Exclusive / Weiss deputy says CBS owners are ‘independent of the news operation’

Ben Smith: Just to begin with, you’re the managing editor of CBS News. You came in with Bari Weiss with David Ellison. Do you accept that your hire and Bari’s hire a part of a deal between the Trump administration and the Ellison family to make coverage more favorable to the Trump administration.

Charles Forelle: It sounds like a hard question, but it’s an easy question, no,

Donald Trump said to Tony Dokoupil: I got you your job. Was that false? I mean,

That’s a question for Donald Trump, not a question for me. Like Tony Dokoupil was the person that we wanted to be the anchor.

But when you say that’s an easy question, to say no, to like, how do you know that’s not true? I mean, the Ellisons don’t deny it. Trump says it out loud.

Well, no, that’s not true. David Ellison is very clear that we are editorially independent of the ownership. Everybody here is owned by somebody. Maybe not you. You own your thing, but most journalism is owned by somebody, and the convention in American journalism is that the owners are independent of the news operation. And that’s the case at CBS. And he said that, and he said quite clearly that that would be the case no matter what. So it’s not, it’s not true that he admits it out loud. It’s the opposite. … I mean, you see, you like, see what the president tweets about.

Yeah, he seems to feel like he’s been sold a bill of goods. But the there’s a perception among reasonable people that there was a familiar kind of deal in the world, but not in the United States — in which the Ellison family got regulatory approval by giving Donald Trump the impression, maybe they’re not keeping their side of the deal, that he was going to get more favorable coverage. And you came in with this mandate to restore trust. … How do you win that trust back?

Well, OK, there’s a whole bunch in there. … We’re reporters, we’re journalists. If you have a perception like that, you should do some reporting and figure out if it’s true or not. We do lots of stories that are critical of the administration, lots of stories that are critical of Trump, we do all the stories that everybody else does. So the record, what we produce, what we show to viewers, what we do — would be the opposite of what you’re suggesting.

… I’m not suggesting your coverage looks like it’s being run by the White House. I’m just saying that it seems like there was this original sin that you do have to somehow reckon with because your audience is familiar with it.

Here we go with ‘seems like.’

The president said.

The president says a lot of things. But I know what you’re saying. I’m not going to try to pretend that I don’t know what you’re saying.

How do you get out from under that?

How do you get out from under that is a good question, and the answer to that question is, we do stories like it’s not a complicated question. We do stories. We go after people, we try to enlighten and inform our viewers. We explain, we elucidate. We do all the stuff that journalists do, and we hope that people who are the self-appointed criticizers and assessors of that perception see that. But at the end of the day, what I care about, what Bari cares about, is the audience and the viewers, and that’s what David Ellison cares about. And this sounds very high-minded and journalist-y, and we all care about the audience, which we do, but also from a business standpoint, we care about the audience. We care about the fact that we need to grow. We need to grow a new audience on new platforms, with new formats, and yes, an audience that is a wider audience than the audience that is conventionally thought of as an audience for mainstream media.

Let’s sort of move to that thesis, because I think I probably agree with a lot of the critiques that Bari has of mainstream media, that there’s worries about liberal bias. It is also true that a number of media companies, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and CNN, all came out of the gate before you guys and said: There’s a big part of the country that thinks the media is too left wing. We are going to go right at them. And all three of them basically just saw their audiences collapse as a result, because there are all sorts of things happening there. There’s digital transitions. There’s the fact that partisan audiences just basically seem to do where the numeric, where the numbers are. Do you have any evidence that, even if you’re kind of right on the principle, that you want to say you think you should move 10 degrees to the right and that’s where the center is, that that’s building an audience?

OK, I’ll take the question, but I want to make one adjustment to the question, which is, we don’t think that we want to move 10 degrees to the right and find the center. We think that there’s a wider aperture of audience out there than other people think, and that there are lots of people who watch the news, who read the news, who see the news, and think: This isn’t for me. This doesn’t address the issues that I care about. It’s not told in a way or coming from people who understand my worldview or share my worldview. And thus we want to do things in a different way. …

Let me answer your question about lots of people who have tried for the center and failed. Fair. The problem is that if you think about the center as the space that is minimally offensive to the maximum number of people … it’s boring, it’s not interesting, it’s not lively, it’s not fun, it’s not exciting, it’s not engaging. And our contention is that you can without being all the way over here or all the way over here — and I don’t mean those only to be political statements, left and right politically, but left and right, or up and down, or whatever your axis is, culturally, socially, politically, whatever … if you do it [journalism] in an interesting and compelling way, [audiences] will look at it and think, OK, that’s interesting. So it’s not about finding the thing in the center that’s the least offensive. It’s about having a set of things that you cover and a set of perspectives that you entertain, and a set of ideals that you work from, that is wider than trying to find them in the least offensive way.

