at CBS have garnered so much attention. If Weiss can push CBS back to the center, the same can happen elsewhere. That will outrage the left while not pleasing many on the right, who are just as interested in avoiding views that challenge their ideas as their counterparts on the other end of the political spectrum. But it will likely make for a healthier society and political system, as well as one which will be less friendly to the sort of woke antisemitism that is routine in mainstream outlets today.

© JNS