We Need to Be the News’: Inside
Bari Weiss’s Bumpy Revamp at CBS
Her reimagining of “CBS
Evening News” is under heavy scrutiny, and even became a punchline on her own
network on Sunday at the Golden Globes.
By Michael
M. Grynbaum and Benjamin
Mullin
Jan. 13, 2026Updated 8:55
a.m. ET
Bari Weiss’s message to
the “CBS Evening News” team was blunt.
“Let’s make sure every
single night has something with viral potential,” Ms. Weiss, the new editor in
chief of CBS News, wrote to top producers as they prepared for the show’s new anchor, Tony Dokoupil, to start his tenure this
month with a two-week tour of the country.
“The goal for this road
show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms.
Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news*
for these 10 days.”
Ms. Weiss has achieved
that goal — perhaps not in the way she hoped.
Her reimagining of CBS
News has faced heavy scrutiny, and even became a punchline on her own network:
At Sunday’s Golden Globes, broadcast by CBS, the host, Nikki Glaser,
earned one of her biggest laughs when she declared that
CBS News was “America’s newest place to see BS news.” (David Ellison, the
technology heir who controls CBS and installed Ms. Weiss, was in the audience.)
That Ms. Weiss’s news division merited
a mention at a Hollywood awards show speaks to how the disruptions at CBS have
penetrated the culture beyond the media in-crowd — and underscored questions
already hanging over her bumpy stewardship of a major news institution.
Ms. Weiss, who took over
in October, has presented her reinvention of the “Evening News” as a necessary
change to an often-staid half-hour format, and the sort of reform she hopes to
enact at CBS News, which ranks behind ABC and NBC in viewership.
But problems have piled
up. Mr. Dokoupil’s debut weeknight telecast on Jan. 5 was marred by a
teleprompter issue that left the anchor grasping for words and shaking his head
with frustration in front of millions of live viewers. “First night, big
problems here,” he conceded. The blunder occurred in part because Ms. Weiss and
her aides were rewriting the “Evening News” script up until minutes before the
6:30 p.m. airtime, three people with knowledge of the events said.
Then Mr. Dokoupil got
his viral moment: a tonally confused segment in which he showed internet memes
featuring the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and praised his “impressive
résumé.” Mr. Dokoupil concluded with an ad-libbed remark that raised eyebrows:
“Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida man.”
The segment was meant to
be lighthearted, part of Ms. Weiss’s effort to inject more personality and
informality into the newscast, a person familiar with internal discussions
said. But Mr. Dokoupil’s improvised sign-off was pilloried on social media by critics
who called it inappropriate for an anchor expected to report evenhandedly on
Mr. Rubio’s State Department.
CBS also posted a message from Mr.
Dokoupil introducing himself to viewers. He accused “legacy media” of having
“missed the story” by relying too heavily on “academics or elites,” a claim
that closely mirrored the critiques often published by The Free Press, the news
and opinion site co-founded by Ms. Weiss. Besieged by online critics, Mr.
Dokoupil responded in part by promising that his show would be “more
transparent than Cronkite,” prompting more mockery.
All the attention on a
nightly newscast — a format sometimes dismissed as a dinosaur — reflects the
outsize interest in Ms. Weiss, a longtime opinion journalist who rose to fame
in part by accusing mainstream media outlets like CBS News and The New York Times
of groupthink.
She caused a firestorm
last month when, at the last minute, she postponed a “60 Minutes” segment that was critical
of the Trump administration. The correspondent who reported the segment called
the move “political,” and Ms. Weiss faced accusations that she was, at best,
mismanaging staff and, at worst, censoring journalism to please President Trump.
(The incident also seemed to prompt another joke by Ms. Glaser at the Golden
Globes, when she announced that “the award for most editing goes to CBS News.”)
Ms. Weiss has said the “60 Minutes” segment needed work to be more “comprehensive and fair,” and later blamed “a slow news week” for the firestorm over its postponement.
Mr. Ellison selected Ms. Weiss to run CBS News last year after
he acquired the network’s parent company, Paramount. The
Trump administration approved his purchase after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit
brought by Mr. Trump against “60 Minutes.” The lawsuit, which many legal
experts called frivolous, accused the show of editing an interview to harm Mr.
Trump’s presidential campaign.
Ms. Weiss and her allies
insist that she does not take orders from either Mr. Ellison or Mr. Trump. They
maintain that she is exercising her prerogative as the network’s editor in
chief. “The majority of Americans say they do not trust the press; it isn’t
because they’re crazy,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a recent memo to her staff.
Ms. Weiss is also proud
of the newsmakers that Mr. Dokoupil has booked for the program, some of whom
she helped secure. He has interviewed Thomas Homan, Mr. Trump’s top border
official; Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary; and María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan
opposition leader.
Part of the debate
inside CBS News is whether Ms. Weiss’s early stumbles are a symptom of
partisanship, inexperience or something else. She had never managed an
organization nearly as large as CBS News, and she has brought along some of her
colleagues from The Free Press, including Adam Rubenstein, who previously
worked with Ms. Weiss on the Opinion desk of The Times, and Sascha Seinfeld,
the daughter of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Her inner circle at CBS includes
Charles Forelle, a former deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Sophia
Efthimiatou, who formerly oversaw writer relationships at Substack.
Privately, Ms. Weiss has
been deeply frustrated by the negative reaction to her decisions, and has
blamed some subordinates for not stanching the criticism, three people familiar
with internal discussions said. Ms. Weiss’s wife, Nellie Bowles, a former reporter
at The Times, openly mocked the objections of the “60 Minutes” staff who had
clashed with her spouse in a column published by The Free Press, which Ms.
Weiss continues to oversee.
“My lovely wife asked some 60 Minutes producers to report out a story
a little more, literally Hey guys make a couple
more phone calls and then we’ll run the piece in a week or two,” Ms. Bowles wrote. “No! the media collectively shrieked.
We shan’t!” (CBS News declined to make Ms. Weiss available for an interview.
Referring to Ms. Bowles’s column, Ms. Weiss said in a statement that The Free
Press was “completely editorially independent,” and added, “Also: My wife is
the funniest writer in America.”)
Mr. Dokoupil’s
teleprompter flub last week came about after Ms. Weiss asked to add an on-air
analysis of why Mr. Trump had extricated Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela.
In the rush before
airtime, the new material was inadvertently added twice into the script, the
three people with knowledge of the evening’s events said. Mr. Dokoupil was
flummoxed when he encountered the same words twice, asking his producers out
loud which segment he was supposed to turn to next.
“Are we going to Kelly
here, or are we going to go to Jonah Kaplan?” he said, before lapsing into five
seconds of silence. The error led to recriminations in the CBS control room,
where Ms. Weiss and her top aides had gathered to watch the broadcast, the
people said.
“Mistakes like what
happened with the prompter tonight can never happen again,” the show’s
executive producer, Kim Harvey, wrote to her staff hours later, after 1 a.m.,
announcing “a new schedule and process” that would take effect immediately.
“We get 19 minutes (and 30 seconds)
every night,” Ms. Harvey added. “We need to nail it.”