The call occurred a day after it was announced that Bari Weiss sold her right-leaning opinion news outlet, The Free Press, to Paramount for a whopping $150 million.
To sweeten the deal, Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News, becoming the first openly gay person to lead the network that’s famous for news icons like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather and for 60 Minutes, which has won 150 Emmys through its 58-season run.
For many venerable journalists at my former place of work, Weiss’ new role is alarming in part because of her conservative ideological bent but—most importantly—because of her background.
Bari Weiss has zero experience in broadcast news and has spent much of her career working as an associate editorial features editor for The Wall Street Journal and subsequently as an opinion editor at The New York Times, where she became notorious for casting doubt on allegations of sexual harassment, assault and rape and for whining about her frustrations with cancel culture, social justice warriors and “the PC police.”
“Let’s do the fucking news,” Bari Weiss declared on a CBS News editorial call last week, telling network staffers—who reportedly rolled their eyes and cringed—that she wants to “win.”
Bari Weiss hates mainstream media
Bari Weiss has also spent much of her career telling Americans that the mainstream media sucks and has used that argument to convince them that The Free Press, which has received funding from billionaire investors and whose slogan is “Honest. Independent. Fearless.” was the answer.
“If you’re someone that used to read the New York Times and listen to NPR in the morning, and now you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I don’t know if I can trust what I hear or read there anymore,’ where do you go? Those people want a publication that will treat them like adults, with respect and transparency, and honesty. And that’s what we’re going to try to do with The Free Press,” Weiss said in a 2022 interview shortly after the launch of the media company.
Beyond Bari Weiss’ self-aggrandizing critiques of mainstream media lies a track record that is antithetical to CBS News’ reputation for bulletproof journalism.
A notable example of this is in 2023 when The Free Press published a story called “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle,” where author Jamie Reed claimed that practitioners at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital had permanently harmed multiple children.
The article had a profound impact. After it was published, the state of Missouri launched an investigation into the clinic, and Reed was called to testify in support of a bill passed later that year banning gender-affirming care for minors.
The problem with the story was that it was sloppy: an internal investigation by Washington University found that Reed’s claims were unsubstantiated, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch spoke with multiple parents whose experiences directly contradicted her account; and NBC News interviewed more than two dozen people associated with the clinic, none of whom corroborated her allegations. In addition, First Alert 4 KMOV interviewed the family of one trans kid mentioned in the article, where Reed claimed that their child had suffered liver damage due to botched treatment and that the family had considered suing. The family said neither claim was true.
The New York Times was the only outlet able to find anyone who had received care from the clinic and shared Reed’s criticisms. Their article still noted that “It’s clear the St. Louis clinic benefited many adolescents: Eighteen patients and parents said that their experiences there were overwhelmingly positive, and they refuted Ms. Reed’s depiction of it.”
Despite this, Weiss claimed the article “confirmed” Reed’s account.
There are many other examples of missed fact-checks and weak journalism. The Free Press claimed that children in Gaza were starving because of preexisting health conditions in order to challenge reports of famine in the region, a claim that an expert called “as callous as it is inaccurate.” They published another story about how in the “deep-blue city” of Austin, Texas, crime had gone up under a progressive district attorney, even though it hadn’t and was actually at the lowest in the past four years.
Bari Weiss has done a remarkable job at capitalizing on polarized Americans who have been convinced, in large part by the president, to believe mainstream media is untrustworthy. She fed a huge part of America’s right-of-center population information that would satiate their appetite for confirmation bias.
But as she takes the reins at a news network known for journalistic integrity, rigorous fact-checking and straightforward news, will Bari Weiss be able to help the company succeed while at the same time maintaining the journalistic standards of the newsroom?
Probably not.
