The aerobic freakout has begun inside the liberal media over the new owners of CBS News appointing “anti-woke” Bari Weiss to the new post of “Editor In Chief.” None of the CBS veterans want a new boss with a new ideology. They like pretending they don’t have an ideology. They call themselves courageously “independent.”
Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison wants to put CBS News firmly in the middle: “We want CBS to speak to that 70 percent of the audience that would really define themselves as center-left to center-right.”
In her initial memo to employees, Weiss stated several principles that are absolute anathema inside CBS: “Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny,” and “Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.”
The anonymous leakers are already on fire. Jeremy Barr of The Guardian spread the early spurts: “CBS News veterans I've talked to are encouraging Bari Weiss to not mess with the Golden Goose(s) of 60 Minutes and CBS News Sunday Morning.”
What makes them “golden”? They’re the opposite of the Weiss principles. They rely on a narrow spectrum of ideas and persistently favor one political party over another.
60 Minutes is notoriously pro-Democrat, from Steve Kroft trying to save Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign from the early adultery charges of his mistress Gennifer Flowers to Steve Kroft performing a series of blatantly promotional interviews with Barack Obama, starting in 2008.
Donald Trump exposed Lesley Stahl for what she didn’t put on the air during their interview in the last weeks of the 2020 campaign. She huffed that there was no way to verify that Hunter Biden’s laptop full of potentially devastating Biden family influence-peddling evidence was real. Then the media verified it….in 2022, with Biden safely elected.
In 2022, Scott Pelley did the Steve Kroft spit-and-polish interview with President Biden. He cooked up gooey gushers like this one: “You have lived a long life of triumph and tragedy. In November, you'll be 80. And I wonder what it is that keeps you in the arena.” We know part of the answer: He was kept in the arena by powerful White House aides who were actually running America, and who easily manipulated the partisan journalists to fall in line.
CBS infuriated the troops by settling with Trump over their sappy interviews with Biden and Harris. Previous owner Shari Redstone told The New York Times that CBS employees warned her that in October 2023, when Pelley scored a second softball session with Biden, the president had seemed “drowsy and had to be prodded to answer.” She worried that CBS might be accused of “editing the interview to conceal Mr. Biden’s failings.” Biden’s doddering was still apparent on air, but imagine what Team Pelley edited out.
It’s been a very long time since CBS was aiming for an audience that was “center-left to center-right.” They’ve been trying to drag everyone to the left, even in the so-called glory days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. CBS loved the Kennedys, but they despised Nixon and Goldwater and Reagan. The Bushes, who never wanted to upset a liberal journalist, learned just how much Dan Rather hated them.
Can CBS actually move to the center? And will that expose how tilted the other networks are every day? It must be a terrifying prospect for the badly named “mainstream media.” Because merely adding Democrat scandals and policy failures to the definition of “newsworthiness” is a nightmare, a concept they refuse to accept.