There has also been speculation that Bari Weiss has been appointed as CBS News’ top editorial executive, and that David Ellison paid $150 million for his contrarian news organization, the Free Press, largely to appease the likes of Donald Trump by signaling his desire to make CBS News “anti-woke” and root out liberal bias.
As expected, Weiss’s arrival at CBS News rattled the force. WGA East warned employees not to respond to her memo asking for details about how they “spend their working hours” until the union received assurances that their answers would not constitute termination or “disciplinary action.” CBS told WGA that employees will not face disciplinary action if they fail to respond.
But the episode reflects fear and uncertainty about what Mr. Weiss plans to do with CBS News. Many observers have expressed dire alarm and anger at Ellison’s appointment as head of news operations.
Longtime CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather called Weiss “one of the most polarizing figures in the American media landscape today” and lamented that her appointment marked “a dark day in the halls of CBS News.” (The title of his post was “MAGA-tested, Trump-approved news.”) New York Times columnist Jamel Bouie, a former colleague of Weiss at the paper, called his impending appointment to CBS News “a heartwarming story of how being an unethical, talentless hack doesn’t have to be a hindrance to success if you’re willing to endlessly flatter the pathetic opinions of rich scumbags.” John Oliver accused Wyeth of having “spent years publishing work that, in my opinion, is at best irresponsible and at worst deeply misleading.” and so on.
Weiss insists she is simply “seeking the truth and wanting to tell it openly.” The Free Press’ 170,000 subscribers “proved there is a market for honest journalism,” she wrote in X on October 6. “And they have given us a mandate to pursue that mission from an even greater platform,” he wrote on CBS News. By the way, she has her supporters: Anna Wintour of Condé Nast said Weiss is “a very fine young woman” who has the qualities of a great leader.
It’s true that trust in the news media is at an all-time low. According to a Gallup poll conducted from Sept. 2 to 16, 28% of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “a lot” of confidence in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” This is the lowest number since Gallup began measuring Americans’ trust in news reporting in 1972. For Weiss and others, this is proof that news organizations must change if they want to continue to be a concern.
Meanwhile, as Variety’s Brian Steinberg pointed out, CBS News needs some reform. A series of news executives have been unable to turn around CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings in recent years, leaving them ranked third in ratings behind rivals NBC News and ABC News.
However, a major factor in Americans’ decline in trust in the media is the attack on the news media by Donald Trump and his fellow MAGA travelers. Trump has written nearly 3,500 social media posts attacking news organizations over the past 10 years. On Thursday, the president’s lawyers refiled a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, alleging that the reporters intentionally and maliciously defamed the president’s accomplishments. (The Times said the refiled lawsuit was without merit and “nothing has changed.”) This comes after he received a $16 million payout from a lawsuit he filed against ABC News and CBS News’ “60 Minutes.” He is also suing the Wall Street Journal for $20 billion over its coverage of a vulgar birthday letter he once sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
Why is President Trump so persistently hostile to the press? (Note that he lashes out at ostensibly friendly media outlets like Fox News when it suits him.) According to “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl, after Trump won the 2016 election, she asked him why he kept berating the press. According to Stahl, Trump responded, “You know why I do that? I do it to discredit all of you, to diminish all of you, so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
Recall that Trump’s “60 Minutes” lawsuit alleged that the show’s editing of an interview with Kamala Harris violated the Texas Consumer Fraud Act, caused “widespread confusion and emotional distress for consumers,” including Trump himself, and somehow harmed Trump’s business interests. Editing interviews for length and clarity is standard journalistic practice, and “60 Minutes”’ edits did not change the meaning Harris was trying to make. Paramount Global initially called the lawsuit “meritless” and “an affront to the First Amendment.” But then-controlling shareholder Shari Redstone, keen to sell her family’s media business to Skydance Media, decided paying Trump was the right business decision. Redstone said last month that the $16 million settlement with Trump was “absolutely” the right thing to do. The lawsuit was a “distraction” that “wasted too much time on the news and had a significant impact on our employees and our ability to conduct other transactions.”
In the context of President Trump’s anti-media firefighting, there may be nothing Weiss can actually do to change the perception (or misperception) that mainstream media is irredeemably unfair. Either way, there’s no doubt that more changes are in store for CBS News under her watch. The changes are particularly impending as Paramount Skydance looks to cut thousands of jobs. It’s definitely going to be a bumpy ride.
