October 6, 2025

ED MORRISSEY: Conquest Complete? The Bari Weiss Era Starts at CBS And … I Have Questions.

Should we be celebrating Weiss’ success? Absolutely. However, I wonder just how much Weiss can change CBS News, as opposed to how much it can change her — and The Free Press. CBS News has a lot more history and entrenched culture than a webzine, and even though Weiss knows it, it’s not clear whether she can move it in any direction, not even with Ellison’s initial support and endorsement.

Let me offer two examples that feed my skepticism: the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Jeff Bezos bought the WaPo and Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Times, and for a few years let both run without any real intervention to redirect policies and approaches. When Bezos finally got tired of losing money, he tried to change the culture by bringing in Will Lewis and pushing a similar approach as Weiss pledges now … and then spent the next year or so quelling staff revolts. It’s still not clear where the Post is heading now, or even if their profitability has improved in the slightest.

As for the LA Times, Soon-Shiong claims that he will redirect that newspaper in a similar fashion. His staff has pushed back too, and so far, it seems as though Soon-Shiong hasn’t done much but talk about change. At least Bezos is trying.

In both cases, even the owners have had little success in changing the culture and direction at media outlets with entrenched progressive workforces. Ellison’s move here could be akin to Bezos bringing in Lewis at the WaPo, but will Ellison stick to his choice as Bezos did and get rid of staff who stands in the way of change? Or will he be more interested in other issues and future conquests? While I have great admiration for Weiss’ grit and determination, I can’t help but wonder whether Ellison might just get tired of reform at some point if CBS News staff and stars revolt, and give Weiss a golden parachute as the easiest option to keep the operation from collapsing.

The conquest may be complete. The question will be who conquered whom. Only Ellison can answer that in the long run. I’m rooting for Bari, but … color me skeptical, about both CBS and the future of the Free Press.

I very much hope to be wrong, but I agree. Though it’s fun to watch old media absolutely meltdown over Weiss’s new title, including Jesssica Testa, a former colleague of Weiss at the Gray Lady: How Bari Weiss Won. At The Free Press, she battled “wokeness” and buddied up with billionaires. Now she’s the editor in chief of CBS News.

The scare quotes around “wokeness” lets the reader know what he or she is in for:

In its nearly 100 years, CBS has not seen a leader quite like Ms. Weiss. Neither has the media industry. Ms. Weiss, 41, has ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot. In 2020, she publicly resigned as an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times to start a newsletter on Substack. Today, she has one of the most prestigious jobs in news.

She achieved this without climbing the typical journalistic career ladder, and with no experience directing television coverage. She is richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers. And she is known more for wanting to rid the world of so-called wokeness than for promoting journalistic traditions. While newsroom leaders do not traditionally trumpet their personal beliefs, Ms. Weiss has described herself as a “left-leaning centrist,” a “radical centrist,” “a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice” — she is married to Nellie Bowles, a former Times reporter who now works at The Free Press — and a proud recipient of the label “Zionist fanatic.”

Yet she has also come to symbolize the power and potential of independent media. Her world is a patchwork of podcasts, newsletters and videos built around a common idea that legacy outlets have lost their authority and connection with readers. With that power up for grabs, several younger outlets have spent the last few years jostling for it: The Bulwark, Punchbowl News, Puck, Semafor.

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Her publication has criticized corporate diversity initiatives and pro-Palestinian campus protesters. Its popular podcast “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” chronicled the backlash over statements by the “Harry Potter” author about transgender women. Ms. Weiss has agreed that “cancel culture” is akin to “social murder.”

“They ousted good people for fake thought crimes and tried to ruin their reputations and their lives,” Ms. Weiss said of the “far left” during that February speech. (Their “insanity,” she said, included acknowledging Indigenous land, adding pronouns to email signatures and wanting to abolishing police and prisons.)

“Conservatives know two things above all else,” Ms. Weiss continued, after warning of similar rising extremism on the right. “That evil is real and that our precious civilization is human and therefore fragile.” She told The Free Press readers on Monday, in an announcement about the Paramount deal, that the publication’s values “now have the opportunity to go very, very big.”

It is unclear how much of this sensibility Ms. Weiss will inject into “CBS Evening News,” the former home of Dan Rather and Connie Chung; to “Face the Nation,” which premiered 70 years ago with an interview with Senator Joseph McCarthy; to “60 Minutes,” where Lesley Stahl has been a correspondent for nearly 35 years. Reached by text, the former “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric said, “It will be fascinating to watch.”

Ms. Weiss has insisted The Free Press is not ideologically homogenous. In 2024, the publication said its staff was split equally between voting for Mr. Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris and abstaining.

It is theoretically possible to trace this political inscrutability to the integrity of CBS News giants like Walter Cronkite, who claimed to never vote along party lines. “The Free Press is a media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of great American journalism,” its introductory note proffered. “Honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.”

Why is 60 Minutes the former home of Dan Rather? Why can’t Lesley Stahl ascertain the ideologies of the people she works with daily? We know from Cronkite’s biographer, a lefty himself, that Cronkite was from politically inscrutable, particularly when he was on the air. At CBS Katie Couric once read a poem on air hoping that Obamacare would pass, and then had a Rathergate moment of her own after she left CBS.

Considering that in the mid-1950s, Edward R. Murrow helped coach fellow Democrat Adlai Stevenson, CBS News’ bias dates back a good 70 years. Good luck to Weiss finding the pony in that stable.

Still though, credit where it’s due; Testa’s article could be far worse:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll