Bari Weiss’s first
month at CBS News unfolds in a newsroom culture clash
The
opinion journalist took over as editor in chief in October, launching a new era
for the network amid layoffs, confusion and shifting expectations.
November 7, 2025 at 6:00
a.m. ESTToday at 6:00 a.m. EST
By Laura Wagner
and
Two journalists who are part of Bari Weiss’s expanding
journalistic empire were on-site to cover now-Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s
election night watch party Tuesday in Brooklyn. Ed O’Keefe, senior White House
reporter for CBS News, approached the event with the signature buttoned-up
style of a longtime network political correspondent. Also present was Olivia
Reingold, an election-night contributor to CBS who is a staff writer for the
Free Press, the popular opinion website co-founded by Weiss, who was named CBS News editor in chief last month.
From a well-lit set inside the venue, O’Keefe reported
Mamdani’s projected win. “Word of the victory has just reached this crowd,”
O’Keefe said over the cheers of New Yorkers massing behind him, before offering
up several minutes of political analysis.
Reingold, for her part, documented on Instagram her
experience as she waited in the wrapped-around-the-block lines to enter the
venue (like “Soviet bread ones,” quipped a Free Press video producer
accompanying her on a separate Instagram account).
Once inside, she appeared briefly on the CBS News election
night special. She trailed left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker, who
said he had seen her “work on denying the Gaza famine” — a reference to
Reingold’s Free Press article asserting that media organizations had exaggerated
starvation in the Palestinian enclave by using images of emaciated children who
also had preexisting health problems. Piker laughed and declined her request to
profile him for the Free Press, saying the outlet had “called me the handsome face of terror apologia.”
It was a split-screen rendering of the moment CBS News
finds itself in: trying to meld the rigors of a hard-nosed, capital-J
journalism infused with the DNA of Walter Cronkite and the first-person voice
of a feisty, contrarian outlet that courts controversy, often by attacking
liberal and left-wing ideas and causes.
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What that process means for the long-term direction of the
news network, and how much of the Free Press approach it takes on, is unknown.
What is clear is that this is a new era for CBS News. And it belongs to Weiss.
The
41-year-old took over as CBS News editor in chief after billionaire David
Ellison’s Skydance — backed by his father, Oracle founder and Trump ally Larry
Ellison — acquired the site for $150 million in October. In the news release
announcing the deal, David Ellison said he wanted CBS to serve “the majority of
the country [that] longs for news that is balanced and fact-based.”
Finding that voice falls to Weiss, who left the New York
Times in 2020 after saying she faced “constant bullying” from her colleagues over her opinions. Soon after, she
founded the Free Press, which has grown into one of the most-read sites on
Substack, with a heady mix of articles challenging “wokeness” and showing
strong support for Israel.
Weiss, who has described herself as “politically homeless”
and a “radical centrist,” has cast the outlet as a cultural change agent,
focused on “stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an
ideological narrative.” She has embraced that role, including by co-founding a
university in Austin that offers “forbidden courses,” aiming to
counter what she sees as illiberalism and group think in American higher
education.
One month into her tenure, staffers at the revered TV
newsroom known for its pull-no-punches reporting are weathering a flurry of
layoffs, shifting resources and a cultural collision with Weiss’s ideas of how
to tackle the news. Some newsroom employees say Weiss’s sensibility has begun
to shape editorial operations at the network.
This report is based on interviews with more than a dozen
current and former CBS employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of
anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or feared retribution. A
CBS News spokeswoman declined to comment. Reingold did not respond to requests
for comment.
A week after she took over, Weiss asked every CBS News
staff member to send her an email memo outlining their working hours,
achievements and ideas for improvement, an exercise she said would help get
everyone “aligned on achieving a shared vision for CBS News.”
“It was refreshing in a lot of ways and also extremely
intimidating. The last sentence about making sure we are all aligned did not
sit well with a lot of people,” said a recipient, one of several staffers who
described a feeling of paranoia in the newsroom. “At same time, [I] can’t
remember a time at CBS when someone asked for my opinion about what is working
and what isn’t.”
Weiss’s connections have helped her secure CBS interviews
with figures including Benjamin Netanyahu, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza
Rice. The “60 Minutes” interview Trump sat for on Sunday was in the works before Weiss started at
the company, but the president made a point to praise her as a “great new
leader.” While that quote didn’t make it to the broadcast interview, it was
included in a full transcript the network posted. After settling a lawsuit
Trump brought against CBS for its editing of an interview last year with Kamala
Harris, the network applied its new standard of posting a full
transcript, inviting criticism of its decisions on what to run and what to cut in the Trump interview
it aired.
Free Press journalists, including Weiss’s sister Suzy
Weiss, have started appearing on CBS streaming shows to talk about their
reporting and provide analysis on topics including Democrats’ views on
socialism, Trump asking banks to crack down on “suspected terrorist activity,”
the health downsides of long-term cannabis use, and lab-grown diamonds.
