LOS ANGELES – MAY 5: Walter Cronkite, left, and Dan Rather at the CBS/TELEVISION NETWORK AFFILIATES CONFERENCE, LOS ANGELES, CA. Image dated May 5, 1980. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)
CBS via Getty Images
The news business just can’t stop making news – about itself. This week brought the announcement that the “new” Paramount has purchased the independent news site The Free Press and named its founder Bari Weiss as the next Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. In our never-ending partisan divide, this has been met with huzzahs from the right and genuine fear and some loathing on the left. I’m on the hunt for the gray here – can we discern what this really might portend for the future of CBS News and journalism in the U.S.?
Weiss herself is a fascinating actor in this drama. She is a former op-ed contributor at The New York Times who left there in 2020 in a very public break against what she claimed was the narrow-minded focus of the Times on satisfying the political left rather than adhering to its long tradition of the more straightforward commitment to “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Weiss started The Free Press as a newsletter in 2021 and a more formal media organization in 2022. She earned her reputation as a critic of the “woke” left, but in fairness the publication is not some blind follower of the MAGA great hits of news playlist. Weiss herself is pro-choice and has been quoted as saying that she “believes in same-sex marriage so much so that I’m actually in one myself.” To some on the left her strong and thoughtful support of Israel is problematic, but the site has provided a range of points of view and was early at recognizing the powerful populist allure of avowed Israel critic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
With revenues solely drawn from its 170,000 monthly subscribers, by 2025 The Free Press had become a $20 million a year business, one that the David and Larry Ellison-owned Paramount is paying $150 million to own. The Ellisons have been spending a lot of money since the closed on the Paramount deal, including over $7 billion for the rights to air UFC fights and another $1.25 billion for South Park. So maybe more stunning than the $150 million purchase of The Free Press is Weiss’s installation atop the historically resonant CBS News brand.
Some might ask – does anyone really watch broadcast news anymore? Does it still matter? I’m going to toss in a “damn right it still matters” here. It’s true that I haven’t had a graduate media management student of mine in the last ten years who subscribes to cable. But even with a limitless array of news sources available today, the audiences for the nightly broadcast news on ABC, NBC and CBS still averages over 16 million people in the U.S. There are just under 7 million live daily viewers of the network morning shows and slightly more than that for the broadcast Sunday panel programs. CBS’s 60 Minutes gathered more than 10 million viewers this past Sunday as the number one non-sports primetime program on TV.
Clearly millions of Americans still see broadcast news as worthy of their time and attention. And these are all broadcasts that, whatever their flaws, provide a capsule of down-the-middle reporting and carry a different expectations for viewers than the more slanted approach at Fox News, MSNBC and to some degree CNN. As one of my former colleagues in the news business pointed out to me, how many news organizations in the U.S. today are still sending reporters and camera crews abroad or even outside of their own region to bring that news into American homes? It’s even more vital when news “deserts” in the U.S. – mostly rural areas with no local or regional newspapers or TV broadcasts – are only growing, and when the federal government is terminating funding of news and information from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Does Weiss mean the end of hope for down the middle reporting at CBS News? There are plenty of reasons for concern, and I’m not ready to entirely trust first then verify, but there just isn’t an answer to provide yet. What gets a bit lost in the glossy history of CBS News is the irony that some of its finest moments didn’t involve playing it safe or down the middle. The movie and Broadway play Good Night and Good Luck rightfully venerate Edward R. Murrow for taking on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Murrow was fearless but hardly down the middle on McCarthyism.
Walter Cronkite, for all his mantle of dependable centrism, came out against the Vietnam War after reporting from there in 1968. For years CBS News’s nightly broadcast ended with a commentary – not reporting – from Eric Sevareid. The most successful news program in history, 60 Minutes, has for decades broken important investigations that delivered powerful conclusions. All this only enhanced, not diminished, the CBS News brand.
It may be that the strongest and most legitimate complaint leveled against the elevation of Weiss is that she has a resume that doesn’t look like anyone that has ever held this position in broadcast journalism. She hasn’t been a reporter, and she hasn’t been a part of any broadcast news enterprise, never mind running one. At a time when the government is populated with a Secretary of Defense who has never run anything that looks like the Pentagon, and the media business is run by people who did not grow up in a digitally-native environment, experience is and should be something that we respect and lean on whenever possible.
On the other hand, Weiss built a credible news organization from scratch that “punched above its weight” in terms of its influence. A big part of the complexity here is that it’s impossible to give the benefit of the doubt to the same new corporate owners who almost immediately after their ascent canceled Stephen Colbert. There are landmines everywhere, for the people that work for CBS News today, and for millions of viewers.
There is bit of a news insider battle about the importance of “objectivity” and “truth” in journalism, and respected news figures like Marty Baron – one of the heroes from the film Spotlight – have been raising red flags for years. It’s clear that Bari Weiss herself, as well as The Free Press, aren’t “objective” in how they approach a range of subjects. But it’s not entirely clear that Weiss, even with strong and sometimes controversial points of view, can’t grow into a role at CBS News that honors the commitment to finding and reporting on the truth, even in the face of complaints descending from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Diane Sawyer was a part of the Nixon White House. Tim Russert was a top adviser to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Governor Mario Cuomo, as rough and tumble political pugilists as anyone. And George Stephanopoulos emerged from the top of the Clinton war room. All certainly came to their news jobs with little proven “objectivity.” What we need and must demand from Weiss and CBS News – as ever – is the truth. We can handle the truth.