You could be forgiven for not knowing how much people love CBS News. I certainly didn’t until a few weeks ago, but the hoary institution is once again being described as the “Tiffany network”—Edward R. Murrow saying, “Good night and good luck”; Walter Cronkite taking the manliest moment in all of live television to get control of himself after announcing the death of John F. Kennedy; and … the trail grows cold. Dan Rather in a turban?
I don’t know and neither do you, because it turns out that fans of the network were willing to do whatever it took to save the network—except watch CBS News. It’s the least watched of all three little-watched network news programs, each weeknight a valiant struggle to report news that everyone’s been refreshing all day long—or more likely not, because … NATO?—and close with a human-interest piece, like one last bedtime story.
But now—cry havoc and write a hit piece—CBS News has been desecrated, a Slurpee sloshed on William Paley’s Picasso. The network is owned by Paramount Skydance. Paramount is now run by Larry Ellison’s son, David, who also bought Bari Weiss’s publication, The Free Press, and selected her as the new editor in chief of CBS News. Weiss is a hugely successful journalist and entrepreneur, and the target—especially from others within her field—of Bari Weiss–derangement syndrome.
Weiss famously resigned from The New York Times in 2020—she’d been an opinion writer and editor—after publishing a blistering letter of resignation enumerating the ways that the paper had abandoned the core principles that had made it great: the sharp line between opinion and reporting, and an approach to the news and editorial vision that wasn’t prey to the whims or axioms of political ideology or popular sentiment.
Apparently, sufferers of BWD include “everyone” at CBS; they are freaking out, no, they’re “literally freaking out,” a staffer told The Independent—“it’s not a good place right now.” The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the network’s journalists “reeled” as they “digested” the news, although by yesterday morning, the Post had downgraded the mood at CBS to (per one employee) “noticeably uncomfortable,” with “pockets of hopefulness”—both good signs, because reeling while digesting is misery. Apparently, there is also anxiety about coming layoffs, an understandable fear but a long-standing one.
Weiss; her wife, Nellie Bowles; and her sister, Suzy Weiss, are the founders of The Free Press and close friends of mine, a friendship born when I met Bari over coffee when she was at the Times and learned that we share the same disgust at what has become of so much of the mainstream, legacy press. When I was growing up, the Times didn’t reflect the truth; it was the truth. In school, we were always encouraged to read at least one front-page story a week in the San Francisco Chronicle, with the regular reminder that, as good as our local paper might be, it was a pale shadow of the great New York Times. When I moved east and began reading the Times, the thought of doubting something it had reported was the furthest thing from my mind. Now I often have to shake the reported facts (which are almost always accurate) free from the omissions, biases, and willful imposition of narratives.
After Weiss left the Times—in a blizzard of respect but also of derision—she started a Substack. That’ll show ’em! And it did: It became The Free Press, which currently has 1.5 million readers and for which Paramount reportedly paid $150 million in cash and Paramount stock. (This last fact may be driving as much of the hysteria as anyone’s ideological beliefs; as Christopher Hitchens said in a different context, “It’s not just the principles. It’s the money of the thing.”)
Weiss’s hiring at CBS isn’t a reeling-and-digesting story. It’s a business story. Everyone in journalism has known for years that there’s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism—reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness—to subjects that either don’t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. If creating such an enterprise seems simple to you, you don’t know the territory. It’s one of the hardest things you can attempt in media: it’s hugely expensive, and it has to fight for space in the attention economy at a time when Americans’ drive for knowledge seems to be powering down.
That she will somehow denigrate the storied CBS News—it has been reported that some staff members have delivered minatory instructions to not “mess with the Golden Goose(s) of ‘60 Minutes’ and ‘CBS News Sunday Morning,’” as though West 57th Street were the O.K. Corral—is a complete misreading of her and her vision, which is to bring the traditional methods of American journalism back to the news, and also to build a culture of ideas. This is exactly what she’s done at The Free Press, which covers a variety of stories, the most popular of which—Uri Berliner’s explanation of NPR’s decline, for example—are those that hold powerful institutions to account.
This is exactly the kind of journalism that made CBS News so justly respected in its great era. Weiss’s understanding of the network’s role in the American imagination—both as a trustworthy source and as a holder of cultural continuity in a fractured time—is obvious in the opening of the letter she sent the staff yesterday: “Growing up, CBS was a deep family tradition. Whenever I hear that tick, tick, tick or that trumpet fanfare, it sends me right back to our den in Pittsburgh.” I’m sure there are plenty of people at CBS News who aren’t freaking out but are excited about this turn of events.
Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.
When there’s a big media story like this, everybody eats. The haters write hateful stories; the hateful stories alert new readers to the existence of an outlet they might like, and instill in those readers a fierce loyalty to it because the criticism is so absurd. A current beef against Weiss is that she’ll fail because she lacks broadcast experience. The beef against Weiss when she left the Times was that she would sink into obscurity. And the beef against her when she started to become successful was that she was selling out. If there’s one person in the world I wouldn’t bet against now, it’s Bari Weiss.