So I was gonna read you [Marty Baron] reacting to something that Bari had said: It’s a political impulse to say, we’re going to center-left, we’re going to center-right. The journalistic impulse is just whatever’s true. He feels like CBS has diverged from that. … To make it more concrete, can you give us examples of stuff that CBS used to be doing that was kind of narrowing it, and things that it’s doing now that are widening that.

We’ve taken a bunch of criticism for this, but we’ve been pretty open about interviewing and talking to and seeking coverage of and seeking ways to engage with senior administration officials. And it’s and we get sometimes: ‘Why are you talking to Pete Hegseth? How would you platform Pete Hegseth?’

That’s too easy. That guy’s on every Sunday show. I mean, everybody’s trying to talk to those guys at this point.

But we still take a bunch of criticism. … We are trying to talk to as many people as we possibly can. … We’ve been pretty aggressive on coverage fraud in Minnesota. So that was a topic that we had been looking at for a while. We had a great reporter in Minneapolis who was at the station in Minneapolis and has since moved to the network, who has been kind of all over that, and has been all over that for a while. And that was a thing that burst onto the scene and was sort of immediately politically valorized one way or the other. And my diagnosis, and I may be wrong about this is, and The New York Times did great work on this, and others did great work on this, but that was a topic that made a number of people in mainstream media … people who are not Nick Shirley, uncomfortable. And our view is, you know what? This is a pretty interesting story, and the fact that it has taken on a political tone isn’t a reason for us to back away from it as a story. We’re gonna keep going on it. And we did keep going on it, and we’ve done similar stuff on hospices in California that we’re really proud of. And we’re going to do these stories.

CBS ratings are at historic lows for the morning show and the news. Do you take responsibility for that? I mean, not you personally, but the new management?

We are in charge of CBS News, and so we take responsibility — who else would take responsibility for it? … I acknowledge that I am six months into my television life and don’t have all the answers. But these things move slowly. It takes time. These are audiences that have habits, that have ways of viewing, that are not easy to change, and they’re not totally the sort of thing where you can do things and immediately see a reaction.

You did see a reaction, the numbers went down. Do you have a diagnosis?

The numbers have been trending down for a long time prior to Tony taking over the show. So I don’t think that there’s a cause-effect there from Tony taking it over. … In particular around the big news events, we are seeing more viewers come to us. We had killer ratings on Artemis. We had killer ratings on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. … On any given Wednesday, it’s very hard to make somebody say, I’m going to not watch NBC or ABC and instead I’ll watch CBS. But we are seeing some indications in the data that in big news moments, people do come to us. I see that as a bright spot. But bottom line, these things take time. Both mornings and evenings have been on a downward trend line for a long time. … There’s not gonna be a turnaround of that in two months or three months.

This phenomenon you mentioned is … no one is watching except, once in a while, suddenly everybody’s watching. And how to capture that value, and to do with that, has always been this big challenge for television. What do you take from that? … This is an incredible strength of CNN that they’ve kind of been unable to convert into much of anything.

So one framing point. … Four million people watch the Evening News every day. That’s not a small audience. That’s a lot of people. On any given Sunday, 8-10 million people watch 60 Minutes. Is there anything else in journalism that has that kind of audience size-wise? … There are still millions and millions and millions of people for whom this is an essential and valuable way for them to be informed and get news.

What’s the median age?

It’s very old. … So on balance, it is going to be very difficult for any of us, ABC, NBC, anybody, to add new people to the linear broadcast cohort. There may be some people who age into it, but really not. That cohort is watching linear television. That cohort is aging. There is not an obvious replacement. So the lesson that we take, and the reason that we feel a ton of urgency about making changes at CBS, is that we have to, have to — have to — make a change and find new places and new formats and new ways of reaching our audiences.

Let’s say that [decline] continues. … What is a television network, CBS, NBC, ABC. Fox … whatever a television network is … what is that in five years? Where does it? Where do I watch it? How do I pay for it? How does it make money?

A lot of answers. The cleanest, most straightforward one … is streaming. Paramount has a streaming service that has 8 million viewers. There is a pending merger that has not received regulatory approval, that is still pending, with a company with HBO Max’s 140-ish million subscribers. … There, is order of magnitude, a couple hundred million people who subscribe to a product that they watch on their rectangles online.

Sounds a lot like cable.

Except that it’s moving up. More people are subscribing to streaming. … There is this giant field out there of people who are paying for content and paying for entertainment in a different way. They’re paying for Yellowstone. They’re paying for The Pit. They’re paying for whatever it is that they want to watch. The challenge for us as the news division, this giant thing, is to figure out, what does news look like on this for the next generation of people who watch this way. I don’t think it looks like reruns of old 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning episodes. I don’t think it looks like a simulcast of the CBS Evening News. … It’s something else. … It is something that looks closer to video podcasts, like the intersection of video podcasts and shows. Shows meaning 60 Minutes, or other things that don’t necessarily have to be the same thing that is on linear broadcast.

