The News
If CBS News’ new owners are trying to pull the network away from what they see as liberal politics and reflexive hostility to Donald Trump, the president would like them to try harder.
“Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker Sunday, shortly before storming off, then added: “And so is ABC and CBS.”
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and her team find themselves in an unusual situation in America’s contemporary polarized politics: under siege from both sides. Trump appears uninterested in a modest rightward adjustment, while the most powerful right-wing outlet in America, Fox News, has greeted CBS’ attempt to woo its audience with gleeful hostility. That has left CBS’ leaders taking solace in support from stray voices on X, led by Elon Musk, as they try frantically to damp down a rolling civil war.
CBS News’ most visible longtime star, 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley, has continued to nuke the network in a series of statements, counterstatements, and a lengthy Interview sitdown with The New York Times that, as of Sunday afternoon, was already among the top 10 conversations on the show’s YouTube page. Pelley and several of the network’s former correspondents have accused Weiss of inserting editorial bias into the news coverage that more favorably treats the president. The media newsletters and trades have written up transcripts of chaotic meetings and tracked Weiss and new 60 Minutes chief Nick Bilton’s daily movements, while the Times has sent multiple push alerts to millions of readers for stories about the chaos inside CBS.
Within the network, every editorial decision has been scrutinized by CBS’ own staff, who have leaked moment-by-moment discussions, making it more difficult for the leadership to accomplish basic elements of daily journalism.
The newsroom disputes have many causes, but a central one is journalists’ perception that Weiss and her deputies are trying to pull coverage in Trump’s direction. Pelley said he didn’t listen when Weiss suggested in an email that he make changes to a piece about the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. He believed she was trying to put her “thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”
In a statement, CBS News suggested that Pelley was exaggerating, and that Weiss had made four fairly run-of-the-mill editorial points that had “no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”
But staffers described to me other friction along similar, if less dramatic, lines. On one recent morning call, managing editor Charles Forelle, a former Wall Street Journal editor who is one of Weiss’ new deputies, got into what one person described as a heated exchange over recent retail earnings numbers with some members of the network’s business reporting team, insisting that the network’s coverage should reflect the strong overall economic indicators. Forelle’s point, which he continued to make in a separate meeting with the business reporting team, aligns with the mainstream financial media consensus about the contrast between strong US economic indicators and broad public dissatisfaction. But some disillusioned staff at the network saw it as another instance in which the new CBS News sought to project a rosier view of Trump’s America than some of its peers.
For her part, Weiss has tried to stay out of the spotlight around the decisions.
Weiss skipped the daily editorial meeting the day after the 60 Minutes blowup and let network president Tom Cibrowski handle much of the conversation with Pelley before his firing on Tuesday. As late as last week, Weiss was still expected to speak at The Seminar, an off-the-record gathering of PR professionals in Scottsdale, Arizona. But attendees on Sunday noted that Weiss’ name had been removed from the speaker’s lineup; a CBS News source later confirmed she would no longer attend.
Among media watchers and within the network, many wonder whether Weiss, once seen as a potential candidate to run a soon-to-be-combined CBS News and CNN, could survive.
Insiders have also begun to observe shifts away from Weiss in the network’s intricate internal politics. In particular, CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, whom Weiss promoted to that role, surprised colleagues by playing a lengthy tribute to Pelley and his career at 60 Minutes during a broadcast last week.
While Paramount CEO David Ellison hasn’t seemed to waver in his support for her, last week, Status reported that CBS Entertainment chief Amy Reisenbach has privately told associates that the news division’s woes were beginning to damage its business on the entertainment side. Puck reported that the network had quietly discussed layering Weiss, and noted that she would likely not oversee the combined CNN and CBS when the merger closes. And some involved in the CBS acquisition had doubts about Weiss since soon after Paramount’s acquisition of Weiss’ outlet, The Free Press. Last year, advisers to RedBird Capital, a key investor in Paramount’s acquisition of Warner, privately expressed concerns about whether Weiss was ready to run a television network.
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Max’s view
As I wrote last month, Weiss and Bilton are not wrong in their assessment of the trajectory of the media business. Television news has a huge but shrinking audience, and CBS News, like all of its competitors, needs to rapidly adapt if it hopes to survive the behavioral changes that have moved eyeballs to algorithmically-driven digital media platforms.
But the new leadership group underestimated the willingness of longtime staff to welcome the latest in a series of new regimes promising change. In his interview with the Times, Pelley suggested how offended he was by Bilton’s suggestion that the network needs to adapt faster.
“Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous. It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is,” he told the Times.
And in their zeal for new media, the new CBS leadership similarly underestimated one of the strengths of some old media players: the ability to generate spectacle. Despite losing his job, Pelley successfully derailed their announcement plan for a new 60 Minutes, causing Bilton to play defense and apologize to staff just a week after joining the network and conceding that 60 Minutes would have full editorial independence that could not be swayed.
Notable
- The chaos around Weiss is reminiscent of another recent television network controversy. In 2023, CNN staffers rebelled against changes and critical comments made by then network chief Chris Licht, who was eventually forced to resign.
- Fellow 60 Minutes stars Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim said Friday they are staying put for now.