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Illustration Credit: Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker
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The network’s new editor-in-chief has championed a press free from élite bias, while aligning herself with a billionaire class more willing than ever to indulge Donald Trump.
Weiss, who has faced criticism for the network’s recent coverage of the Trump Administration, told one person that she is pursuing a “de-Baathification of CBS.
On Halloween, a production team from “60 Minutes,” CBS’s flagship news program, went to Mar-a-Lago for an interview that the correspondent Norah O’Donnell was conducting with Donald Trump. It was the President’s first appearance on the network since filing a lawsuit against it, claiming that, in the run-up to the 2024 election, “60 Minutes” had unfairly edited an interview with his opponent Kamala Harris. Most observers agreed that the suit had little merit, but CBS’s parent company, Paramount, which was owned by the Redstone family, had agreed to pay Trump sixteen million dollars to settle the matter. At the time, the media mogul David Ellison was in the process of acquiring Paramount, an eight-billion-dollar deal that required the Administration’s approval. “I see good things happening in the news,” Trump now told O’Donnell. “I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership—CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”
Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, was watching the interview off camera. Just a few years earlier, she had resigned from her position as an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, condemning the paper as doctrinally liberal and out of touch. She went on to start a Substack that would eventually become The Free Press, an anti-woke rejoinder to a mainstream media that, Weiss argued, pandered to an audience of élites who were “turning against America.” Fox News and MSNBC were feeding their audiences “political heroin,” she said. Elsewhere, she added, “I think there’s a lot of people in this country who are politically homeless, who feel like the old labels—Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal—no longer fit them or no longer mean what they used to.”
Ellison had handpicked Weiss as the new head of CBS News in early October, after buying The Free Press for a hundred and fifty million dollars. Many in the industry viewed the move as an attempt to further appease the President. “They just wanted to hire Bari as a symbolic gesture to Donald Trump to make sure they got that deal through,” one longtime media executive told me. “Don’t think about it as David Ellison paying a hundred and fifty million dollars for The Free Press. Think about it as a hundred and fifty million dollars on top of the price they paid for Paramount. It was basically the cost to get it to go through.”
But Weiss’s arrival at the network also coincided with a long-simmering crisis in broadcast news, in which its programming is increasingly distrusted by a rapidly dwindling audience. For Weiss, the job seemed to offer a chance to give viewers what she believed they really wanted: news coverage that was more heterodox and politically interesting. The size of CBS News was daunting—the newsroom had twelve hundred employees, compared to around sixty at The Free Press—but its potential audience was also beyond anything she could have hoped to build with a Substack. Early on, she circulated a list of ten principles that would guide the network’s coverage under her leadership, laying out a brand of journalism that, she said, “holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and “embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.”
Weiss, who is forty-one, had started The Free Press out of her home. Now she was ferried around in an S.U.V., and the company required her to be accompanied by bodyguards—including, for a time, inside CBS’s offices—something Weiss has described as an annoying but necessary aspect of her new gig. (“Some would say it’s offensive,” one producer told me. “The implication was that we’re going to try to kill her.”) At the same time, it was apparent to many inside the network that Weiss, a digital-media native, was an uneasy fit in the more buttoned-up world of television news. She had donned a CBS baseball cap for her first editorial meeting, and ended the session by telling the room, “Let’s do the fucking news!” At another meeting, Weiss urged staff to up their coverage of the protests unfolding in Iran, mentioning videos she’d seen online that “almost look like a movie scene.” One senior reporter with experience covering the country cautioned that some of what Weiss was citing were videos from protests three years earlier.
Weiss also seemed unconcerned about the norms surrounding talent recruitment, reaching out to the Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who was then still under contract at his own network. Four days into the job, she arranged a joint interview with the former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, which aired on CBS’s streaming platform. Some applauded the move as evidence of Weiss’s clout; others thought it revealed her inexperience. “Why are you booking those people for a show that eleven people are going to watch?” the longtime media executive said. “That’s not understanding where you should be prioritizing your time.”
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Clare Malone is a contributing writer at The New Yorker covering the media business, journalism, and politics. She received the 2025 Mirror Award for commentary, for her essays on the meme-ification of American politics, the spectre of an extinction-level event in the media landscape, and the hybrid media-finance company Hunterbrook Media. She previously wrote for FiveThirtyEight, where she reported on class, race, and electoral politics, and covered the 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns. Her writing has also appeared in New York, The Atlantic, GQ, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Harper’s.