“The Bari Weiss schadenfreude is just completely crazy,” an entertainment industry dealmaker says. “Everyone’s drowning in it.”
Weiss has long been a favorite gossip vortex in New York and DC media circles—first as a controversial opinion staffer at The New York Times and then as a founder of anti-woke website The Free Press. But the talk of Hollywood? Not so much. When I texted her name to an array of entertainment industry pals recently, they responded with the equivalent of a blank look, professing to be “tuned out” or uninterested. “She’s a gay married woman,” one quipped. “How far right could she possibly be?”
A week into her tenure as editor in chief of CBS News, though, Weiss is starting to grab the industry’s attention. Especially because she was installed by David Ellison, the new CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, which is reportedly currently in negotiations to buy Warner Bros. Discovery—the parent company of CNN. The merger of those companies would make Ellison a new Hollywood behemoth, and Weiss his $150 million-plus protégé.
“I don’t think that people in LA were thinking about Bari Weiss much before,” a screenwriter tells me. “During the Biden years, we could afford to ignore people like that. And then Trump surged back, and brought with him this edict to transform American media.” The recent Jimmy Kimmel affair—in which Disney’s ABC pulled Kimmel’s late-night show off the air “indefinitely,” hours after Trump-appointed FCC chairman Brendan Carr made not-so-veiled threats about revoking broadcasting licenses—stunned many Hollywood insiders (Kimmel’s show has since been reinstated). Among other things, it revealed just how scared top media executives are and how vulnerable to political intimidation.
“We just couldn’t believe that it was happening,” the screenwriter says, pointing out that entertainment and news are mostly created by the same corporate institutions. Late-night shows like Kimmel’s and Stephen Colbert’s—which was canceled shortly after Colbert criticized Paramount for settling a $16 million lawsuit with Trump—have always blurred the line between light entertainment and hard news. Their newfound peril has made some in Hollywood think more sharply about the potential ramifications of Ellison’s Paramount takeover and his hiring of Weiss. “What kind of chilling effect could the Trump administration’s demand for a conservative viewpoint have on entertainment?” the screenwriter asks. Would movie and TV writers be expected to quietly toe some party line, or avoid subjects that might provoke the president’s Truth First trigger finger?
Amid the panic, some industry denizens have managed to wring amusement out of Weiss’s cringey early missteps, debating whether her rallying cry of “let’s do the fucking news” and the email she sent Friday asking all of CBS News to tell her “how you spend your working hours” felt more like outtakes from The Newsroom or Veep.
“I think some people are just genuine fans of who she is and what she’s built,” says the dealmaker. “But probably even those people are concerned about having someone who is opinion-based running a news division. And she has been really deliberate in speaking to her lack of television experience in almost every meeting. I think you saw that in that email, which might’ve been intended as a super earnest ‘I’d love to know more about you’ and not ‘prove yourself.’ But everyone knows a bunch of layoffs are coming, so it feels like an unfortunate way to connect with your people.”
David Simon, the writer behind The Wire and The Deuce (and a former journalist for the Baltimore Sun), finds only the blackest humor in Weiss’s ascent to the top of the news heap. When asked for his perspective, Simon replied via email, “Murrow and Cronkite have both interrupted their peaceful mouldering, and are now revolving at such speeds that never mind the affront to televised journalism—we need to consider the geologic risks to us all.”
The mood inside CBS News isn’t much cheerier. One current newsroom producer described Weiss’s first editorial meeting (where the new boss proposed booking Hillary Clinton for an interview) as having “the vibe of the overly confident intern who comes in and is like, ‘I’ve got an idea no one’s ever thought of: Let’s talk to Hillary Clinton!’ It’s just kind of a shock that this is who’s in charge.” Weiss’s mention of creating new podcasts and focusing on digital did rouse a bit of excitement from colleagues. “I could see this being a good use of her skills. Clearly, she’s very good at marketing herself and marketing her platform on social and digital. But the level to which she immediately jumped into editorial is making everybody feel like that’s not really her mandate.”
CBS and Paramount employees have been buffeted by layoffs and instability for years now. They tell me they’ve been spiraling for so long that, at this point, they are pretty much spiraled out. “You have the instability of what’s happening at the company and in our newsroom, and then you have the instability and unknown about what’s happening in the world that you’re reporting on, so you have to pick your battles,” another CBS source told me. “Are we seeing journalism die before our very eyes? I don’t know, but we’re all just strapping in for the ride.”
Several Hollywood insiders told me they are trying to keep an open mind, despite the waves of schadenfreude rising around Weiss. “Often, someone young and fresh and charismatic and opinionated comes in, and sometimes they don’t fuck up, right? Sometimes they listen and learn and they do good,” says the screenwriter warily. But the possibility of Hollywood devolving into a state-controlled media front feels all too close for comfort. “We have to make sure our unions are sticking up for us, and our executives and our talent agencies stiffen their spines. It’s a four-alarm fire, and we ignore it at our peril.”
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