Recently, Free Press articles have also been cited in news stories on the CBS
website. On at least two occasions, articles from the Free Press appeared at
the bottom of CBS articles as paid advertisements: “How the Yuppies Became
Socialists” and “How Catholicism Got Cool.” CBS declined to comment on the
advertisements.
While a CBS News spokesperson said the Free Press and CBS
News are and would remain separate entities, some staffers have expressed
concern about the distinction, wondering if employees for the two newsrooms are
held to the same social media guidelines and journalistic standards. “I think
we’re all unclear about what the line is between the two companies,” one
current staffer said. “Nobody has said anything about it, really. It’s wild!”
At 9 a.m. editorial planning meetings that staffers say
Weiss attends sporadically, some staffers have recoiled at her editorial
suggestions. One found her proposal to book “Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown
for an interview about the recent heist at the Louvre frivolous. (Novelist
Daniel Silva, whose work has featured art and espionage, was booked instead.)
Last month, Weiss asked for an article on Sanae Takaichi,
the first female prime minister of Japan, focused on the right-wing
politician’s affinity for heavy metal. “She pitched it as a BuzzFeed listicle,”
a staffer said. “Like what her favorite 10 songs are.”
The eventual CBS story — which began “The Iron Lady listens to … Iron
Maiden?” — laid out Takaichi’s love of music, motorcycles and karate.
While some employees haven’t been impressed with Weiss’s
story instincts, others say the morning meetings haven’t much changed. There is
a long tradition, one employee said, of the bosses “spitballing dumb ideas.”
A shake-up might have been what Ellison had in mind by
hiring Weiss, an opinion journalist with no experience running a large
newsroom. For years, “CBS Evening News” has run in third place behind the
evening news programs from NBC and ABC, and some staffers welcomed new ideas.
“My guess is that what they’re trying to do is appeal to
those who feel they are alienated from CBS because they think that it’s too
left-leaning or too biased in one way or another,” said Jacob Nelson, a
communications professor at the University of Utah. The risk Weiss and Ellison
take on, he added, “is that they are just going to alienate even the people
that they already have.”
David Karpf, a professor at the School of Media and Public
Affairs at George Washington University, said: “You don’t put Bari Weiss in
charge of CBS News unless the project is to Free Press-ify CBS News.”
Last week, roughly 100 CBS News employees were notified
they were being laid off as part of a broader Paramount corporate restructuring.
Those layoffs came amid a string of departures among senior leadership and
network talent since Weiss took the editorial helm.
Claudia Milne, who oversaw standards and practices at CBS,
resigned in October. Longtime CBS analyst and anchor John Dickerson announced he was leaving the network two days before the layoffs were
announced. And on Monday, executive Laurie Orlando, who managed talent
recruitment and strategy at the network, announced her exit. Dickerson declined
to comment. Milne did not respond to requests for comment. Orlando could not be
reached for comment.
The layoffs, which a CBS spokeswoman said were planned
before Weiss’s arrival, were felt deeply throughout the newsroom.
CBS News’s climate coverage team, which was acclaimed in
June by the journalistic association Covering Climate Now for its “standout” news hits on the effects of
climate change, lost four producers, one of whom was reassigned. CBS News’s
race and culture unit was disbanded. The co-hosts of “CBS Saturday Morning”
were laid off, along with five other on-air personalities. “CBS Mornings Plus”
and “CBS Evening News Plus,” the streaming spin-offs of the network’s morning
and evening news programs, were canceled.
Trey Sherman, a producer on “CBS Evening News Plus,” said
he was told the show was being canceled and the team laid off. In that meeting,
with CBS News executive David Reiter, Sherman asked whether reassignment within
the company was possible. Reiter, he said, told him it was not. Later, Sherman
learned that four members of his team — all people of color — had been laid
off, while five White colleagues had been reassigned. When he confronted Reiter
about the discrepancy, Sherman said, Reiter replied that he had retained people
he had worked with before.
Sherman said he was not accusing anyone of racism but
believed “whatever policy they used to lay people off had a racist or disparate
impact on my team.”
Reiter declined to comment. A spokeswoman for CBS News
declined to comment on Sherman’s account.
Layoffs and re-toolings are commonplace in an era of media
consolidation. Despite the cuts, CBS News still employs dedicated journalists
who want to do ambitious work of the highest quality. But for some, the magic
of the place is gone.
One CBS News staffer recalled an iconic “60 Minutes”
episode following a couple, Mike and Carol Daly, grappling with the wife’s
Alzheimer’s over a decade. Asked in a final scene if he still loved his wife,
Mike replied, “I love Carol who was Carol, but now Carol’s not Carol anymore.”
“It’s a metaphor,” said the CBS News staffer, reflecting on
his years at the network. “I think people love what CBS used to be.”
Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.
