Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, has pledged to uphold the network’s traditional ideals of objectivity and rigor. Perhaps she will. Yet the evidence suggests a more discouraging future for one of the great pillars of American broadcast journalism.
Weiss casts herself as an independent thinker. She has described herself at various times as a left-leaning centrist, a moderate liberal, “politically homeless,” a “radical centrist,” and a conservative. She has defined her ideology as a visceral hatred of bullies. A hatred of bullying may have plausibly explained her decision in 2020 to quit the New York Times opinion section, where her criticism of left-wing pieties made her deeply unpopular and the subject of relentless attacks from colleagues. Perhaps it also propelled her decision to co-found The Free Press, a scrappy media company, the following year.
Unlike Weiss’s legion of enemies, I believe that The Free Press filled an important niche. When Weiss left the Times, many established media outlets were at least contemplating abandoning their traditional standards of objectivity in favor of a crusading progressive spirit. Such ideological hegemony inspired a flourishing of independent journalism from the center and center-left on Substack (see Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and others) and in podcasts (Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal, and others). The Free Press joined this rebellion from a more conservative perspective, and regularly featured important stories that discomfited the left and that the mainstream media often ignored or dismissed.
The trouble is that the cultural conditions under which Weiss founded her publication have changed radically. The era of progressive institutions firing or silencing staffers who step out of line peaked five years ago and is now over. What looms over American culture at the moment is an authoritarian presidency that threatens to crush the very values of free speech and open discourse that Weiss pledged to uphold. While Yglesias, Sullivan, and others have passionately condemned Donald Trump’s illiberalism, Weiss’s Free Press continues to cover America as if it’s still the summer of 2020. Instead of continuing its campaign against bullies, The Free Press these days seems to be contorting itself to defend the bullies of the moment as misunderstood people who sometimes act out, but just because they, too, have been mistreated.
The Free Press has devoted only glancing attention to the administration’s Peronist economic ambitions, its historic self-dealing, its devastation of scientific research, and its legislative agenda that has engineered the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history. This odd silence may simply reflect Weiss’s own coverage priorities, which run toward foreign policy, especially Israel, and domestic culture wars. Yet this neglect deflects attention from issues that threaten to split Trump’s coalition, and lavishes it on the social issues where Trump has expanded his following.
Even within Weiss’s free-speech wheelhouse, The Free Press has failed to convey the administration’s deep-rooted authoritarianism. This is not to say that The Free Press has completely ignored Trump’s clampdown on civil liberties and the media. When ABC bowed to pressure from the Federal Communications Commission and took Jimmy Kimmel off the air last month, an editorial declared that this “should alarm anyone who cares about free speech.” But the paper has generally applied a different standard to such incidents than it has to violations of free speech from the left. Often, it frames Trump’s most thuggish moves as thorny questions. After Trump ordered up charges on James Comey, ousted the prosecutor who’d told him there was no case, and then appointed an unqualified lackey to do his bidding, Jed Rubenfeld, a constitutional-law professor at Yale, sagely took to The Free Press to muse, “This is a very difficult problem—morally, legally, and politically.”
One go-to Free Press move is to cover Trump’s most indefensible actions by holding a debate. After Republicans used Charlie Kirk’s murder to set off a national wave of cancellations, firing once-anonymous workers for saying anything negative about Kirk’s legacy, The Free Press treated its audience to a symposium weighing the pros and cons. Arguing for the pro side were the Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson (“Fire Them All”) and Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute, who characterized this wave of social-media mobbings and hasty terminations as “a healthy culture asserting moral clarity, not canceling dissenters and freethinkers.”
When universities, newspapers, or other institutions throw somebody out for violating progressive orthodoxy, nobody at The Free Press endorses this as an assertion of moral clarity. Instead, leftists who engage in illiberalism are following the dictates of their ideological fanaticism. A 2023 article blamed the rise of university cancel culture on the Marxist philosophizing of Herbert Marcuse, whose scholarship allowed leftists to “justify using any tools necessary to shut down their opponents and serve their political ends.” Another in 2024 described “anti-Israel activism” among students as merely the latest radical fad in education: “Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology.”
But when Trump cracks down on dissent and liberates violent supporters, he’s just being a bad boy again. After Trump pardoned every January 6 insurrectionist, The Free Press scolded, “For those who have supported Trump, this is a moment to recognize when he doesn’t measure up, morally or constitutionally, as he did not measure up on that day four years ago.” Trump can do something bad, but he cannot be something bad.
Weiss’s announcement of her new role at CBS was revealing. “We now face a different form of illiberalism emanating from our fringes,” she wrote. “On the one hand, an America-loathing far left. On the other, a history-erasing far right. These extremes do not represent the majority of the country, but they have increasing power in our politics, our culture, and our media ecosystem.”
The illiberal tendencies on the far left and right that trouble Weiss apparently lurk well beyond the corridors of power. The president of the United States may throw people in foreign prisons without due process and declare that laws do not constrain him, but Weiss seems more concerned with what’s “emanating from our fringes” than she does with what’s coming down from the White House.
Ominous hints of what this means for CBS can be found in Trump’s own social-media feed. After years of tweets denigrating traditional broadcast networks, the president began to conspicuously omit CBS from his regular stream of agitprop over the summer. “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES,” he wrote in August.
The timing is no coincidence, given the concessions the president exacted in exchange for approving the merger between Paramount (which owns CBS) and Skydance in July. Paramount Skydance’s prompt acquisition of the Trump-friendly Free Press and appointment of Weiss as the head of CBS News has every appearance of being a sop to the president and his politicized FCC. Trump may be misreading or overinterpreting the signals, but his social-media posts seem to indicate that he believes that CBS is now in his pocket.
Weiss is an intelligent and talented editor. If the maneuvering that led to her installation atop CBS News fails to fulfill Trump’s expectations of deferential coverage, it will not be the first time his schemes went awry. But on the surface, this looks like a trade of journalistic integrity for regulatory favors. It is now up to Weiss to prove that her defense of liberal values is not so easily bargained away.
The post Bari Weiss Still Thinks It’s 2020 appeared first on The Atlantic.