It is strange that as television is collapsing, everything else is becoming television.

The nice thing is, for a streaming audience, you don’t have to answer the question of, what is it? Because it’s lots of different things. Because the way that streaming viewers interact with the thing on their wall is they choose what they want to watch. … So I think interesting things in a bunch of different formats that are for the viewers who are accustomed to streaming. I choose what I want to watch, not Oh, I get whatever’s broadcast to me at 6:30. …

This is not like a plan that we have, but if you think about Iran news, we could have a page on the streaming service that is a whole bunch of different things about what’s happening in Iran right now. One thing you can click on could be a correspondent who is live in the Middle East, who’s going to give you an update on the latest thing that’s happening there. Another thing could be a visual explainer of the Strait Hormuz. Another thing could be a long 60 Minutes piece that’s an investigation into the nuclear material in Isfahan. … All of those things fit into the collection of stuff that is the news product that becomes the thing that people watch on stream.

Is text still part of the universe? Or are we postliterate?

I don’t think we’re postliterate. It makes me very sad. I love text. I love words. I do think as a lover of words and a person who appreciates them, I also know that the way that most people want to consume news as video. So there will always be space for text. There will be space for carefully argued and thoughtful analysis and essays. There’ll be space for beautiful writing. We have those spaces. There’s the Free Press, there’s CBS News.com — in a potential integration and merger, there are properties at Warner Brothers that are text-based. But we do need to think really thoughtfully about how we take all of the great values of journalism and all the things that we do and make sure that they all survive into a digital video era.

And then what about live? In some sense the evening news is, you have a guy who’s talking live and throwing to a series of on demand clips in a weird way.

Live is complicated, because live is logistically complex. I firmly believe that that the audience understands the energy of live, and understands like when something is happening at a moment that is in front of them, there is a there is a value to that, purpose to that and I think we need to lean really heavily into doing that at live moments, and less trying to make things look live.

Do you think you’re still broadcasting the CBS Evening News in five years?

Yes, for sure.

The idea that you’re trading analog dollars for digital dimes is still true, in terms of the advertising values on YouTube versus CBS’ air. How do you solve that?

There’s not some kind of market disequilibrium here, where advertisers are overpaying to reach analog audiences. They’re not dumb. These are very smart people who think carefully about CPMs and think about what they’re getting when they spend. So it’s like, yes, the structure of ad dollars towards linear is sort of structurally higher in a bunch of different ways. But that’s not like a market disequilibrium. That’s a consequence of something.

Isn’t the thing that’s a consequence of is that Google and Meta are unbelievably efficient at targeting your viewers once they get into a digital environment and you’re in this race to the bottom?

Correct. I think that’s the reason why the digital thing is so low. Why is the analog so high?

Your less expensive competitors can’t reach them there. Do you feel like you’re able to crack importing those economics into digital? Or do you think you just need to cut costs?

Absolutely, we will need to cut costs like, and we’ve been open about that. Part of that is that we need to reinvest in other parts of the business … to grow the digital stuff. But … the point I’m trying to make about the analog audiences is that they’re valuable to advertisers for a reason, not because the advertisers are dumb and don’t understand that they could reach these people much more cheaply with Google DoubleClick or whatever it is. There is a value to those to those people, and the way that we capture that value best is by converting them to subscribers on the streaming platform. … The economic play is, to my mind, trying to figure out how to take the value that that audience has to come to us, and not to other people.

That makes sense. Jeff Zucker said a few years ago he was running CNN, that … either CNN was going to become the New York Times, or the New York Times was going to become CNN. And obviously, CNN did not win that race. Do you see The New York Times as a significant television competitor?

No, because the New York Times is … still largely text based. … I think they certainly can evolve into a competitor for the digital video space, but I think we’re fundamentally thinking about different audiences. … The order of magnitude of the audience size on streaming is 200 million. The order of magnitude of people who can afford to pay $30 a month, or $24.99 or $42.99 whatever it is a month for The New York Times, is just much smaller. … There’s a ceiling on how big that audience can be because of the price. That’s not a left-center-right thing. That’s a price point thing.

Do you think [The Wall Street Journal] remains as committed to kind of hardcore financial journalism as it was when you were there?

The short answer is no, and I don’t, but I don’t necessarily think that that’s a bad thing. I think the journal has an extraordinary history and an extraordinary market position as a news organization that is for a certain kind of person, not specifically a trader on Wall Street or a person in the financial industry and … has thought about, really, how you widen that out as much as possible. That’s a sort of natural consequence of thinking about lots of different kind of coverage, and what that person, that person who fits into that Wall Street Journal-type audience person … those people are interested in more things than just stocks and bonds, and so the Journal has given them more things than stocks and bonds.