The legacy media have lost the trust of the public and are in dire need of reform.
The appointment of Bari Weiss to be editor in chief of CBS News has people freaking out — “like, literally freaking out,” per a staffer at the organization quoted by The Independent. “People are using words like depressing and doomsday,” said another.
So what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
Weiss gained national attention in 2020 when she resigned from the New York Times, which had become a hostile environment. She wrote as a disillusioned liberal rather than as a doctrinaire conservative, but that was enough to earn her the ire of colleagues in a newsroom that could not tolerate any deviation from progressive groupthink.
She “garnered controversy” at the New York Times, an NPR profile informed readers, for, among other things, “questioning whether sexual assault allegations against then-Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh should be disqualifying. . . .”
After leaving, she launched a successful Substack that grew into the Free Press, which was acquired by Paramount as part of the deal that put her in charge at CBS.
Critics have complained that somebody with a lack of television production experience could take over such a supposedly vaunted journalistic institution. But this would be nothing new for CBS. Richard Salant, the longtime president of CBS, who oversaw the introduction of the cherished 60 Minutes in 1968, had been a lawyer without journalistic experience before joining the network. In reality, the protests aren’t about experience but the idea that the heterodox Weiss (a pro-choicer who doesn’t hate pro-lifers, a critic of woke overreach, a passionate supporter of Israel) will take control of an institution that the left views as one of theirs.
In her letter to CBS employees, Weiss outlined ten principles that should be considered basic best practices for any straight news and investigative journalism outlet. Among the values she offered were “journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual”; “journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny”; “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.”
That any of this could be controversial goes a long way toward explaining why trust in media reached an all-time low this month, with Gallup finding that just 28 percent of Americans — and a meager 8 percent of Republicans — have confidence in the ability of the mass media to report news “fully, accurately, and fairly.”
CBS, and 60 Minutes in particular, is no stranger to embarrassing journalism failures — and you don’t have to go back to the 2004 Rathergate scandal, when the network published forged documents to smear George W. Bush ahead of the election. In just the past year, the news magazine show was caught deceptively editing a Kamala Harris interview to clean up her answers, and it ran a fawning segment on Germany’s Orwellian policing of online speech on the same weekend that another CBS host, Margaret Brennan, asserted that “free speech was weaponized” by Nazi Germany to carry out the Holocaust.
Weiss has a tough job ahead of her. She is entering a vipers’ nest filled with employees who will be all too eager to dish dirt about her to their friends at other journalism outlets. But the upside of reforming a legacy news organization that has long been a byword for bias and self-regard would be huge, and it potentially have ripple effects across the industry. We wish her every success.