In the resignation letter announcing her departure from the Grey Lady in July 2020, opinion journalist Bari Weiss memorably lamented that “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.” 

What Weiss meant was that the extremely progressive sensibilities of elite social media users — leftist activists, educators, journalists, Democratic campaign staffers, etc. — held undue sway over the range of views that could be printed in the opinion pages. This was a constant source of frustration for Weiss, a centrist thinker critical of the left whose mission was to bring some measure of ideological diversity to the paper.  

In her letter, she bragged about having published independent and contrarian writers such as Jesse Singal, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Nick Gillespie. But in the summer of 2020, the collective set of ideologies, habits and preferences commonly referred to as wokeness still ruled the roost. 

Much has changed in the last few years, and they are about to change even more noticeably at another large media company. That’s because Weiss is set to become the editor-in-chief of CBS News. Parent company Paramount has also purchased The Free Press — the media company she built from scratch in the years since leaving The New York Times — for an eye-popping $150 million. Here was her announcement. 

Over the course of just five years, Weiss has gone from an under-appreciated mid-level editor at a hostile (to her) newspaper to the boss of a major television news company, making millions in the process. One doesn’t have to be in sympathy with Weiss’s views in order to appreciate the staggering nature of this achievement: She has pulled off an elaborate Count of Monte Cristo-style revenge, if not over The Times itself, at least over the sort of people who made her experience at The Times so miserable. 

And the misery, in Weiss’s telling, was indeed thorough. She claims that her colleagues bullied and badgered her for soliciting opinions that conflicted with their own, even though this was the job the Times had hired her to perform. 

This tension had culminated, just one month prior to her resignation, in a full-on staff revolt over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that called for the National Guard to be deployed to quell post-George Floyd rioting in U.S. cities. Progressive staffers framed their opposition to the op-ed as a matter of workplace safety; they said this op-ed put the lives of black staffers at risk and constituted a form of violence. But the argument was not, “We question the wisdom of sending the army into cities to conduct law enforcement,” it was. “you should not be allowed to write this.”  

In other words, it wasn’t an argument at all. 

Back in 2020, this was par for the course. A phenomenon that previously remained confined to elite college campuses had spread throughout social media, infecting workplaces that disproportionately hired young, uber-progressive people. It hit the media industry particularly hard — the Times was hardly alone in having to reckon with junior employees suddenly making unreasonable demands for emotional safety. Twitter may have served as the “ultimate editor,” in Weiss’s telling, but Slack — the online communications platform used by many businesses, particularly media companies — was where the social-media-constructed opinions of woke youngsters took shape as internal enforcement mechanisms for groupthink. 

Since at least 2016, when Donald Trump made opposition to political correctness a central aspect of his presidential campaign, many libertarian, contrarian and otherwise heterodox figures — including Weiss herself, and yours truly — have warned that the thing we now call wokeness would engender massive backlash. Weiss’s elevation to the position of editor-in-chief of CBS News is, in some sense, one of the clearest indicators yet that wokeness in media, like wokeness everywhere else, is a loser. It is losing in the marketplace of ideas, as well as the actual marketplace. 

Now, Weiss isn’t Trump or MAGA, and though the mainstream media is already describing CBS News as facing a hostile takeover from a “Trump-friendly” journalist, The Free Press does run plenty of criticism of Trump and his movement, particularly on foreign policy. Their sensibilities are far more neoconservative than MAGA’s, and the publication’s uncompromising support for Israel is out of step with many of the right’s more popular online figures these days: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, and others. To its credit, The Free Press does regularly feature debates on this subject, including one between Coleman Hughes and Dave Smith. 

For her part, Weiss has announced no specific plans to radically rebrand or reformat CBS News. In a letter to all employees of the company, she outlined ten “core journalistic values” she thinks the company should exemplify under her leadership. They are all inoffensive and non-ideological. Even so, CBS News veterans are anonymously telling media reporters that they are “encouraging” Weiss not to interfere with “60 Minutes” or “CBS News Sunday Morning.” That seems more than a little delusional on their parts. 

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.